The Later Romantics

Violin I

Rachel Lane, Acting Concertmaster
Kirsten Dalboe
Sara Dimmick
David Engel
Dawn Levy

Violin II

Seiichi Takedai, Acting Principal
Sarah Brittman
Wendy Chun
Richard Hong
Sachi Rosenbaum

Viola

Michael Garrahan, Principal
Stephen Fisher
Ashley Reinhart

Cello

Debra Anker, Principal
Philip Hopko
Edwina Moldover

Bass

Dale Houck, Principal

Flute

Eric Abalahin
Colleen Darkow

Oboe

Susan Herlick
Leslie Jewell

Clarinet

Karin Caifa
Susan Sandler

Bassoon

Hillary Burchuk
Katrien van Dijk

Horn

Linda Hardin
Jim McIntyre
Bruce McWhirter
Ilycia Silver

Trumpet

Chris Erbe
Bruce Stanly

Timpani

James Adams

Stage Managers

Debra Anker
Ethan Butler
Katrien van Dijk

Ava Pakiam is a 15 year old sought after soloist and recitalist currently residing in the Bay Area. A student at the Pre College of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music since the age of seven, Ava presently studies with renowned violin professor, Simon James. Ava made her solo debut at eight years old in California performing the Mozart Concerto No. 2 with the Fremont Symphony. Later that summer, she performed Vivaldi’s Winter Concerto with the Sempre Musik Orchestra and New York Sinfonietta in Boston and New York City, making her solo debut at Carnegie Hall at age 8. [read more]

The conductor for today’s performance is Christopher Hite. He has been the Music Director of The Manassas Ballet Theatre since 1997, having conducted virtually all of the works in the standard ballet repertoire, plus being involved in the creation of multiple new works for the stage. In 2000, he founded the Dominion Symphony Orchestra, with the goal of enriching the cultural life of Northern Virginia. He was recently appointed as Assistant Conductor of The Symphony of the Potomac. Mr. Hite has conducted performances by The National Gallery Orchestra, The McLean Orchestra, The Rock Creek Chamber Players and The United States Air Force Band.

Mr. Hite was born in Columbus, Ohio and raised in a musical family. He received his Bachelor of Music degree from Capital University in Columbus, where he studied with his father, well-known clarinetist David L. Hite. He received a Master of Music degree from The Catholic University of America in 1984. He performed for two seasons at The Aspen Music Festival. As a member of the US Air Force Band from 1974 to 1998, he was a featured soloist on over fifty performances worldwide. He performs as a clarinetist with the Symphony of the Potomac. Mr. Hite resides in Annandale, Virginia.

Wagner composed what we now know as the Siegfried Idyll in November 1870 as a birthday gift for his wife, Cosima, and as a tribute to their son Siegfried, born on June 6, 1869. It was first performed on Christmas morning, 1870; although Cosima’s actual birthday was December 24 she preferred to celebrate it on the 25th. The Idyll was performed by a small orchestra on the staircase of their villa, it is unclear as to whether thirteen or fifteen players were involved; the part-writing suggests a minimum of fifteen, however the grandiose original title identifies the work as a “…symphonic birthday greeting…” and after its publication in 1878 Wagner conducted it with orchestras of all sizes. The score calls for single woodwind, plus a second clarinet, two horns, and strings, with a miniscule but crucial part for trumpet.

To the listener familiar with the Ring music dramas, the thematic material will refer to Acts II and III of Siegfried, with the addition of a German lullaby, “Schlaf, Kindchen, schlaf.” In reality several of these motifs originate in sketches for a string quartet (later abandoned) which Wagner had begun in 1864, subsequently incorporated into Siegfried; this chronology was sorted out in the 1930s by the great British Wagner biographer Ernest Newman, which led another scholar, Gerald Abraham, to attempt a reconstruction of the original quartet.

The work’s overall structure approximates sonata form, with the introduction of additional material in the central, developmental section, and its major climax just before the recapitulation. Particularly striking is the composer’s structural use of changes in both harmonic and tonal rhythm; while at times the relatively simple melodies are accompanied by fast-moving streams of complex chords at others they are projected against a nearly static background. A pungent dissonant chord, prominent also in Act II of Die Walküre also serves as a recurring, unifying motif.

While Wagner had hoped in his last years to compose free-standing symphonic works and in fact left both written and musical evidence for this ambition, the Siegfried Idyll remains unique in his œuvre. It is a staple of chamber orchestra programming as it—along with the somewhat earlier Serenades of Brahms—enables us to expand our repertoire into the mid-Romantic era within the framework of relatively small venues and performing forces.

(Based on material from Werner Brieg, “The Musical Works”, in Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapenewski, eds., Wagner Handbook, 1992)

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While we hear little of his music today other than the Kol Nidre (1880), the G-minor Violin Concerto (1866) and the Scottish Fantasy (1880), Max Bruch wrote prolifically during a creative life which extended over nearly seventy years. His œuvre includes three violin concerti as well as a number of other works for solo strings and orchestra, three symphonies, three operas, two string quartets, instrumental music based on a variety of national styles, and above all, a vast body of choral music. Bruch’s musical language remained consistent throughout; the British musicologist Christopher Fifield notes that “His reverence for the music of Mendelssohn and Schumann and his resistance to change meant that works written at the end of his life…sounded much the same as those compositions dating from 60 years earlier…His utter distaste for and outspoken criticism of…Wagner and Liszt isolated him more and more throughout his life…Bruch was respected as a teacher in his later years, with Respighi and Vaughan Williams among his pupils in his Berlin composition classes.” (“Max Bruch” in The New Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition, 2001).

In his admirable introduction to the 2003 Henle Urtext edition of the G-minor Concerto, Michael Kube reminds us that its popularity “…has distorted not only our view of Bruch’s other compositions but the complex genesis of the work itself.” He points out that between 1864, when the composer began work on it, and the première of the definitive version on 7 January 1868, by Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), conducted by the composer, there had been a public performance of a preliminary version on 24 April 1866. Almost immediately thereafter Bruch sent the score to Joachim who praised the concerto while suggesting revisions both to the solo part and to the work’s overall structure, most notably urging composition of a transition connecting the first and second movements. Not satisfied with these interventions, the composer then invited Joachim’s teacher Ferdinand David (1810-1873), dedicatee of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, to peruse the solo part; confronted with David’s copious emendations, he apparently rejected most of them, but edited the last movement along lines previously suggested by the conductor Hermann Levi (1839-1900). Levi’s enthusiasm for the Concerto led him to encourage Bruch to write the first of his three symphonies, completed in 1868 and first performed two years later.

In the first movement, originally titled “Introduzione quasi Fantasie”, Bruch alternates bold, recitative-like gestures and melodic utterances from the soloist with brief dramatic interjections from the orchestra. After a powerful orchestral outburst fades away, the slow movement begins, again both lyrical and rhetorical in turn, sumptuously scored yet sensitive to balance. The brilliant finale, evocative of Gypsy fiddling, possibly a tribute to Joachim’s Hungarian ancestry, may well have influenced Bruch’s older contemporary Brahms, whose Violin Concerto, also written with Joachim’s collaboration, appeared in 1879.

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Like his two sets of Slavonic Dances (1878 and 1886) Dvořák’s ten Legends (1881) were originally piano duets, orchestrated at the request of his publisher, Simrock later that year and in early 1882. While the Slavonic Dances in their subsequent orchestra versions (1878 and 1887) call for a typical late Romantic orchestra, with trombones and percussion, the Legends are more restrained in instrumentation, requiring a smaller ensemble, more discretely deployed. A third set of six piano duets, From the Bohemian Wood appeared in 1884, only the fifth of these, “Silent Woods” was transcribed by the composer for solo cello and a small orchestra in 1891.

While each of the Slavonic Dances is based on a specific dance-type; Furiant, Polka, Sousedská, Kolo, etc., and they are for the most part clearly sectional in form, with many internal repeats, most of the Legends are freer in language and structure, usually within a large three-part framework. The Legends are predominantly lyrical or narrative in mood, often with frequent changes in character and with flexible pulse, unlike the pervasive rhythmic drive of the Slavonic Dances.

To my mind the Legends are a wonderful, thoughtful counterpoise to the better-known, more extravert Slavonic Dances; they can be successfully presented as a mixed group on an orchestral program just as a pianist often offers a “Chopin Group” consisting of an assortment of Nocturnes, Mazurkas and Waltzes, ending perhaps with one of the large-scale Ballades or Scherzos. 

Notes by Joel Lazar © 2025

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Mozart’s time in Vienna, from 1781 to 1786, was arguably the most successful period of his short life. Equally famed as both a pianist and composer, he was in such constant need of pieces to showcase himself that he wrote 15 piano concertos during that time, and those works outline his maturation as a composer during the peak of his career. The rarely performed Piano Concerto No. 16 falls right in the middle of that time, and it has a particularly joyous character, using a larger orchestra than was common, including trumpets and timpani, which was rare in concertos at the time.

The writing for the piano showcases brilliant technique right from its very first entrance. The work places demands on the soloist that are greater than any of his previous works. Mozart even wrote that “it is a piece to make the performer sweat!” The heroics of the first movement are followed by a deceptively simple Andante second movement, in which there is considerable inventive interplay between the woodwinds and the soloist. The work concludes with a sprightly finale, at the end of which he cleverly morphs the music into a different time signature.

In Mozart’s lifetime and in the years after, this concerto was rarely performed, possibly because it required not only a very proficient soloist, but also a fairly large and well-trained orchestra. This is unjustly one of the least performed of Mozart’s piano concertos, and we hope you enjoy discovering this little-known masterpiece.

Christopher Hite

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