Beethoven and Mozart – Program Notes 10.04.26
Virtuosity and Brilliance. Season Opener.
Sunday, October 4, 2026, 3:00 pm
Arizona Philharmonic
Peter Bay, conductor
Steven Moeckel, violin
Printable PDF of these notes · All program notes this season · All Season 9 concerts
Arizona Philharmonic opens its ninth season with three works whose composers answer what they inherited. José Carlos Campos wrote Danza rústica as a conservatory student in Lima, inventing his own folk tunes and driving them with syncopated rhythm. Ludwig van Beethoven wrote his only violin concerto for a friend whose playing was prized for delicacy, and gave it long singing lines where the fashion of the day expected fireworks. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart finished his last symphony in the summer of 1788 and built its finale on a four-note formula that was already old when he was born, ending with five ideas sounding at once.
José Carlos Campos
Danza rústica (1981)
The story
José Carlos Campos was born in Lima in 1957 and trained at Peru’s National Conservatory of Music, where Edgar Valcárcel taught him composition and Celso Garrido-Lecca taught him orchestration. Danza rústica is the first orchestral piece he wrote there, in 1981, for the youth orchestra of the Camerata de Lima, which gave the premiere in 1983 under Edward Brown. Asked in 2021 where his music belongs, he answered that he does not worry about belonging to any school: “what I do is a synthesis of everything I have absorbed since my student days.”
The absorbing took him a long way from Lima. Asked in a 2022 radio interview why he has spent most of his life outside Peru, he gave two reasons: the circumstances life brings anyone, and “curiosity, and the wish to widen a little the frontiers of perception that every artist has.” The first widening came in 1982, the year after Danza rústica, at a festival in Brazil where he met the composers Claudio Santoro and Almeida Prado and found “that Latin American feeling, which I did not have very clear in Peru.” A French government scholarship then brought him to Paris in 1985 to study analysis with Betsy Jolas and composition with Allain Gaussin, and a scholarship from the Nadia and Lili Boulanger Foundation in 1987 let him continue with Michel Philippot and Maurice Ohana, for whom he prepared the piano reduction of the opera La Célestine ahead of its 1988 premiere at the Paris Opéra. Paris put him in the room with the music he had studied: Berio or Messiaen “not far from where you are sitting,” as he told the interviewer, and Elliott Carter, whom he met at a Radio France rehearsal. He went home in 1990 to teach at the Conservatory, where he later headed the composition department, and in 1998 settled in France for good, taking a degree in music at the Sorbonne and teaching for the Académie de Versailles. His music has been played in seventeen countries, from the United States and Brazil to Singapore and Australia. Asked at the end of that interview, after more than twenty years in Europe, whether he thinks of going back to Peru, he called it a question that deserves deep reflection and spoke of “the compatriots I miss so much.”
The piece waited forty years for a recording. Miguel Harth-Bedoya, a conductor born in Lima who founded the Caminos del Inka project in 2007 to promote the music of South America, recorded it with the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in Oslo, and the disc, Naxos’s Inca Trail Connections, came out in April 2021 as a world premiere recording; the same album carries the Danzas populares andinas of Garrido-Lecca, the man who taught Campos to write for orchestra, and Campos’s own alma mater ran the news. The concert falls inside National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
Campos has written his own note on Danza rústica, and it is the best guide to the three and a half minutes you will hear. The dance is “in the style of a very free scherzo,” a fast, light movement, “with the preponderant influence of Stravinsky,” and every melody in it that sounds like folk music is his own invention. It begins with a syncopated ostinato in the bass instruments (an ostinato is a short figure repeated over and over; syncopation puts the accents where the beat is not), over which the oboe spins “an oriental-type theme” while flute and clarinet answer in modal counterpoint, and a big crescendo gives way to “an energetic and agile theme on the strings, with a Latin American character.” A new ostinato in three-beat time carries the middle of the piece, where an ornamental motif in the violins grows into a full orchestral tutti; the horns announce the climax, and the dark three-beat ostinato returns to end the dance with the whole orchestra playing. The score calls for piccolo, pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns and trumpets, timpani, three percussionists on bass drum, cymbal and triangle, and strings, and is marked Allegretto.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (1806)
I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Larghetto
III. Rondo: Allegro
Steven Moeckel, violin
The story
In 1794 Beethoven heard a Viennese boy of thirteen or fourteen play the violin and wrote in the boy’s album: “Go forth on the way in which you hitherto have travelled so beautifully, so magnificently. Nature and art vie with each other in making you a great artist.” The boy was Franz Clement, who had begun the violin at four, played in public at seven and toured London at ten. By 1806 he was the orchestra’s director at the Theater an der Wien, and Beethoven wrote a concerto for him, heading the manuscript with a joke: “Concerto par Clemenza pour Clement,” a concerto by clemency for Clement.
Clement’s playing was described in 1805 as “indescribably delicate, neat and elegant,” with “an extremely delightful tenderness and cleanness,” and that is the sound Beethoven wrote for: sustained tone and long singing phrases in place of speed. Clement was a composer too, and Beethoven honored that in the writing. Clement’s own Violin Concerto in D had its first performance at his benefit concert of April 7, 1805, the same evening the “Eroica” Symphony was first played in public, and the scholar Clive Brown has shown that figures in Beethoven’s concerto allude directly to passages in Clement’s.
Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny said the new concerto was finished only two days before its premiere, and Clement is reported to have played some of it at sight, though writers disagree on how much. That premiere was Clement’s own benefit concert at the Theater an der Wien on December 23, 1806, an evening that mixed the new concerto with music by Mozart, Handel and Cherubini and with a showpiece of Clement’s own, which he played with the violin held upside down. By one account the stunt came between the concerto’s movements, by another later in the program. The Wiener Zeitung für Theater, Musik und Poesie granted the concerto “manche Schönheit,” many beauties, yet complained that its continuity “often seems completely torn apart” and that “the endless repetitions of a few commonplace passages could easily lead to weariness,” while reporting that the public liked both the concerto and Clement’s playing “extraordinarily.”
The work found occasional champions over the next decades in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Stuttgart and Leipzig, yet it didn’t take hold. What changed that was a concert in London on May 27, 1844: the Philharmonic Society, Felix Mendelssohn conducting, and a twelve-year-old soloist named Joseph Joachim, who had memorized the concerto and written his own cadenzas for it. Mendelssohn reported that the audience broke into applause three times in the first movement before the big orchestral tutti, and again in the middle of the cadenza. Joachim played the concerto for the rest of his career, and the cadenza he wrote at twelve was thought lost apart from nine bars until two complete manuscripts surfaced and were published in February 2026. Beethoven wrote no cadenzas for the violin version, and most violinists today play Joachim’s or Fritz Kreisler’s; for this concert Steven Moeckel plays Kreisler’s.
Beethoven dedicated the published concerto to Stephan von Breuning, a friend from his Bonn boyhood. In 1807 the London publisher Muzio Clementi bought it, along with the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Coriolan overture and the three “Razumovsky” quartets, for one hundred pounds, about £10,000 in today’s purchasing power (roughly $14,000), and talked Beethoven into arranging the concerto for piano as part of the deal.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
The concerto opens with soft strokes on the timpani alone, and the woodwinds answer as if the drum had asked a question. Those strokes are the first movement’s connective tissue, returning in the strings, inside the accompaniment and under the melodies, and the violin waits about three minutes before it enters, climbing in rising octaves. Early on, the violins play the drum’s figure on a D-sharp, a note foreign to D major, and one annotator hears Beethoven settle that account in the finale: the main tune comes back in E-flat, the same pitch as D-sharp under another name, and then slips home to D major, so the note that sounded wrong in the first movement is at last resolved. The slow movement is a set of variations over muted strings in which the soloist never plays the theme, only decorates it, and it runs without a break into the finale, where the violin plays a hunting tune on its lowest string, the orchestra takes it up, and a bassoon leads a brief episode in the minor before the celebration resumes. The whole runs about forty-two minutes, roughly fifteen minutes longer than any of Mozart’s violin concertos.
Steven Moeckel plays a French violin. “The dark sound of a French violin has always suited me,” he writes, “and the tonal power found in the violins of French makers allows me to produce a wide variety of expressive colors.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, “Jupiter” (1788)
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante cantabile
III. Menuetto: Allegretto
IV. Molto allegro
The story
The summer of 1788 brought the Mozarts a new home, a death in the family and an empty purse, and out of it came three symphonies in six weeks. In June Mozart moved the family to a garden apartment in the Alsergrund, then a suburb of Vienna, and wrote to his friend Michael Puchberg on June 17 that the place “is cheaper and more pleasant during the spring, summer and autumn, because I also have a garden.” The move was a step up, more space at the same rent, and the letters to Puchberg that summer still ask for loans. On June 29 the Mozarts’ six-month-old daughter Theresia died. Mozart’s own catalogue dates the three symphonies June 26, July 25 and August 10, 1788, the last of them the “Jupiter,” and no performance of it in his lifetime can be proved.
The “Jupiter” nickname is not his. In 1829 the English organist Vincent Novello visited Mozart’s family and recorded in his diary that Mozart’s son “considered the Finale to his father’s sinfonia in C, which Salomon christened the Jupiter, to be the highest triumph of Instrumental Composition.” Johann Peter Salomon was the London impresario who brought Haydn to England. The name was in print by 1819.
Three days before the concert, on Thursday, October 1 at 2:00 pm, Peter Bay and principal timpanist Maria Flurry teach a free OLLI class at Yavapai College on how Mozart’s symphonies changed over his lifetime, from his first, written when he was eight, to this one. The class is open to the public, with registration through OLLI; details at AZPhil.org.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
The orchestra is Mozart’s usual one without clarinets: flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, timpani and strings. The first movement opens with a two-sided gesture, a martial figure and a soft reply, and keeps the argument going. Near the end of its first section comes a skipping tune that Mozart lifted from an aria he had written that spring for a bass singer. The words there are “You’re a little dull, my dear Pompeo,” and the tune is a joke smuggled into a grand symphony. The slow movement uses muted violins, a color Mozart “hardly ever used in a symphony,” in the words of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, and it is broken by sudden loud chords before the calm returns. The minuet hides a clue: in its trio, the four notes that will open the finale appear in the minor, in disguise.
Those four notes, C, D, F, E, each held long, are a formula from plainchant that composers had used for centuries as a foundation for counterpoint; it appears in Johann Joseph Fux’s 1725 counterpoint manual Gradus ad Parnassum, and Mozart had reached for it since childhood, in his first symphony, written at eight, in a Mass of 1774 and in his Symphony No. 33. In the finale he states the four notes plainly in the violins, adds four more ideas one at a time, and in the coda sounds all five together in invertible counterpoint, meaning any of the five can sit above or below any other. It is not a fugue, whatever the old nickname “the symphony with the fugue” suggests, but a symphonic movement that breaks into fugal writing, and the conductor Claudio Abbado described the effect as ideas “bursting out, one after the other, like fireworks.”
Program
José Carlos Campos 🇵🇪
Danza rústica (1981)
Ludwig van Beethoven 🇩🇪
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (1806)
I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Larghetto
III. Rondo: Allegro
Steven Moeckel, violin
Intermission
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 🇦🇹
Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, “Jupiter” (1788)
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante cantabile
III. Menuetto: Allegretto
IV. Molto allegro
Biographies
Steven Moeckel, violin
Violinist Steven Moeckel has performed as concerto soloist, concertmaster, chamber musician, and recitalist throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. A Laureate of the Sibelius Competition, he has appeared with orchestras in repertoire ranging from the major classical and Romantic concertos to works by Shostakovich, Corigliano, Elgar, Britten, and Walton. He was the first Western violinist invited to perform The Butterfly Lovers concerto with a Chinese orchestra and has collaborated with musicians including Leon Fleisher, Menachem Pressler, William Wolfram, and longtime recital partner Paula Fan, with whom he has performed the complete Beethoven violin sonata cycle three times.
Moeckel has deep ties to Arizona, having served as Concertmaster of both The Phoenix Symphony and the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. His other concertmaster positions have included Germany’s Ulm Philharmonic and the Santa Fe Opera. A graduate of the Hochschule Mozarteum in Salzburg and Indiana University, he joined the faculty of Northern Arizona University in 2020 as a tenured Professor of Violin. He is also active as an educator, orchestral coach, and advocate for string teaching, and serves as artistic director of the Oxmoor Farm International Chamber Music Festival in Louisville, Kentucky.
Peter Bay, conductor
Peter Bay became Music Director and Conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra in 1998, Conductor of the Arizona Philharmonic in 2018, and Resident Conductor of the PianoTexas Festival in Ft. Worth in 2026.
Maestro Bay has appeared with over eighty different orchestras including the National, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Baltimore, New Jersey, North Carolina, San Antonio, Tucson, West Virginia, Colorado, Hawaii, Sarasota, Fort Worth, Bochum (Germany), Carinthian (Austria), Lithuanian National, and Ecuador National Symphonies, the Minnesota and Algarve (Portugal) Orchestras, the Louisiana, Buffalo, Rhode Island and Boca del Rio (Mexico) Philharmonics, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Eastman (Postcard from Morocco) and Aspen (The Ballad of Baby Doe) Opera Theaters, and the Theater Chamber Players of the Kennedy Center. Summer music festival appearances have included Aspen and Music in the Mountains (CO), Grant Park and Ravinia (IL), Round Top (TX), OK Mozart (OK), Mostly Modern (NY), Bowdoin (ME), and Skaneateles (NY). In June 2018 he led fully staged performances of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass as part of the Bernstein100Austin celebration.
Peter is the primary conductor for Ballet Austin. For Austin Opera he has conducted A Streetcar Named Desire, La Traviata, Turandot, The Marriage of Figaro, and La Bohème.
Other positions held by Bay have included Music Director of the Erie Philharmonic, Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, Breckenridge Music Festival (CO), Britt Festival Orchestra (OR), Bravo! Big Sky Classical Festival (MT), Hot Springs Music Festival (AR), and posts with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Richmond Symphony. Bay and the ASO with pianist Anton Nel released a critically acclaimed Bridge CD of Edward Burlingame Hill’s music. With the Richmond Symphony he recorded the U.S. premiere of Britten’s The Sword in the Stone for Opus One Records, and with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Voices, featuring the percussion ensemble NEXUS. He is conductor for Christopher Cross’ Secret Ladder album and Hanan Townshend’s soundtrack to the 2016 movie The Vessel.
In 1994, he was one of two conductors selected to participate in the Leonard Bernstein American Conductors Program. He was the first prize winner of the 1980 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Young Conductors Competition and a prize winner of the 1987 Leopold Stokowski Competition sponsored by the American Symphony Orchestra. In July 2012 and January 2020, he appeared in Solo Symphony, a choreographic work created for him by Allison Orr of Forklift Danceworks, and was inducted into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame in May 2016.
Musicians
Flute
Jeannette Hirasawa Moore, Principal
Oboe
Mary Simon, Principal – Sponsored by Cheryl Berry
Shane Werts
Clarinet
Scott Richardson, Principal
Adam Schay
Bassoon
Chip King, Principal
Zach Millwood
French Horn
Alex Manners, Co-Principal
Karen Teplik, Co-Principal
Principal French Horn chair sponsored by Jon & Christena Cavaletto
Trumpet
Joshua Haake, Principal
Morgana Ortiz
Timpani
Maria Flurry, Principal – Sponsored by Jon & Christena Cavaletto
Violin I
Katherine McLin, Concertmaster – Sponsored by Mike & DeEtte Johnston
Luke Hill, Assistant Concertmaster – Sponsored by Barbara Stallings
Wei Jhen Chen
Patricia Cole
Spencer Ekenes
José Leonardi Moore
Luke Stikeleather
Violin II
Grace Nakano, Principal
Kylie Ahern
Louis Coste
Susan Dunn
Carlos Gamez
Jamie Wu
Viola
Esteban Hernandez Parra, Principal – Sponsored in honor of Ruth R. Meyer
Bryn Cannon
Julia Chen
Samara Humbert-Hughes
Rick Knous
David Rigby
Cello
Wesley Skinner, Principal – Sponsored by Barbara Metz & Mark Schufletowski
Alexander Duke
Thomas Hoisch
Dayoung Park
Yun-de Tsai
Contrabass
Wan-Ting Yu, Principal
Sila Kuvanci
Siqing Zhang
Glossary
Terms as they come up in these notes, in plain words, with where you will meet them on this program.
- Allegretto, Allegro, Allegro ma non troppo, Allegro vivace, Molto allegro
- Italian tempo words: moderately fast; fast; fast but not too much; fast and lively; very fast. Danza rústica is marked Allegretto; the Beethoven opens Allegro ma non troppo; the Jupiter opens Allegro vivace and ends Molto allegro.
- Andante cantabile
- At a walking pace, in a singing manner. The Jupiter’s slow movement.
- Aria
- A song for solo voice with orchestra, usually from an opera. Mozart lifted a tune from one of his own for the Jupiter’s first movement.
- Autograph, manuscript
- The composer’s own handwritten score. Beethoven’s pun on Clement’s name is written on his.
- Benefit concert
- In Beethoven’s Vienna, a concert a musician put on for his own income, choosing the program and keeping the receipts. Clement gave the concerto its premiere at his.
- Cadenza
- A passage for the soloist alone, usually near the end of a concerto’s first movement, originally improvised on the spot. Beethoven wrote none for this concerto’s violin version; Joachim wrote his own at twelve, and Steven Moeckel plays Fritz Kreisler’s.
- Catalogue numbers: Op., K
- Op. (opus, “work”) numbers a composer’s pieces in order of publication, so the Violin Concerto is Op. 61. Mozart’s works are numbered by K., for Ludwig von Köchel, who catalogued them in 1862; the Jupiter is K. 551.
- Coda
- The closing section of a movement, after its main business is done. The Jupiter’s finale has one of the famous ones.
- Concertmaster
- The first violinist, who leads the section and, after the conductor, the orchestra. Katherine McLin holds the chair on this program.
- Concerto
- A work for a soloist with orchestra, usually in three movements, part display and part conversation.
- Counterpoint, invertible counterpoint
- Two or more melodies sounding at the same time, each making sense on its own. Invertible counterpoint is written so that any of the melodies can go above or below the others. The Jupiter’s coda does it with five.
- Crescendo
- Getting louder. Campos’s big crescendo leads to the string theme.
- D-sharp and E-flat
- The same note under two names: on the piano it is the black key just to the right of D, the higher one in each pair of black keys. Which name a composer writes tells you where the music is heading. Beethoven’s D-sharp in the first movement points away from D major, and the E-flat in the finale is the same note coming home.
- Exposition, “first section.”
- The opening part of a symphony’s first movement, where the tunes are laid out before they are worked over. The Jupiter’s borrowed aria tune sits at the end of it.
- Fugue, fugato
- A fugue is a piece built entirely on one theme that enters in each voice in turn and is combined by the rules of counterpoint. A fugato is a stretch of fugue-like writing inside a movement that is otherwise something else. The Jupiter’s finale is the second.
- Key, major and minor
- The home note and scale a piece is built around. D major is the Beethoven’s home; C major the Jupiter’s. Major tends to sound bright, minor darker; the bassoon’s episode in Beethoven’s finale is “in the minor.”
- Larghetto
- Fairly slow, a shade less slow than Largo. The Beethoven’s second movement.
- Minuet and trio
- A dance movement in three, in which the minuet frames a contrasting middle section called the trio. The Jupiter’s third movement; the trio is where the finale’s four notes hide.
- Modal
- Built on the older scales, from plainchant and folk music, that came before major and minor. Campos’s “modal counterpoint.”
- Motto, motif
- A short musical idea that returns and gets built on. The four notes C, D, F, E in the Jupiter; the timpani figure in the Beethoven.
- Mute, muted strings
- A small clamp on a string instrument’s bridge that softens and veils the tone. Both slow movements on this program use it.
- Octaves
- The same note eight steps higher or lower, as when a man and a woman sing one tune together. The violin’s first entrance in the Beethoven is a climb made of octave leaps, each note answered by the same note an octave above before the next step up.
- Orchestration
- Deciding which instruments play what. Campos learned it from Celso Garrido-Lecca, whose own Danzas populares andinas is on the same Naxos disc as Danza rústica.
- Ostinato
- Italian for “obstinate”: a short pattern repeated over and over as a foundation. Danza rústica opens with one in the low instruments.
- Piano reduction
- An orchestral or operatic score arranged for piano, for rehearsals and study. Campos made one of Maurice Ohana’s opera.
- Plainchant
- The single-line, unaccompanied singing of the medieval church; Gregorian chant is its best-known repertory. The Jupiter’s four-note formula comes from it.
- Principal
- The player who leads a section and takes its solos; the first name under each section in the roster. Co-principals share a chair, and a single timpanist is always the principal.
- Rondo
- A form, often used for finales, in which the main tune keeps coming back between contrasting episodes. The Beethoven’s third movement.
- Scherzo
- Italian for “joke”: a fast, light movement. Campos calls his dance “a very free scherzo.”
- Symphony
- A large work for orchestra alone, usually in four movements.
- Syncopation
- Accents placed off the main beat, which gives rhythm its kick. The Campos ostinato is syncopated.
- Theme
- A tune or idea a movement is built from. Campos’s “energetic and agile theme on the strings”; the five in the Jupiter’s coda.
- Three-beat time
- Music that goes ONE-two-three, like a waltz. The ostinato in the middle of Danza rústica.
- Timpani
- Kettledrums, tuned to definite notes. The word is Italian and plural; one drum is a timpano, and an orchestra usually has four. They open the Beethoven, alone.
- Tutti
- Italian for “all”: the whole orchestra playing. The big orchestral tutti in the concerto’s first movement; the tutti that ends Danza rústica.
- Variations
- A theme restated several times, changed each time. The Beethoven’s slow movement, where the soloist decorates a theme the orchestra owns.
