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Tierra Flamenca – Program Notes 11.01.26

Guitar, Dance, and Classical Roots.

Sunday, November 1, 2026, 3:00 pm
Ruth Street Theater, Prescott
Chris Burton Jácome, flamenco guitar
Lena Jácome, dance
Jeannette Hirasawa Moore, flute
Luke Hill, violin
Cindy Binkley, viola
Wesley Skinner, cello

SEE THE CONCERT, NOVEMBER 1

Printable PDF of these notes · All program notes this season · All Season 9 concerts

Chris Burton Jácome and Lena Jácome first performed with Arizona Philharmonic on November 1, 2019. Today’s concert, seven years to the day later, is a program that keeps trading places: Chris’s guitar and Lena’s dance take up works by Bach, Chopin, Ernesto Lecuona, Massenet, Pachelbel and Diego Ortiz, and five of Chris’s seven pieces open out for the AZ Phil Quartet of flute, violin, viola and cello. Chris composes, arranges, plays and sings, Lena dances, and the ensemble changes from piece to piece, from solo cello with dance, and guitar alone, to all six performers together. “Integrating classical instrumentation into the textures of flamenco is thrilling!” Chris says. “For this concert, I’m excited to explore how the flamenco guitar can bring in a new sonic perspective to some traditionally ‘Classical’ music works.”

Chris and Lena encourage new audiences to shout “¡Olé!” whenever they want to. “You can say it quiet, reserved, or you can say it real loud,” Chris says. They ask you not to clap along, because sound takes time to cross a hall: “Even if you have great rhythm, it wouldn’t matter because of the distance.” Applause after each piece is welcome: “We are excited to hear your clapping after each piece.”

The notes below follow the program order. Each piece has two parts: “The story,” for everyone, and “Inside the music,” a closer look for anyone who wants one, with the terms explained in the glossary at the end. Open every closer look

Johann Sebastian Bach

Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007 (c. 1720)

Lena Jácome, dance; Wesley Skinner, cello

Johann Sebastian Bach in 1748, holding a six-part canon. Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Bach-Archiv Leipzig, via Wikimedia Commons.
Johann Sebastian Bach in 1748, holding a six-part canon. Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Bach-Archiv Leipzig, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Johann Sebastian Bach probably wrote his six suites for unaccompanied cello around 1720, during his years as court music director at Köthen. His own manuscript is lost, and the music comes down to us chiefly in a copy made by his second wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, between 1727 and 1731. A suite is a set of dances, and Bach opens each of these with a prelude in the free spirit of an improvisation. The cellist Pablo Casals found a copy of the suites in a Barcelona music shop at thirteen and called the find “the great revelation of my life.” He studied them “every day for the next twelve years” before playing one at a concert, and his recordings of 1936 to 1939, Suite No. 1 among them in Paris in 1938, renewed appreciation for them.

“For this piece, the cello is my duet partner,” says Lena Jácome, who uses “the language skills of traditional flamenco to create movement from the breathing rhythms and rich textures of the cello.”

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
The Prelude in the copy Anna Magdalena Bach made between 1727 and 1731. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The Prelude in the copy Anna Magdalena Bach made between 1727 and 1731. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Prelude is an unbroken stream of broken chords that ring against the cello’s open strings, the low G above all. Near the end the line climbs note by note above the open D string as the energy rises, and the movement comes to rest on a full G major chord.

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Chris Burton Jácome

Guajira

Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

The story

Six of Chris’s seven pieces and Lecuona’s Malagueña take their names from flamenco forms, or palos. Each palo has its own mood and home ground, and most have their own compás, a cycle of beats and accents; their homes run from Cuba and Málaga to Seville, Jerez, the mining towns of the southeast and Cádiz.

The guajira is named for Cuba’s guajiros, the island’s country people, and comes from Cuban folk music; many experts say it should really be called by its Cuban name, punto cubano. Its verses are mostly about Havana and its people. Flamenco calls forms like this cantes de ida y vuelta, songs of going and coming back between Spain and the Americas.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Guitarist, dancer and singer all share the compás. The guajira is always in a major key. For the Guajira, Chris sent the quartet four falsetas, a word that in flamenco, as he puts it, “means musical interludes,” and told them that with Lena dancing, “we will place these falsetas throughout her choreography.”

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Frédéric Chopin

Nocturne No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2 (c. 1830–31), arr. David Popper; adapted by Chris Burton Jácome

Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Wesley Skinner, cello

Chopin in 1829, the year of his Vienna debut. Ambroży Mieroszewski. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Chopin in 1829, the year of his Vienna debut. Ambroży Mieroszewski. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

“Chopin’s most beautiful compositions are merely reflections and echoes of his improvisations,” wrote his friend and editor Julian Fontana, and the young Frédéric Chopin improvised in public: at his Vienna debut in August 1829, asked for a Polish theme, he improvised on the song “Chmiel” (Hops), and his “parterre spies,” he wrote home, assured him people “were even dancing on the benches.” He composed the Nocturne in E-flat around 1830 to 1831, the years he left Poland and settled in Paris, and published it in 1832. He went on changing its ornaments as he played and taught it, in variants so numerous that the Polish National Edition prints them separately, drawn from his pupils’ copies, his sister Ludwika’s, and one marked up by his friend the cellist Auguste Franchomme. David Popper, a cellist born in Prague in 1843, arranged it for cello and piano.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
David Popper, who arranged the Nocturne for cello and piano. Photograph by Fritz Luckhardt, Vienna. Bergen Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.
David Popper, who arranged the Nocturne for cello and piano. Photograph by Fritz Luckhardt, Vienna. Bergen Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

Over a steady left hand of bass notes and wide chords, the melody returns with more written-out ornament each time, and near the end a flourish marked senza tempo, “without time,” suspends the beat. Popper gives Chopin’s melody to the cello, and in Chris’s adaptation the guitar takes the piano’s bass notes and chords, which Chris improvises within Chopin’s harmony. Today, the Chopin Nocturne is played a half step up, from E-flat to E major, and the players are free to improvise the cadenza near the end.

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Ernesto Lecuona

Malagueña, arr. Chris Burton Jácome

Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

The story

Ernesto Lecuona’s Malagueña is a Cuban piano work from his suite Andalucía, published in Havana in 1928, and Chris plays it alone, in his own arrangement for guitar. Its name comes from the malagueña, the flamenco song of Málaga, which grew from the city’s old fandangos.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

In Chris’s arrangement, the Malagueña moves from free rhythm into a twelve-beat rhythm, felt in threes for a while, and a bridge of his own leads back to the main melodies.

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Chris Burton Jácome

The Kiss

Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

The story

“It’s about my bride,” Chris says. Chris and Lena met at a pool party in Tempe in the summer of 2001, and properly that October at a Halloween party, where they talked for three hours in their friend’s kitchen. He was already working on the idea for the piece, and he recorded it the next year on his album Pa’lante. He remembers playing it, still unfinished, once they had started dating.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

From the start Chris knew The Kiss wasn’t flamenco, and he heard it as “a much bigger piece, meaning the guitar didn’t seem enough. I really heard the different voices.” He thought of it as an orchestral piece, and for the 2002 recording he and his co-producer added timpani samples for “that symphonic element,” while still wanting “the melodies to last longer than they can on a guitar.” Performing it with chamber players, he says, is “a really exciting… evolution,” with “other instruments that can make the music sing like I really wanted it to in my head.”

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Jules Massenet

Méditation from Thaïs (1894)

Luke Hill, solo violin; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Cindy Binkley, viola; Wesley Skinner, cello

Massenet in 1895, the year after Thaïs. Photograph by Eugène Pirou. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons.
Massenet in 1895, the year after Thaïs. Photograph by Eugène Pirou. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Jules Massenet’s opera Thaïs, after Anatole France’s 1890 novel, opened at the Paris Opéra on March 16, 1894, with the American soprano Sibyl Sanderson in the title role Massenet wrote for her. The Méditation, for solo violin and orchestra, is an orchestral interlude between the two scenes of Act II. It portrays the courtesan Thaïs turning toward a life of faith after the monk Athanaël’s visit, and Massenet brings its melody back in the last act, including at her death. Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, wrote that “it took only a generation after the opera’s debut for the Meditation to become a rite of passage for fiddlers.” Massenet himself recast the tune as an Ave Maria.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
Manuel Orazi’s 1894 poster for Thaïs at the Paris Opéra. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons.
Manuel Orazi’s 1894 poster for Thaïs at the Paris Opéra. Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons.

Steinhardt writes that “the beauty of its long, winding melody buttressed by languid harmonies is elusive and challenging.” Luke Hill plays the solo, and Chris’s guitar, with viola and cello, reinterprets the accompaniment; Chris improvises his part within Massenet’s harmony, and everyone follows the soloist’s pacing and phrasing.

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Chris Burton Jácome

Sevillanas Nos. 1 and 2

Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Sin Miedo (Verdiales)

Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

The story

Sevillanas Nos. 1 and 2. Seville’s spring fair, the Feria de Abril, opened in 1847 as a livestock market, and today its booths usually have a floor for dancing sevillanas. Sevillanas are sung and danced in sets of four coplas, or verses, each with its own steps, and guitarists also compose their own: these two are Chris’s.

Sin Miedo (Verdiales). Sin miedo means “without fear,” and Chris recorded the piece on his 2005 album Flamenco. The verdiales belong to Christmas in the hills above Málaga, where bands called pandas play them at their liveliest from Christmas Day to December 28, when the season ends. A panda plays guitars, a large tambourine, small cymbals and a violin, which carries the melody. The players’ hats are trimmed with ribbons and with mirrors meant to flash the sun across the ravines. At the December 28 gathering, two pandas would play together, faster and faster, until one of them lost the beat.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Sevillanas and verdiales both count in three.

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Intermission

Chris Burton Jácome

Tesoro (Tonás)

Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

The story

Chris calls his tonás Tesoro, Spanish for “treasure.” The tonás are among flamenco’s oldest songs, rooted in Jerez de la Frontera and the Triana district of Seville and traditionally sung with no accompaniment at all; almost all experts, says Andalusia’s flamenco institute, the Instituto Andaluz del Flamenco, consider them “el cante madre del flamenco,” the mother song from which all the others come. Their family includes the martinete, which probably began in the forge, sung over a hammer striking an anvil, and Spanish uses the same word, martinete, for the small hammer that strikes a piano string.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Lena and Chris perform Tesoro alone, so watch Lena’s feet. Chris calls flamenco footwork “a critically important percussion instrument” and the dancer “the percussionist and the leader”: she decides when the music speeds up, slows down and stops, and the guitarist follows her.

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Johann Pachelbel

Canon in D Major, arr. Chris Burton Jácome

Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

The opening of the Canon in its oldest surviving copy, an early 19th-century score. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. ms. 16481/8, via Wikimedia Commons.
The opening of the Canon in its oldest surviving copy, an early 19th-century score. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Mus. ms. 16481/8, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Johann Pachelbel, an organist from Nuremberg, was godfather to Johann Sebastian Bach’s sister Johanna Juditha and taught their elder brother Johann Christoph, who gave Johann Sebastian his first formal keyboard lessons. He wrote his Canon and Gigue for three violins and basso continuo, and nobody knows when; the first edition, in 1919, came from a manuscript that has since been lost. The Canon became famous in the 1970s, after Jean-François Paillard’s chamber orchestra recorded it in June 1968 at a much slower tempo than the first recording, made in 1938.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

The Canon rests on a ground bass, a two-bar figure of eight notes that Pachelbel repeats 28 times under the same eight chords, while three violins play one melody in canon, each entering after the one before. Chris’s arrangement adds his flamenco guitar to the flute and strings and makes room for the ensemble to improvise with him.

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Chris Burton Jácome

Albaicín (Tarantas)

Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

The story

The tarantas was born in Almería and spread to the mining towns of Linares and La Unión, and the Instituto calls it the trunk from which the other miners’ songs grow. La Unión’s international festival of these mining songs, founded in 1961, is held in a 1907 iron-and-glass market hall known as the “Catedral del Cante” (Cathedral of Song), and its top prize is the Lámpara Minera, the Miner’s Lamp.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Like the malagueña, the tarantas moves in free rhythm.

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Diego Ortiz

Recercadas sobre tenores italianos, from Trattado de glosas (1553)

Jeannette Hirasawa Moore, flute; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Wesley Skinner, cello

Diego Ortiz, in the portrait on the title page of his Trattado de glosas, Rome, 1553. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Diego Ortiz, in the portrait on the title page of his Trattado de glosas, Rome, 1553. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Diego Ortiz, born in Toledo around 1510, spent his working life in Naples and Rome, and from 1558 he was chapel master to the Spanish viceroy of Naples. In Rome in 1553 he published his Trattado de glosas, in Spanish and Italian editions, a manual for viol players on ornamenting and improvising, and he called its model pieces recercadas (searches or trials). Nine of them are written over tenores italianos, repeating bass patterns; later scholars have identified the patterns under eight of them as the passamezzo antico, passamezzo moderno, romanesca and folía. Spanish guitarists and vihuelists called variations over a repeating bass, improvised or composed, diferencias. The romanesca is closely related to, and some say identical with, the Spanish tune “Guárdame las vacas” (“Mind the cows for me”).

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one
A page of Ortiz’s instructions for ornamenting, with music examples, from the Trattado de glosas, Rome, 1553. Via Wikimedia Commons.
A page of Ortiz’s instructions for ornamenting, with music examples, from the Trattado de glosas, Rome, 1553. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Under each recercada a short pattern of chords repeats over and over, the part Ortiz printed for the keyboard, while the solo line above it spins out faster and more ornate variations. This performance runs in three parts: Ortiz’s second recercada, built on the passamezzo moderno, then his first, then the second again. Jeannette Hirasawa Moore’s flute plays Ortiz’s written solo line, Wesley Skinner’s cello plays the repeating bass, and Chris improvises the chords above it on the guitar, ornamenting the pattern as he goes.

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Chris Burton Jácome

Alegrías for Chamber Quartet (premiere)

Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

The story

All six performers close the concert with the first performance of Chris’s Alegrías for Chamber Quartet. Alegrías, Spanish for “joys,” is one of the cantiñas, a family of songs from Cádiz. It is related to the city’s old jota, into which, the flamenco scholar Faustino Núñez writes, the people of Cádiz poured their joys.

Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Alegrías counts twelve, with the accents on beats 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12, in a major key: count to twelve in your head through the Alegrías and listen for those five accents.

As in the Guajira, Chris has given the quartet a set of falsetas for the Alegrías, and where each one comes in is settled in rehearsal. In performance the four players watch for their cues from Chris and from Lena, which Chris calls “a big learning curve for them,” adding that “they’re very brave for jumping on board.”

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Program

Johann Sebastian Bach 🇩🇪
Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007
Lena Jácome, dance; Wesley Skinner, cello

Chris Burton Jácome 🇺🇸
Guajira
Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Frédéric Chopin 🇵🇱
Nocturne No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2, arr. David Popper; adapted by Chris Burton Jácome
Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Wesley Skinner, cello

Ernesto Lecuona 🇨🇺
Malagueña, arr. Chris Burton Jácome
Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

Chris Burton Jácome
The Kiss
Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Jules Massenet 🇫🇷
Méditation from Thaïs
Luke Hill, solo violin; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Cindy Binkley, viola; Wesley Skinner, cello

Chris Burton Jácome
Sevillanas Nos. 1 and 2
Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Chris Burton Jácome
Sin Miedo (Verdiales)
Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Intermission

Chris Burton Jácome
Tesoro (Tonás)
Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

Johann Pachelbel 🇩🇪
Canon in D Major, arr. Chris Burton Jácome
Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

Chris Burton Jácome
Albaicín (Tarantas)
Chris Burton Jácome, guitar

Diego Ortiz 🇪🇸
Recercadas sobre tenores italianos, from Trattado de glosas (1553)
Jeannette Hirasawa Moore, flute; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; Wesley Skinner, cello

Chris Burton Jácome
Alegrías for Chamber Quartet (premiere)
Lena Jácome, dance; Chris Burton Jácome, guitar; AZ Phil Quartet

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Biographies

Chris Burton Jácome, flamenco guitar

Chris Burton Jácome is the artistic director and founder of the celebrated flamenco music and dance company Jácome Flamenco. As a flamenco guitarist and composer, Chris has played to many sold-out solo performances and has worked alongside great artists such as Compañía de María Jesús (Sevilla, Spain) and as the musical director of Calo Flamenco. Chris has been an invited guest artist of the prestigious La Guitarra California Festival multiple times, performing alongside such top classical guitarists as Pepe Romero, Ana Vidovic and Roland Dyens. He has presented his original productions at such venues as Jazz at Lincoln Center and New York City Center.

Chris’s original music can be heard on the popular TV shows Touch, Kyle XY and Greek; the feature films Amreeka and 9/Tenths; and the recently released feature film Just the Vampire Hunter, which showcases Chris’s composing skills and guitar virtuosity in multiple genres. Chris has written and produced five critically acclaimed CDs, including his album Levanto. Chris won the Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest World Category two years in a row with his original songs from Levanto.

Chris has composed chamber and full orchestral works with performances by SOU Percussion Ensemble, the Chandler Symphony Orchestra, Arizona Philharmonic and the University City Symphony Orchestra in St. Louis, Missouri.

For information on concerts, projects, compositions and more, visit chrisburtonjacome.com.

Lena Jácome, dance

Lena Jácome is a flamenco dancer, choreographer, and instructor with Jácome Flamenco. Her performance highlights include Lorca in a Green Dress with Teatro Bravo!, the World Premiere of the Pangean Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and New York City Center. Globally and nationally recognized, she has taught and performed as a guest artist for the Ibero-American Association in Indonesia and the Dance Network of South Dakota. Beyond performing, Lena designs dance curricula, including a long-term multi-residency program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and choreographs for diverse groups spanning university settings and private studios.

Lena earned her B.F.A. in Dance Performance from the New World School of the Arts in Miami and her M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance from Arizona State University. Lena is the recipient of several grants to study in Spain. She has toured with Calo Flamenco under the direction of Martín Gaxiola and danced for Noche Flamenca during their summer residency at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts.

She is a recent recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Artist Opportunity Grant for her collaboration with Arizona Philharmonic on Tierra Flamenca, and her choreography Undone was a semi-finalist in Ciutat Flamenco’s competition Ciutat Batalla 2026, held in Barcelona, Spain.

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Musicians

Chris Burton Jácome, flamenco guitar
Lena Jácome, dance

AZ Phil Quartet
Jeannette Hirasawa Moore, flute
Luke Hill, violin
Cindy Binkley, viola
Wesley Skinner, cello

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Glossary

Terms as they come up in these notes, in plain words, with where you will meet them on this program.

Alegrías
Spanish for “joys”: one of the cantiñas, the flamenco songs of Cádiz, in a twelve-beat compás accented on beats 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12, in a major key. It closes the concert.
Arrangement, adaptation
A new version of an existing piece for different performers. Chris arranged Lecuona’s Malagueña and Pachelbel’s Canon and adapted Popper’s arrangement of the Chopin.
Basso continuo
In Baroque music, a bass line with chords built on it, played by a low instrument with a keyboard or lute. Pachelbel’s Canon rests on one.
Broken chords
The notes of a chord played one after another instead of together. The Bach Prelude is made of them.
Cadenza
A free, showy passage for a soloist, often improvised. The cello and guitar may improvise one near the end of the Chopin.
Canon
A piece in which several voices play the same melody, each starting a little after the one before, as in a round. Pachelbel’s three violins.
Cante
Flamenco song. El cante madre, “the mother song,” is what most experts call the tonás; La Unión’s market hall is the “Catedral del Cante,” the cathedral of song.
Cantes de ida y vuelta
“Songs of going and coming back”: forms that traveled between Spain and the Americas. The guajira.
Cantiñas
A family of flamenco songs from Cádiz, alegrías among them.
Catalogue numbers: BWV, Op.
BWV numbers Bach’s works (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, the catalogue of Bach’s works); Op. (opus, “work”) numbers a composer’s pieces in order of publication, so the Chopin is Op. 9, No. 2.
Compás
The cycle of beats and accents that most flamenco forms are built on, shared by guitarist, dancer and singer.
Copla
A verse. Sevillanas come in sets of four.
Diferencias
The Spanish name for variations, improvised or composed, over a repeating bass, as played by Spain’s guitarists and vihuelists.
Falseta
A melodic passage between sections; Chris calls falsetas “musical interludes.” He sent the quartet four for the Guajira and a set for the Alegrías.
Fandango
A family of Spanish song and dance in three, from which the malagueña grew and to which the verdiales belong.
Footwork
The dancer’s feet striking the floor, played as a percussion instrument.
Free rhythm
Music with no fixed beat, which stretches and pauses as the performer chooses. The malagueña and the tarantas.
Gigue
A lively dance in compound meter that often ends a Baroque suite. Pachelbel paired his Canon with one.
Glosas
Ornaments or divisions: fast notes that fill out a plain melody. Ortiz’s Trattado de glosas teaches how to make them.
Ground bass
A bass figure repeated over and over as the foundation of a piece. Pachelbel’s two-bar bass, heard 28 times.
Guajira
A flamenco form from Cuban folk music, in a major key, with verses mostly about Havana.
Interlude
Music played between the sections of a larger work, such as the scenes of an opera. The Méditation from Thaïs is an orchestral interlude.
Jota
A lively folk song and dance found across Spain. Cádiz had its own, and the alegrías is related to it.
Key, major and minor
The home note and scale a piece is built on. Major tends to sound bright, minor darker.
Malagueña
The flamenco song of Málaga, grown from its old fandangos, in free rhythm.
Martinete
A toná probably born in the forge, sung over the strokes of a hammer on an anvil. Spanish uses the same word for the hammer that strikes a piano string.
Nocturne
A “night piece”: a lyrical piano piece, usually a singing melody over a flowing accompaniment. The Chopin.
Olé
A shout of encouragement. Chris and Lena welcome it whenever you want to shout it.
Open string
A string sounded without a finger pressing it down. The cello’s G string, its second lowest, rings through the Bach.
Opera
A drama sung to orchestral accompaniment. Thaïs.
Ornament
Extra notes that decorate a melody. Chopin kept changing his in the Nocturne.
Palo
A flamenco form, with its own mood, home ground and, for most, its own compás. Six of Chris’s seven pieces and Lecuona’s Malagueña are named for one.
Panda
A band of verdiales players.
Prelude
An opening piece. The Bach opens its suite.
Recercada
A “search” or “trial”: Ortiz’s word for a model piece showing how to improvise or ornament.
Senza tempo
Italian for “without time”: play freely, outside the beat. Near the end of the Chopin.
Sevillanas
The festive song and dance of Seville, in three, in sets of four coplas.
Suite
A set of dances, usually in one key, often opened by a prelude. The Bach.
Tarantas
The miners’ song of Almería, Linares and La Unión, in free rhythm.
Tenor (tenores)
In Ortiz, a repeating bass and chord pattern laid down underneath while a soloist varies a line above it. The tenores identified in Ortiz are the passamezzo antico, passamezzo moderno, romanesca and folía.
Tonás
The family of flamenco songs traditionally sung with no accompaniment, which includes the martinete.
Transposition
Moving a whole piece up or down to a new key. The Chopin is played a half step higher than written, in E major.
Verdiales
The music of the hills above Málaga, a kind of fandango in three, played by pandas with a violin carrying the melody, at its liveliest from Christmas Day to December 28.
Vihuela
The plucked string instrument of Renaissance Spain, tuned like a lute and shaped like a guitar.
Viol
A bowed string instrument of the Renaissance, held between or on the knees. Ortiz wrote his manual for it.

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Beethoven Goes to the Dogs – Program Notes 04.25.27

Season Finale.

Sunday, April 25, 2027, 3:00 pm
Arizona Philharmonic
Peter Bay, conductor
Laura Arganbright, oboe

SEE THE CONCERT, APRIL 25

Printable PDF of these notes · All program notes this season · All Season 9 concerts

The Arizona Philharmonic’s April program opens with a work by Peter Schickele, best known as the composer of very funny works credited to his alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach. In his 1994 work Thurber’s Dogs, Schickele wrote music inspired by the dog cartoons of American humorist James Thurber. We then feature Arizona Philharmonic principal oboist and Arizona native Laura Arganbright, in the romantic Oboe Concerto in D minor by Marie Clémence de Grandval. Next is a popular piece by Peter Maxwell Davies, his Farewell to Stromness, a work whose lovely folklike character seems to contrast with its origins in a bitter environmental protest piece. We close with the Symphony No. 1 of Beethoven, a work in which the composer looks back to the works of Mozart and Haydn, but also signals some of the innovations to come in his own later symphonies.

Program notes ©2025 by J. Michael Allsen

Each work below is described in two parts. The story is for everyone. Inside the music is a closer look for anyone who wants one, with the terms explained in the glossary at the end. Open every closer look

Peter Schickele

Thurber’s Dogs (1994)

I. A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes
II. Dog and Butterfly
III. He Goes with His Owner into Bars
IV. Dog Asleep
V. Dog at His Master’s Grave
VI. Hunting Hounds

Peter Schickele. Publicity photo by Peter Schaaf, via Wikimedia Commons.
Peter Schickele. Publicity photo by Peter Schaaf, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

The late Peter Schickele (1935-2024) was born in Ames, Iowa, and raised in Washington, DC, and Fargo (near Hoople), North Dakota. Schickele was best known through his compositional alter ego, P.D.Q. Bach, music which is hilarious on many levels: it works just fine as pure pie-in-the-face comedy, but it is also obvious that Schickele had a deep understanding of the 18th- and 19th-century forms and styles he was poking fun at. Beginning in 1992, he hosted the public radio show Schickele Mix—a radio “music appreciation” show in the grand old tradition of Deems Taylor, Karl Haas, and others, but unlike most similar programs, his was wonderfully eclectic, and totally lacking in pretension and pomposity. Unfortunately, the least well-known side of Schickele’s career is the concert music he published under his own name.

His Thurber’s Dogs was written in 1994 for a commission by the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio; it celebrates the centennial of the birth of Columbus native James Thurber. Schickele provided the following description:

There are so many loud, in-your-face stand-up comics around these days, that the humor of James Thurber, E. B. White and their contemporaries seems positively genteel. But what saves Thurber’s (and Garrison Keillor’s) output from being hopelessly sentimental is a streak of nastiness that makes ignoring the nasty side of human beings impossible. I have long been a fan of Thurber’s prose and drawings, so I eagerly accepted a commission to write a piece having some connection with his work. When the idea of basing the composition on the essays he wrote about dogs was suggested, I liked it immediately, but as I read them (Thurber collected all of his dog material into one volume), my musical juices were more stirred by the drawings. So I selected six of them and made up simple titles for the uncaptioned ones (all but the first and third of the suite).

Thurber’s work was lively, but not gaudy, vernacular, but not gross, and I hope that’s true of my pieces as well. I certainly feel a kinship with his world: Fargo, North Dakota may be hundreds of miles from Columbus, Ohio, but there are certain things about midwestern cities that seem to be constant (although Thurber seems to have run into more eccentrics than I did, that’s for sure).

James Thurber in 1954. Photo: Fred Palumbo, New York World-Telegram & Sun. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.
James Thurber in 1954. Photo: Fred Palumbo, New York World-Telegram & Sun. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Schickele’s description continues with the movements themselves:

After a brief fanfare, the first movement [A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes] presents six distinct musical ideas and then throws them all together, which is, I suppose, what a canine mother does when she creates a family. Long after I completed the work, I went back, and looked at the drawing again, and noticed that it depicts five puppies, not six. Oh well—so much for program music.

In the third movement [He Goes with His Owner into Bars], I again used the technique of creating an orchestral refrain made up of several distinct thematic ideas or textures (a technique I probably picked up from Bach and Messiaen)—textures that are then treated separately before being recombined—but here the image in my mind was of a big, teeming, friendly bar. The West End Bar, at Broadway and 115th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was such a bar during my student days at Juilliard (which I attended in the pre-Lincoln Center days, when it was a few blocks from Columbia), and probably still is. You walk into a bar like that, and there are all sorts of little plays going on: noisy plays, quiet plays, bravura plays, desperate plays, loquacious plays, terse plays, comedies, tragedies. There are five plays going on in the orchestral refrain heard soon after the movement begins. After the refrain is taken apart and put back together, the piece degenerates into a rowdy drinking song.

The programmatic aspects of the other movements are all quite obvious. I should say, however, that as I was working on the last movement [Hunting Hounds], I found myself thinking as much about the fox as about the hunting hounds. This coupled with the fact that I recently acquired a recording of background music from the old movie serials I used to go to as a kid, probably accounts for the quite ungentlemanly, almost lurid quality of the chase music.

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Marie Clémence de Grandval

Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7 (1877), orchestrated by Lajos Lencsés

I. Allegro moderato
II. Andantino con moto
III. Final: Moderato maestoso

Laura Arganbright, oboe

Clémence de Grandval. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Clémence de Grandval. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Marie Clémence de Grandval (1828-1907) was among the finest French composers of the later 19th century. Born into a prominent and wealthy family, she later married into the nobility, becoming the Vicomtesse de Grandval. As a girl, she studied composition with Friedrich Flotow, and piano with Frédéric Chopin, later working with Camille Saint-Saëns. Her wealth and social status were a kind of double-edged sword: she could freely compose throughout her life without the need to make a living with music, but because it was considered improper for an upper-class woman to work professionally as a composer, she was obliged to publish many works under pseudonyms. In 1881, Grandval was awarded the very first Prix Rossini with her librettist Paul Collin, for their oratorio La fille de Jaïre. (This triennial prize was established by the French Academy of Fine Arts to honor particularly promising vocal pieces.) She composed at least seven operas, five of them staged during her lifetime.

She completed her Oboe Concerto in D minor, Op. 7 on July 16, 1877, signing it with a dedication “to my friend, Georges Gillet.” Gillet (1854-1920) was already one of the leading oboists in France and, eventually, oboe teacher at the Paris Conservatory—Grandval’s concerto is the earliest of several works written for him. Though when it was first performed remains a mystery, it was published a few years later, and Gillet’s esteem for the piece is clear in the fact that it was used in 1892 and 1900 as the contest piece for the Conservatory’s oboe premier prix.

Georges Gillet, for whom Grandval wrote the concerto, around 1900. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons.
Georges Gillet, for whom Grandval wrote the concerto, around 1900. Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

The opening movement (Allegro moderato) begins with a pair of forceful statements from the orchestra, answered much more lightly by the soloist. After a stormy transition, the oboe introduces a more expressive idea, based upon the main theme. The interaction between the soloist and orchestra in a brief development section is playful rather than intense. After a reprise of the opening music, the oboe’s second theme suddenly veers off into a short, lyrical passage prior to a short coda. The playful mood continues in the Andantino con moto, which opens with a pair of light puckish themes. There is a melancholy, minor section in the middle, but just when things seem to be building towards something tragic, a long trill from the oboe steers the movement back to the original mood. The third movement (Final: Moderato maestoso) begins with a mischievous passage from the orchestra, leading to a graceful main theme from the oboe; the repeats of this idea tie this Rondo-form movement together. A passage marked “with determination” opens the first contrasting idea, with teasing interchanges between soloist and orchestra. Things turn briefly tragic, with flashy lines for the soloist, before the oboe coaxes the mood back for another new idea marked “very sweetly.” There is an extended transition section which impishly hints at the main theme before it makes one last appearance. In the coda, the oboe soloist gets a chance at some flashy virtuoso fireworks.

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Peter Maxwell Davies

Farewell to Stromness (1980), arranged for string orchestra by Rosemary Furniss

Peter Maxwell Davies in 2012. Photo: University of Salford Press Office, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Peter Maxwell Davies in 2012. Photo: University of Salford Press Office, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

Sometimes musical protests have actual impact in the real world. The Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, are known for their craggy beauty. In the 1970s, geologists discovered uranium ore, the raw material of the concentrate called yellow cake, near the Orkney town of Stromness. (Stromness, with a population of about 1,700 making it the second largest town in Orkney, had been founded as a Viking anchorage over 1000 years ago.) When the South of Scotland Electricity Board, then a state-owned utility, applied to drill test boreholes near the town, Orcadians (Orkney residents), fearing an environmental disaster, protested strongly. One of them was leading British composer, Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016), who lived in Orkney from 1971 until his death. His response was the Yellow Cake Revue, a bitterly satirical set of songs and recitations performed in Stromness. Farewell to Stromness was originally written as one of a pair of piano interludes in the revue, but it quickly became one of Davies’s most popular works—though its simple folk-inspired style was hardly typical for the composer, who is primarily known for musically and intellectually challenging orchestral and theater pieces. At least partly because of the notoriety of Farewell to Stromness, and the near-unanimous objections of Orcadians and scientists, the mining plan was scrapped soon afterwards. The string orchestra version heard here, arranged by Rosemary Furniss, was first played at the blessing of the marriage of Prince Charles (now King Charles III) and Camilla Parker Bowles at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in April 2005.

Stromness, Orkney. Photo: Geoff Wong, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Stromness, Orkney. Photo: Geoff Wong, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Farewell to Stromness proceeds in three parts. The wistful and folklike main theme is Davies’s own, but it seems to channel the strathspey, a moderate-tempo dance common to Scottish and Orcadian folk music. The theme, with its distinctive “Scotch snap” rhythms, is heard first in a solo violin above a simple repeating bassline, and then in a version for full strings. There is a more somber middle section, followed by a return of the main idea.

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Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)

I. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace

Beethoven at about thirty, the years of the First Symphony. Engraving by Johann Joseph Neidl after Gandolph Ernst Stainhauser von Treuberg, c. 1801. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Beethoven at about thirty, the years of the First Symphony. Engraving by Johann Joseph Neidl after Gandolph Ernst Stainhauser von Treuberg, c. 1801. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The story

The early career of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) seems to have been a time of systematically mastering successive genres, starting from the small and working towards the large. While he was still a teenager in Bonn, he produced mostly small-scale Lieder, piano pieces, and chamber works. By the time he published his Op. 1 piano trios (1795) and Op. 2 piano sonatas (1796), he was a young composer who had already made the Viennese public sit up and take notice. These early works are thoroughly classical in character, very much in the style of Mozart and Haydn—it is obvious that the younger composer had carefully studied the works of his great Viennese predecessors and adopted many of their techniques. The Op. 2 sonatas are, in fact, dedicated to Haydn, with whom Beethoven had started composition lessons in 1792. During the late 1790s, Beethoven began to forge a more personal style and turned his attention to larger genres: the string quartet, the concerto, and, finally, to the symphony.

After nearly fifty years of evolution, the symphony was by then the premier form of instrumental composition—the true test of a Viennese composer’s powers. Beethoven seems to have been in no hurry to pick up this challenge. He had completed most of a four-movement symphony in C Major during 1795-96 but eventually shelved this work and never finished it. Just why Beethoven failed in this first effort remains something of a mystery, but it may be that he still lacked confidence in his ability to pull off this largest of forms. He did not complete a symphony until 1800, with the Symphony No. 1. He seems to have completed the score in a matter of months during the winter of 1799-1800, but sketches for some of the symphony’s material date from as early as 1795. It was performed for the first time at an Akademie at the Burgtheater on April 2, 1800—a concert arranged for Beethoven’s benefit. In addition to the new symphony, this program included a symphony by Mozart, numbers from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, and piano improvisations. The only newspaper critic to comment on this event, the Vienna correspondent of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, praised the Septet, but complained about the heavy use of wind instruments in the symphony.

Three days before the concert, on Thursday, April 22 (time TBA), Peter Bay teaches a free OLLI class at Yavapai College. The class is open to the public, with registration through OLLI; details at AZPhil.org.

The old Burgtheater on the Michaelerplatz, Vienna, where the First Symphony was first played. Rudolf von Alt. Via Wikimedia Commons.
The old Burgtheater on the Michaelerplatz, Vienna, where the First Symphony was first played. Rudolf von Alt. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Inside the music a closer look, for anyone who wants one

Compared to the eight symphonies that followed, the Symphony No. 1 is a fundamentally conservative and cautious work, but still one that shows great individuality. Beethoven’s model was the symphonic style of his occasional teacher, Haydn, and in fact the Symphony No. 1 seems to have particularly close ties to one of Haydn’s “London” symphonies, the Symphony No. 97 of 1792, also in C Major. The opening movement begins in truly Haydnesque fashion, with a slow introduction (Adagio molto) that takes its own good time working its way towards the key of C Major. When the body of the movement begins (Allegro con brio), strings introduce the main theme, a fanfare-style figure. The second theme is a graceful little idea that falls from the flute to the strings. The brief development section—a miniature by Beethoven’s later standards—concentrates entirely on the main theme. The recapitulation restates the opening themes in a more forceful way, introducing a few slight variations. The movement ends with a brief, crisp coda.

The second movement (Andante cantabile con moto) is also set in sonata form. If the first movement seems to pay tribute to Haydn, this lilting movement reflects the spirit of Mozart. The opening theme is presented in fugal fashion by the strings, and a secondary theme—really a skeletal outline of the first—is also introduced by the strings. At the end of the exposition, the timpani plays a dotted rhythm below a triplet line in the flute and first violins. Almost immediately in the development section, this dotted rhythm is picked up by the entire string section, and it stays in the background while Beethoven works with the other material. The recapitulation brings back the opening material in slightly varied form.

True to Classical symphonic form, the third movement is a Menuetto (Allegro molto e vivace), although Beethoven’s energetic and brilliant writing seems to point towards the scherzo movements of his later symphonies, rather than the courtly minuets of Haydn and Mozart. The opening panel of this movement consists of two repeated sections, ending with a distinctive off-beat passage. The central trio, also in two repeated sections, contrasts a placid woodwind figure with quick string lines. The movement ends with a repeat of the opening music.

The finale begins with a comical little introduction (Adagio), in which the violins begin to build a G Major scale, adding an additional note to the top of each little phrase. Just when it becomes apparent that the key is not G, but C, the tempo quickens abruptly (Allegro molto e vivace) and the violins stumble, as if by accident, on the main theme. This dancelike melody may have been one of the first parts of the Symphony No. 1 to be composed: it appears in a counterpoint exercise that Beethoven wrote for his teacher Albrechtsberger in 1795. The movement is set in sonata form, although, as in some Haydn finales, Beethoven introduces elements of rondo form as well. Both main themes are fast and lively, and the entire exposition acts like a perpetual motion machine. If anything about the Symphony No. 1 reveals what was to come in Beethoven’s later symphonies, it is the intense fugal development section of this movement. The opening scale passage of the first theme pervades this section, as Beethoven weaves counterpoint from the remaining material. Only after the recapitulation, and at the beginning of the coda, does the furious forward motion of this movement stop for a moment. We hear two briefly-held chords—as if the orchestra was taking a combined breath before launching into the closing measures.

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Program

Peter Schickele 🇺🇸
Thurber’s Dogs (1994)
I. A Litter of Perfectly Healthy Puppies Raised on Fried Pancakes
II. Dog and Butterfly
III. He Goes with His Owner into Bars
IV. Dog Asleep
V. Dog at His Master’s Grave
VI. Hunting Hounds

Marie Clémence de Grandval 🇫🇷
Oboe Concerto in D Minor, Op. 7 (1877), orchestrated by Lajos Lencsés
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andantino con moto
III. Final: Moderato maestoso

Laura Arganbright, oboe

Intermission

Peter Maxwell Davies 🇬🇧
Farewell to Stromness (1980), arranged by Rosemary Furniss

Ludwig van Beethoven 🇩🇪
Symphony No. 1 in C Major, Op. 21 (1800)
I. Adagio molto – Allegro con brio
II. Andante cantabile con moto
III. Menuetto: Allegro molto e vivace
IV. Adagio – Allegro molto e vivace

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Biographies

Laura Arganbright, oboe

Laura Arganbright. Photo: JT Weston, Blushing Cactus Photography.
Laura Arganbright. Photo: JT Weston, Blushing Cactus Photography.

Dr. Laura Arganbright is the principal oboist of both the Bakersfield Symphony Orchestra and the Arizona Philharmonic. A versatile performer, she has played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Pacific Symphony, Modesto Symphony, and Jacaranda Music, among others. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Bakersfield Symphony in Oscar Navarro’s Legacy, with Arizona Philharmonic in Marcello’s Concerto in D minor, and in the world premiere of Viet Cuong’s Extra(ordinarily) Fancy.

A dedicated educator, Laura is the Oboe Teaching Artist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s YOLA program and has worked with The Harmony Project and USC’s Thornton Community Engagement Program. She maintains a competitive private studio and is active in reed-making pedagogy, having coached reed-making for oboe majors at USC.

Laura holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California, where she was honored with the Brandon Mehrle Service Award. She studied with Joel Timm, Marion Kuszyk, and Lot Demeyer, and earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Arizona State University under Martin Schuring.

Peter Bay, conductor

Peter Bay
Peter Bay

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.

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Musicians

The orchestra roster will be added closer to the concert.

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Glossary

Terms as they come up in these notes, in plain words, with where you will meet them on this program.

Adagio, Adagio molto
Slow; very slow. The Beethoven’s first movement opens with an Adagio molto introduction, and its finale with a few bars of Adagio.
Akademie
In Beethoven’s Vienna, a concert a musician put on for his own benefit, choosing the program and keeping the receipts. The First Symphony had its premiere at one.
Allegro, Allegro moderato, Allegro con brio, Allegro molto e vivace
Italian tempo words: fast; moderately fast; fast, with spirit; very fast and lively. The Grandval opens Allegro moderato; the Beethoven’s first movement is Allegro con brio once its introduction is over, and its last two movements are Allegro molto e vivace.
Andante cantabile con moto
At a walking pace, in a singing manner, moving along. The Beethoven’s second movement.
Andantino con moto
Andantino is a gentle walking pace; con moto adds “with motion.” The Grandval’s second movement.
Bassline
The lowest part in the music, the foundation the harmony stands on. Farewell to Stromness rests on a simple repeating one.
Coda
The closing section of a movement, after its main business is done. The Grandval’s finale saves its fireworks for the coda; Beethoven ends his first movement with a brief, crisp one.
Concertmaster
The first violinist, who leads the violins and, after the conductor, the orchestra. The first name in the roster.
Concerto
A work for a soloist with orchestra, usually in three movements. The Grandval.
Counterpoint
Two or more melodies sounding at once, each making sense on its own. Beethoven studied it with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, and his finale’s development is woven from it.
Development
The middle part of a movement in sonata form, where the themes laid out in the exposition are broken apart, combined and taken through new keys. The Grandval’s first movement has a brief, playful one; Beethoven’s finale an intense one.
Dotted rhythm
A long note followed by a short one, the long note stretched by half its value, which gives a jaunty snap. The timpani play one at the end of the exposition in Beethoven’s second movement.
Exposition
The opening section of a sonata-form movement, where the main themes are first laid out.
Fanfare
A short, bright flourish, traditionally for trumpets. Thurber’s Dogs opens with one, and the main theme of Beethoven’s first movement is a fanfare-style figure.
Fugue, fugal
A fugue is built on one theme that enters in each voice in turn and is combined with itself by the rules of counterpoint; fugal describes writing in that manner inside another kind of movement. The strings open Beethoven’s second movement in fugal fashion, and his finale’s development is fugal.
Genre
A kind of piece: song, sonata, string quartet, concerto, symphony. The notes follow the young Beethoven through them, from small to large.
Interlude
A short piece played between the main numbers of a show. Farewell to Stromness was one of two piano interludes in The Yellow Cake Revue.
Key, major and minor
The home note and scale a piece is built around. Major tends to sound bright and minor darker. The Grandval is in D minor, the Beethoven in C major; the Beethoven’s slow introduction takes its time arriving in C, and its finale’s introduction seems to be in G until it turns out to be C.
Lieder
German for “songs”: art songs for voice and piano. Among the first things the teenage Beethoven wrote in Bonn.
Minuet (Menuetto) and trio
A courtly dance in three beats, and by Haydn’s day the usual third movement of a symphony; the trio is its contrasting middle section, after which the minuet returns. Beethoven’s Menuetto is too fast to dance to and points toward the scherzo.
Movement
A self-contained section of a larger work, with its own tempo and character. Thurber’s Dogs has six, the Grandval three, the Beethoven four.
Oboe
A woodwind instrument sounded by a double reed, two thin blades of cane vibrating against each other. Oboists make and adjust their own reeds, and Laura Arganbright teaches reed-making.
Opus, Op
Latin for “work”: a number given to a composer’s pieces, usually in order of publication. Grandval’s concerto is Op. 7, Beethoven’s symphony Op. 21; the notes also mention his Op. 1 trios, Op. 2 sonatas and Op. 20 Septet.
Orchestration
Deciding which instruments play what. This performance uses Lajos Lencsés’s orchestration of the Grandval.
Perpetual motion
Music that runs in a steady stream of quick notes with hardly a pause. The exposition of Beethoven’s finale.
Premier prix
French for “first prize,” awarded at the Paris Conservatoire’s year-end competition, where every student on an instrument played the same set piece. Grandval’s concerto was that piece for oboists in 1892 and 1900.
Principal
The player who leads a section and takes its solos. Laura Arganbright is the Arizona Philharmonic’s principal oboe.
Program music
Music that depicts a story, scene or picture. Schickele’s six drawings set to music, with his joke about counting puppies.
Recapitulation
The section of a sonata-form movement where the opening themes return, usually in the home key, after the development.
Refrain
A passage that keeps coming back. Schickele builds his third movement around an orchestral refrain of five overlapping ideas, like five little plays going on in one bar.
Revue
A stage show of songs, sketches and short numbers, often satirical. Davies’s Yellow Cake Revue protested the uranium plan.
Rondo
A form in which a main tune keeps returning between contrasting episodes, often used for finales. The Grandval’s finale; Beethoven’s finale borrows some of its habits.
Scherzo
Italian for “joke”: a fast, playful movement that took the minuet’s place in Beethoven’s later symphonies.
Scotch snap
A short accented note followed by a longer one, a rhythm typical of Scottish music. It gives Farewell to Stromness its Scottish accent.
Septet
A piece for seven players. Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, shared the program at the First Symphony’s premiere.
Slow introduction
A slow opening passage before the fast main body of a movement, a habit of Haydn’s. Beethoven’s first movement has one, and his finale a comic miniature version.
Sonata form
The usual plan for a symphony’s first movement, and often for others: an exposition lays out the themes, a development works them over, a recapitulation brings them back. Three of the Beethoven’s four movements use it.
Strathspey
A Scottish dance in a moderate four beats to the bar, known for the Scotch snap.
String orchestra
An orchestra of strings alone: violins, violas, cellos and basses. Farewell to Stromness is heard in Rosemary Furniss’s arrangement for one.
Suite
A set of short pieces meant to be played together. Thurber’s Dogs is a suite of six.
Symphony
A large work for orchestra alone, usually in four movements.
Theme
A tune or idea a movement is built from.
Timpani
Kettledrums, tuned to definite notes. They play the dotted rhythm in Beethoven’s second movement.
Trill
A rapid alternation between two neighboring notes. A long oboe trill turns the Grandval’s slow movement back from the brink.
Triplet
Three notes played in the time of two. The flute and first violins play a triplet line in Beethoven’s second movement.
Virtuoso
A performer of dazzling technique, or music written to show it off. The Grandval’s coda.
Winds, woodwinds
Flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons; in Beethoven’s day “winds” often took in the horns too. The review of the First Symphony’s premiere complained that he used them too much.

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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

SEE THE CONCERT, OCTOBER 4

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.

Each work below is described in two parts. The story is for everyone. Inside the music is a closer look for anyone who wants one, with the terms explained in the glossary at the end. Open every closer look

José Carlos Campos

Danza rústica (1981)

José Carlos Campos. Photo courtesy of the composer.
José Carlos Campos. Photo courtesy of the composer.

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.

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Ludwig van Beethoven

Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61 (1806)

I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Larghetto
III. Rondo: Allegro

Steven Moeckel, violin

Beethoven around the time of the concerto. Joseph Willibrord Mähler, c. 1804-05. Wien Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.
Beethoven around the time of the concerto. Joseph Willibrord Mähler, c. 1804-05. Wien Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

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
Joseph Joachim’s album leaf quoting the concerto’s opening theme, Dresden, 5 November 1860. Dorotheum, via Wikimedia Commons.
Joseph Joachim’s album leaf quoting the concerto’s opening theme, Dresden, 5 November 1860. Dorotheum, via Wikimedia Commons.

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.”

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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

Mozart, in the unfinished portrait by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, c. 1782-85. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Mozart, in the unfinished portrait by his brother-in-law Joseph Lange, c. 1782-85. Via Wikimedia Commons.

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 first page of the Jupiter Symphony in Mozart’s hand, 1788. Via IMSLP and Wikimedia Commons.
The first page of the Jupiter Symphony in Mozart’s hand, 1788. Via IMSLP and Wikimedia Commons.

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.”

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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

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Biographies

Steven Moeckel, violin

Steven Moeckel
Steven Moeckel

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
Peter Bay

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.

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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

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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.

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