Program Notes: Søndergård Conducts Symphonie fantastique
On November 13 and 14, 2025, the Minnesota Orchestra presents Søndergård Conducts Symphonie fantastique, Music Director Thomas Søndergård conducts music by Tōru Takemitsu, Hector Berlioz and Karol Szymanowski, with Benjamin Beilman featured as soloist in Szymanowski's Violin Concerto No. 1.
The performances take place at Orchestra Hall on Thursday, November 13, and Friday, November 14, 2025. The November 14 performance will be broadcast live on Twin Cities PBS (TPT 2), with Ariana Kim serving as broadcast host, and will be available for online streaming on the Orchestra’s YouTube channel and live on Facebook. It will also be broadcast live on stations of YourClassical Minnesota Public Radio, including KSJN 99.5 FM in the Twin Cities.
Program Notes
Tōru Takemitsu
Born: October 8, 1930, Tokyo, Japan
Died: February 20, 1996, Tokyo, Japan
Night Signal
Premiered: September 14, 1987
Contradictions and the push and pull of cultures were recurring themes in the singular musical life of Tōru Takemitsu, one of the most revered 20th-century Japanese composers of music for the concert hall and films. While living in American-occupied Japan after World War II, the young Takemitsu became acquainted with Western music through radio broadcasts on the Armed Forces network and began composing, primarily self-trained. He rooted his early works in the so-called “Western” idiom, rather than Japanese traditions, though his stance on incorporating influences from his home country evolved over time. Other sources of musical inspiration included the avant-garde American composer John Cage and Olivier Messiaen of France.
Takemitsu and his compositions enjoyed great success around the world during his lifetime, and he remains so beloved in Japan that a major Tokyo concert hall and composition prize are named in his memory. It is emblematic of this cultural straddling that Takemitsu’s 1987 two-part brass ensemble work Signals from Heaven received its world premiere on not one but two continents. The first movement, Day Signal, was premiered in Tokyo by the Les Chevaliers Brass Ensemble on July 25, 1987, while the second, Night Signal, received its first performance by the brass musicians of the Scottish National Orchestra, conducted by Matthias Bamert, at a contemporary music festival concert in Glasgow on September 14, 1987.
“A SIGNAL SENT TO THE UNKNOWN”
The word “signal” was clearly a meaningful one for Takemitsu. In 1993, he commented of his works in general: “My music is something like a signal sent to the unknown. Moreover, I imagine and believe that my signal meets another’s signal, and the resulting physical change creates a new harmony different from the original two.” The brief Night Signal, dedicated to British composer-conductor Oliver Knussen, fits this image well, as it is composed in the antiphonal brass tradition popularized in Renaissance-era Italy—in which two distinct ensembles play in alternation or combination. Set in slow, slightly shifting tempos, this peaceful music is characterized by short, simple musical gestures and constant soft-loud-soft dynamic swells. In the middle section, rhythms grow in complexity and the separation between the two groups erodes. The conclusion brings one last dynamic swell from both groups, then a fade to nothing.
Instrumentation: 4 horns, 2 trumpets, cornet, 3 trombones and tuba
Program note by Carl Schroeder.
Karol Szymanowski
Born: October 3, 1882, Tymoshivka, Ukraine
Died: March 29, 1937, Lausanne, Switzerland
Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra, Opus 35
Premiered: November 1, 1922
Karol Szymanowski was a member of an interestingly lively and talent-filled family. He studied first with his father, who played cello and piano, and with another musical relative, Gustav Neuhaus, but it was really in the course of travel, independent study and quite simply experience that his true education began. He had been brought up on the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) plus Chopin and, surprisingly for so conservative an environment, Scriabin. Now his horizons expanded to embrace Wagner, Strauss and Reger, then Debussy and Ravel, eventually and crucially Stravinsky, whose Firebird and Petrushka he saw in their original productions by Sergei Diaghilev. In sum, he drew on many sources, but fused them into a colorful, malleable language all his own.
The voice behind Szymanowski’s two Violin Concertos is that of Paweł Kochański, a fiery and sweet-toned virtuoso, and one of the most admired European violinists of his time. The plan was for Kochański, who wrote the cadenza for Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto and to whom the work is dedicated, to give the first performance in St. Petersburg at the end of 1917, but the Russian Revolution got in the way. The premiere finally took place in Warsaw on November 1, 1922, with Józef Ozimiński as soloist and Grzegorz Fitelberg conducting.
A POETIC CONCERTO
Szymanowski cast his First Violin Concerto as a single movement of about 23 minutes’ duration. The analytical ear and eye readily enough distinguish different sections and the recurrences of certain ideas, but what the spontaneous listening ear responds to is the seamless, self-generating flow. (Violinist and conductor must be fully aware of the former in order to create the impression of the latter.)
The dominant impression is that of an intensely lyric, enchantingly colorful music that is in constant flux. The work is as much a poem as it is a concerto, being in fact based on a rhapsody, Summer Night, by one of the composer’s literary contemporaries, Tadeusz Miciński. Summer Night is a feast of fantastical images—donkeys in crowns settled majestically on the grass, fireflies kissing the wild rose, and many birds.
The concerto is a work of white-hot passion, set in a magical landscape inhabited by, among others, the figure of Pan, part humorous, part threatening, whom Szymanowski invokes so wonderfully in the third of the Myths. Szymanowski said that the true national music of his country was not “the stiffened ghost of the polonaise or mazurka, nor a fugue on the Chmielu wedding song…but the solitary, joyful, carefree song of the nightingale in a fragrant night in Poland.” In this concerto, he set that ecstatic song down for us to share.
Instrumentation: solo violin with orchestra comprising 3 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 3 clarinets (1 doubling E-flat clarinet), bass clarinet, 3 bassoons (1 doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, tambourine, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, glockenspiel, piano, celesta, 2 harps and strings
Excerpted from a program note by the late Michael Steinberg, used with permission.
Hector Berlioz
Born: December 11, 1803, La Côte-Saint-André, France
Died: March 8, 1869, Paris, France
Symphonie fantastique, Opus 14
Premiered: December 5, 1830
Hector Berlioz composed Symphonie fantastique in 1830, when much that was new and forward-looking was in the air. From today’s vantage point we can see fairly easily that the beginnings of a new kind of European classical music were to be found in the works of Beethoven. And the better we know Symphonie fantastique, the more clearly we can sense in it the presence of Beethoven. At the same time, however deeply he was in debt to Beethoven, Berlioz strove to write “new music.” He succeeded. The fantastique sounds and behaves like nothing ever heard before. It takes off on paths Beethoven could never have imagined; that it was written just three years after the death of Beethoven staggers the imagination.
A COMPOSER’S OBSESSION
In 1827, at the Paris Odéon, Berlioz saw a staging of Hamlet by a company from London. Among the performers was Harriet Smithson, a 27-year-old actress with whom Berlioz fell instantly and wildly in love. He wrote to her repeatedly; he heard gossip about an affair between her and her manager. This hurt him, but it also provided enough distance to enable him to plan and to begin work on the symphony—whose subject was an artist “with a vivid imagination” who falls in love with his “ideal” woman, experiences hope and doubt, then an opium-induced dream in which he sees himself being executed for killing his beloved; after his death she appears to be taking part in an orgy at “a foul assembly of sorcerers and devils.”
The premiere took place on December 5, 1830. Two years later Berlioz presented a sharpened and improved version of his symphony, now with a sequel whose script was full of unmistakable allusions to his passion for Smithson. She was persuaded to attend Berlioz’s concert on December 9, 1832. They finally met, and on October 3, 1833, they were married. The whole business was a disaster. By the time they separated in 1844, Smithson was no longer performing, as an accident had put an end to her career. She died in 1854, an alcoholic and paralyzed; though they were no longer together, Berlioz supported her financially until her death.
A FANTASTIC SYMPHONY
Berlioz wrote several programs for his autobiographical symphony. Excerpts from his 1845 note are indicated with quotation marks.
REVERIES–PASSIONS. A young musician, “the artist,” sees and falls hopelessly in love with a woman who embodies the charms of “the ideal being of whom he has dreamed.” In his mind she is linked to a musical motif, and both “the melodic image and its human model pursue him incessantly like a double idée fixe....The passage from this state of melancholic reverie, interrupted by a few fits of unmotivated joy, to one of delirious passion, with its movements of fury and jealousy, its return of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolation—all this is the subject of the first movement.” The subtly shaped idée fixe is the melody that violins and flute play to an accompaniment of nervous strings interjections when the Allegro begins.
A BALL. Whether the artist is engaged in festivities or contemplating nature, the “beloved image appears before him and troubles his soul.” The first three dozen measures paint for us the ballroom with its glitter and flicker, its swirling couples, the yards and yards of whispering silk. This softly scintillating waltz is exquisitely scored.
IN THE COUNTRY. The artist is calmed by the sound of shepherds piping, by “the quiet rustling of the trees gently disturbed by the wind,” but wondering if his beloved might be deceiving him, he feels a “mixture of hope and fear...ideas of happiness disturbed by black presentiments.” There is nothing in music before this, or since, like the pathos of the recapitulated conversation with one voice missing. As a picture of despairing loneliness it is without equal.
MARCH TO THE SCAFFOLD. “Having become certain that his love goes unrecognized, the artist poisons himself with opium.” But rather than dying, he “dreams that he has killed the woman he loves, that he is condemned, led to the scaffold, and that he is witnessing his execution.”
DREAM OF THE WITCHES’ SABBATH. The artist sees himself “in the midst of a frightful assembly of ghosts, sorcerers, monsters of every kind, all come together for his funeral.” The melody representing his beloved is now “no more than the tune of an ignoble dance, trivial and grotesque...she takes part in the devilish orgy...funeral knell, burlesque parody of the Dies irae...”
As we enter the final scene, with its trim thematic transformations, its bizarre sonorities—deep bells, squawking E-flat clarinet, the beating of violin and viola strings with the wooden stick of the bow, glissandos for winds, violent alternations of ff with pp—its grotesque imagery, its wild and coruscating brilliance, we have left the Old World for good.
SOUND THE BELLS
This week’s performances of Symphonie fantastique feature a pair of large church bells, custom-cast for the Minnesota Orchestra by the Royal Eijsbouts foundry in the Netherlands and added to the Orchestra’s permanent instrument collection thanks to a donation by Orchestra patron Gary B. Cohen.
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (1 doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (1 doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (1 doubling E-flat clarinet), 4 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 cornets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, field drum, bass drum, cymbals, 2 large bells, 2 harps and strings
Program note excerpted from the late Michael Steinberg's The Symphony: A Listener's Guide (Oxford University Press, 1995), used with permission.
