Program Notes: Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances

JOAN TOWER 
Suite from Concerto for Orchestra   
BORN: September 6, 1938 
COMPOSED: The Concerto for Orchestra was composed in 1990; the Suite was distilled by conductor Peter Oundjian in 2024 with the composer’s permission. 
WORLD PREMIERE: The Concerto for Orchestra premiered January 28, 1990, at Carnegie Hall in New York City by the American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Wolff; the Suite premiered at the same venue, with Peter Oundjian conducting the Yale Philharmonia on January 27, 2025. He brings it to the Seattle Symphony to open this exciting program. 

A concert pianist who began writing music in the 1970s for her own chamber ensemble, the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players, Joan Tower has since become a well-respected, much-performed American composer with a wide body of work that has earned her three GRAMMYs and the Grawemeyer Award for Music (she was the first woman to receive it, in 1990), among many other accolades. Her Concerto for Orchestra had its original premiere more than 35 years ago, a joint commission by the St. Louis Symphony, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.  

In her program note, she wrote: “Concerto for Orchestra begins slowly, quietly and simply, on a unison F-sharp that emerges from the depths of the orchestra. I had imagined a long and large landscape that had a feeling of space and distance. From the beginning I wanted to convey this sense to let the listener understand that the proportions of the piece would be spacious and that the musical materials would travel a long road. … There is a strong sense of direction in this piece, as in all my music, and a feeling of ascent, which comes not only from the scale motives, but from tempos, rhythms, and dynamics that cooperate to produce the different intensities.” 

It was her biggest work to date when it was completed in 1990, but it followed three concertos she wrote for clarinet, flute and violin, which, she wrote, “reflects that experience, enabling me to take more risks between soloists and orchestra,” highlighting not only four solo instruments, but duos, trios and other combinations to form the structural, timbral and emotive elements of the piece. “Although technically demanding, the virtuoso sections are an integral part of the music, resulting from accumulated energy, rather than being designed purely as display elements ...” 

The Suite from Concerto for Orchestra is a new version of the work, condensed to 11 minutes by our program’s conductor, Peter Oundjian, and premiered in January 2025. He has conducted Tower’s full work several times in the past as well as presiding over the 2021 world premiere of her cello concerto, A New Day, and last summer’s world premiere of her saxophone concerto, Love Returns. His Suite from Concerto for Orchestra preserves the virtuosic interplay among players, its contrasts, and, as she described the 1991 work, that “feeling of ascent.” Tower apparently approved: “It took a lot of courage for Peter to distill my Concerto for Orchestra into a suite. I think he actually pulled it off — and I am totally in awe of how he did it.”  

Seattle Symphony © 2026 

CHRISTOPHER THEOFANIDIS 
Gemini Sun for Violin, Percussion and Orchestra 
BORN: December 18, 1967 
COMPOSED: 2025 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 20, 2026, by the Colorado Symphony, with guest soloist Svet Stoyanov joined by Colorado Symphony Concertmaster Yumi Hwang-Williams and Peter Oundjian conducting. 

Another American composer, with a catalog that ranges from orchestral and chamber music to opera and ballet, Christopher Theofanidis has earned his fair share of accolades since he began composing in the early 1990s. This includes a two GRAMMY nominations (for his 2007 chorus and orchestra work based on the poetry of Rumi, The Here and Now, and his 2017 Bassoon Concerto), a 2021 Best Instrumental Solo GRAMMY win (for his Viola Concerto, recorded with David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony with soloist Richard O’Neill), and his orchestral work, Rainbow Body, earned the 2003 Masterprize. To date, Rainbow Body has been performed by over 200 orchestras internationally. 

He has a long-standing relationship with the Atlanta Symphony and its former Music Director Robert Spano, with which he recorded four of his works, like the 2015 concert-length oratorio, Creation/Creator, while another 2015 work, Dreamtime Ancestors, was played by more than 50 orchestras in its first two seasons of existence. He has served as a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program, and he is a former faculty member of the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University as well as the Juilliard School. He is currently a professor at Yale University, and composer-in-residence and co-director of the composition program at the Aspen Music Festival.  

According to his program note, “Gemini Sun has been a longtime dream growing out of my friendship with percussionist extraordinaire, Svet Stoyanov. I have known Svet since the early 2000s, and we started talking about this double concerto back in 2013. The idea of pairing violin and percussion has a strong recent history, with wonderful composers like Paul Lansky and Alejandro Viñao, as well as with some older, mid-20th century composers like Lou Harrison, leading a valiant charge. One of the tricky things about this duo combination is the apparent disparity between the sustain-lined world of the violin and the shorter attack world of the percussion battery. It has been a wonderful challenge to thread these two starting points and make sense of them in the concerto. I have chosen the image of Gemini, or the Twins, as a way to think about this relationship throughout the work. 

“One of the things I often find distracting in contemporary concertos with percussion, is the enormous set ups of instruments across the stage. For this reason, I have chosen to mostly keep one percussion instrument per movement to allow for a kind of focused listening experience;  movements 1 and 4 are primarily marimba oriented, movement 2 is vibraphone oriented, and movement 3 has the percussion soloist playing a Bulgarian frame drum, called the Tappan. That decision was a kind of tip of the hat to Svet’s musical heritage, and he is a phenomenal Tappan player. 

“In the first movement (con brio, translated as ‘spirited’ or ‘with energy’), the melodic and secondary lines alternate in exuberant dialogue between the two instruments with a kind of vivid and light orchestral texture. The second movement (which uses the English, easy) finds a kind of meeting of the minds between the duo soloists, having the vibraphone player frequently play the instrument with a bow, paralleling the bow playing of the violin. The pedal on the vibraphone also allows for a more sustained and luminous sound palette which, to my ears, provides a nice counterweight to the melodic lines of the violin.   

“Movement 3 (cantabile, or ‘singing’) is based on the interaction not just of the two soloists, but also between an original tune I wrote for this movement and a traditional Bulgarian folk tune called ‘kaval sviri.’ The title of that folk tune translates to ‘the flute plays,’ and accordingly, the movement begins and ends with a flute solo (it is a personal reference and homage to Svet and his flute-playing wife, Felice, who also happens to be a friend of mine from years ago). The nature of the folk tune itself is really nice — with alternating patterns of 2s and 3s and parallel electric intervals of 2nds that give it a vibrant quality. Here, Svet is playing a different, non-pitched instrument — a drum. I wrote the percussion line so that he could ornament it in a way that was organic to that tradition.  

“The final movement (presto), is again lively, in a 12/8 meter with duple interjections that keep it dancing. The percussion soloist returns to the marimba, as in the first movement. This movement has the most playfully competitive dialogue between the two instruments, culminating in a short final cadenza.   

“It has been a great pleasure to work on Gemini Sun, and I hope it will bring some joy to people. I am grateful to the Seattle, Colorado, Frost School and New York Youth symphony orchestras for making this work possible, and of course, to Svet for believing in it.” –Christopher Theofanidis 

SERGEY RACHMANINOV  
Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 
BORN: April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, Russia 
DIED: March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 1940 
WORLD PREMIERE: January 3, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with Eugene Ormandy conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra. 

The notion of a ballet score from the pen of Sergey Rachmaninov seems, on first consideration, a surprising one. Although he had written a one-act music drama early in his career and had served for a time as a conductor at the renowned Bolshoi Opera in Moscow, Rachmaninov’s ties to the theater were permanently severed when he left Russia in 1917. (Rachmaninov lived in Germany initially but eventually settled in the United States.) And the distinctive combination of somberness and Romantic effusion that had emerged as the signature trait of his concert music would seem ill-suited to the world of ballet.  

As it happened, Rachmaninov made his debut as a ballet composer quite unintentionally. In 1939, another Russian emigré, Mikhail Fokine (the legendary choreographer of Les Sylphides, Petrushka, Daphnis and Chloé and other works), created a ballet set to Rachmaninov’s already well-known Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The composer, undoubtedly flattered, took a sudden interest in dance music and in early 1940, began to work on a new orchestral piece. He initially called it Fantastic Dances, and titled its three movements “Noon,” “Twilight” and “Midnight.”  

When he had accumulated sufficient sketches, Rachmaninov played the music for Fokine, hoping that the choreographer would want to make a ballet with the new work as well. But the potential collaboration with Fokine never materialized and Rachmaninov completed the music as a concert piece. By the time he was finished, in the autumn of 1940, he had dropped the descriptive titles of the movements and changed the name of his composition to Symphonic Dances. “It should have been called just Dances,” the composer told a journalist, “but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestras.” 

Symphonic Dances proved to be Rachmaninov’s last work, and the music suggests a new direction the composer might have pursued had fate granted him more time. In contrast to the lush harmonies and sweeping melodic lines that formerly characterized his style, this composition offers a more modern sound of leaner textures, sharper harmonies and more concise motifs.  

The first movement has a broad three-part format, with energetic music at the start and close framing a lyrical central section. The movement that follows brings a strange waltz interrupted periodically by sinister figures from the brass instruments. As in other well-known waltz treatments by early modern composers — Sibelius’ Valse triste and Ravel’s La valse, for example — this music conveys a somewhat ghostly atmosphere. 

The finale is the longest of the three movements, and the richest in detail. It opens with a slow tempo but eventually accelerates to an allegro vivace section marked by animated rhythms and a surprisingly Spanish flavor. Even more surprising, in the context of this lively music, is the intrusion of a severe theme given out by the brass as the movement builds to a climax. This is Dies irae, an ancient ecclesiastical chant for the dead. With what seems a peculiar fatalism, Rachmaninov had adopted that melody as a personal motto, quoting it in a number of his compositions. But its reminder of death has only a passing effect here, for the chant is soon swept aside by more vital sounds as the music rushes to its conclusion. 

Paul Schiavo © 2011, revised 2026