Program Notes: Xian Conducts Grieg Piano Concerto, Opening Night Concert

JESSIE MONTGOMERY 
Hymn for Everyone 
BORN: December 8, 1981 
WORK COMPOSED: 2021 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 28, 2022, by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti. 

Much of Jessie Mongomery's work and background has been influenced by movements advancing social and racial equity, making her a unique voice as an educator and performer. Of her expansive list of projects and accolades, her involvement with the Sphinx Organization, the Detroit-based nonprofit focused on representation in classical music, stands out. She served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, its professional touring ensemble, which gave her a valuable platform to share her new compositions. 

“Music is my connection to the world,” Montgomery writes on her website. “It guides me to understand my place in relation to others and challenges me to make clear the things I do not understand. I imagine that music is a meeting place at which all people can converse about their unique differences and common stories.” 

The Hymn for Everyone reflects on personal and collective challenges from 2021, at the height of COVID. Up until that point, she had resisted composing “response pieces” to the pandemic and the social-political upheaval that followed. She also struggled with an intense writer’s block after the death of her mother that same year.  

“But one day, after a long hike, this hymn just came to me — a rare occurrence,” Montgomery noted. “The melody traverses through different orchestral ‘choirs,’ and is accompanied by the rest of the ensemble. It’s a kind of meditation for orchestra, exploring various washes of color and timbre through each repetition of the melody.” 

Characterized as a chorale for orchestra, Hymn for Everyone continuously evolves from a simple tune. It begins around a four-bar melodic phrase set free by a tolling bell. The soft and meditative theme weaves in and around the orchestra, and while a buildup in the brass sections lends weight, the music remains serene, accessible and even hopeful. The tolling bell returns — enveloped by the full force of the orchestra — to close the work in calm repose. 

EDVARD GRIEG 
Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 
BORN: June 15, 1843, in Bergen, Norway 
DIED: September 4, 1907, in Bergen, Norway 
WORK COMPOSED: 1868 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 3, 1869, in Copenhagen, with the Royal Danish Orchestra conducted by Holger Simon Paulli and featuring pianist Edmund Neupert.  

Norway’s best-known composer, Edvard Grieg, was a shy, inward-looking man inspired by the calm of the country, away from the bustle and noise of his native Bergen. He found solace in summer trips to a cottage near Copenhagen, where he enjoyed fruitful days and nights of composing, and gave birth to one of the world’s most endearing concertos.  

The least characteristic of all Grieg’s works is, ironically, his greatest success. The Piano Concerto in A Minor announces itself like a tidal surge, the opening rumble of timpani sending the piano on a flourish of unforgettable melodies and a middle movement of breathtaking poetry. No wonder this impassioned work has enjoyed more than 400 recordings over the last century. 

Inspiration came from hearing Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor in a performance by Clara Schumann at a concert in Leipzig. In fact, the opening of both works seems to be cast from the same mold, and certainly the same key. Grieg shared the handwritten manuscript of his new work with Franz Liszt, who played it by sight and offered advice on orchestration. Grieg accepted the counsel and continued to dabble with it: from its inception in 1868 until the year of his death, Grieg revised the work no less than eight times. 

The concerto opens with a salvo: a timpani roll followed by a series of descending octaves by the piano. From there, Grieg condenses his material into a neatly packed development section with not one wasted note. Near the end, the soloist takes over with a luxurious cadenza. Film buffs may recognize this music from the movies Intermezzo and The Seventh Veil. 

The adagio requires an unerring delicacy from the soloist, free of showmanship, and when done well, this movement mirrors an elegy by Mozart. Grieg was at heart a poet, and here he is at his most lyrical, turning plaintive lines into aural teardrops. The finale unfolds aggressively with a fast-paced Norwegian dance known as a halling, bolstered by trumpets, trombones and timpani that send the movement toward a triumphant close. 

GIUSEPPE VERDI 
Overture to La forza del destino (The Force of Destiny)  
BORN: October 10, 1813, in Le Roncole, Italy 
DIED: January 27, 1901, in Milan, Italy 
WORK COMPOSED: 1861 (revised 1869) 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 10, 1862, at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre of Saint Petersburg, Russia. 

The Force of Destiny is the only one of Giuseppe Verdi’s 28 operas with an abstract idea for its title. He wanted to move away from the lighthearted stories and music that dominated Italian theater and toward more powerful and universal content. 

In this sense, he followed in the footsteps of Christoph Willibald Gluck from a century earlier, who set out to reform opera by reinforcing the bond between music and drama, and dismissed the “superfluous embellishments” of virtuoso singers. 

Both Verdi and Gluck emphasized the heightened role of the orchestra in driving the narrative, especially when the story involved matters of great importance — such as how fate chooses its victims. In fact, from the beginning of The Force of Destiny overture, the leitmotif of fate permeates the opera in a variety of guises, including its beautiful expression by the clarinet in Act III.  

Like Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Verdi compresses a great deal of material into a tightly wound nucleus, the tension so palpable it could explode at any moment. It opens with three foreboding horn calls — the fate motto — followed by an agitation in the orchestra associated with the heroine Leonore. Verdi’s mastery of form and concision (in just eight minutes) encapsulate the themes of love and tragedy that fuel a four-hour opera. 

BEDŘICH SMETANA  
Sárka No. 3 from Má vlast 
BORN: March 2, 1824, in Litomyšl, Bohemia, Czech Republic 
DIED: May 12, 1884, in Prague, Czech Republic 
WORK COMPOSED: January–February, 1875 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 10, 1876, in Prague, under the baton of Adolf Čech. 

There may not be a better example of radical feminism in classical music than Šárka, from Smetana’s Má vlast (My Country, or My Fatherland), his popular set of six tone poems depicting life and nature in Bohemia. The third in the mix, Šárka is named after the woman warrior from the Czech legend The Maiden’s War, and as the story has it, she was not one to cross. 

Smetana captures the urgency and passion of the myth, which describes a country ruled by a political matriarchy. Men, however, challenge it and war soon breaks out. Šárka — spiteful from a failed relationship — organizes a band of female soldiers to oppose their adversaries. 

She attempts to fool her foes by being tied to a tree, pretending to be a captive and waiting for the knight Ctraid (played by the cello) to free her. Ctraid’s army celebrates the union of the two, who become lovers, but Šárka has other ideas. In camp, she serves drugged beer to Ctraid and his troops, who fall asleep (note the “snores” of the bassoon). She then sounds a hunting call to alert her warriors, who sneak up and kill the men in their slumber. Šárka regrets her vicious act — depicted by a weeping clarinet — but it’s too late. In the end, violence triumphs over love.  

Smetana didn’t hold back in writing this music, as the subject matter demanded a forceful approach: “In this composition I not only want to portray this wild and rugged landscape,” he wrote, “but also to tell the story of a young woman who swears to take vengeance on the entire male sex, motivated by her unfaithful lover.” 

RICHARD WAGNER 
Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Master-Singers of Nuremberg) 
BORN: May 22, 1813, in Leipzig, Germany 
DIED: February 13, 1883, in Venice, Italy 
WORK COMPOSED: 1862 
WORLD PREMIERE: June 21, 1868, National Theater, Munich 

Wagner composed magnificently for the theater, and most of his operas and music dramas are still with us, constantly being re-imagined in major houses: Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and the four-night Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). Wagner fully believed in his greatness and wasn’t humble about it. “I am not made like other people,” he said. “I must have brilliance and beauty and light. The world owes me what I need.” 

Most of what Wagner composed might be considered serious, except The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, his only comic opera. Although many of us will never hear this lengthy opera in its entirety, the stand-alone prelude remains a popular staple of orchestras all over the world.  

Wagner wrote the music during a train trip in 1862, drafting a microcosm of the opera’s expansive themes associated with the mastersingers and their apprentices — which represent an ancient musical guild and its traditions. The stately opening is unforgettable in its sweep and gives way to the entrance of the mastersingers. A lyrical middle section plays against the contrapuntal passages that depict the singing contest, and the prelude ends with a return of the two opening themes in celebratory fanfare. 

All notes by Kurt Loft © 2025 

Kurt Loft is a journalist and music critic who has covered classical music for various publications and arts groups for more than 40 years. A member of the Music Critics Association of North America, he lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.