Program Notes: Xian Conducts Schumann & Beethoven

NOKUTHULA NGWENYAMA  
Primal Message 
BORN: June 16, 1976, in Los Angeles, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 2018 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 5, 2020, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Xian Zhang. 

American solo violist and composer of Zimbabwean and Japanese descent, Nokuthula Ngwenyama earned international prominence when, in 1993 at age 16, she won the Primrose International Viola Competition and went on to win in the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1994. She embarked on a career as a soloist — a rarity for a viola player — that began with debuts at the Kennedy Center and the 92nd Street Y. Since then, she has performed with orchestras and in recitals around the world. She is an alumna of the Crossroads School, Colburn School for the Performing Arts, Curtis Institute of Music and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar. She also earned a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard University and is a recipient of Avery Fisher Career Grant. 

She started composing in 2014 and has a few dozen works to her credit. She originally wrote Primal Message for string quintet in 2018, her creativity sparked by a New York Times Magazine article relating the story of the Arecibo Observatory’s 1974 rechristening. At the time, Arecibo was home to the largest radio telescope in the world, and as part of its rechristening, an interstellar radio message about Earth and humanity was sent from it to the globular star cluster M13. The story went into detail about the concepts behind the message and the math behind it that gave it the potential to be decoded by aliens. 

In a 2021 interview with Violinist.com, she explained, “I thought, ‘What should we put in a message that we’re sending 25,000 light years away? What would I imagine putting in there, if it could be a musical message?’” She pondered the message’s prime numbers — 2, 3, 5, 7 — and decided to use these numbers to shape the rhythmic patterns as well as melodic and harmonic structures of Primal Message. At its heart is a warm, yearning melody based on the pentatonic scale and offered in wave-like sections. 

In her original Artist Statement about Primal Message, she wrote, “It’s 1974. What should we put in humanity’s first message in a bottle sent 25,000 light years away? Astronomers Francis Drake (Drake equation), Carl Sagan (Contact), and others created the historic Arecibo message, in which 186 seconds of interstellar radio waves sent a friendly map, our then-understood DNA structure, and transmitting technology in binary anthropomorphic organization to globular M13 in our galaxy’s Hercules cluster.   

“The ideas conveyed by Steven Johnson’s New York Times Magazine article ‘Greetings E. T. (Please Don’t Murder Us.)’ from June 28, 2017, encouragement from the Phoenix Chamber Music Society and Chamber Music Northwest, and early days with partner John Clements awakened imaginings about what a ‘primal message’ might sound like. This assumes other possible life forms hear and feel sound like we do. Opening off-world communication through transverse waves explores existential conveyance under a frayed veil of decorum through form, melody, and numbers. 

“Primal Message is a fantasia that relies upon primal relationships [...] It invites examination of our collective evolution through a drive to express, tying us in concert with universal celebration.” 

The Seattle Symphony presents the orchestral version of Primal Message, which was premiered in November 2020 by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Xian.  

Seattle Symphony © 2026

ROBERT SCHUMANN 
Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129 
BORN: June 8, 1810, in Zwickau, Saxony 
DIED: June 29, 1856, in Endenich, near Bonn 
WORK COMPOSED: 1850 
WORLD PREMIERE: Performed June 9, 1860, at the Leipzig Conservatory in Leipzig, with Ludwig Ebert as cello soloist. The posthumous performance would have marked Schumann’s 50th birthday.  
NOTABLE SEATTLE SYMPHONY CONCERTS: April 13–15, 1981, with Rainer Miedél conducting and Yo-Yo Ma as cello soloist.  

Robert Schumann was a composer of decidedly Romantic temperament, his personality and his music alternately dreamy and passionate. In view of this, it seems entirely natural that Schumann would have looked to the cello as a solo instrument. With its capacity for lyrical expression, on the one hand, and its great range and agility, on the other, the cello is well suited to conveying both gentle reveries and impassioned outbursts. And Schumann’s Cello Concerto reveals its protagonist as a Romantic instrument par excellence. 

This work dates from 1850, the year the composer accepted the directorship of the municipal orchestra and chorus in Düsseldorf and moved with his family to that city on the Rhine. The Düsseldorf appointment represented a significant professional advance for Schumann, and he was cheered at the prospect of finally gaining some measure of the recognition that had thus far eluded him.  

These boosts to the composer’s hopes and confidence prompted an outpouring of music. During his first six months in Düsseldorf, Schumann completed a number of substantial works, the most important being his Third, or “Rhenish” Symphony and his Cello Concerto. He composed the latter piece with remarkable speed during the month of October, shortly after arriving in his new city.  

As do many of Schumann’s compositions, the Cello Concerto combines features of Classical form with the more experimental procedures of the 19th century. The work preserves the traditional three-movement concerto plan but links the movements to form an uninterrupted flow of music. Moreover, in beginning his concerto, Schumann dispenses with the orchestral exposition, once the obligatory opening of any concerto. Instead, the cello enters immediately after three prefatory chords from the orchestra, giving out the beautiful and elegiac melody that forms the principal subject of the first movement. Schumann shows admirable restraint in his writing for the solo instrument. Clearly he is more interested in the poetic qualities of the cello than in its capacity for virtuoso display, and this first movement is generally free from the sort of showy passagework that might have distracted from its more significant musical virtues. 

The second movement, which flows seamlessly from the first, conveys a sense of peaceful and languorous reverie until an agitated cadenza-like passage offers a recollection of the first movement’s main theme. This episode leads directly to the strongly rhythmic finale, where the soloist is finally allowed a notable display of dexterity. 

Paul Schiavo © 2014, revised 2025 

LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN 
Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 
BORN: December 16, 1770, in Bonn 
DIED: March 26, 1827, in Vienna 
WORK COMPOSED: 1806 
WORLD PREMIERE: The time and place of the first performance is uncertain, but it occurred no later than March 1807, when Beethoven conducted the work in Vienna. 

Ludwig van Beethoven’s life was scarcely a model of serenity. The year 1806 was one illustrative case: it was overloaded with intense and failed love affairs, frustrating and exhausting rehearsals of his opera Fidelio, emotionally draining misunderstandings with one of his major patrons, Count Lichnowsky — all exacerbated by the on-again, off-again occupation of Vienna by Napoleonic “armies of liberation.” Yet despite, or perhaps because of, these upheavals, the composer seems to have been inspired by a ferocious eruption of creative genius. As if to parallel the multiple issues confronting him, he worked on many masterpieces simultaneously: the Appassionata Piano Sonata, the three Op. 59 Razumovsky string quartets, the Fourth Piano Concerto, a violin concerto, and his Fourth and Fifth symphonies. 

Robert Schumann, an astute commentator on the state of music in the generation after Beethoven’s death, described his predecessor’s Fourth Symphony as “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants,” aptly characterizing the lighter mood and comparative restraint of the B-flat symphony when compared to the revolutionary and epic Third (“Eroica”) and fiercely dramatic Fifth. Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony breathes a gentler, more bucolic air than its weightier brethren, and looks forward to both the Sixth (“Pastoral”) and Eighth symphonies.  

One might not divine as much from the expectant Adagio that serves to introduce the buoyant Allegro vivace that completes the first movement. This is music of mystery and introspection, and serves to heighten the outburst of good spirits that infuses the remainder of the symphony. Throughout the engaging first movement, Beethoven weaves delightful conversations among the winds, the evolution of part-writing learned from the scores of his one-time teacher, Joseph Haydn. The lovely second movement recalls the nocturne-like sensibilities of the Larghetto of the Second Symphony, with a stress on lyricism rather than dark passion, though a series of slowly descending scales adds a sense of portent to the proceedings. 

Though labeled Menuetto, the third movement is a true scherzo both in the literal meaning of the word — “joke” — and in its boisterous and syncopated energy. The trio brings the winds back to center stage, adding to the music’s rustic feel. Good humor abounds in the whirlwind finale, as bumptious and comic a movement as Beethoven ever penned. 

Steven Lowe © 2008, revised 2025