Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Guest conductor David Amado makes his PSO debut in a brilliant program about the heavens and the gods of old. The concert opens with another PSO début: the music of American composer Missy Mazzoli. Mazzoli writes that her nine-minute piece is “music in the shape of a solar system.” It’s elusive, beautiful, ethereal, and very engaging.

André Caplet’s shimmering orchestration of Debussy’s brief piano work (whose title simply means moonlight), invites us to contemplate one of the nearest and yet most elusive heavenly bodies in our solar system. Caplet and Debussy were friends and sometime collaborators.

Claire de lune also provides a moment of repose before Barber’s great dramatic orchestral showpiece. The piece was originally written, in smaller orchestration and different form, for the Martha Graham Dance Company. (Another well-known Graham commission was from Aaron Copland, for Appalachian Spring.) Graham’s dance style, angular, intense, too easily parodied, nonetheless helped pave the way for modern dance in America. And concert audiences have benefited from her generous program of composer commissions. This concert’s work vividly depicts Medea’s gradual unspooling as she realizes her husband’s betrayal and takes her fearful vengeance.

Mozart’s great and lofty final symphony is now called by one and all “Jupiter”, though Mozart himself never used that name. Most sources cite London impresario Johann Peter Salomon, anxious to promote the work’s English première, as the creator of this most famous nickname. It is, by even so dry a name as “Symphony No. 41”, one of the composer’s greatest gifts to humanity, alternating grandeur, serenity, humor and in the finale, a monumental and affirming  structure that encompasses the earth and the heavens.

– Martin Webster