Performed by The Toledo Symphony on February 20, 2026 at The Valentine Theatre

Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra 
David Nathaniel Baker (1931–2016) 

Originally from Indianapolis, American jazz composer, conductor, and musician David Baker holds a master’s degree from Indiana University and honorary doctorates from Oberlin College and Conservatory, Wabash College, and New England Conservatory. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1973, followed by several Grammy nominations and numerous other awards, including a James Smithson Medal from the Smithsonian Institution, the American Jazz Masters Award, the National Association of Jazz Educators Hall of Fame Award, the Governor’s Arts Award from the State of Indiana, and others.  

Baker was a Distinguished Professor of Music and Chairman of the Jazz Department at Indiana University for five decades and directed the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra from 1991– 2012. Baker completed more than 65 recordings and wrote more than 70 books and 400 articles during his lifetime.  

Baker’s Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra was commissioned by the Chicago Sinfonietta in 2006 and composed that same year. He completed the piece within five weeks. In it, Baker combines traditional orchestration with audience participation by including cellphone ringtones performed by members of both the orchestra and the audience. The idea for a piece that includes cell phone ringtones is Paul Freeman’s, the founder of the Chicago Sinfonietta. When Freeman was the music director for the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, he spent a lot of time on international flights. Freeman explains, “I was sitting at the gate in the Prague airport one day and saw so many people using cell phones for last-minute conversations before boarding their flights. I thought there must be some way of combining this technological accomplishment with music.” 

In Concertino for Cell Phones and Orchestra, Baker wanted to illustrate how cell phones create both order and disorder, noting, “All man-made devices can be used for good and for bad.... [clearly cell phones are] great for keeping in touch and getting help in emergencies[;] they’re also very disruptive.” Baker was aware of and excited about the element of chaos that would be introduced into the piece. After all, it’s impossible to control which ringtones the audience will use, or even whether or not they will follow the directions. Baker explains, “The premise is chaos vs. order. What I was really thinking was chaos vs. organization.... But more importantly, how do you change somebody’s listening apparatus by what’s going on around them?”  

Baker also hoped this piece would be fun and would help get everyone involved: “Sometimes we take everything so seriously that we forget there’s a real world out there that’s not life and death. There’s nothing more deadly than a passive audience.”  

Before the first performance, Freeman told the audience, “This is a great moment in history, when we can say to you, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, turn on your cellphones.’”  

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major, Op. 73, “The Emperor” 
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 

It’s interesting to note that after all the upset following Beethoven’s dedication of his “Eroica” Symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte, his fifth piano concerto would come to be called the “Emperor.” While Beethoven definitely espoused the political ideals he saw reflected in the post-revolutionary Jacobins and a pre-emperor Napoleon, there’s no doubt he didn’t give his concerto that moniker himself. 

The origin of the nickname isn’t certain. Musicologist Victor Lederer suggests, “[The] grandeur of the work justifies the nickname.” Historian George Grove, however, dismissed the title as “inconsequential,” and Sir Donald Francis Tovey, renowned musicologist, writer, composer, conductor, and pianist, considered it “vulgar” and refused to use it at all. In an essay about several of Beethoven’s works, Tovey remarks on “the E-Flat Concerto, Op. 73, which the wrathful republican ghost of Beethoven forbids me to call by its popular English title of the ‘Emperor’ Concerto.” But, as Lederer aptly points out, “[the name is] welded so tightly to the work that it stands as identification and little else…. [And] spaciousness and majesty … [are] evident in all three movements.” 

Beethoven’s “Emperor” was written during a time of unrest in Europe, when the Napoleonic wars were spreading across the continent. Annotator James Keller explains that in 1807–1808, Napoleon was occupied chiefly in Portugal and Spain where he was endeavoring to block British supplies – a situation that came to be called the Peninsular War. (We can see evidence of its horrors in the work of artist Francisco Goya). Napoleon’s absence from Northern Europe prompted Austria to launch an attack on French-occupied Bavaria, which brought the Emperor back to subdue them. This caused members of the royalty and upper classes, including Beethoven’s patron, Archduke Rudolph, to flee Vienna. Beethoven finished the concerto in 1809 and dedicated it to the archduke. 

In this concerto as well as in his Fourth (most likely finished around 1807), Beethoven speaks in his own voice. That is, there is far less evidence of Mozart’s or Haydn’s influences than in his earlier piano concerti. The first movement opens with the full orchestra playing three majestic, fortissimo chords that immediately give way to unfolding piano cadenzas. This is not strictly thematic material just yet but merely establishes the work’s harmonic base. This opening movement is one of Beethoven’s longest, characterized by extraordinary power and composure. Lederer writes that it is “without question an epic utterance.” 

The orchestra presents the main theme first in a proud, marchlike manner that Lederer refers to as a sort of all-pervading “Olympian calm.” The timpani is prominent, reinforcing the idea of the piece’s marshal bearing. After the piano’s second entrance, Beethoven gives us the development section, featuring gorgeous melodies passed between the solo piano and the woodwinds. Beethoven also wrote out his own cadenza for this movement and marked that pianists should use it and not write their own, as was sometimes the custom.  

The second movement presents a lovely theme in B Major, about as far from the key of E-Flat as anyone can hope to go. Lederer tells  us that the muted strings give a cooled, almost shimmering effect to the “hymnlike second movement … hypnotic in its … tranquil beauty.” In this movement, the piano acts as a delicate filigree, soaring over the pizzicato strings and touching certain chords with soft phrases. This technique was not new to Beethoven, who employed it in both his first and third piano concerti as well. The music maintains a steady pace throughout the movement, almost as if it’s dancing. 

The last movement is a rondo; however, there are no contrasting episodes! Beethoven also flouted tradition this way in his fourth piano concerto, and both movements appear on a larger scale than most rondos. Tovey notes, “The closing rondo, again one of Beethoven’s largest essays in the form, is an immense and intoxicating dance…. No question that Bartok, composer of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, knew this wonderful page!” The final episode is taken by the orchestra, after which the piano opens the coda. As in the first movement, the timpani plays a prominent role here. 

As Tovey points out, one of the main things that makes this concerto so effective is Beethoven’s “power of conveying an impression of vastness in a short time. Beethoven’s rondos show this with quite as much power as his first movements: there is not room in the art of music for a greater sense of space than the developments of the second episodes in the rondos of the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and the E-Flat Concerto…. Thus, Beethoven maintains his powerful structural grip all the way to the final notes of this vast rondo movement.” 

The whole concerto is massive in breadth and in both technical and musical difficulty. Lederer jokingly says that no one would describe is as intimate, but this doesn’t preclude it from being counted as one of the greatest contributions to the repertoire and one of Beethoven’s best. Tovey claims that “nobody with a sense of style has the slightest doubt that Beethoven’s three greatest concertos, the G major, op. 58, and E-Flat, op. 73 for pianoforte, and the Violin Concerto, op. 61, are among his grandest works. Every element in them is at its highest power. The orchestra is not only symphonic, but is enabled, by the very necessity of accompanying the solo lightly, to produce ethereal orchestral effects that are in quite a different category from anything in the symphonies. On the other hand, the solo part develops the technique of its instrument with a freedom and brilliance for which Beethoven has no leisure in sonatas and chamber music.” 

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) 

Brahms grew up with parents who fostered his musical ambition by enrolling him in piano and composition lessons with the best teacher available, and he took full advantage of the instruction. He began performing solo recitals when he was 15, and most of his compositions from this time were for the piano. He left home for the first time a few years later to join violinist Eduard Reményi on tour as his accompanist, and it was during this trip that he met and befriended violinist, composer, and conductor Joseph Joachim. He also met Robert and Clara Schumann for the first time in Düsseldorf. He felt an immediate affinity for the couple but didn’t get to study Schumann’s music for a few more years.  

Despite the Schumanns’ increasingly tenuous position (Robert’s mental health was deteriorating rapidly and his work and livelihood were in jeopardy), both Clara and Robert helped Brahms with the beginning of his career, suggesting work and advocating for him. The first time Brahms had a piece published, he wrote to the Schumanns: “I am taking the liberty of sending you your first foster children, who owe to you their right to exist.” Not long after, Robert entered the mental hospital, following a suicide attempt. While he was there, he often requested that Brahms’s scores be sent to him so that he might study them and play through sections on the piano. With Robert in the hospital, Clara was now solely responsible for raising and educating their seven children, and she turned to Brahms and a small circle of friends (including Joachim) for support. 

Thankful for her and Robert’s continued support of him, Brahms put his career on hold and rented rooms in the Schumann home. He managed the money and helped care for the children so that Clara could practice – she was still performing regularly. Brahms’s own composing was, therefore, delayed for the time being, and he supplemented their income by taking in piano students. In 1855, his mother wrote to him to express her support of his music and nudge him to return to composing. “That you’re giving lessons is probably good; at least it’s something. But you always dislike it and it brings in very little – I mean for you, who can do so much more…. When one has been so richly endowed by God with so many gifts, it is not right to remain sitting there so calmly.” 

Following Robert’s death, Clara described a little of her relationship with Brahms to her children: “Like a true friend, he came to share all my grief; he strengthened the heart that threatened to break, he uplifted my spirit; brightened my soul … He was, in short, my friend in the fullest sense of the word.” Eugenie Schumann adds, “She [Clara] once asked me if I could at all realize what it meant to have had a friend from childhood upwards who stimulated all your noblest and most artistic qualities, who in daily hourly intercourse lavished pearls and jewels upon you; if I did not think it was natural that she felt she could not go on living deprived of such gifts, and that she clung to friends like Brahms and Joachim who could console her in some measure for what she had lost.” 

Like Robert, Brahms was inspired by his love for literature, especially E. T. A. Hoffman, Jean Paul Richter, and Goethe. He even reportedly referred to this time in Düsseldorf with Clara and the Schumann family as his “Werther years.” Musicologist Nancy Reich notes, “Certainly there were many parallels between the young Brahms and Goethe’s sensitive young hero, with his unrequited love for the beautiful, maternal Lotte, the betrothed of another man.” In a letter to Joachim, Brahms wrote, “I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arm around her…. Clara shows it [heaven] revealed to us.” This is a sentiment that undoubtedly affected Brahms’s entire life. 

Inevitably, Brahms could not remain in the Schumann household after Robert’s death. Eugenie later wrote, “It was inevitable that he should recognize that the destiny he had to fulfill was irreconcilable with single-minded devotion to a friendship. To recognize this and immediately to seek a way out was the natural outcome … That he broke away ruthlessly was perhaps also an inevitable consequence when one takes his inherent qualities and the nature of his situation into account. But without doubt he had had a hard struggle with himself before he had steered his craft in a fresh direction, and he never got over the self-reproach of having wounded my mother’s feelings at the time, and felt that this could never be undone.” Neither Brahms nor Clara ever (re)married. 

Brahms took a far longer time than most composers to both start and finish his first symphony. He felt that any contribution to the symphonic genre at this time was incredibly important, and was also painfully aware of the dual weights of Beethoven’s legacy and the hope placed in him by Schumann, who loved Brahms’s music and hailed him as the “messiah for a troubled musical scene.” Of Brahms, Schumann wrote, “To me  … it seemed that under these circumstances there inevitably must appear a musician called to give expression to his times in ideal fashion; a musician who would reveal his mastery not in a gradual evolution, but like Athene would spring fully armed from Zeus’s head. And such a one has appeared; a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes have stood watch. His name is Johannes Brahms … he has been working in quiet obscurity…. This is a chosen one. Sitting at the piano he began to disclose wonderful regions to us. We were drawn into even more enchanting spheres. Besides, he is a player of genius who can make of the piano an orchestra of lamenting and loudly jubilant voices. There were sonatas, veiled symphonies rather; songs the poetry of which would be understood even without words… some of them turbulent in spirit while graceful in form… every work so different from the others that it seemed to stream from its own individual source. Should he direct his magic wand where the powers of the masses in chorus and orchestra may lend him their forces, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses of the secret world of spirits. May the highest genius strengthen him to this end.” 

The first mention and sketch of part of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 dates from 1862, in a letter from Clara to Joachim, where she shared the exciting news that Brahms had sent her part of a new symphony. Only one year before, Brahms had exclaimed, “I shall never write a symphony! You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant [Beethoven] marching behind you!” Since he destroyed almost all of his early sketches of the work, there’s no mention of it again until 1868, when Brahms sent Clara a snippet of the horn theme in the fourth movement. 

He finally completed the work in 1876. Annotator Michael Steinberg notes that this symphony is “still within earshot of the giant’s echoing footsteps, and it was not for nothing that Hans con Bülow called it the Beethoven Tenth. To write a C-minor symphony with a triumphant C-major conclusion was anything other than a trivial decision, and Brahms knew just what he was about when, at the great arrival in C major, he evoked the Ode to Joy.” 

The first movement is marked Un poco sostenuto – Allegro – Meno allegro, and opens with an intense and controlled introduction underpinned by repeated booming beats given by the timpani. This moves into a faster allegro section, which is something of a relief but still does not move forward freely. Instead, each idea expands to fill the time it’s given, almost painfully. The meno allegro near the end of the movement brings back a little of the introduction, softening it briefly before the close of the movement. 

The Andante sostenuto is one of the loveliest movements in the repertoire and one of the few occasions in Brahms’s work where we can glimpse his creative process through letters between him and Clara. In one of these, Clara writes, “In one respect you have unconsciously met my wishes, and that is in the alteration you have made in the adagio. To my mind one needs some rest between the first and last movements – some broad melody, which, particularly at the beginning, should be less elaborate in form and which would not obscure the actual melody itself.” In this movement, listen for the melody in the oboe, which is then passed to the clarinet before being taken up by the woodwinds. Musicologist A. Peter Brown suggests also that Brahms may have been inspired at the end of this movement by the close of Wagner’s Tristan. 

The third movement, Un poco allegretto e grazioso, is replete with sweetness and seeming simplicity. However, beneath the surface, there is careful thought and planning, and a tight structure. Brahms bypassed Beethoven’s symphonic template, which suggested a scherzo in triple meter, and instead chose a duple meter. Also outside the normal practice are the phrase lengths of five bars rather than the traditional four. And the coda slows the tempo further instead of speeding toward the end. Listen for the delicate arpeggiated figure in the clarinet and the horn line moving opposite the celli and basses. 

The finale, Adagio – Più andante – Allegro non troppo ma con brio – Più allegro, is in multiple sections (as you may have guessed by the title) and begins with a feeling of temporal uncertainty. This and the harmonies he uses suggest a return in temperament to the first movement. The Più andante section is very different, with the bright horn melody set in the warmth of C major over a shining texture in the strings. When Brahms shared this horn melody with Clara, he included the text: 

Hoch auf’m Berg, 
tief im Thal, 
grüss ich dich, 
Viel tausendmal! 

High on the mountain 
Deep in the valley 
I greet you 
Many thousand times! 

The subsequent string chorale has been repeatedly compared to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and the two do share thematic elements. However, Brahms develops his melody differently from Beethoven. In terms of form, the movement has more in common with Schubert’s than with Beethoven’s. Following the development, the melody bursts forth into a triumphant fortissimo coda that seems to continue to grow with joy until the final chords. 

Otto Dessoff conducted the premiere of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in 1976. The symphony was greeted warmly, despite the complexities of the score, which might have seemed demanding to an audience. The conductor Hermann Levi, a friend of Brahms and Clara, described the work as “probably the greatest thing he has yet created in the instrumental field.” However, after several more performances, Brahms felt it necessary to revise the score, which was published in 1877. He believed firmly in placing perfection before beauty – that is, revising until a work was “unassailable” in construction. Beauty was all well and good but still of secondary importance. In his own words, “One should never forget that by actually perfecting one piece one gains and learns more than by starting or half-finishing a dozen. Let it rest, and keep going back to it and working it over and over again, until … there is not a note too many or too little, not a bar you could improve on. Whether it’s beautiful too, is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be … I never cool down over a work, once begun, until it’s perfected, unassailable.” 

In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford points out that while Brahms may not admit to feeling the importance of beauty, he still maintained “that yearning voice … [that] has been a prime source of his popularity all along. The lyricism and emotion draw listeners into his music before they come to grips with complexities – the sheer difficulty of absorbing his constant protean variation, his tonal deflections, his experiments with conventional forums…. Even if he made considerable demands on his listeners, even if he never coddled them in his big pieces, he still never forgot their feelings, or his own. He made sure the warmth stayed in his work…. An elusive master of an elusive art.”