Program Notes

Since its composition in 1741 and premiere in Dublin in 1742 George Friedrich Handel’s oratorio Messiah has become a holiday tradition. Although nowadays it is performed almost exclusively at Christmas time, it was originally presented at Easter. The current institution of performing Messiah during Christmas, especially popular in the United States, may have been born at least partly of necessity: Laurence Cummings explains that “there is so much fine Easter music – Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, most especially – and so little great sacred music written for Christmas.”

The songs are gentle, sensuous, sweet, lyrical, and feature delicate textures. Musicologist Herbert Glass writes, “The sublime Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs are retrospective, drenched in a sense of what was and never will be again.... But they are indeed songs of farewell – to life, to art, to a vanished world.... To more than one observer, Strauss saved his best for the very end.”

The only thing Mahler asks of his listeners (at first!) is that you listen openly. He wrote, “At a first performance … the principal thing is to give oneself with pleasure or displeasure to the work, to allow the human-poetic in general to affect one, and if one then feels drawn to it, to occupy oneself with it more thoroughly…. One must bring along one’s ears and heart and, not least, surrender willingly…. A bit of mystery always remains – even for the creator!”

Pairing brilliance with poignancy, this concert features two quintessential chamber works by two prolific composers that were each written within the span of less than three months. 

“But let me tell you, you are not acquainted with love, although you say you feel it strongly. That’s not the rage, the fury, the delirium which takes possession of all our faculties and makes us capable of anything.”

– Hector Berlioz

Angry’s Black Athena~Power was commissioned and premiered by Jonathan McPhee and the Lexington Symphony in 2022. Like many musicians, McPhee wanted to work on a project as a response to the heightened awareness of racial injustice as well as contribute to increasing diversity in orchestral literature.

Composer and pianist Maurice Ravel is most commonly associated with the French Impressionist movement, along with his contemporary, Claude Debussy, though neither acknowledged the label. Ravel was raised in a musical household and had access to an excellent musical education at the Paris Conservatory, where he decided against a career as a concert pianist and opted to devote his life to composing.