SF Symphony Plays R. Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier

At A Glance 

ANNA CLYNE
Masquerade  2013  |  5 mins

Anna Clyne offers these comments: “Masquerade draws inspiration from the original mid-eighteenth century promenade concerts held in London’s pleasure gardens. As is true today, these concerts were a place where people from all walks of life mingled to enjoy a wide array of music. . . . Combined with costumes, masked guises and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration.”  MORE

LALO
Symphonie espagnole for Violin and Orchestra  1874  |  30 mins 

Lalo’s reputation chiefly rests on this spectacular piece. It even made an impression on famed Russian composer Tchaikovsky, who said, “It has a lot of freshness, lightness of piquant rhythms, of beautiful and excellently harmonized melodies. . . . . [Lalo] thinks more about musical beauty than about observing established traditions.” LISTEN FOR: Recognize parts of Lalo’s Andante movement? Tchaikovsky wasn’t kidding when he sang its praises: He used Lalo’s Andante as the inspiration for the Andante movement of his own violin concerto. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?  MORE 

KEVIN PUTS
Silent Night Elegy 2018  | 20 mins

Kevin Puts’s opera Silent Night recounts an extraordinary event in World War I, when spontaneous cease-fires and celebrations took place along the Western Front on Christmas Eve. Kevin Puts offers these comments: “Since my opera premiered in 2011, I have gotten some interest in making a separate piece out of the orchestral music in the opera. . . I felt that a single-movement ‘essay’—rather than a suite of separate movements—would work better for my purposes. Silent Night Elegy more or less follows the narrative of the opera itself.” MORE

R. STRAUSS
Suite from Der Rosenkavalier  1910/1944  |  21 mins

The opera Der Rosenkavalier is a delicate treatment of a sensitive subject—how youth and age do, or do not, mix in the arena of love. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto is itself the stuff of greatness but the addition of Strauss’s score turned Der Rosenkavalier into one of opera’s most enduring masterpieces. LISTEN FOR: The Viennese setting is suggested in part by the use of seductive waltzes—an anachronism, since the action is set about a century before the “Waltz Era,” but, with music like this, who could seriously complain? The 1911 premiere of Der Rosenkavalier was one of the great events of operatic history. In the century since, it has not diminished in the affection of opera lovers. MORE

JEANETTE YU is Editorial Director and STEVEN ZIEGLER is Managing Editor at the San Francisco Symphony.