Philharmonia Orchestra
Santtu-Matias Rouvali, conductor
Víkingur Ólafsson, piano

Ludwig van Beethoven
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major,
Op. 73, Emperor
There is a certain irony in the subtitle Emperor that was later given to Beethoven’s fifth and final piano concerto, but never used by the composer himself. By the spring of 1809, when he was creating this concerto, the last person Beethoven would have wanted to honor was the emperor of the day, Napoleon Bonaparte. Years earlier, he had angrily obliterated a dedication to the French leader he had once admired from the title page of his Symphony No. 3, the Eroica, after he learned that Napoleon had just crowned himself at Notre-Dame de Paris.

Now in May 1809, Napoleon’s armies were actually besieging the city of Vienna. Beethoven’s home was in the line of fire of the French cannons, and he was forced to flee to his brother’s house, where he holed up in the cellar with a pillow pressed to his still sensitive ears. But his work on the new concerto did not cease.

And yet in many ways, “Emperor,” taken in a more generic sense, is an appropriate title for this concerto. It is a work of imperial size and scope—particularly in its huge first movement—and it reflects its war-riven era in its virile, martial tone. Its key, E-flat major, was one of Beethoven’s favorites and one he associated with heroic thoughts; it is also the key of the Eroica. Sadly, Beethoven was never able to display his own powers as a pianist with this work. Although he had introduced all his other keyboard concertos to the public, his deafness was too far advanced for him to risk playing the 1810 premiere in Leipzig.

The length and complexity of the sonata-form first movement demonstrate Beethoven’s new symphonic conception of the concerto. The opening is boldly innovative. First, we hear the pianist sweeping over the keyboard in grand, toccata-like arpeggios and scales, punctuated by loud chords from the orchestra. Then the soloist allows the orchestra to present its long exposition of themes. The first theme, with its distinctive turn ornament, is introduced immediately. The second, a quirky little march, appears first in halting minor-mode form in the strings, then is immediately smoothed out and shifted to the major by the horns. Over the course of the movement, Beethoven will transform both these themes in a wondrous range of keys, moods, and figurations.

After its long absence, the piano begins its version of the exposition with an ascending chromatic scale ending with a long, high trill. Throughout, Beethoven uses this scale as an elegant call-to-attention: whenever we hear it, we are being told that a new section of the movement is beginning. It will mark the opening of the development section and later the closing coda after the recapitulation.

Just before that coda comes the usual moment for the soloist’s big cadenza. But here Beethoven has quashed the soloist’s customary right to improvise his own exhibition of virtuosity. Fearing the jarring improvisations other soloists might make, the composer wrote in Italian in the score: “Don’t play a cadenza, but attack the following immediately.”

A complete contrast to the extroverted Allegro, the second movement is a sublime, very inward elegy in B major, a remote key from the home tonality of E-flat. Two themes receive a quasi-variations treatment. The first and most important is the strings’ grave, almost religious theme heard at the opening. The second theme is the downward cascading music with which the pianist enters.

At the close of the movement, the pianist experiments hesitantly with a new melodic/rhythmic idea. Suddenly, the spark is struck, and the theme explodes into the exuberant finale. Beethoven stresses the weak beats of his dancing meter, giving the theme an eccentric, hobbling gait. An important element is the incisive rhythm first heard in the horns; this martial, drum-like motive returns us to the wartime world of the concerto’s birth. Near the end, Beethoven gives this to the timpani, in eerie duet with the soloist, before the concerto’s triumphant finish.

Gabriela Ortiz
Si el oxígeno fuera verde
Honored at the Grammy Awards in February 2025 with three prizes—including the award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition—Gabriela Ortiz is finally achieving the international acclaim her extraordinary 40-year career deserves. Gustavo Dudamel, a longtime champion of her music, says of her: “Gabriela is one of the most talented composers—not only in Mexico, not only in our continent—in the world. Her ability to bring colors, to bring rhythm and harmonies that connect with you, is something beautiful, something unique.” Commissions have poured in from the United States (seven commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic alone), Europe, and South America, as well as her native Mexico. She has just completed a year as composer in residence at Carnegie Hall and assumes that role with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw this season.

Born to a musical family in Mexico City, Ortiz has always felt that she didn’t choose music—music chose her. “My childhood was around music all the time, and my parents founded this incredible group called Los Folkloristas, dedicated and devoted to promoting the music of Mexico,” she says. Band rehearsals with folk instruments from across Latin America served as the soundtrack of her upbringing. “I felt very grateful and lucky to be able to listen to this incredible music and to learn how to play it.” Progressing from playing charango and guitar, Ortiz mastered classical piano as well, earning a master’s degree from London’s Guildhall School of Music and a doctorate from London City University. All these strands have been woven into her highly rhythmic, irresistibly colorful music, an ingenious merging of distinct sonic worlds. Her many accolades include the 2022 Bellas Artes Gold Medal, Mexico’s National Prize for Arts and Literature.

Tonight, we will hear her 2025 work Si el oxígeno fuera verde (“If Oxygen Were Green”), which has just been premiered by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Here are Ortiz’ notes on this work:

Si el oxígeno fuera verde is a work dedicated to the memory of my friend and fellow Mexican musician Jorge Verdín, founder of the Nortec Collective and known by his artist name “Clorofila.” Verdín’s musical originality lay in the way he combined electronic sounds with banda music from northern Mexico, forging a style that reflected the borderland between Tijuana and San Diego.
Although I never had the chance to ask him why he chose the word clorofila (“chlorophyll”) as his artist name, I decided to take the meaning and implications of that word as a starting point for this piece, within the framework of my sonic imagination.
Chlorophyll is a biomolecule of vital importance to life on our planet. Without it, the process of photosynthesis—carried out by plants and other organisms—would not be possible, and without photosynthesis, oxygen would not be present in our atmosphere.
Nature is made up of numerous cycles that are fundamental to the functioning of ecosystems and the maintenance of life on Earth. These cycles are interdependent and form a complex network that keeps our environment in balance. They are essential for conserving natural resources and protecting the planet. With these reflections in mind, I began to imagine particles of oxygen as sonic fractals ringing in the atmosphere, celebrating life in its purest, most essential form.
Just as fractal geometry features self-replicating patterns on different scales, in this piece I use rhythmic patterns and melodies that develop independently, gradually transforming through a mechanical sonic process akin to those found in nature. These groupings evolve through subtle variations, creating a sense of continuity and growth—forming diverse, intricate musical structures.
Si el oxígeno fuera verde is structured in four main sections, each conceived as an autonomous life cycle within an infinite universe:
• Fractal structures and sound particles floating in the atmosphere
• A nocturnal song nourished by the soul of a forest
• The dawn of plants transforming light into oxygen
• The dance of chlorophyll begins

The title’s metaphor suggests the fragile green murmur of life—where a disruptive, ecological nature can be imagined as a forest that, after a transformative event, reinvents itself and blooms with greater diversity and sustainability. The piece concludes with a final dance, becoming a symbol of the interdependence of all living beings—a reminder that each of us, as human beings, holds an urgent responsibility to help build a future that is more balanced and harmonious with the natural world.

Jean Sibelius
Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 82
In September 1914, Jean Sibelius began the most difficult creative journey of his career, but one that ultimately produced one of his greatest works: his Fifth Symphony. The journey took five years and three different versions until it would be ready for its first public hearing on November 24, 1919 in Helsinki under the composer’s baton. During those years, Europe was convulsed by World War I, the Russian Revolution spread to Finland, and Sibelius found himself for a time a political prisoner in his own home.

World War I cut the composer off from the outside world and made him a virtual recluse at his rustic villa, Ainola, north of Helsinki. Money was tight, food scarce. When Russia was swept by revolution, Finland seized her opportunity and declared independence on December 6, 1917. But Finland also became embroiled in the power struggle between the Red Bolsheviks and the White monarchists/democrats, and the Bolsheviks briefly placed Sibelius under house arrest and tore his possessions apart looking for a nonexistent arms cache.

It was the composer’s passionate, virtually religious attachment to nature that saved his sanity and animated his new symphony. Ainola, overlooking Lake Tuusula and surrounded by Finland’s deep, mysterious woods, was an ideal place for nature worship. The wheeling patterns and wild cries of the migratory swans, geese, and cranes over the lake filled the composer with profound wonder and joy. On April 21, 1915, he wrote in his diary: “Today at ten to eleven I saw 16 swans. One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, that beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon. Their call the same woodwind type as that of cranes, but without tremolo. The swan-call closer to the trumpet. … The Fifth Symphony’s finale-theme: Legato in the trumpets!!” From that mystical experience came the great swinging theme, the Swan Hymn that dominates the Fifth’s magnificent finale.

It is clear from Sibelius’ diary entries that these cries of nature and Finland’s brooding Nordic landscapes inspired his unique orchestral sound. And he created this sound world, full of mysterious wind rustlings and epic power, using simply the standard 19th-century orchestra. At its heart are the woodwinds, evoking the wild voices of untamed Nature.

Even the symphony grows like life itself by natural evolutionary processes rather than by being squeezed into traditional symphonic formal molds. We hear this at the beginning of the first movement. Out of a mysterious horn chord, a little upward flip of a motive emerges in the high woodwinds. At each reiteration, it grows a bit, soon acquiring a trilling tail, which in turn spawns a shimmering, exotic flight of woodwinds. Slow to make their entrance, the strings finally arrive with a sharp initial sting and a whirring, buzzing sound that opens a new musical phase of passionate struggle. The string buzzing becomes faster, wilder, and more menacing; only a majestic brass climax can control it. But then another cycle begins with the angry buzzing growing ferociously dissonant.

The music suddenly metamorphoses into a light-footed 3/4 dance—the composer’s deft telescoping of what was originally a second-movement scherzo into his opener. Listen closely: the themes remain the same. The powerful finale built from this playful episode grandly caps the whole movement.

The second movement is much gentler; commentator Michael Steinberg aptly calls it “variations on a rhythm.” We hear a little five-note phrase played by plucked strings and flutes. Sibelius builds a number of melodic themes from it, some warmly Romantic, others faintly disturbing. But under the grace and lightness of this music there are latent powers barely in check. Though we can’t hear it yet, the finale’s Swan Hymn is striving to be born.

The finale begins with agitated, whirring strings. Then the horns begin the mighty, tolling Swan Hymn; above it rides a yearning melody in high woodwinds. It is the goal toward which the whole symphony has been striving, its great swings implied in the earlier movements. Later, the hymn struggles to return to the home key of E-flat and finally achieves it with a splendid pealing of brass. But Sibelius will not permit us to wallow in this grandeur. In an abrupt, startling ending, he suddenly wraps matters up with six loud, sharp chords, separated by oddly spaced pauses. Their blunt power reflects the tough, idiosyncratic Nordic genius who created them.
—Janet E. Bedell © 2025

Janet E. Bedell is a program annotator and feature writer who writes for Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Opera, Caramoor Festival of the Arts, and other musical organizations.