Yuja Wang © Norbert Niat
The San Francisco Symphony celebrates the new 2025/26 season with its Opening Gala concert in which Jaap van Zweden leads the orchestra in Tchaikovsky’s majestic Piano Concerto No 1, with soloist Yuja Wang – a favourite of San Francisco audiences since her debut with the Orchestra in 2006. Also on the program are John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome.
Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden is currently music director of the Seoul Philharmonic, Honorary Chief Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Orchestra, former music director of the New York Philharmonic and Music Director-Designate of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. He has led many of the world’s finest orchestras such as the Orchestre de Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and London Symphony Orchestra. In the United States, he has also conducted ensembles which include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony.
Yuja Wang is described by the New York Times as a pianist who has “made a career out of dazzling displays of virtuosity”. She recently joined Yannick Nézet-Séguin and The Philadelphia Orchestra in a performance of all four of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerti and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in a single concert – which has never before been attempted at Carnegie Hall. Again, according to the New York Times, she performed with “both clarity and poetry …” and – as always – had encores to spare. Other highlights of the 2024/25 season included a European tour with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra – with whom she was Artist in Residence – and in early 2025 she returned to the US and a residency with the New York Philharmonic, where she appeared with the orchestra as both soloist and leader for performances of Janáček and Stravinsky alongside the original jazz-band version of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Yuja Wang was awarded a Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for the 2023 release The American Project, which also won an Opus Klassik award in the Concerto category.
Ms Wang is set to thrill the audience with Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Whatever Nicolai Rubenstein first thought of it, this masterpiece of the Russian Romantic era has remained one of the most popular works in the concert repertoire. Written in November and December 1874, the concerto was composed in the hope that Rubenstein – Director of the Moscow Conservatory – would premiere the work. With Rubenstein refusing to do so unless a number of revisions were made, and Tchaikovsky (rightly) refusing to “alter a single note”, the work was premiered by Hans von Bülow (to whom it was dedicated). The premiere took place at the Music hall in Boston, with Benjamin Johnson Lang conducting a freelance orchestra. As has been well documented, Rubenstein, eventually changed his view of the concerto – which underwent further revisions in the summer of 1879 and December 1888 – and he became one of its greatest champions.
John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine is joyful and exuberant. About the title, he says: “You know how it is when someone asks you to ride in a terrific sports car, and then you wish you hadn’t?” Short Ride in a Fast Machine features Adams’ minimalist trademarks, what Michael Steinberg (former program writer for the Symphony) describes as “… repetition, steady beat, and, perhaps most crucially, a harmonic language with an emphasis on consonance unlike anything in Western art music in the last five hundred years”. The 2012 recording of Short Ride in a Fast Machine, commissioned by former Music Director of the Symphony Michael Tilson Thomas, won a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for Adams and the San Francisco Symphony in 2013.
Pines of Rome, a tone poem for orchestra in four movements, is Respighi’s most frequently performed work. It is the second in a series of three tone poems by the composer, known as the Roman trilogy, preceded by Fountains of Rome, written between 1914 and1916, and followed by Roman Festivals, written in 1929. Premiered in Rome in 1924, the trilogy is the Italian composer’s tribute to scenes around his country’s capital. The four movements of Pines of Rome, played without a pause, are subtitled The Pines of Villa Borghese, Pines near a Catacomb, The Pines of the Janiculum and The Pines of the Appian Way. Pines of Rome depicts the century-old trees which dominate the Roman landscape.
Jaap van Zweden leads the San Francisco Symphony and Yuja Wang in Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1, Short Ride in a Fast Machine by John Adams, and Pines of Rome by Respighi at the Opening Gala on September 12th. Further information and details can be found on the San Francisco Symphony website.
Information sourced from:
San Francisco Symphony program notes
Artists’ websites
Short Ride in a Fast Machine
Pines of Rome
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