Livestream: Spring Turning to Summer

This is the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s last concert and livestream of this unusual spring season. Summer is welcomed by a spring ballet and a spring symphony. The orchestra is led by Alan Gilbert, Conductor Laureate of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and its chief conductor 2000–08. Presently, he is the chief conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg and designate Music Director of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm.

American composer Aaron Copland (1900–90) studied, as many of his fellow countrymen, with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The ballet music Appalachian Spring was composed in the mid 1940s for the noted choreographer and dancer Martha Graham. The ballet takes place in spring, at a settler’s farm in Pennsylvania around 1830. It tells the story of a young bridal couple and their dreams of a simple life in tranquility. 

With his Symphony No. 1 in B Major from 1841, Robert Schumann (1810–56) wanted to describe the lush greenery adorning the entire world, and we can thank Clara, his wife-to-be at the time, for the symphony’s existence at all. She urged him to compose for the orchestra, since his creativity was too great for the feeble piano. The symphony’s opening can also be seen as a wordless musical interpretation of a poem by Adolf Böttger, Frühlingsgedicht, which encourages the reader to turn around and change direction.

In a letter to his colleague Wilhelm Taubert, Schumann wrote: ”I would like the music to suggest the world’s turning green, perhaps with a butterfly hovering in the air”.