Winter Concert

Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Oberon, or The Elf King’s Oath was first performed on April 12, 1826, only two months before the composer’s death, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the Overture, completed just three days before the premiere, Weber gathered the main themes of an adventurous, exotic journey that leads from France to Baghdad by way of Tunis. “Shaker Loops draws on the aspects of minimalism that I find most appealing: steady, light pulsation, broad harmonies and timbres, and musical architectures that form slowly,” John Adams said of his most popular work, composed in 1978 as a sextet after an earlier failed attempt, and arranged in 1983 for string orchestra. The concept of the loop dates back to the era of magnetic tape, when musical clips were spliced together like strips of paper. The word “shake” refers both to a violin technique and to the ritual, frenzied dance of the Shakers, a religious sect once active in the composer’s home state of New Hampshire. “I am useless, I am nothing,” lamented Tchaikovsky, tormented by self-doubt as he worked on his First Symphony, which he would later describe as a “sin of youth.” With its dark winter atmosphere, completed in 1866, the work is by no means “a mistake to be forgotten,” but rather a testimony to his talent.