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Nov 28
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piano
Pianist Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty, and captivating stage presence. She has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians, and ensembles, and is renowned not only for her virtuosity but her spontaneous and lively performances.
Yuja was born into a musical family and began studying the piano at age 6. She received advanced training in Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and albums. Her recordings have garnered multiple awards, including five Grammy nominations and her first Grammy win for Best Classical Instrumental Solo with her 2023 release of The American Project. For this, she also won an Opus Klassik award in the Concerto category.
Recent projects include a collaboration with David Hockney at London’s Lightroom, play-direct tours to Europe and South America with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, an international duo recital tour with pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, and a residency with the New York Philharmonic.
The 2025–26 season sees Yuja open the seasons of many major US orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and at Carnegie Hall, where she play-directs Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. Among her orchestral performances, she will embark on a major European tour with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Other orchestral appearances include performances with The Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Her play-directing continues with tours with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to Spain and the US, and she will give a recital tour throughout Asia.
In November, Playing with Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang opens at the Paris Philharmonie. This groundbreaking, multi-sensory installation will take visitors behind the scenes and offer a rare perspective into the emotion and artistry behind Yuja’s performances.
conductor
Petr Popelka’s 2025–26 season is underscored by the Wiener Symphoniker’s 125th anniversary celebration, with a gala concert followed by tours throughout Europe and Asia. In addition to various performances at the Wiener Konzerthaus and Musikverein, Popelka and the Symphoniker will launch the second edition of their “Primavera da Vienna” festival in Trieste, following its success last season.
Further highlights of the season include Popelka’s debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, as well as his returns to The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. With the Czech Philharmonic, he will embark on a summer festival tour to Grafenegg and the George Enescu Festival.
As an acclaimed opera conductor, Popelka will lead a new production of Strauss, Jr.’s Die Fledermaus with the Wiener Symphoniker at the Theater an der Wien. Furthermore, he will conduct Tosca at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin and return to the Bayerische Staatsoper for Rusalka during the 2026 Munich Opera Festival.
Previous debuts have taken Popelka to the Staatskapelle Berlin, Staatskapelle Dresden, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, among others. Last season, he appeared in prestigious televised concerts such as the Czech Philharmonic’s Velvet Revolution concert and the 2024 Nobel Prize Concert with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. In the opera pit, he made guest appearances at the Zurich Opera House (Mozart’s Don Giovanni), Bayerische Staatsoper (Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová), Deutsche Oper Berlin (Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde), Semperoper Dresden (Shostakovich’s The Nose), and Theater an der Wien (Weinberger’s Schwanda the Bagpiper).
Popelka began his conducting career during the 2019–20 season after serving as deputy principal double bassist at the Staatskapelle Dresden from 2010 to 2019. Shortly after, he was appointed chief conductor at the Norwegian Radio Orchestra in Oslo (2020–23). He received his musical training in his hometown of Prague and in Freiburg.
The Cleveland Orchestra, under the leadership of Franz Welser-Möst since 2002, is one of the most sought-after performing ensembles in the world. Year after year, the ensemble exemplifies extraordinary artistic excellence, creative programming, and community engagement. In recent years, The New York Times has called Cleveland “the best in America” for its virtuosity, elegance of sound, variety of color, and chamber-like musical cohesion.
Founded by Adella Prentiss Hughes, the Orchestra performed its inaugural concert in December 1918. By the middle of the century, decades of growth and sustained support had turned the ensemble into one of the most admired around the world.
The past decade has seen an increasing number of young people attending concerts, bringing fresh attention to The Cleveland Orchestra’s legendary sound and committed programming. More recently, the Orchestra launched several bold digital projects, including the streaming platform Adella.live and its own recording label. Together, they have captured the Orchestra’s unique artistry and the musical achievements of the Welser-Möst and Cleveland Orchestra partnership.
The 2025–26 season marks Franz Welser-Möst’s 24th year as Music Director, a period in which The Cleveland Orchestra has earned unprecedented acclaim around the world, including a series of residencies at the Musikverein in Vienna, the first of its kind by an American orchestra, and a number of celebrated opera presentations.
Since 1918, seven music directors — Nikolai Sokoloff, Artur Rodziński, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi, and Franz Welser-Möst — have guided and shaped the ensemble’s growth and sound. Through concerts at home and on tour, broadcasts, and a catalog of acclaimed recordings, The Cleveland Orchestra is heard today by a growing group of fans around the world.
Composer
The Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s music in the 1960s and ’70s established him as a leader of the European avant-garde — in succession to such figures as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose music represented the first wave of postwar innovation.
Fleeing Hungary after the 1956 uprising, Ligeti settled in Vienna and absorbed all the newest music he could, always aiming to be free of prevailing orthodoxies. The most distinctive feature of his first successful pieces was “micropolyphony,” a dense texture generated by many strands too intricate to be heard individually, yet combining to produce a texture of great richness. Apparitions (1959) and Atmosphères (1961) are examples of this style. At the same time, he adopted stylistic elements from his compatriot Béla Bartók and was always interested in folk music of all kinds.
In 1969, the American conductor Mario di Bonaventura programmed Ligeti’s Cello Concerto at the Congregation of the Arts Festival at Dartmouth College, of which he was the director, and offered Ligeti a commission to compose a piano concerto to be played by his brother Anthony, professor of music at Boston University. No deadline was set, in part because the composer was deeply involved in creating his “anti-opera” Le Grand Macabre, eventually performed in Stockholm in 1978.
Although Ligeti jotted down some ideas for the Piano Concerto in 1980, he made little real progress. He later said he had made “hundreds of attempts” to compose the concerto’s first page, pointing to a sprawling pile of manuscripts underneath his piano. So, he set it aside to work out some ideas on rhythm, mainly in a series of Études for piano. He took up the concerto again in 1985, completed three movements for a hearing in 1986, and wrote two additional movements for the premiere of the completed work in 1988. The soloist and conductor for both performances were the di Bonaventura brothers, as originally intended, and it was to Mario that the work was dedicated.
Ligeti’s aim in this music was to control separate levels of sound. In his busiest music, different rhythmic strands are clearly heard, but they do not relate audibly to one another or to the conductor’s beat, at least at first. From the listener’s point of view, the conductor can be seen giving a regular pulse, although the events in the music rarely, if ever, coincide with that beat. The accumulation of notes, in Ligeti’s argument, is a special application of Chaos Theory — though there is complex “chaos” throughout, patterns do eventually emerge from within. This is exceedingly difficult music for the soloist as well as the orchestra to play, and, despite appearances, very difficult for the conductor also.
The pianist is accompanied by a small orchestra (single winds and no timpani) with an immense variety of percussion and “street sounds” such as the slide whistle and ocarina. The first movement keeps the pianist busy, with a solo part that could be by Bartók were it not for the orchestra’s seemingly random intrusions. Folklike tunes with lopsided rhythms are heard from time to time.
The second movement is the longest, being in essence a lament, with many drooping, mournful phrases, as in the opening piccolo solo over a bass drone. The plaintive mood is gradually destroyed by several short, fierce entries and an accumulating sense of crisis. The scream of high-pitched whistles and a climactic siren bring it to a nightmarish conclusion, with the unexpected sound of a harmonica appearing from seemingly nowhere.
The third movement is a scherzo, reminiscent of Bartók’s “night music” near the start and of Messiaen’s forestful of birds later on.
The fourth movement is more enigmatic, with clearer textures interspersed with silences. Ligeti applied the mathematical concept of fractals in devising some of the rhythmic elements of this movement. (As the story goes, he was also amused to be told that some listeners could hear fragments of “Happy Birthday to You” in this movement.)
The fifth movement is the shortest of the concerto, beginning with a piano cadenza that quickly gives way to fairy-like music brimming with scales that reach up to the sky. The work concludes with a race to the finish between piano and xylophone, punctuated by the click of a woodblock.
This is music of astonishing complexity, but is also unmistakably exciting and brilliant. It was a breath of fresh air when it appeared in the 1980s and was widely embraced and imitated by younger composers.
— Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.
“What a terrible blow!” exclaimed Modest Mussorgsky in a letter to the critic Vladimir Stasov in 1874. He then proceeded to paraphrase a famous passage from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, live on, when creatures like Hartmann must die?”
Viktor Hartmann, a gifted architect and painter and a close friend of Mussorgsky’s, had recently died at age 39. A commemorative exhibit of his paintings inspired Mussorgsky to pay musical tribute to his friend — a piano suite based on the composer’s impressions of the paintings. The suite was not performed or published during the composer’s lifetime, and it did not become widely known until Maurice Ravel orchestrated it in 1922. What’s more, originally written for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition did not become a regular part of the piano repertoire until the middle of the 20th century, after it had already been popularized by symphony orchestras.
From its conception, the original piece cried out for orchestration, partly because its piano writing was not idiomatic — Mussorgsky did not have the gift that composers such as Robert Schumann, Chopin, or Liszt had for creating music that fits the instrument so perfectly. But mostly because its sharply profiled and contrasting musical characteristics could be underscored to great effect when set for full orchestra. Other composers had already orchestrated it, but Ravel’s version enchanted the world.
In his piano cycle, Mussorgsky composed musical illustrations of 10 of Hartmann’s pictures. The pictures are connected — in the first half of the work, at any rate — by a “Promenade,” which depicts a visitor strolling through the gallery, from picture to picture. With each passing image, this melody changes as if the impression left by the last picture lingers as the visitor proceeds to the next painting.
The first picture, Gnomus, shows a toy nutcracker in the shape of a dwarf. The strange and unpredictable movements of this creature are depicted vividly. Then we hear the “Promenade” and are ushered into Il vecchio castello (The Old Castle), where a troubadour voices a wistful song in a medieval court. In Ravel’s orchestration, this haunting melody is played by the alto saxophone.
The next picture — preceded again by the “Promenade” — is Tuileries and depicts rowdy children fooling around in Paris’s famous gardens. It is followed immediately by Bydlo, a Polish oxcart, slowly approaching and then driving away as its ponderous melody crescendos before fading out.
A more lyrical but shorter “Promenade” leads into the Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in Their Shells. This scene is based on Hartmann’s designs for the ballet Trilbi at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. In the ballet, a group of children appeared dressed as canaries; others were said to have been “enclosed in eggs as in suits of armor,” with their legs sticking out of the eggshells.
The next picture is titled Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle. Hartmann had painted a number of characters from the Jewish ghetto in Sandomierz, Poland, and this movement is believed to represent an argument between a rich man and a poor one. The rich man, Goldenberg, is represented by a slow-moving unison melody stressing the augmented second (an interval used in certain forms of Jewish chant and folk music). The poor man, Schmuÿle, is characterized by a plaintive theme whose repeated notes seem to choke up with emotion. When the two themes are played simultaneously, Goldenberg’s commands the entire string section, while Schmuÿle’s is intoned by a single muted trumpet.
Limoges: The Market portrays the hustle and bustle of an open-air market in France where people are busy gossiping and quarrelling. Mussorgsky’s original manuscript contained a more detailed program which, although crossed out by the composer, provides amusing context:
The big news: Monsieur de Puissangeot has just recovered his cow ‘Fugitive.’ But the good wives of Limoges are not interested in this incident because Madame de Remboursac has acquired very fine porcelain dentures, while Monsieur de Panta-Pantaléon is still troubled by his obtrusive nose that remains as red as a peony.
What a contrast to immediately go from this bustling market to the Catacombs. Hartmann’s watercolor shows the artist, a friend, and their guide examining the underground burial chambers in Paris. On the right, one can see a large pile of skulls which, in Mussorgsky’s imagination, suddenly begins to glow. When the “Promenade” theme appears next, it is completely transfigured, and an inscription in the score reads: Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (With the dead in a dead language).
The next section, The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga), evokes the witch of Russian folk tales. According to legend, Baba Yaga flies through the woods in a giant mortar, luring children into her hut before eating them. Hartmann designed a clock in the form of the famous hut; it survives only as a sketch. Mussorgsky’s movement — whose rhythm recalls the ticking of a giant clock — has a mysterious-sounding middle section, after which the wilder and louder first material returns.
The “witch music” continues directly into the grand finale, The Great Gate of Kiev (spelled in the Anglicized form of its Russian name instead of the now-preferred Ukrainian spelling “Kyiv”). This movement was inspired by an ambitious design Hartmann submitted to a competition — and won — but it was never realized. To depict this immense architectural structure, Mussorgsky wrote a grandiose melody resembling a church hymn and set it in rich harmonies. This theme alternates with a more subdued second melody, harmonized like a chorale. Near the end, the “Promenade” theme is heard, leading directly into the magnificent final climax.
— Peter Laki
Peter Laki is a musicologist and frequent lecturer on classical music. He is a visiting associate professor of music, emeritus, at Bard College and was The Cleveland Orchestra’s program annotator from 1990 to 2007.
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Yuja Wang does double duty in two virtuosic piano concertos: Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, which transforms an apparent limitation into a jaw-dropping tour de force, alongside Ligeti’s fiendishly playful contribution to the genre. Czech conductor Petr Popelka continues the celebrations for Ravel’s 150th birthday with the composer’s magnificent orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
There will be a concert preview presentation one hour prior to the performance in Reinberger Chamber Hall with Caroline Oltmanns, Professor of Piano, Youngstown state University.
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