Aspen Festival Orchestra
Xian Zhang, conductor
Tony Siqi Yun, piano

Jessie Montgomery

Hymn for Everyone

Jessie Montgomery was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, on December 8, 1981, and currently serves on faculty of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. Hymn for Everyone was written in 2021 on commission by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra while Montgomery was composer-in-residence there. The piece is scored for two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes (one doubling English horn), two clarinets, two bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), two horns, two trumpets, three trombones (one doubling bass trombone), tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

“I had some great advice by [composer] Gabriela Lena Frank early on, where she said, ‘Keep a scrapbook of all of your ideas, and keep it like a treasure chest’,” composer Jessie Montgomery told NPR in 2022. “Musical ideas, and ideas for gesture, come kind of randomly sometimes—even in the midst of writing another piece. I realize there’s a section that I don’t want to use in that piece anymore, but I’m going to save it and use it for something else. They’re like little quilt patches, and so at this stage I have a fair amount of those patches to work with.”

One such quilt patch arrived in summer 2020 after a long mountain hike in New Jersey. When Montgomery got home, she picked up her violin, and there it was, fully formed. “It was during the pandemic, so there was a lot of walking in the woods, trying to clear the mind,” she said in that same interview. “I have a friend who’s a writer and they described the poem always coming in one gesture. It’s the manifestation of an intuitive kind of realization, like an epiphany. And that’s how this piece came, and it’s the only time that’s ever really happened [to me].” She talks, too, about reflecting on the George Floyd protests and being involved in collective performances of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—a song sometimes called the Black national anthem—which the opening gesture of the tune resembles. The melody, she says, is a manifestation of that particular moment. She wrote down the tune, calling it Hymn for Everyone because it felt hymn-like, and filed it away.

In spring 2021, while Montgomery was struggling with her first piece as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, her mother Robbie McCauley died. While sorting through McCauley’s papers, Montgomery found a poem her mother had written titled Poem for Everyone. The title didn’t seem like a coincidence. She decided then to return to Hymn for Everyone and make it into an orchestral piece. “I thought, yes, she taught me about how to think about the world,” she recalled, “but it was sweet that I had, on my own, written this hymn.”

The piece is straightforward in some ways, built around a series of repetitions of the hymn. First stated by the violas and horn, it unfurls slowly, rising and falling stepwise like a mountain trail. Other instruments add their support through this initial utterance, doubling lines, adding harmonies, and generally thickening the texture. The theme recurs four times, each with a different orchestration, a different rhythmic underlay, and a different emotional valence. Montgomery describes these groupings as different “orchestral ‘choirs’” engaged in acts of collective singing.

After the fifth time through the hymn, a new, slightly syncopated theme emerges based on an earlier countermelody. It is no less mournful and evocative than the original, and it, too, goes through an array of repetitions and timbral evolutions. When the two melodies combine at the end, they arrive transfigured, simultaneously joyous and sorrowful: a reflection of all the personal, social, and political threads Montgomery placed inside it. — © Dan Ruccia

Sergei Prokofiev

Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, op. 111

Sergei Sergeyevitch Prokofiev was born in Sontzovka, near Ekaterinoslav in Ukraine, on April 23, 1891, and died in Moscow on March 5, 1953. He began his Sixth Symphony in 1945, but did not complete it until two years later; Yevgeny Mravinsky conducted the premiere with the Leningrad Phiharmonic on October 11, 1947. Set in the dark key of E-flat minor (with six flats), and in three movements rather than the more customary four, the Sixth employs a large orchestra similar to the Fifth’s, with two flutes and piccolo; two oboes and English horn; two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet; two bassoons and contrabassoon; a large brass section (four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba); timpani, percussion, piano, celesta, and strings

If Sergei Prokofiev’s heroic Fifth Symphony (1944) celebrates victory in war, his Sixth addresses the collective post-war trauma Soviet citizens suffered in the aftermath. Tens of millions of lives had been lost in the titanic struggle against Nazi Germany, and vast areas of the country lay in ruins. In an interview in October 1947, around the time of the Symphony’s premiere in Leningrad, Prokofiev described his feelings to Israel Nestyev, a musicologist who would become his official Soviet biographer. “Now we are rejoicing in our great victory, but each of us has wounds that cannot be healed. One has lost those dear to him, another has lost his health. This must not be forgotten.”

In Prokofiev’s case, the physical and psychic wounds were real. Soon after conducting the enthusiastically received premiere of the Fifth Symphony in January 1945, Prokofiev took a bad fall that resulted in a severe concussion, dizziness, and chronic headaches. For a time he could not compose, and he never fully regained his health before he died (on the same day as Stalin) eight years later. His family life was also difficult. Before the war his marriage to his first wife Lina had ended in rancor only a few years after they had moved to Moscow from Paris. Prokofiev rarely saw their two sons, and was now living in very modest circumstances with his new life partner, a young writer named Mira Mendelson.

By summer 1945, Prokofiev was allowed by doctors to work again, but only for a few hours each day. One of his first projects was to continue work on the Sixth Symphony, begun in 1944.

Of Prokofiev’s seven symphonies, the Sixth is the most tragic and intensely personal. Also his longest (except for the revised version of the Fourth), it runs almost three times longer than his first and most popular symphony (Classical), a playful and carefree entertainment which he had completed thirty years earlier in what must have seemed like a different lifetime. According to Nestyev, Prokofiev considered dedicating the Sixth to Beethoven. Its opus number, 111, is the same as that of Beethoven’s last piano sonata, which Prokofiev particularly admired.

Prokofiev described the movements himself as follows. “The first movement is agitated, at times lyrical, at times austere; the second movement, Largo, is brighter and more tuneful; the finale, rapid and in a major key, is close in character to my Fifth Symphony, save for reminiscences of the austere passages in the first movement.”

Staccato bursts from the brass open the first movement, followed by the statement of the first theme in the muted strings, wistful and solemn in gently rocking 6/8 meter. A second, more lyrical theme follows, then the two develop in Classical sonata form, with the first dominating. As the movement progresses, Prokofiev transforms what initially sounded like a nostalgic reminiscence into a menacing threat, with blaring trombones, clattering piano, and wood block. A funeral march emerges and fades away. In a startling episode, the French horns “wheeze,” as if the Symphony is pausing to catch its breath. Towards the end, sounds of war and alarm resound in the brass before a gradual return to the melancholy mood of the opening in a passage underpinned by a pounding rhythm akin to a ticking clock.

Full-blown hysteria erupts in the opening bars of the second movement, in A-flat major, with flutes, oboe, and clarinet screaming in their high registers. Ominous episodes repeatedly interrupt statements of the passionate, romantic main theme, which is reminiscent of scenes from Prokofiev’s incidental music for Romeo and Juliet. Just before the end, the celesta enters like a brief ray of sun peeking through the dark clouds of disaster that reappear in the closing measures.

Dances fill the E-flat major finale starting with a fast-galloping theme that seems to promise relief and happiness, as does the second folksy carnivalesque tune. But terror lurks behind the merriment. In the coda, the oboe and English horn reprise the first movement’s sorrowful main theme (back in E-flat minor), followed by a brief dissonant episode that repeats the Symphony’s harrowing opening bars, now expanded and fortified into what sounds like a cry of triumph and anguish. In an exceptionally introspective moment at a rehearsal, Prokofiev told Mendelson that with this gesture he was asking “questions cast into eternity.” Although E-flat major returns for the final section, with running scales rushing up to the tonic E-flat, unease remains beneath the superficial optimism.

After the Leningrad premiere, reviews were positive, but Prokofiev once again became the victim of bad timing. Shortly afterwards Stalin and his cultural watchdogs launched an assault on Soviet composers for their alleged deviation from the requirements of Socialist Realism. The Sixth Symphony was singled out in particularly vitriolic terms by Tikhon Khrennikov, General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, who called it a failure filled with “contrived chaotic groanings.” Even Nestyev, who just months before had lauded the Sixth as a work of “noble humanism,” betrayed Prokofiev by calling it “Formalist,” the worst charge he could make. For many years the Sixth disappeared from the USSR, but enjoyed considerable success abroad—Leopold Stokowski conducted the American premiere with the New York Philharmonic on November 24, 1949.

— © Harlow Robinson

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, op. 23

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk, in the district of Vyatka, Russia, on May 7, 1840, and died in St. Petersburg on May 18, 1893. He composed his First Piano Concerto between November 1874 and February 21, 1875. The first performance took place in Boston on October 25, 1875, with Hans von Bülow as the soloist and B. J. Lang conducting. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings.

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto has become so popular that we often forget how striking a work it is. Its famous introductory section has been vilified on the grounds that it has nothing to do with the rest of the work; but Tchaikovsky’s biographer David Brown has demonstrated that the opening section in fact provides a veritable anthology of harmonic progressions and melodic fragments that reappear in many guises throughout the Concerto. Tchaikovsky surely did not calculate all these relationships in rational or mathematical ways. It is more likely that his mind was whirling with these gestures and that they coalesced in various ways satisfying to his inner ear. They are, in any case, quite subtle, but they set the stage suitably for the main body of the movement.

The popularity of the Concerto owes much to its unusual introduction, a well-loved tune made even more popular in the early 1940s when it was converted into a Tin Pan Alley song called “Tonight We Love” by changing the meter from 3/4 to 4/4. It is in the relative major of D-flat, not the home key of B-flat minor. The main theme that follows is a Ukrainian folk song, but Tchaikovsky is not so much concerned with investigating folklore as he is interested in the dramatic opposition of soloist and orchestra.

The second theme is a poignant Tchaikovskyan melody with a gently rocking accompaniment familiar from his earlier Romeo and Juliet. This happens to begin with the notes D-flat and A. David Brown argues that the Concerto as a whole recalls the composer’s deep affection for the soprano Desirée Artôt, to whom Tchaikovsky was engaged in the winter of 1868–69 before she suddenly married another singer. Several musical references suggest that he still thought of Artôt, evidently the only woman that he ever loved, very warmly some five years after the end of their relationship. One clue, Brown maintains, is the prominence of the pitches D-flat and A, which in German would be called Des and A, as in DESirée Artôt. (This use of one’s initials spelled out in musical pitches is something Tchaikovsky might well have learned from the music of Schumann, who employed the device often, and whose music Tchaikovsky admired.)

The second movement combines elements of both a slow movement and a scherzo. The slow part features a flute melody with a reply by the soloist. The faster portion quotes a French song, Il faut s’amuser (One must amuse oneself); this song was in the repertory of Artôt and makes a particularly clear reference to her, since otherwise the tune has little overt connection with the other themes in the score.

For his finale, Tchaikovsky concentrates on the effective alternation of his materials, the first theme being another Ukrainian folk song, the second a tranquil string melody. He connects these by having the string melody enter over the soloist’s development of the first theme, but for the most part this finale aims at virtuosic excitement and hits its mark.

— © Steven Ledbetter

2025–26 marks the Grammy and Emmy Award-winning conductor Xian Zhang’s tenth season as music director of the New Jersey Symphony, and her inaugural season as Seattle Symphony’s music director. Following her tenure as music director of Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano (2009–16), she remains their conductor emeritus. A regular guest of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra, Zhang’s 2025–26 re-invitations include Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. She also conducts Tosca at Finnish National Opera, having previously conducted Madama Butterfly (2023–24) and Tosca (2024–25) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Recent highlights include subscription concerts with Boston Symphony, London Symphony, Houston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., among others. Zhang’s inspiring work with young musicians led to regular collaborations with the orchestras of The Juilliard School (which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2023), New World Symphony, and Aspen Festival. Last summer she also conducted at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West. Zhang previously served as Principal Guest Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony and BBC National Orchestra & Chorus of Wales, the first female conductor to hold a titled role with a BBC orchestra. In 2002 she won first prize in the Maazel-Vilar Conductor’s Competition. She was appointed New York Philharmonic’s assistant conductor in 2002, subsequently becoming their associate conductor and the first holder of the Arturo Toscanini Chair.ssa rhoncus, volutpat.

Twenty-three-year-old Canadian-born pianist Tony Siqi Yun, Gold Medalist at the First China International Music Competition (2019) and winner of the Rheingau Music Festival’s 2023 Lotto-Förderpreis, is quickly becoming a sought-after soloist and recitalist. In 2025–26 he appears with Orchestre Métropolitain, Louisville Orchestra, Las Vegas Philharmonic, and Lincoln Symphony, among others. Major recital debuts this season include Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw, and Celebrity Series of Boston. He returns to China this season, appearing with orchestras in Beijing and Hangzhou. Summer highlights include a debut recital at Ravinia and a concerto debut at the Aspen Music Festival. This past season Tony appeared with the Nashville Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Colorado Springs Philharmonic orchestras, among others. He gave debut recitals with Washington Performing Arts, San Francisco Symphony’s Shenson Spotlight Series, and Friends of Chamber Music Denver. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2024 under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin with Orchestre Metropolitain following his 2022–23 debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Yun is a 2024 graduate of The Juilliard School, where he was a recipient of the Jerome L. Greene Fellowship and studied with Professors Yoheved Kaplinsky and Matti Raekallio. He continues his studies in the master’s program at Juilliard.