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This concerto for orchestra is inspired by the poem, Awake, Asleep, written by the Nepali poet, Rajendra Bhandari. In this profound poetic offering, Bhandari warns of the danger of being obliviously asleep in a social world, but yet how collective wakefulness provides “a bountiful harvest of thoughts.” My goal in writing this work was not only to wake a sleeping hall with the sound of the orchestra, but to leave those who hear the piece with the question: Am I asleep? For these reasons, I chose to compose a two-note rhythmic motif that acts as a “wake up call” throughout the composition – as if the orchestra is speaking to the hall and the audience, “WAKE UP!” --Carlos Simon

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, harp, piano, bell tree, bass drum, crotales, metal pipe, suspended cymbal, tom toms, brake drum, snare drum, triangle, sleigh bells, wood blocks, vibraphone, tam tam, sizzle cymbal, wind chimes, piatti, xylophone, strings

Things didn’t go smoothly that frigid night. The pick-up orchestra was under-rehearsed; the soprano soloist got stage fright (or was it frostbite?) and could barely sing; the Choral Fantasy fell apart and had to be re-started. But witnesses attest that Beethoven played his concerto brilliantly, so that must have been a relief.

Although Mozart defied tradition by having the piano pop up in the second measure of his Concerto No. 9 (it will be played later during this NSO season), it’s really more of a tease; the soloist quickly gives the floor back to the orchestra and the movement unfolds normally. That normal process, with the orchestra stating the first movement’s themes before the solo instrument enters, was followed in Mozart’s other piano concertos and the first three of Beethoven’s. But with No. 4, Beethoven cut a new path, one that many composers would follow later. And it’s not just the piano-first idea that sets the piece apart; there’s also something special about the interaction between soloist and ensemble throughout—alternately conversational, argumentative, jocular, and poetic.

The piano’s sotto voce and unhurried chordal theme that launches the concerto is built on the kind of four-note pattern Beethoven loved and made even more pronounced use of in his Fifth Symphony. When the strings enter to pick up on that theme, playing even softer than the soloist, they ignore the piano’s G major tonality and start in B major—one of the coolest curveballs ever thrown in music. Things quickly get on the expected harmonic track as more of the orchestra comes in to reinforce the opening theme and provide a second, which has an engaging lilt and minor-key shadings. The piano reappears in due course, adding more layers to the development of the melodic material and, to wonderful effect, occasionally slipping into brief moments of quiet reverie. The four-note idea provides continual fuel for the movement, especially in the prismatic coda that follows the soloist’s expansive cadenza.

Beethoven never specified a subtext to the second movement, but that didn’t stop conjecture. A particularly popular notion is that the music depicts Orpheus taming the wild beasts, but there’s no need these days to get so mythological. Remember the 2019 encounter on CBS-TV when the now-imprisoned singer R. Kelly went ballistic, and interviewer Gayle King kept her cool, calmly repeating “Robert” until he settled back down? That sort of dichotomy goes on here. A confrontational outburst from the strings is answered by a serene, songful response from the piano. The strings lash out again. The unruffled piano delivers another tranquil response. Gradually, the strings lose volume and insistence, won over by the piano’s inner peace, and this unforgettable movement draws to a tranquil close.

The finale starts off quietly with a crisp principal theme that soon sparks all sorts of animated banter between soloist and orchestra. More themes, along with contrasts of atmosphere and tempo, generate an eventful flow. After a short cadenza, the movement’s melodic and rhythmic ideas get tossed around a little while longer before everyone shifts into presto gear to give the concerto an infectiously frisky coda.

Instrumentation: Solo piano, flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings

It was created amid the Great Terror, with its show trials and purges targeting Stalin’s perceived enemies. Friends and relatives of Shostakovich were arrested or exiled; his Symphony No. 4 became a casualty, too. Its premiere, scheduled less than a year after Stalin’s operatic snit, was abruptly cancelled amid signs that its challenging music would provoke another rebuke from on high.

Shostakovich soon started writing a Fifth Symphony, adjusting his style in the process. The result was a work accessible even to clueless Soviet officials. But the great soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, wife of storied cellist and longtime NSO music director Mstislav Rostropovich, detected beneath the notes “the agonies” endured by the composer. The score speaks to the Terror “with more passion and courage,” Vishnevskaya wrote, “than any writer or painter who bore witness to those times.”

That may explain the audience’s reaction when the Leningrad Philharmonic premiered the Fifth on Nov. 21, 1937. People wept during the third movement, and started to stand well before the last notes of the finale, as if the music pulled them from their seats. During the half-hour ovation that followed, conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky held the score aloft, icon-like.

Afterward, the government seemed satisfied. It no doubt helped when Shostakovich offered a very Soviet-friendly statement about how the music reflected “a series of tragic conflicts” that lead to “life-affirming optimism.” He also cited approvingly an unnamed critic who called the Fifth “the creative reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism.” But did Shostakovich really think that? Or was he just saying what appalling apparatchiks wanted to hear? In Vishnevskaya’s view, the Fifth wasn’t about repenting and “pledging henceforth to be an ordinary Soviet-Realist mediocrity,” but merely the composer’s way of putting “on a mask he would wear for the rest of his life.”

The Fifth Symphony starts with a burst of angular, leaping lines that soon turn plaintive. A second theme—more lyrical, but still containing angles and leaps—emerges from the violins beneath gentle pulsations in the lower strings. Edgy low notes from a piano signal the start of the development section, where the themes undergo vigorous, even frenzied, dissection. A climactic peak, with the orchestra declaiming at full throttle, moves seamlessly into a newly colored recap of the opening material and a delicate coda haunted by a celesta’s upward scales.

In the prismatically orchestrated scherzo, Shostakovich nods to Gustav Mahler with a sardonic dance in three-four time, alternately lumbering and swaggering. A cheeky violin solo leads to a more gently scored middle section. The opening material returns, subtly at first, then with all its initial brightness and wit.

Providing the symphony’s emotional core, the Largo begins with the strings in subdued, solemn reflection. Melodic ideas unfold organically, inevitably; a motive that starts with four repeated notes proves especially important. After an anguished peak, the music recedes, concluding with two soft, luminous chords, as if in benediction.

For some, the finale provides a logical, uplifting culmination, the light to resolve any earlier darkness and worry. For listeners like Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich, this is where Shostakovich wears his mask most tightly; they hear forced exuberance behind the music and, in the end, an image of torture. (This view is also articulated in the purported memoir of Shostakovich contained in Solomon Volkov’s 1979 book, “Testimony”).

The movement erupts with a brusque and brassy martial theme. A trumpet slips a more lyrical and uplifting tune into the thick orchestral fabric. The racing music unexpectedly slows down to shed new light on these two ideas, while adding allusions to earlier movements. Tension builds toward a timpani-thundering coda where the brass reiterate the opening theme and the strings shift attention to a single note, repeated relentlessly (sounding to Vishnevskaya “like nails being pounded into one’s brain”). A unison orchestral blast brings this brave, brilliant, multi-dimensional symphony to an end.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, celesta, piano, bass drum, cymbals, orchestra bells, snare drum, tam tam, triangle, xylophone, strings