Overview

For better or worse, the orchestra and orchestral music are fundamentally European inventions. Symphonic practice and styles were developed over hundreds of years in Western Europe where audiences were well educated in musical practice and held strong, often rigid opinions about what was acceptable and what was not. When symphonic music spread to Eastern Europe and eventually to the United States, it brought with it those well developed practices. But over time, freed from centuries of expectation, it was allowed to absorb new influences, mingle with emerging cultural identities, and gradually evolve into something distinct from its European parentage.

American composers were not the only ones to benefit from a more open-minded audience. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought a kind of artistic Russian invasion to the United States. Composers such as Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninoff all spent significant time in the United States, often finding American audiences more receptive to their music than those in Western Europe. In fact, Americans loved the Russian sound, favoring its lush romanticism and emotional depth. That affinity has endured. These composers played a major role in shaping the sound of early film music, writing some of the earliest film scores, and leaving a lasting mark on what we now recognize as the cinematic sound.

Two American composers who played central roles in shaping the American symphonic sound were Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Copland’s distinctive voice came to define what we now think of as Americana through works such as Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, while Bernstein’s influence—both as a composer and as a conductor—profoundly shaped the American orchestra, and bridged the worlds of classical music and popular idioms. For Russian music, one of the earliest works to capture American audiences and establish a lasting appetite for that repertoire was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

There’s more to the story than just these three composers, of course, but this concert offers a glimpse at how the apple fell from the tree, tracing symphonic music in America from around 1875, when Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers first made their mark on American audiences, to the 1950s, by which time American orchestral music had arrived at a voice entirely its own.

Overture to Candide (1956)
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Run Time: Approx. 5 minutes

Leonard Bernstein’s Candide somewhat defies categorization. Most often labeled an operetta, it is lighter fare for the opera stage, yet more classically rooted than a Broadway musical. Its roles, like heroine Cunégonde, have been played by both soprano Renée Fleming and Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth. How, then, to categorize it? Perhaps the ambiguity is part of its charm, and apt for a composer who so deftly straddled the worlds of classical music stardom and popular culture.
The story comes from Voltaire’s 1759 satire which savagely rebukes the philosophy of blind optimism. The idea—popularized by Leibniz and touted throughout the play by Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss—insists that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” and therefore everything that happens, no matter how horrific, must be for the best. Candide earnestly tries to take this to heart, but over the course of the story he faces all manner of evils, including war, greed, earthquakes, shipwrecks, and even slavery, all while Pangloss tirelessly explains why each humiliation was necessary. Voltaire’s point is merciless: abstract optimism is grotesque in the face of real human suffering.
It is not hard to see why this story resonated with Bernstein. For a Jewish man barely ten years after the end of World War II, the idea of human cruelty made acceptable by ideology, prejudice, and willful blindness was no abstraction. Candide is not the only of Bernstein’s works to grapple with themes of violence and hatred, but where works like West Side Story and Mass face them with solemnity, Candide approaches them with manic absurdity.
Bernstein’s music meets Voltaire’s barbed satire pound for pound, and the overture offers an excellent snapshot of the antics to come. There’s something quixotic about the music’s exuberance: bright, brash confidence offset by chirping woodwinds, strange percussion sounds, and an undercurrent of insidious mockery. Even the radiant love theme between Candide and Cunégonde feels deliberately exaggerated—valiance teetering on parody.
And yet, at the conclusion of the story, Bernstein allows himself a measure of sentimentality that Voltaire does not. Both endings find the characters disillusioned and withdrawn from the world, settling on a small farm to live a simple, practical life. But where Voltaire’s final line is curt and unsentimental—“il faut cultiver notre jardin” (“we must cultivate our garden”)—Bernstein, ever the humanist, transforms this resignation into a warm and hopeful call, set to one of the loveliest ensemble pieces in the repertoire, “Make Our Garden Grow.” Just try to get through it dry-eyed. Candide is a fairytale indeed, but not one about happy endings. It’s a fairy tale about how to live in a world of injustice and horror and build something anyway.

Piano Concerto No. 1 (1875)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Run Time: Approx. 38 minutes

American audiences love Tchaikovsky. There’s something about his particular brand of Romanticism, with its soul‑bearing directness and obvious melancholy that just speaks to us. The love affair all began with his First Piano Concerto, the work that introduced the composer to U.S. audiences and went on to have a rich history in this country. It was premiered by Hans von Bülow and the Boston Symphony on October 25, 1875, after being initially rejected by Nikolai Rubinstein, who deemed it poorly written and unplayable. The audience rather disagreed with Rubinstein. They went wild for the work, welcoming Tchaikovsky immediately, and never looking back.
Just 16 years later, Tchaikovsky himself conducted the work for the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891, and in 1958, the concerto took on a new kind of cultural significance when Van Cliburn, an American, won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition performing it. Upon his return to the United States, Cliburn became a national figure—an American winning a Russian competition during the Cold War was something of a coup—and his recording of the concerto was the first classical album ever to go platinum. Today, it remains one of the most performed piano concertos in the world, ranking as the fourth most frequently performed piano concerto at Carnegie Hall, according to their website.
It’s easy to see why this concerto was met with such enthusiasm. Filled with dazzling virtuosity, powerful chords, and captivating melodies, it demonstrates both the excitement and virtuosity of a great piano concerto as well as Tchaikovsky himself at his very best.

Symphony No. 3 (1946)
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Run Time: Approx. 42 minutes

To today’s ears, there is no composer that more readily personifies the American symphonic sound than Aaron Copland. From Fanfare for the Common Man to Appalachian Spring, his sensibility seems to capture something intrinsic about the United States, from its spirit to its diverse landscapes. But what is it about his music that sounds so American? Is it just that we’ve come to associate it with Americana because of the many patriotic, military, and western films that have so effectively utilized his music? Or is there really something about it that speaks specifically to this land?
It’s easy to forget that barely a century ago, the United States was still unsure of its artistic identity. The country was still young, and its artistic life was still largely shaped by European imports, while the traditions of Native peoples and other non-European cultures were overlooked. As Jeff Counts has written, “Much like the search for the Great American Novel, the Great American Symphony was an aspirational mid-century dream for a country that longed to compete credibly with the Old World.”
Copland himself explored many different styles and voices throughout his career. Raised in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish immigrants, his formative musical studies took him to Paris where he studied with renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulenger. Later, he traveled extensively throughout America, Africa, and Mexico, where he formed an important friendship with composer Carlos Chávez. He experimented with various genres, moving from avant-garde compositions to an appreciation for the music of the American Southwest and Mexico. Late in his life he delved into serialism, a modernist technique that rethinks the treatment of pitches entirely. But the works for which he is most beloved are the ones hailing from his middle period, where his personal style culminated in the sound perhaps best personified by the 3rd symphony: Americana.

If you Google the characteristics of Copland’s Americana period, the words you’ll most often find are things like “open,” “broad,” and “simple.” Though these words may seem metaphorical, they actually do reflect real musical traits Copland used to create his sound. The types of intervals he favored, fourths and fifths, are less definitive than the usual building blocks of the Western canon. They do not have major or minor qualities; you need 3rds for that. In the absence of this defining quality, they have a sense of possibility. There are fewer rules governing how they might function harmonically. They can be anything. What an impeccable allegory for the American dream. And the harmonies, uncomplicated and widely spaced, give such a sense of scale as to evoke a great expanse. How could we not see this as the perfect backdrop for a scene depicting the Great Plains or the Mountain West?

Besides the pure musical qualities, Copland is not withholding in his titles, particularly when it comes to music of this period. Rodeo; Billy the Kid; Fanfare for the Common Man—these are American stories, and he’s made sure we know it.

The Third Symphony is built from precisely these qualities, but don’t take openness and simplicity to indicate a lack of drama. The first movement offers all the might, and perhaps menace, a brass section can muster, before yielding to an austere lullaby in the strings and winds. If the first movement evokes the natural world, the second is much more urban—bustling even, featuring shorter spurts of melody that buzz hurriedly around the orchestra like a busy cosmopolitan scene. Here, the influence of jazz as well as the avant-garde contemporaries like Stravinsky can really be heard in the snappy articulations and syncopated rhythms.
The lush, but angst-filled third movement offers a sharp turn from the excitement, reminding us that this work was premiered just one year after the close of World War II. But halfway through the movement, Copland revisits material from the second, perhaps nodding to the persistence of the human spirit.
In the transition from the third to the fourth movement, Copland arrives at perhaps his most salient point. Here he inserts the Fanfare for the Common Man—written just 3 years prior in fulfillment of a commission for uplifting and patriotic music to bolster the war effort—in its entirety, before continuing with his joyously hopeful conclusion.
If readers will indulge a bit of a leap: the placement of the Fanfare for the Common Man in this symphony reminds me very much of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th—a defining melody placed late in the work and carrying with it a philosophical message. If Serge Koussevitzky, who commissioned the work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was indeed searching for the “Great American Symphony,” he certainly got it. And if Beethoven’s Ninth serves as a totem for European artistic and philosophical achievement, then one might make the case that Copland’s Third Symphony occupies a similar symbolic space for American music, offering a message of hope and forward looking optimism for the country amidst a time of darkness.
Finally, because it’s too wonderful a full-circle conclusion to resist, I’ll end with a bit of trivia: this work received its European premiere in 1947, conducted by none other than Leonard Bernstein leading the Czech Philharmonic.

—Notes by Valerie Sly, 2026