Program Notes

Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54

Between May 4 and May 20, 1841, Robert Schumann composed a single-movement Concert Fantasy for piano and orchestra in A minor. On August 8 of that year, his wife Clara, played the work twice at a closed rehearsal with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Felix Mendelssohn. It was Schumann’s first completed composition for piano and orchestra, following several earlier concerto projects that he had left unfinished. The Fantasy remained a single movement for four years. In 1845, Schumann returned to it, revised the existing music, and added an Intermezzo and Finale to create the three-movement concerto we know today. The completed score is therefore the product of two separate periods in Schumann’s career: its musical foundation dates from 1841, while the complete concerto took shape in 1845.

The finished work received its premiere on December 4, 1845, at the Hôtel de Saxe in Dresden. Clara Schumann was the pianist, and Ferdinand Hiller conducted; Schumann dedicated the concerto to Hiller. Clara would continue to perform the concerto, helping establish it as an important part of her repertoire.

Schumann’s orchestration is relatively compact: pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, together with timpani, strings, and solo piano. That scoring allows the concerto to move easily between the intimacy of chamber music and the power of a full Romantic orchestra. Perhaps most importantly, Schumann treats the piano and orchestra as partners rather than opponents. The soloist certainly receives moments of considerable virtuosity, but the concerto continually passes musical ideas between piano, woodwinds, strings, and the full ensemble. The Boston Symphony’s Michael Steinberg characterized the work as fundamentally a conversation—sometimes intimate, sometimes playful—between the pianist and orchestra. That conversational quality makes this concerto especially fitting for a competition winner’s performance. The soloist is asked not simply to command the keyboard, but to listen, respond, accompany, lead, and become part of the larger orchestral ensemble. This work has performed by your BCSO four times since 1955, with the most recent coming in 1992. Our 2026-2027 Collegiate Concerto Competition Winner will be performing the first movement tonight.

About Maikol Perez Gomez, 2026-2027 Collegiate Concerto Competition Winner

Maikol Pérez Gómez is a Cuban concert pianist currently pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance at the Duquesne University Mary Pappert School of Music in Pittsburgh, where he studies with Dr. Kevin Lee Sun. At the same time he is an engaged educator and church musician. Currently serving as piano instructor at Bee Sharp Music Studio and as pianist at Fairhaven United Methodist Church and Duquesne Chapel of the Holy Spirit.

In 2025, Pérez Gómez won First Prize at the Marian Garcia International Piano Competition held at Penn State University, and Third Prize at the 9th José Jacinto Cuevas Yamaha International Piano Competition in Mérida, Mexico, where he advanced to the finals and performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the Yucatán Symphony Orchestra. In 2026 he won the Philip Bianco Award at Keynotes Music Scholarship and more recently the 2026-2027 Butler County Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition.

He is the recipient of other international and national awards, including First Prize at the 2021 Villahermosa International Piano Competition in Mexico and Second Prize at the 2017 edition 2nd Prize from the 2018 Amadeo Roldán Regional Piano Competition( Havana), the New York International Music Competition (2024), and a UNESCO Caribbean Region Prize, which funded his participation at the 2024 Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy, where he studied with Lilya Zilberstein. He also has had masterclasses with Kirill Gerstein, Luca Chiantore, Ninowska  FernándezBrito, and David Allen Wehr.

Born and trained in Cuba, Pérez Gómez began his musical studies on saxophone before earning degrees in Saxophone and Piano Performance from the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. He continued advanced studies at the Universidad de las Artes (ISA) in Havana with Danae Ulacia.  Prior to relocating to the United States, he served on the faculty of the Manuel Saumell Conservatory and worked as a collaborative pianist and coach at several Cuban music institutions.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

The premise of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is immediately recognizable: someone discovers a way to make a difficult job easier, without fully understanding how the solution works. Dukas found the story in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem Der Zauberlehrling. He composed his orchestral treatment a century later and conducted its premiere in Paris on May 18, 1897, at a concert of the Société Nationale de Musique. He called the work a symphonic scherzo—a designation that points toward its animation and humor, even as the comedy becomes increasingly alarming. In his master’s absence, an apprentice enchants a broom to carry water. The experiment succeeds much too well. Unable to remember the words that will stop it, he watches the water rise and attempts a drastic solution: chopping the broom in two. Both halves spring into action, making the problem worse. Only the returning sorcerer can undo the spell and restore order. The story is a compact lesson in the difference between possessing a little knowledge and understanding how to use it.

Dukas begins with a quiet, mysterious introduction. Before the bustling action takes over, the music establishes a world in which something unusual might happen. When the enchanted broom’s familiar theme arrives in the bassoon, it gives the listener a character to follow: energetic, purposeful, and completely unconcerned by the apprentice’s growing distress. The musical storytelling depends on more than recognizable sound effects. Repeated ideas acquire new meaning as the surrounding music changes. What initially sounds useful and industrious becomes relentless; increasing orchestral activity turns a manageable task into an emergency. This is the central joke made musical: the servant has not become disobedient. It continues to obey with disastrous efficiency. As the crisis develops, the orchestra’s growing density makes the apprentice’s loss of control audible. The destruction of the broom briefly interrupts the action, but renewed activity transforms that apparent solution into another calamity. The sorcerer’s return finally restores the quiet atmosphere heard at the beginning, before a sharply delivered ending closes the episode.

Listen especially for the relationship between repetition and change. A musical idea can remain recognizable while everything around it becomes more urgent. In that relationship, Dukas captures a particularly effective kind of suspense: we understand what is happening, but the apprentice cannot make it stop.

For many, this music is inseparable from Mickey Mouse’s appearance in Disney’s Fantasia in 1940. The animated sequence was originally conceived as a separate short before becoming part of the larger film. Its visual storytelling brought Dukas’s orchestral work to generations of new audiences, but the music had been written as a concert piece decades earlier. A live performance offers the pleasure of discovering where those familiar images begin: in the instruments themselves. Watch the exchange between players, notice how an accompaniment can generate excitement, and listen for the timing of pauses as well as bursts of sound. Whether the film is a childhood favorite or entirely unfamiliar, the invitation is the same—to hear an orchestra turn rhythm, melody, and instrumental personality into a complete theatrical adventure. This was last performed by your BCSO in 1972.

The Planets

Despite its title, The Planets is not a musical textbook about the solar system. Holst’s starting point was astrology: the personalities and emotional qualities associated with the planets. Its sequence therefore follows a musical logic rather than a map of planetary orbits. Earth is absent because the astrological viewpoint looks outward from Earth toward the other planets; Pluto had not yet been discovered when Holst wrote the work. The movements offer a more useful guide than any knowledge of astronomy.

Holst began the suite in 1914. An early private orchestral performance took place before an invited audience at London’s Queen’s Hall on September 29, 1918, conducted by Adrian Boult. A complete public performance followed on November 15, 1920, with Albert Coates conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. That distinction matters: the music reached the stage gradually, rather than arriving in a single, immediately public unveiling.

The complete work reveals contrasts that individual excerpts cannot convey. Its most forceful passages are answered by moments of tenderness; exuberance gives way to reflection. The movements need not be heard as chapters of a literal story. Instead, they offer a succession of perspectives, each changing how we experience what follows. This work was last performed by your BCSO in 2018

I. Mars, the Bringer of War
“Mars” begins with a repeated pattern organized into five beats, creating an unsettling drive rather than the familiar balance of a conventional march. The strings strike with the wood of their bows, adding a dry, percussive sound. From these beginnings, the music develops an increasingly formidable force. Listen for the persistence of the rhythmic pattern beneath the changing orchestral activity: it makes the movement feel difficult to escape. Although its violence has often been associated with the First World War, Holst had already sketched “Mars” before the conflict began. The movement is not a musical report from the battlefields. Its power lies in a more general—and disturbing—impression of force stripped of reassurance or glory.

II. Venus, the Bringer of Peace
The opening of “Venus” changes the way we listen. A rising horn phrase receives a gentle woodwind response; the orchestra now seems to breathe rather than advance. Solo violin, harps, and the bell-like celesta contribute to the movement’s luminous atmosphere. The instrumental palette that produced such menace moments earlier becomes a source of delicacy and repose. “Venus” invites attention to small gestures. Listen for a phrase passing from one instrumental voice to another, or for the way a quiet accompaniment changes the character of a melody. Peace here is not emptiness. It is a different kind of richness, made audible when the pressure subsides

III. Mercury, the Winged Messenger
“Mercury” is a study in movement: quick, light, and continually changing direction. Short musical figures pass among the instruments, while overlapping rhythmic patterns make the music seem to dart across the orchestra. Its agility offers a lively contrast to the sustained calm of “Venus.” Try following a musical idea as though it were a small object being passed from player to player. Its outline may remain recognizable, but its character changes with the instrument that receives it. The pleasure of “Mercury” comes partly from this combination of precision and apparent spontaneity: everything is carefully coordinated, yet nothing seems willing to stand still.

IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
“Jupiter” opens with bustling strings and an exuberant orchestral energy. Its celebrations encompass more than high spirits, however. At the center stands a spacious, hymn-like melody that gives the movement a sense of ceremony and generosity. That tune was later adapted for “I Vow to Thee, My Country”; it originated here as part of Holst’s orchestral movement, rather than entering the suite as a quotation of an existing hymn. Listen for how naturally the music moves between lively motion and breadth. The contrasting sections suggest different kinds of shared happiness: the pleasure of dancing, the excitement of gathering, and the quieter dignity of celebrating something that matters.

V. Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
“Saturn” begins with slowly alternating sounds in the flutes and harps, against which darker instrumental lines emerge. The steady pacing can suggest the passage of time, but the movement is not simply a portrait of decline. Its gradual intensification leads through an anguished climax before the music finds a calmer, more accepting character. Holst identified “Saturn” as his favorite movement of the suite. Its emotional complexity offers one possible reason for that preference: there is room here for apprehension, resistance, and consolation. Listen for the transformation of the atmosphere. The movement’s destination matters as much as the weight of its opening. 

VI. Uranus, the Magician
A forceful four-note brass figure announces “Uranus,” followed by bassoons that give the movement an unmistakably ungainly sense of fun. This magician’s arrival is theatrical rather than discreet. Sharp contrasts, rhythmic surprises, and increasingly extravagant orchestral gestures create a performance full of mischief. On a program that also includes The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, listeners may hear a family resemblance between these two musical conjurings. Both find humor and danger in the orchestra’s ability to make a gesture grow beyond its modest beginnings. Holst, however, supplies no apprentice-and-broom narrative. The title leaves us free to imagine the magician’s personality and exploits for ourselves

VII. Neptune, the Mystic
“Neptune” turns away from spectacle. Hushed instrumental colors and elusive melodic fragments create an atmosphere in which familiar landmarks seem to disappear. Eventually, a wordless women’s chorus enters from beyond the audience’s sight, extending the orchestra’s sound into a new dimension. Holst’s instructions make the effect especially striking. He places the chorus in an adjoining room, specifies that the door should gradually close near the end, and directs the final choral bar to repeat until the sound is lost in the distance. The conclusion is therefore a carefully composed disappearance, rather than a conventional final chord.

Allow those last faint voices, and the silence after them, to complete the journey. After the insistence of “Mars,” this ending proposes an entirely different relationship with sound: not something that overwhelms us, but something we follow until it passes beyond our reach