Delaware County Symphony
Sebastian Grand, Music Director
Visual Program Notes- The Planets Symphony Concert, May 4, 2025
Louise Farrenc- Overture No. 1
Louise Farrenc was a French composer, virtuoso pianist, and teacher of the Romantic period. Farrenc was the only woman in the 19th century to hold the esteemed position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory. Her Overture in E minor, Op. 23 was composed in1834.
Farrenc portrait (1835)
by Luigi Rubio
Original Conservatoire building at
15 rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky- Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op.33
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. In the Variations on a Rococo Theme, composed in 1877, Tchaikovsky shows that he was highly gifted at writing in a past style of the18th-century.
Cabinet card portrait of Tchaikovsky in 1888
Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, a German cellist who gave the premiere of Variations on a Rococo Theme.
Gustav Holst- The Planets
Gustav Holst was an English composer, arranger, and teacher. He is best known for his orchestral suite The Planets. Written between 1914 and 1917, each of the seven movements is named after a planet of the Solar System and its supposed astrological character.
By Herbert Lambert - National Portrait Gallery, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67990161
Front cover of The Planets. One of
two hundred copies of the 1921 edition.