Philharmonia Orchestra

Program Notes

Ortiz – Si el oxígeno fuera verde

Gabriela Ortiz
Born December 20, 1964, Mexico City

Gabriela Ortiz composed Si el oxígeno fuera verde premiered in Amsterdam on September 24, 2025, by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the direction of Santtu-Matias Rouvali. The composer has provided an introduction to this work on the website of her publisher, Boosey & Hawkes:

Si el oxígeno fuera verde (If Oxygen Were Green) is a work dedicated to the memory of my friend and fellow Mexican musician Jorge Verdín, founder of the collective Nortec Collective, and known by his artist name “Clorofila.” Verdín’s musical originality lay in the way he combined electronic sounds with banda music from northern Mexico, forging a style that reflected the borderland experience between Tijuana and San Diego. I was fortunate to collaborate with Verdín on several occasions, whether as the graphic designer of my album Únicamente la Verdad, or helping me shape the electronic sounds used in my seventh string quartet with percussion, Pico-Bite-Beat.

Although I never had the chance to ask him why he chose the word clorofila (“chlorophyll”) as his artist name, I decided to take the meaning and implications of that word as a starting point for this piece, within the framework my sonic imagination.

Chlorophyll is a biomolecule of vital importance to life on our planet. Without it, the process of photosynthesis—carried out by plants and other organisms—would not be possible, and without photosynthesis, oxygen would not be present in our atmosphere.

Nature is made up of numerous cycles that are fundamental to the functioning of ecosystems and the maintenance of life on Earth. These cycles are interdependent and form a complex network that keeps our environment in balance. They are essential for conserving natural resources and protecting the planet. With these reflections in mind, I began to imagine particles of oxygen as sonic fractals ringing in the atmosphere, celebrating life in its purest, most essential form.

Just as fractal geometry features self-replicating patterns on different scales, in this piece I use rhythmic patterns and melodies that develop independently, gradually transforming through a mechanical sonic process akin to those found in nature. These groupings evolve through subtle variations, creating a sense of continuity and growth—forming diverse, intricate musical structures.

Si el oxígeno fuera verde is structured in four main sections, each conceived as an autonomous life cycle within an infinite universe:

Fractal structures and sound particles floating in the atmosphere
A nocturnal song nourished by the soul of a forest
The dawn of plants transforming light into oxygen
The dance of chlorophyll begins

The title’s metaphor suggests the fragile green murmur of life—where a disruptive, ecological nature can be imagined as a forest that, after a transformative event, reinvents itself and blooms with greater diversity and sustainability. The piece concludes with a final dance, becoming a symbol of the interdependence of all living beings—a reminder that each of us, as human beings, holds an urgent responsibility to help build a future that is more balanced and harmonious with the natural world.

Program notes by Gabriela Ortiz

Ravel – Piano Concerto in G Major

Maurice Ravel
Born March 7, 1875, Pyrénées, Basses-Ciboure, France
Died December 28, 1937, Paris, France

For decades of his career, Maurice Ravel had written zero concertos, and then in the fall of 1929, at age 54, he set to work simultaneously on two piano concertos. One was the Concerto for the Left Hand for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, and the other—the Concerto in G Major—was intended for the composer’s own use. Concerto for the Left Hand is dark and serious, but Concerto in G Major is much lighter. Ravel described Concerto in G Major as “a concerto in the truest sense of the term, written in the spirit of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. Indeed, I take the view that the music of a concerto can very well be cheerful and brilliant and does not have to lay claim to profundity or aim at dramatic effect… At the beginning I thought of naming the work a divertissement; but I reflected that this was not necessary, the title ‘Concerto’ explaining the character of the music sufficiently.”

The actual composition took longer than Ravel anticipated, and the concerto was not complete until the fall of 1931. By that time, failing health prevented the composer from performing this music himself. Instead, he conducted the premiere in Paris on January 14, 1932. The pianist was Marguerite Long, to whom Ravel dedicated the concerto (Long had given the first performance of Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin in 1919).

Ravel may have taken Mozart and Saint-Saëns as his model, but no listener would make that association. What strikes audiences first are the concerto’s virtuoso writing for both piano and orchestra, the brilliance and transparency of the music, and the influence of American jazz. It is possible to make too much of the jazz influence, but Ravel had heard jazz during his tour of America in 1928 and found much to admire. When asked about its influence on this concerto, he said, “It includes some elements borrowed from jazz, but only in moderation.” Ravel was quite proud of this music and is reported to have said that in this work “he had expressed himself most completely, and that he had poured his thoughts into the exact mold that he had dreamed.”

The first movement, marked Allegramente (“Brightly”), opens with a whipcrack, and immediately the piccolo plays the jaunty opening tune, picked up in turn by solo trumpet before the piano makes its sultry solo entrance. Some of the concerto’s most brilliant music occurs in this movement, which is possessed of a sort of madcap energy, with great splashes of instrumental color, strident flutter-tonguing by the winds, string glissandos, and a quasi-cadenza for the harp. The Adagio assai, one of Ravel’s most beautiful slow movements, opens with a three-minute solo for the pianist, who lays out the haunting main theme at length. The return of this theme later in the movement in the English horn over delicate piano accompaniment is particularly effective. Despite its seemingly easy flow of melody, this movement gave Ravel a great deal of trouble, and he later said that he wrote it “two bars at a time.” The concluding Presto explodes to life with a five-note riff that recurs throughout, functioning somewhat like the ritornello of the baroque concerto. The jazz influence shows up here in the squealing clarinets, brass smears, and racing piano passages. The movement comes to a sizzling conclusion on the five-note phrase with which it began.

Sibelius – Symphony No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 82

Jean Sibelius
Born December 8, 1865, Tavastehus, Finland
Died September 20, 1957, Järvenpää, Finland

World War I threatened the western consciousness in a way that it had never been assaulted before. For the first time it dawned on the human imagination that it might be possible to destroy civilization. Though that war leveled much of western Europe, it left Scandinavia untouched, and the residents of those countries watched warily as the horror unfolded to the south. In 1915, the first full year of the war, two Scandinavian composers drafted powerful symphonies. Neither composer connected his symphony directly to the war, but it is hard not to feel that both works register some response to that traumatic time. In Denmark, Carl Nielsen wrote his Fourth Symphony, which he called the “Inextinguishable”—it is a violent symphony that finally makes a statement of faith that life will prevail. In Finland, Jean Sibelius wrote his Fifth Symphony, which—while not so violent as the Nielsen—also drives to a heroic conclusion. Sibelius wanted his symphony understood only as music: for the London premiere in 1921, he specified that “The composer desires the work to be regarded as absolute music, having no direct poetic basis.” But while neither symphony may consciously be about the war, both make statements of strength and hope from out of that turbulent time.

The Sibelius Fifth Symphony had a difficult birth, enduring three different versions spread out over five years. Sibelius had made a successful tour of America in 1914, and he returned home to find Europe at war. A notebook entry from September 1914 brings his first mention of the new symphony, as well as an indication of how depressed he was: “In a deep valley again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend… God opens his door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.” He drafted the symphony across 1915 and led the premiere on December 8 of that year, his 50th birthday. But Sibelius was dissatisfied, and across 1916 he revised the symphony, combining its first two movements and so reducing the number of movements from four to three. But when this version was performed in December 1916, he was still unhappy, and he came back to the symphony three years later and revised it a third time. This final version was premiered in Helsinki on November 24, 1919, a year after the end of the war.

As completed, the Fifth Symphony has an unusual structure, and it blurs traditional notions of sonata form, which depends on the contrast and resolution of different material. Instead, the Fifth Symphony evolves through the organic growth of a few fundamental ideas. The most important of these is the horn call heard at the opening of the first movement. That shape sweeps up over an octave and falls back (commentators are unable to resist comparing this opening to the dawn), and this shape will recur in many forms over the course of the symphony. The movement rises to a great climax at which that horn-shape blazes out in the brass, then speeds seamlessly into the Allegro moderato. This is the symphony’s scherzo, and in the earliest version of the Fifth Symphony it was a separate movement (this movement also incorporates the fanfare figure from the opening, and perhaps that unifying feature was what led Sibelius to fuse the two movements.) The movement gathers strength on its driving 3/4 pulse and drives to a tremendous conclusion.

The central movement—Andante mosso, quasi allegretto—is in variation form, but even this old form evolves under Sibelius’ hands. Instead of a clear theme followed by variations, Sibelius instead offers a series of variations on a rhythm: a sequence of five-note patterns first stamped out by low pizzicato strings. Such a plan runs the danger of growing repetitive, but Sibelius colors each repetition in a new way and at one point plunges into a rather unsettled interlude in E-flat major before returning to the home key of G major and a quiet close. In the movement’s final minutes come hints once again of the horn theme from the symphony’s very beginning.

The concluding Allegro molto bursts to life in a great rush of energy from rustling strings, and soon this busy sound is penetrated by the sound of horns, which punch out a series of ringing attacks. In a memorable phrase, the English writer Donald Francis Tovey has described this moment as Thor swinging his hammer through the whistling wind, but it is a mark of the subtle unity of this symphony that this same figure had served as an accompaniment figure to the rhythmic variations of the middle movement. Over the cascading peal of those bright horn attacks, woodwinds sing a radiant melody, one so broad and grand that its effect has been compared to the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. This melody evolves through various forms and finally builds to a great climax and drives toward the powerful close.

Nielsen had concluded his “Inextinguishable” Symphony with a ferocious duel between two timpanists stationed at each side of the stage. By contrast, the end of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony feels classic in its simplicity. Sibelius builds to a climax, cuts the music off in silence, and then finishes with six huge chords. The first four, widely and unevenly spaced, feel lonely and uncertain, and then every player on the stage joins together for the final two chords, which bring the Fifth Symphony to its smashing close.
Scandinavian composers were all too aware during World War I of the chaos sweeping across Europe, and both Nielsen and Sibelius responded with wartime symphonies that held out hope in the face of that destruction. If Sibelius refused to connect his Fifth Symphony directly to that war, he nevertheless made its moral message clear in his own description of its ending: “The whole, if I may say so, a vital climax to the end. Triumphal.”

Program notes by Eric Bromberger