Pines of Rome

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Respighi’s beloved portrait of the famous pine trees found throughout the city of Rome crowns this vivid program conducted by Dalia Stasevska, whose appearances here have won fervid fans in the audience and the Orchestra. Another fan favorite, Gil Shaham, performs Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto, a dazzler that fairly bursts with passion-driven fancy fingerwork—the perfect showcase for Shaham’s “purity of intonation” that is “extremely impressive” (Classics Today). 

One of three musical postcards from Rome, Respighi’s Pines of Rome enchants with visions of children playing in the shadow of a villa, mournful shadowed scenes near a catacomb, a moonlit night on a tree-lined distant hill overlooking the city, and finally, a ghostly glimpse of bygone triumphs, with trumpet-heralded ancient Roman soldiers marching toward the Sacred Way and the Capitol.

Composer, author, linguist, raconteur, and inimitably stylish Camille Saint-Saëns was a bon vivant who made composing and performing look effortless while creating some of the most devilishly difficult works to play—works that bring out the best in the soloist. Saint-Saëns’s Third Violin Concerto begins with a bold, dramatic theme, subsides to a serene grace, and roars with a bristling, buoyant finale. Like Saint-Saëns, Gil Shaham, “a virtuoso and a player of deeply intense sincerity” (The New York Times), makes it look like child’s play.

Two evocative works add to the excitement of this program: Scottish composer Anna Meredith’s stomp along a beach thrills like the sharp air off a cold sea, and Sibelius’s shimmering symphonic fantasy conjures up images of an iron-willed princess who demands that her lover pass tests of strength and magic.