The Philadelphia Orchestra

This evening's program revisits three premieres—either world or US—presented by The Philadelphia Orchestra. The orchestra commissioned, and last October premiered, Gabriela Lena Frank's Concertino Cusqueño to honor Yannick Nézet-Séguin as the eighth music director of the ensemble. In this composition, Frank, the California-born daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, imaginatively blends her South American heritage with a love for the music of the 20th-century English composer Benjamin Britten. The principal theme of the one-movement work is spun from a religious melody ("Ccollanan María") and a simple motif that opens Britten's Violin Concerto.

Maurice Ravel began composing his Piano Concerto in G Major while on a North American tour in 1928, and readily acknowledged the "thrilling and inspiring" influence of jazz that he heard while in the US. Leopold Stokowski, whose appointment 100 years ago as The Philadelphia Orchestra's third music director is celebrated this season, conducted the US premiere of the concerto in April 1932—four months after its unveiling in Paris.

This coming May 29 marks the centennial of the scandalous premiere in Paris of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, a landmark event in the history of Western music. Historians now generally agree that it was the choreography much more than the music that caused the sensation that night, and indeed, within a year The Rite of Spring was a successful concert piece. It took nearly a decade, until 1922, for the work to make it across the Atlantic. Stokowski conducted the US premiere in Philadelphia in March 1922.