How can an orchestra portray a city?
Respighi does not give us a map of Rome. He gives us four places at four different moments—and asks the orchestra to make each one visible through sound. Children race through the gardens of the Villa Borghese. A solemn chant rises near an ancient catacomb. A nightingale sings on the Janiculum Hill. Finally, an army advances along the Appian Way, growing from a distant pulse into one of the most overwhelming conclusions in orchestral music.
The pines remain in the title, but the real subject is memory: the lives, ceremonies and histories that have unfolded beneath them. Respighi’s Rome is simultaneously ancient and modern, intimate and monumental.
The two works preceding Pines of Rome offer different kinds of remembrance. In Capriccio sinfonico, we hear the young Puccini discovering the melodic and dramatic voice that would later transform Italian opera. Chopin’s First Piano Concerto places the private lyricism of the piano against the scale of an orchestra, with pianist Zach Cheong as soloist. Together, the three works travel from youthful promise and romantic longing to the accumulated memory of the Eternal City.
Giacomo Puccini:
Capriccio Sinfonico
Puccini composed Capriccio sinfonico while completing his studies at the Milan Conservatory. Although he had not yet written the operas that would make him famous, the work already reveals the qualities that would define his mature music: expressive melody, vivid orchestral color and an instinctive sense of drama.
A quiet introduction gradually gathers intensity before opening into a broad, flowing melody. Puccini allows that melody to expand across the orchestra as though it were being sung onstage. Faster music brings rhythmic energy and sharper contrasts, but the lyrical voice remains at the center of the work.
Listeners familiar with La bohème may recognize part of the faster section: Puccini later returned to this music in the opening of that opera. Capriccio sinfonico therefore offers more than a glimpse of a young composer. It allows us to hear Puccini discovering the musical language that would soon become unmistakably his own.
Listen for:
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The quiet opening gradually acquiring weight and intensity
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Broad melodies that seem to ask for a human voice
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Woodwind solos emerging from the orchestral texture
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Sudden changes between lyrical reflection and dramatic momentum
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Music Puccini would later reuse near the beginning of La bohème
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The increasingly confident orchestral sound of the conclusion
Duration: 16'
Frédéric Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1
Chopin completed his First Piano Concerto in 1830, when he was twenty years old and preparing to leave Poland. The work places the intimate, poetic voice of the piano within the public scale and ceremony of a full orchestra.
The first movement begins with an extended orchestral introduction. When the piano finally enters, it does not merely repeat what we have heard: it reshapes the musical material through ornament, brilliance and changing shades of expression. Moments of commanding virtuosity alternate with passages that feel unusually private.
Chopin described the second movement, titled Romanze, as a quiet contemplation of a beloved landscape on a beautiful spring night. Its long piano melody seems suspended above the orchestra, accompanied by muted strings and delicate woodwind responses. The finale changes the atmosphere again, drawing upon the lively rhythms of a Polish dance and carrying the concerto toward an energetic conclusion.
Throughout the work, the orchestra establishes the larger world while the piano speaks as an individual within it—sometimes brilliant and commanding, sometimes delicate and inward.
Listen for:
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The long orchestral introduction preparing the piano’s first entrance
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The soloist transforming orchestral themes through ornament and virtuosity
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The contrast between dramatic public gestures and intimate piano writing
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The stillness of the Romanze and its quietly unfolding melody
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Woodwinds responding to and conversing with the piano
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The Polish dance rhythms that animate the finale
Duration: 43'
Meet Zach Cheong
Zach Cheong is an award-winning concert pianist from Macau and Hong Kong, a Steinway Young Artist whose performances have earned international acclaim across Asia, Europe, and North America. Praised for his “poetic touch and commanding artistry,” (South China Morning Post), he is a graduate of both the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School. A first-prize winner of the International Chopin Piano Competition in Japan, he has appeared as soloist with the Trondheim Soloists, OJEUM Orchestra Mexico City, and the Macao Orchestra.
Intermission
Ottorino Respighi : Pines of Rome (Pini di Roma)
Respighi does not describe the trees themselves so much as the human life, history and memory that surround them. Four scenes follow without pause, carrying the listener from the gardens of the Villa Borghese to the Appian Way at dawn.
The opening movement bursts into motion as children play beneath the pines of the Villa Borghese. Their games are noisy, energetic and continually changing. Without warning, the brightness disappears. Near an ancient catacomb, low strings suggest voices rising from below the earth while an offstage trumpet sounds across the distance.
The third scene moves to the Janiculum Hill at night. A clarinet solo unfolds above softly shimmering strings before the sound of an actual nightingale joins the orchestra. Respighi then takes us to the Appian Way. The final movement begins almost below the threshold of hearing: a slow, persistent pulse suggesting an ancient army approaching through the morning mist.
The music grows steadily closer and more powerful. Brass instruments appear from beyond the stage, percussion intensifies and the full orchestra transforms the distant procession into a monumental vision of Rome’s past entering the present.
Listen for:
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The racing rhythms and brilliant colors of the children’s games
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The sudden descent into the shadowed atmosphere of the catacomb
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The offstage trumpet sounding from a distance
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The clarinet solo and recorded nightingale on the Janiculum
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The nearly inaudible pulse beginning the Appian Way
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Additional brass and percussion gradually enlarging the approaching procession
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The final accumulation of sound as ancient Rome seems to fill the hall
