BSO: Rising Up

Franz Joseph Haydn | Il Mondo Della Luna “The World on the Moon”

Chavalier de Saint Georges | Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 5, No. 2

Maurice Ravel | Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn

Franz Joseph Haydn | Symphony No. 104 in D major “London”

Guest conductor David Rahbee leads our first concert of 2025, opening with Haydn’s Il Mondo Della Luna, a comic opera first performed in Hungary in 1777. Chavalier de Saint Georges’ Violin Concerto follows. First published in 1775, the piece includes solo violin, string orchestra, and basso continuo, and has been described as fun and infectious, charming and energizing. Next is Ravel’s Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn, written in 1909 to mark the 100th anniversary of Haydn’s death. The piece is just 54 bars long and the theme is based on Haydn’s own name as a five-note motif. The concert closes with Haydn’s London Symphony, the Austrian composer’s final symphony. Though not a radical departure from his previous work, Haydn was said to have brought together here all the elements he’d learned in his more than 40 years of composing — but on an even grander scale, with more brilliant orchestration, more daring harmonic conceptions, more intense rhythmic drive and, especially, more memorable thematic inventions.