Czech Philharmonic • Cristian Măcelaru

Wynton Marsalis (*1961) is a prominent musical figure: first and foremost, he is a top trumpeter and outstanding performer of jazz and classical music, as well as a composer, arranger, and popularizer of music. He was born into a musical family in New Orleans, the cradle of jazz. Three of his brothers are jazz musicians. Marsalis began playing the trumpet at the age of six and at 14 appeared with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra as a soloist in Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat major. He subsequently studied music at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York. As a jazz musician, he has collaborated artistically with some of the biggest stars in the field, while also establishing himself as a respected performer of classical music. He has won a total of nine Grammy Awards and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. He is also a recipient of the French Gran Prix du Disque, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

As a solo trumpeter, Marsalis performed intensively for ten years, playing up to 130 concerts a year. He then slowed down his grueling pace and devoted himself more to recording jazz and classical music, arranging music, and hosting music education television programs. In 1987, Marsalis helped start the “Classical Jazz at Lincoln Center” concert series, which led to the establishment of Jazz at Lincoln Center as an independent department of Lincoln Center. Marsalis was appointed the managing and artistic director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO), which now performs at Rose Hall. In January 2026, Marsalis, soon to be 65 years old, announced he would step down from his role as artistic director and continue to serve only as an advisor.

Marsalis has created 641 original compositions across genres, which stand on their own as groundbreaking feats in the world of music and many are genre-bending. His classical oeuvre includes eight ballet and dance scores, four symphonies (Blues Symphony, Swing Symphony), two string quartets, a bassoon quartet, a mass (The Abyssian Mass), 13 suites, a jazz oratorio, and concertos for violin, tuba, trumpet, and cello.

Violin Concerto in D major, composed in 2015 for virtuoso Nicola Benedetti, was co-commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. This 45-minute piece takes inspiration from the life of Nicola Benedetti, a traveling performer and educator. Scored for symphony orchestra, with tremendous respect for the demands of that instrument, it is nonetheless written from the perspective of a jazz musician and New Orleans bluesman. The motto of the entire work is the belief that all human beings are connected in the essential fundamentals of life: birth, death, love, pain, and hope. The composer wrote, “Nicky asked me to ‘invite a diverse world of people into the experience of this piece.’ Because finding and nurturing common musical ground between differing arts and musical styles has been a lifetime fascination of mine, I was already trying to welcome them. It may seem simple enough, but bringing different perspectives together is never easy. Form, improvisation, harmony, and methods of thematic development are very different. Because modern living is an integrated experience, it is never difficult to discover organic connections. Turning those insights into something meaningful and playable, however, is another story. It has to be lived and digested. That’s why I looked for real-life examples in the history of jazz-symphonic collaborations and to the environment and experience that connect Nicky and me. I considered aspects of her Scottish ancestry, the great Afro-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s love of legendary Scottish poet Robert Burns, my love and inextinguishable respect for Scottish baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley, and the luminous but obscure achievements of Afro-American keyed bugler Francis Johnson, father of the American cornet tradition and one of the first published American composers who was also a fine fiddler. These sources led me to reconnect with the Anglo-Celtic roots of Afro-American music.”

The concerto is in four movements. As Marsalis wrote in his notes, its first movement, Rhapsody, “is a complex dream that becomes a nightmare, progresses into peacefulness and dissolves into ancestral memory.” It is highly expressive music which at the end resounds with echoes of a march, perhaps for Marsalis a childhood memory of a funeral procession in New Orleans. The second movement, Rondo Burlesque, draws on the wilder side of New Orleans, as Marsalis put it, “jazz, calliope, circus clown, African gumbo, Mardi Gras party.” The music here is raw and raucous and unlike anything one has ever heard in a violin concerto. The third movement, Blues, is the very incarnation of sadness beyond words. Finally comes a barnyard throw-down entitled Hootenanny (American folk music party best known from Western films), “fiddling from rural America transformed into art music of the highest and most joyous order.”

Marsalis has created a major work in his violin concerto woven from elements of American jazz and folk music, reaching deep into the roots of American music. At the same time, it draws from a wide range of Western violin styles and fiddle music from the Baroque to the present day. It also reflects Celtic, Anglo-American, and African-American dance traditions, making sophisticated use of the magic of violin virtuosity. The world premiere of the composition was given on 6 November 2015 by Nicola Benedetti at the Barbican Centre in London with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan. Since then, she has performed the concerto multiple times with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Cristian Măcelaru.

The Paris years of Bohuslav Martinů (1890‒1959) came to a close with the invasion of Nazi troops in June 1940, followed by the capitulation of Paris and the Martinůs’ escape to the south of France. Finally, on 31 March 1941, they safely arrived on American shores. However, the circumstances of life and music in the United States were completely different from those in France, and Martinů, although he had achieved a great synthesis in his music, had to respond to the changed reality at the age of 52. He turned to the most intellectually serious form, the symphony. When asked why he had not yet written one, it was no longer possible to respond modestly with “I am not yet sufficiently prepared.” While this demonstrated artistic humility and self-criticism worthy of the great Brahms, who also composed his first symphony at a mature age, it was not to be understood in America, the land of unlimited possibilities.

The direct impulse for Symphony No. 1 came from Serge Koussevitzky, the long-time conductor and music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He commissioned a large orchestral piece from Martinů in memory of Koussevitzky’s wife Natalie (who died in the early 1942). Martinů spent several months working on the symphony. “Apart from Julietta, I haven’t used a large orchestra since La Bagarre and Rhapsody, i.e., since 1927 and 1928,” said Martinů. “I postponed the work from month to month until I finally put the first chords down on paper.” These were the opening fifth chords in B minor and B major, which anticipate the main theme of the first movement and return again at its conclusion. “They had been haunting me as a theme since January 1942, and I logically rejected them. After all, you can’t create a theme from two chords! And yet I couldn’t get past them until I suddenly found the form and orchestration they now have, and the whole first movement suddenly grew out of me, as if it had been hidden behind this introduction; at the same time, the modulation of both chords does not actually play any further role in the structure.” The first movement, full of dazzling colors and confident instrumentation, in which the orchestra quietens down only a few times to an intimate duet of woodwind instruments, was written in the Jamaica neighborhood of New York City on 1 May 1942. Then Martinů and his wife Charlotte went to rural Middlebury, Vermont. Surrounded by inspiring nature, Martinů completed the second movement, a striking scherzo with a soulful pastoral middle section, on 26 June 1942. During a several-day stay at Mah-Kee-Nac Lake in Vermont, he composed the third movement, somber Largo, on 14 July 1942. It is music of extraordinary solemnity, power, and tragedy. This movement is not only a memorial to Natalie Koussevitzky, but also seems to reflect the terrible news from home about the Lidice massacre (a Nazi atrocity to avenge the Operation Anthropoid carried out by Czech resistance fighters). Filled with despair and sadness, Martinů later made a powerful antiwar gesture in his symphonic piece entitled Memorial to Lidice.

Another interruption in work on the First Symphony occurred for entirely prosaic reasons: Martinů accepted a lucrative offer to teach composition at the summer courses of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. They took place in the stunning hillside landscape, with Aaron Copland teaching there every year, and Igor Stravinsky and Paul Hindemith frequently in attendance. Koussevitzky had been organizing a summer music festival there with the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937. After six intense weeks of teaching, Martinů was finally able to relax at the Ondříčeks’ home in Manomet, Massachusetts, where he worked on the final movement, a rondo, while going for walks by the sea. He finished his First Symphony there on 1 September 1942. During one such late-night stroll along the seashore, Martinů caught the attention of a local police patrol. The war was raging, and there was constant fear of enemy submarine sabotage on the American coast. Martinů with his broken English seemed suspicious and was arrested. Fortunately, Emanuel Ondříček, who was called at the last minute, managed to explain to the police that Martinů was not a German spy, but a Czech composer suffering from insomnia.

The premiere of Martinů’s First Symphony was given on 13 November 1942 in Boston, but in fact it was first heard a day before at Harvard University in Cambridge. Other successful performances took place at Carnegie Hall in New York on 21 November 1942 and on 7 January 1943, both with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. All of the concerts were a triumph, which opened many doors for Martinů to other commissions. To the doubters – and there were many – Koussevitzky sent a clear message: “You cannot change a single note… it is a classical symphony.” The opinion of the feared critic Virgil Thomson was also telling. In a review in the New York Herald Tribune entitled “Smetana’s Heir”, he wrote enthusiastically: “The Martinů Symphony is a beaut. It is wholly lovely and doesn’t sound like anything else.”

The First Symphony owes much of its subsequent fate to the French conductor Charles Munch, who gave its first Czech performance on 27 and 28 May 1946 at the Rudolfinum in Prague as part of the first Prague Spring International Music Festival. Conductor Václav Neumann recalled this event as follows: “At that time, I played under Munch in the Czech Philharmonic in the viola section. Munch’s direction was a great discovery. He had an amazing relationship with Martinů’s music, he knew all his symphonies and always performed them with great understanding. He introduced Bohuslav Martinů’s music to us in a very fortunate way, and since then Martinů has been played here systematically. And his First Symphony belongs to his most serious works.”