From Puppets to Star-Crossed Lovers: A Lithuanian Debut

About the Work

In 1954-1955, Weinberg composed a children’s ballet based on Alexei Tolstoy’s The Golden Key, a Russian retelling of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio story in which the wooden puppet Burattino discovers a magical key that opens the door to a hidden world. Weinberg revised the ballet in 1961, and in 1964 he arranged its music into four orchestral concert suites, designated Op. 55a through Op. 55d. The Fourth Suite, heard tonight, brings together some of the most charming and theatrical numbers from the score.

The music conjures a world of marionettes, mischief, and wonder. Weinberg’s orchestral imagination is dazzling: woodwinds chatter and squeak like wooden dolls coming to life; the percussion clatters with the wit of a circus pit band; sudden lyrical interludes reveal the puppet’s tender side. The influence of Shostakovich is audible in the same biting wit and the same ironic juxtapositions of the grotesque and the tender, but Weinberg’s voice is entirely his own: warmer, gentler, with a melodic generosity rooted in Eastern European folk and Yiddish song.

Listen for the nimble dance episodes, the mocking music associated with the villainous Karabas-Barabas (a sinister puppet-master), and the radiant lyrical pages that hint at the world beyond the magic door. This is music with the surface of a children’s tale and the soul of a survivor: playful, but never naive.

About the Work

This Piano Concerto has an unusually charming origin story. Williams had mentioned to only a few associates that he was interested in writing for piano and orchestra when Emanuel Ax, tonight’s soloist, called him with an offer: “If you write it, I will play it!” Williams began the score in 2022, and the concerto was given its world premiere on 26 July 2025 at Tanglewood, with Ax as soloist and Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The composer was 93 years old.

The concerto is cast in three movements following the traditional fast-slow-fast pattern, but its musical character is anything but conventional. Williams has said that the three movements were inspired by the very different pianistic personalities of three jazz giants: Art Tatum’s dazzling virtuosity in the opening Introduction: Colloquy; Bill Evans’s introspective lyricism in the central Listening; and Oscar Peterson’s exuberant drive in the closing Finale, presto. He is careful to add that the music is not a portrait of these artists, only a way of remembering them. The orchestral writing is, unsurprisingly, sumptuous, but the piano writing is the heart of the piece: by turns sparkling, tender, and propulsive, exploiting the full sonority of the instrument.

What to listen for tonight: the dialogue between piano and orchestra in the opening movement, in which the soloist seems to be improvising answers to questions posed by the orchestra; the long-breathed, almost vocal melodic lines of the slow movement, which opens with a viola solo and where Williams reveals himself as one of the great melodists of our era; and the relentless rhythmic energy of the finale, launched by the timpani, with its echoes of bebop and swing.

About the Work

Romeo and Juliet grew out of negotiations with the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad in 1934, and Prokofiev wrote most of the score in 1935, after a contract had been signed with Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre. But the road to the stage was tortuous. Neither theatre staged it at first, and Prokofiev’s original ending, in which the lovers survive (because, as he later explained, “living people can dance, the dying cannot”), provoked controversy and was eventually replaced by Shakespeare’s tragic conclusion. The full ballet finally received its world premiere on 30 December 1938 not in Russia but at the Mahen Theatre in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The Soviet premiere followed at the Kirov on 11 January 1940, with the legendary Galina Ulanova as Juliet, a performance that immediately entered the history of dance.

Aware that the full ballet was unlikely to enter the international repertoire quickly, Prokofiev extracted three orchestral suites (two in 1936, a third in 1946) and a set of piano pieces from the score. Conductors today often assemble their own selections from these suites and from the complete ballet, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s evening combines ten numbers into a single dramatic arc that follows the tragedy from its first violent confrontation to its devastating conclusion.

The most famous moment in the score, The Montagues and the Capulets, is one of the most instantly recognisable passages in twentieth-century music. It opens with colossal dissonant chords representing the Prince of Verona’s furious decree against further bloodshed. Then comes the Dance of the Knights: that pounding, menacing tread of low strings and brass, music so iconic that television and advertising have borrowed it again and again. Listen for the delicate middle section, where Juliet dances with Paris.

Throughout, listen for Prokofiev’s gift for character: the quicksilver music that paints Juliet as a Young Girl, a teenager surprised by her own emotions; the breathless lyricism of the Balcony Scene, in which a single soaring melody for the strings carries the weight of all first love; and the shattering orchestral grief that closes the work, as Prokofiev gives Shakespeare’s most heartbreaking final scene a sound world of unbearable tenderness.

Tonight’s Artists

Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Conductor

Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, born in Vilnius in 1986, makes her Berliner Philharmoniker debut with these concerts, a moment many in the music world have been waiting for since her rise began over a decade ago. The daughter of a choral conductor father and a pianist-singer mother, she initially trained in painting and French at the M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius before deciding, at age eleven, that music was her calling. She subsequently studied in Graz, Leipzig, and Zurich.

Her career trajectory has been extraordinary. After winning the Salzburg Young Conductors Award in 2012 and serving as a Dudamel Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she was appointed Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 2016, the first female conductor ever to hold that historic post. In 2019 she became the first female conductor in the history of Deutsche Grammophon to sign an exclusive recording contract; her debut album for the label, devoted to the music of Mieczysław Weinberg, won the Gramophone Recording of the Year award in 2020. Weinberg’s music is one of the central artistic threads of her career, and she is widely regarded as one of the leading champions of his rediscovery, which makes her programming choice for tonight’s debut especially meaningful. A small curiosity: her surname “Tyla,” which she added herself, is the Lithuanian word for stillness, calm and silence.

Emanuel Ax, Piano

Emanuel Ax, born in Lviv in 1949 to Polish-Jewish parents who had survived the Nazi concentration camps, has been one of the most beloved pianists in the world for half a century. The family emigrated to Winnipeg before settling in New York in 1961, where Ax studied piano with Mieczysław Munz at Juilliard and earned a degree in French from Columbia. His international career took off when he won the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv in 1974, followed by the Avery Fisher Prize in 1979.

A multiple Grammy Award winner, Ax is celebrated equally for his solo recitals, his chamber music partnerships (most famously with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, with whom he won Grammys for recordings of Brahms and Beethoven) and his concerto performances with the world’s leading orchestras. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds honorary doctorates from Yale and Columbia. Tonight’s performance carries a particular personal significance: it was Ax himself who told John Williams, then in his nineties, “If you write it, I will play it!” The Piano Concerto on tonight’s programme exists, quite literally, because Emanuel Ax asked for it.