An Emotional Rollercoaster in the Best Way

Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857)
Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842)

Glinka holds a rightful place as the founding father of Russian opera and concert music, but that honor has little to do with his incorporating Russian folk elements into otherwise generic early Romantic compositions. His contemporaries Alexey Verstovsky and Alexander Alyabyev did a lot more of that. Musicologist Richard Taruskin puts the record straight: “Glinka did not invent the Russian style, but he made Russian music competitive. Through him, Russia could for the first time join the musical West on an equal footing, without excuses, as a full-fledged participant in international musical traditions, and a contributor to them. The old saying that Glinka liberated Russian music by turning away from the West has it just backward. Liberation came from facing and matching, not retreating.”

Ruslan and Ludmilla, a setting of Pushkin’s 1820 mock-epic fantasy, was Glinka’s next operatic outing after his landmark A Life for the Tsar of 1836. It tells of the abduction of a prince’s daughter (Ludmilla) by an evil wizard and the quest by a heroic knight (Ruslan) to find and save her. The score is an early example of the “orientalist” style of the Russian Romantic, an idiom that would reach its climax with Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Golden Cockerel. Alas, the 1842 St. Petersburg premiere was a dud; it seems that the public’s taste was more for Italian opera than the home-grown variety. But you can’t keep a good show down, and in the intervening years Ruslan and Ludmilla has become a staple in Russian opera houses, although it had to wait 135 years for a staged performance in the United States.

The overture, a sturdy concert staple, perhaps savors more of Rossini than Rachmaninoff to modern listeners, but that makes it no less of an exhilarating virtuoso joyride and the perfect curtain-raiser. (Nota bene: keep an eye on the string bass section during the performance. They’ve really got their work cut out for them.)

Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981)
These Righteous Paths (2026)

It simply will not do to refer to South African musician Abel Selaocoe as a cellist. To be sure, he does indeed play the cello. But there is so much more to this singer, player, poet, and storyteller. The man in his entirety is the musical instrument; he’s both creator and performer all in one. To hear one of his albums, such as Where is Home (Hae Ke Kae) or Four Spirits, is to engage in a deeply-felt experience that combines voice, instruments, rhythm, and text into a cohesive and utterly compelling whole. Everything is grist for his creative mill; even a mid-Baroque cello sonata emerges transformed by his vivid imagination and creative potency.

Now Selaocoe is joined by another compelling creative force: violinist-composer-teacher Jessie Montgomery, in These Righteous Paths, a new work commissioned by a 10-member consortium, including the Oregon Symphony. Premiered in Berlin on March 20, 2026, it receives its West Coast premiere in these concerts.

Montgomery tells us that she found her inspiration in the plays and poems of her late mother, Robbie McCauley, an important force in the Black theater movement who passed on in 2021. “As I have navigated my own grief in the past five years since her passing, I find myself absorbed by the sentiments in her words, comforted and inspired by them, and realizing the inherent music within them.”

That includes the Black American experience and its inheritance from the African diaspora. “It is from these ancestral traces that I shape a living soundscape, one that honors what has been passed down while allowing the music to conjure new hopes and memories.”

“This collaboration with Abel Selaocoe represents a journey through worlds past and present, and is just as much inspired by the poems as it is by his unique palette of cellistic and vocal capabilities.”

The work is in three large sections: “All the Ancestors and I,” followed by “Another Train Poem” (itself in two parts), and ending in “A New Song.” From those titles we can discern a rich vein of storytelling, very much in keeping with both Montgomery’s and Selaocoe’s creative personas. But this is nonetheless a cello concerto, and it comes with some built-in difficulties. “It can be very easy to cover the cello with orchestration,” says Montgomery. And she also needed to allow for “the other textures and techniques that Abel brings, making sure that there’s room for all of the singing, his vocalizations, and other aspects of his toolbox to shine through.”

Ultimately, it’s all about the storytelling, exemplified by Robbie McCauley’s text “I want a new song / Beautifully sung / About something more.” As Montgomery tells us, “The music communicates something to us, that the listener can explore their own imagination while they listen to the music.”

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) 
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)  

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony gave him no end of trouble. He had just been on a long conducting tour in the mid 1880s, and although he was generally well received, he found the experience enervating. He fretted that the stress had dried up his creative spring. “To speak frankly,” he wrote his brother Modest, “I feel as yet no impulse for creative work.”  

But he got back in the mood. On May 19, 1888, he wrote Modest that “now, little by little, with difficulty, I am beginning to squeeze the symphony from my benumbed brain.” He squeezed throughout the summer, and on August 14 sent this succinct message to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck: “Symphony finished.” On November 5, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, garnering mixed reviews that ranged from an anonymous critic’s respectful notice (“The first two movements make the greatest impression … their themes are very beautiful and developed with complete mastery”) to a gleefully malicious mauling by the ever-waspish César Cui (“The finale distinguishes itself with its vulgarity and blather.”) Tchaikovsky himself harbored some doubts, but by 1889 he could express his relief that “I no longer find the symphony horrible and have started liking it again.” 

It has long been an article of faith that Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is a programmatic symphony, although the only actual documentary evidence to that effect is a scribbled passage in an 1887–88 Tchaikovsky notebook, discovered and translated in 1937 by Nicholas Slonimsky:

“Complete resignation before Fate, or, which is the same, before the inscrutable predestination of Providence. Allegro (I) Murmurs, doubts, plaints, reproaches against XXX. Shall I throw myself in the embraces of Faith??? … a wonderful programme, if I could only carry it out.”

Nobody has a clue as to what Tchaikovsky actually meant by “XXX,”so naturally a steeplechase of supposition has ensued. The odds-on favorite for the win is that the Xs are a coded reference to Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation, with his gambling addiction trailing by a nose. One guess being as good as another, “XXX” can be interpreted to mean just about anything—or nothing at all.

In fact, the Fifth as program symphony has been largely debunked. That lessens neither its dramatic impact nor the persuasiveness of the narrative thread that runs through its four movements. A vital component in that thread is the “motto” theme that appears at the very opening and recurs throughout in various guises. (One commentator has floated the notion that the motto theme is a quote from Mikhail Glinka’s Life for the Tsar.) First heard in paired clarinets, the initially moody motto theme gives way to the first movement proper, a considerably brighter affair that bears compelling witness to Tchaikovsky’s inherent Classicism, exhibiting as it does the rock-solid structural integrity more associated with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven than with the late Romantics.

The second-place “Andante cantabile” contains one of Tchaikovsky’s most beloved melodies, a horn solo that has maintained its inherent dignity even in the face of endless popularizations. For some, this movement not only represents the work’s heart center, but is also Tchaikovsky’s finest slow symphonic movement. Worth mentioning is that it also contains a magnificent and grandiose statement of the motto theme about midway through, providing a sharp contrast to the movement’s overall rhapsodic nature.

The third movement’s distinctly melancholic waltz uses as its primary theme a gloss on a tune that Tchaikovsky picked up on a visit to Florence, as he wrote to his patron Nadezhda von Meck about “the boy whom I heard in the street one evening and whose wonderful voice so touched me.” The song in question is called “Pimpinella,” and we can hear it in a relatively pristine state as the sixth of Tchaikovsky’s Op. 38 set of songs; its appearance in the Fifth Symphony is considerably modified.

Then comes the finale, in which the motto theme kicks off a majestic processional that eventually gives way to a fiery “Allegro.” Towards the end, the motto theme returns yet again—but now in vivid major mode, thereby concluding the symphony in a resplendent glow of triumph.