Excitement is building for your Cape Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert of the 2025/26 season. A New Era features George Walker’s Pageant and Proclamation, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1, and Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. Guest conductor David Charles Abell and soloist Sofia Hernández-Williams shared some thoughts about the program.  

David is a Provincetown resident whose celebrated career has spanned the world’s great stages, from London to Vienna to Boston. We are thrilled to welcome him home to lead our Orchestra as a fellow Cape Codder. Having lived in London for 24 years, he says, “I am grateful to return with such a great program. It really is a concert of tremendous musical riches!”

Pageant and Proclamation, commissioned in 1997 for the inauguration of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, contains “grandeur as well as melody: brass fanfares and percussion flourishes, and a big payoff near the end when the trombones and trumpets quote snippets of When the Saints Go Marching In and We Shall Overcome in a resounding fortissimo,” says David. “I want to be sure those moments get their full due!”

Sofia is delighted to be our soloist for Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto. Already a stunning talent at 11, she is a member of the Repertory Orchestra at Boston Youth Symphonies, and Principal Cellist of Worcester’s Joy of Music Program Youth Orchestra. Sofia is already well-known to some Cape Symphony Orchestra musicians: cellist Alexander Badalov is her chamber music coach, and Principal Clarinet Mark Miller conducts the Rep BYSO.

“It’s a really great piece,” she says of the Saint-Saëns concerto, “very passionate and dramatic. There’s a lot of emotional energy!” She notes that its three sections are played as one continuous movement, which is “not a common thing for a concerto. Most movements are separated, almost like different pieces.” How will we tell one from another? Listen for changes in tempo, says Sofia. “The first one is not as fast as the last, and the second is slow and lyrical.” Listen, too, for themes from the first movement to recur in the third.

After seeing Sofia perform, audience members are sure to want to follow her career. Her next appearance will be on December 6 at 12:00 PM in “Rising Stars,” part of a concert series at the Roxbury branch of the Boston Public Library.

Following an intermission, the Orchestra will perform Brahms’s soaring Symphony No. 1. “Brahms’s First is very special to me,” says David. “I first experienced it playing in the World Youth Symphony at Interlochen Music Camp as a teenager. I was in the viola section… people who play instruments in the middle of the orchestra learn to listen carefully to what’s around them, both above and below. It was good training for a conducting career.” He continues:

The piece describes a huge arc, beginning in emotional turmoil and ending in serenity, then triumph. It’s an intense and satisfying journey. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a rising theme in the violins at the very beginning of the symphony. It rises gradually, by half-steps, struggling upwards. Fritz Steinbach, a conductor who Brahms greatly admired, described it as ‘a fruitless search for transcendence.’ By the end of the first movement, the search seems to have been given up.

The second movement is passionate in a calmer way. Acute listeners will notice the reappearance of the rising theme near the end of the movement. This time, the transcendence seems to have been achieved.

I imagine that Brahms must have conceived the third movement during one of his daily woodland walks. He believed that musicians needed to connect with nature. When a pianist asked him how she could improve her performances, he responded, “walk constantly in the forest.” Every time I think of this movement, I recall the sunlight during my Interlochen summer in the Michigan countryside.

The finale opens in dramatic fashion, with great stormy gestures. Soon, the sun comes out and the horns play the famous “Alphorn tune,” conceived while Brahms was walking in the mountains. He notated the melody on a postcard to Clara Schumann, with words that can be sung to it: “Hoch auf’m Berg, tief im Thal, grüß ich Dich viel tausendmal!” (“High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you many thousand times over!”). Don’t you wish that you had a friend who sent you postcards like that?

Following a pregnant pause, we hear Brahms’s tribute to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a gorgeously simple melody in C major. The energy builds and builds until, finally, the symphony ends in glory, assuring Brahms’s position as Beethoven’s worthy successor.

Tremendous musical riches, indeed.

Don’t miss this exhilarating concert! “A New Era” will be performed on Saturday, September 20 at 4:00 PM and Sunday, September 21 at 3:00 PM. Secure your seats today!