Rodríguez’s deep connection to the DSO precedes his tenure as Composer-in-Residence under the late Eduardo Mata. In 1967, when the DSO selected Rodríguez’s Adagio for Small Orchestra for a program spotlighting young composers, the San Antonio native was still an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin. Adagio was his first work for orchestra. Over the decades the DSO would go on to perform a dozen more of his compositions, seven of them commissions.

The first DSO commission was Favola Boccaccesca, in 1979, not long after Mata was appointed DSO Music Director. Mata performed the work on tour and recorded it with the Louisville Symphony. For the 1982–83 season, when Rodríguez served as composer-in-residence, the DSO commissioned and performed Oktoechos, a concerto grosso for eight soloists and orchestra, and Trunks, a “circus story for narrator and orchestra.”

A passionate advocate for contemporary composers, Rodríguez also helped organize a new music series, bringing new repertoire to the DSO and promoting new voices among his peers. When his residency ended, he continued collaborating with Mata as a consultant, reviewing scores and recommending works to program. He went on to win many international prizes for composition, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Prix Lili Boulanger. Since 1975 he has served on the music faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas, where he currently holds the endowed chair of art and aesthetic studies and directs the chamber music ensemble Musica Nova. Donald Johanos led the Dallas Symphony in the world premiere of Adagio in April 1967, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Composer Speaks

“Adagio for Small Orchestra (1967) was my first work for orchestra. I was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere. It was also the first piece I took to Nadia Boulanger in Paris when I began my studies with her in 1969, and she told me, ‘You were born to write music.’

Scored for flute, clarinet, oboe, two horns, two bassoons and strings, the Adagio is cast in a simple, song-like adaptation of sonata form. Its lyrical opening theme repeats, followed by a short closing phrase, a development and a condensed recapitulation. While the Copland inspired “pre-Rodríguez” tonal language of this early work differs sharply from the harmonic complexities of more recent scores, there remain melodic, textural and structural “fingerprints” which reveal hints of my later works.” — Robert Xavier Rodríguez

Born in Reno, Nevada, Shepherd earned undergraduate degrees in composition and bassoon performance from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University Bloomington. He completed his graduate and doctoral studies at the Juilliard School and Cornell University, respectively. In 2021 his compositions were featured at the Tanglewood and Santa Fe chamber music festivals. Two years later he received the 2024 Charles Ives Living Award, which includes a two-year stipend that allows recipients to compose full time. He lives in Chicago with his husband and two children.

Shepherd’s music has been commissioned and performed by the BBC, Chicago, Minnesota, Montréal, National and New World symphony orchestras, as well as major European ensembles such as L’Ensemble intercontemporain, the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. In 2023 his large-scale vocal work on a clear day, featuring an international chorus of young singers, was premiered by Kent Nagano and the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg at Carnegie Hall. Latticework, his intricate duo showpiece for violinist Leila Josefowicz and cellist Paul Watkins, receives its world premiere this summer.

The Composer Speaks

“When I need to feel grounded in the ripe new music I’m trying to write, I take refuge in old things of all kinds. Not necessarily do I search for music or ideas to emulate, but it’s comforting to remind oneself that it’s all likely been done before. The multi-soloist expression — a little band joined (or supported, or genuflected, or coddled, or confronted, or swallowed whole) by the big band on stage behind them — is a very Old Thing. One can reflect on the Italian Baroque concerto, in which the ripieno (padding! by which we mean both the full orchestra and the music they provide) is crucial to the structure of the piece, or Mozart’s perfectly charming Sinfonia Concertante, so typically full of character to match the virtuosity flowing from the composer’s quill pen and into the musicians’ hands. And we may take note, when fretting over titles for our brand-new Sinfonia Concertante con Ripieno, that Beethoven’s concerto for three equally essential hero-soloists gives rise to that most direct of opus-sobriquets: The Triple.

“How easily ‘the Shepherd Quadruple’ will roll off the tongue in the 23rd century is not for this author to say. But even if this piece’s connections to those Greats of the Past is philosophical at best, then what I share with a great many concerto composers is a deep connection with my muses. My story with each of these DSO principals and brilliant soloists happened to begin somewhere else. Erin Hannigan and Gregory Raden premiered, several years back, a piece I wrote about melting glaciers. Their first notes of that piece, extremely high and soft, depicting a pristine, frozen wonderland, were played so beautifully at the first rehearsal, I have never forgotten the sound or the feeling. With David Buck and Ted Soluri our various stories of my music and their echt virtuosities go back years and decades, all the way to a piece called ‘Four Vinaigrettes,’ in which a student-aged Dave played the most fiendishly difficult piece ever conceived by a 22-year-old about tangy salad dressings.

“In the end, the story of this piece is as simple as a joke gone serious. They are my Woodwind Dream Team— ‘Wouldn’t it be terrific to write a piece for them?’ I said once too often. And in that case, I’m surely in the oldest yet rarest of composer clubs. Lucky (lucky, lucky, lucky) me.” —Sean Shepherd

Mendelssohn made the most of his brief charmed life. His wealthy parents ensured that he had the finest possible education. They turned their Berlin mansion into a concert hall twice a month, promoting their young son as a musical prodigy. When he was 12 years old, he met the elderly Goethe, who sang his praises: “What [Mendelssohn] already accomplishes bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.” Before Mendelssohn was out of his teens, he had completed approximately 100 compositions, including operas, quartets, concertos and a magnificent octet for strings. By age 20 he had written his famous overture after Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and conducted Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to great acclaim.

In spring 1829 the seasoned young composer was invited to England for several high-profile engagements. That summer, after the concert season ended, he left for Scotland in the company of friend and fellow composer Karl Klingemann. There Mendelssohn began his Symphony No. 3, “Scottish”, a kind of travel memoir in symphonic form. Despite his wealth and general indoorsiness, he opted to rough it, traveling with Klingemann from London to Scotland by foot and coach over a single week. The rugged and romantic beauty of the Highlands inspired him profoundly, as did the western coast and the island of Staffa, which occasioned his concert overture The Hebrides.

Although the Scottish was the fifth and final symphony that Mendelssohn would complete, it was the third to be published, which accounts for its number. He started it in Scotland but put it aside once he left and didn’t resume working on it until 1841. He completed the score in January 1842 and conducted the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the world premiere in Leipzig on March 3, followed by the triumphant London premiere a few months later. He asked Queen Victoria, an ardent fan and amateur musician, if he could dedicate the symphony to her, and she consented enthusiastically.

A Closer Listen

Although Mendelssohn structured the Scottish in four movements, he omits the conventional pauses between them, which gives the symphony the feel of a concert overture or tone poem. He retained the preliminary sixteen bars that he’d sketched out more than a decade earlier in the letter to his family, using the idea for the slow introduction and, in a slight variation, for the main theme, which is initially sung by oboes and violas, grave and lovely over winds and horns.

If the opening Andante is dark and turbulent, the Vivace non troppo is a passing sunbeam, a brief respite from the gloom. Although Mendelssohn doesn’t make any direct quotations in this scherzo-like section, he borrows stylistic elements of traditional Scottish folk music, such as the pentatonic scale and the so-called Scotch snap, a syncopated, short-long rhythmic figure equivalent to a 16th note followed by an eighth note. Some scholars say that the second movement may represent Mendelssohn’s impressions of a bagpipe competition, which he took in after church services at Durham Cathedral.

The Adagio shifts to serene A major, interspersing lyrical, harp-kissed passages with a funeral march that might be a reference to the executed Mary, Queen of Scots, whose story Mendelssohn knew from reading Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart, a tragedy in verse.

The finale returns to the Scottish-folk revelry of the Vivace before transitioning to an unusual coda, which announces a majestic new theme in A major. This harmonic ending has sparked some controversy over the years, but most conductors today choose to present the coda as Mendelssohn intended, instead of substituting, for example, Otto Klemperer’s gloomier adaptation.