Daniel Vnukowski performs César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, a late-Romantic cyclic work in three parts in which the main theme grows and transforms into the thematic material of subsequent movements. Vincent D’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français (Symphony on a French Mountain Air) begins with a pentatonic folk tune—which d’Indy heard in a French village overlooking the Cévennes—that then becomes the thematic basis for the subsequent movements. Closing the program is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C: a youthful work composed at the Paris Conservatory when Bizet was only seventeen, Symphony in C shares similarities to the work of Bizet’s teacher, Charles Gounod, but has been hailed as a masterpiece of the Romantic repertoire.

Kristian Alexander | conductor
Daniel Vnukowski | pianist