Tick, tock: Wilkins conducts ‘The Clock’

The great 18th-century Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn composed 104 symphonies during his long career.

How does symphony conductor Thomas Wilkins keep them all straight?

“You’re making a big assumption if you think I know all of those notes,” said Wilkins. “But I do have my favorite Haydn symphonies. And those I know extremely well.”

Wilkins will lead the Omaha Symphony in one of those works — Symphony No. 101 in D major — on Saturday at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Strauss Performing Arts Center.

Like many of Haydn’s late symphonies, this one has a nickname, “The Clock.” The moniker was inspired by the tick-tock pulse of the bassoons and plucked strings in the second movement.

Wilkins says the clock effect is only one of this symphony’s many inspired touches. The piece opens with a fast-paced and exuberant gigue, a form most composers would have used as a finale. Haydn begins his real finale, a rondo, with a long-breathed string melody.

“Haydn’s music is full of surprises like that,” said Wilkins. “His music also has wit, and that’s part of what made his music great.”

Saturday’s concert will feature symphonies by two other composers.

English composer William Boyce was born a generation before Haydn. Unlike Haydn, Boyce generally strung together theatrical overtures into three-movement works that he labeled symphonies.

Francis Poulenc, the 20th-century French composer, rarely composed symphonies. In 1947 when he got around to writing a sinfonietta — literally little symphony — he used the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart as models.

“Poulenc’s piece has classical moments like Haydn,” said Wilkins. “But the slow movement is as warm and romantic as Brahms.”

Contact the writer:

444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com

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