Experience the Power of Music: A Deep Dive into Respighi’s ‘Pines of Rome’ Performance

On April 24, the Seoul Arts Center’s Symphony Festival closed with Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Composed in 1924, the symphonic poem evokes time, place and history through the pines that dot Rome’s landscape.

The work opens with the Villa Borghese scene—bright, lively music where children play—then moves to the Catacombs, a dark, solemn meditation on early Christian mystery and death. A lyrical, dreamlike night falls over the Janiculum, and finally the Pines of the Appian Way arrive: layer upon layer of sound and a wall of brass that depicts a Roman army marching from the distance toward a dramatic climax. Yesterday’s performance of that scene surpassed anything I’ve heard in sheer scale. “Big” barely captures it.

I didn’t feel like an audience member sitting in a hall; I felt as if a giant film sequence was rolling toward me. There was even a visual sense that something was bearing down on the space.

When the footsteps of the ancient army on the Appian Way crashed over the hall like a tidal wave, the conductor leapt from the podium as if defying gravity. For a fraction of a second his feet hung in the air, and some 100 musicians and roughly 2,000 audience members were swept into the same current. It ceased to be mere conducting; it became a takeoff—complete immersion.

The dynamic sight sent me back to a winter decades ago at Carnegie Hall in New York.

As a young musician I attended the New York String Seminar and met the legendary Alexander Schneider. Young players from across the country lived and rehearsed together, preparing to perform on Carnegie Hall’s stage at midnight on Christmas Eve. While we wore down under the relentless schedule, Schneider—then approaching eighty—seemed inexhaustible.

His sharp gaze behind thick glasses never left us. He tapped his own arm and kept shouting, “Strong! Stronger!” to keep our bows from going through the motions. We fell into step with his momentum; even after days he showed no fatigue. Then, at midnight in Carnegie Hall, he danced across the podium like a boy. That image remains vivid.

Schneider’s intensity pulled us fully into the music. Instruments became extensions of our bodies; bows felt like living breath. That thrill—the midnight moment when performers and audience merged—lifted the entire orchestra to another realm.

Today we’re accustomed to the polished outcomes of efficiency, data and artificial intelligence. But machines cannot step off the podium. Passion that transcends calculation, total immersion, and a leader’s “dance” that moves people’s souls—aren’t those distinctly human domains?

The conductor’s leap I saw yesterday seemed to ask me, “Do you have that kind of energy now? On the stage of your life, are you dancing so fiercely that your feet lift off the ground?”