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Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Sea Symphony
Born October 10, 1872, in Down Ampney, England Died August 26, 1958, in London Composed in 1903–09 Premiered on October 12, 1910 at the Leeds Festival, England Performance Time: Approximately 70 minutes In 1892, Bertrand Russell recommended Walt Whitman’s poetry to a fellow undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge: the aspiring young composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Whitman’s poetry was well known in Britain by that time. William Michael Rossetti, brother of…
Intolerance
It would be hard to imagine a work more pertinent to our times than Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960. It is a work of musical theater that tells the story of an emigrant worker who encounters prejudice, injustice, incarceration, and violence. It assumes a political context in Europe of the threat of a return to fascism. Intolleranza 1960 suggests that none of us can afford to assume that we are immune to…
Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960
Born January 29, 1924, in Venice Died May 8, 1990, in Venice Composed in 1960–61 Premiered on April 13, 1961, at Teatro della Fenice in Venice with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bruno Maderna Performance Time: Approximately 75 minutes Fifteen years after the end of World War II, the wounds of Europe were far from being healed. Italy in particular had barely begun to come to terms with the…
The Courage of Friendship: The Composer as Jew in the Soviet Union
The historical thread running through this concert program is the presence and persecution of the Jews of Poland and Soviet Russia in the mid-twentieth century. The nearly total annihilation of the Jews that began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland and proceeded with increased intensity after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had an unexpected and grim epilogue. In 1948 Stalin launched his post-war campaign against…
Mieczysław Weinberg, Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes
Born December 8, 1919, in Warsaw, Poland Died February 26, 1996, in Moscow, Russia Composed in 1949 Premiered on November 30, 1949, in Moscow by the All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gauk Performance Time: Approximately 12 minutes During the last decade or so, a true Mieczysław Weinberg renaissance has begun in the concert halls of the world. Weinberg, who fled the Nazis from Poland to the Soviet Union…
Mieczysław Weinberg, Symphony No. 5
Born December 8, 1919, in Warsaw, Poland Died February 26, 1996, in Moscow, Russia Composed in 1962 Premiered on October 18, 1962, in Moscow by the Moscow Symphony, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin Performance Time: Approximately 42 minutes Weinberg’s Fifth Symphony may be seen as the composer’s response to Shostakovich’s Fourth, which was first performed publicly in 1961, 25 years after it was written. Weinberg had been familiar with the work…
Veniamin Fleishman, Rothschild’s Violin
Born July 20, 1913, in Bezhetsk, Russia Died September 14, 1941, in Krasnoye Selo, near Leningrad Composed by Fleishman in 1939–41, completed by Shostakovich in 1944 Premiered on June 20, 1960, in Moscow Performance Time: Approximately 40 minutes Shostakovich called Veniamin Fleishman his favorite student at the Leningrad Conservatory. At his teacher’s suggestion, Fleishman was working on a one-act opera based on Chekhov’s short story “Rothschild’s Violin” (he himself had…
Music, Autocracy, and Exile
What makes music so compelling as a means of human expression? Why were composers and audiences in the 20th century still drawn to the symphony and the concerto, musical forms that require neither words nor images and that occupy an extended duration of time? Why did composers seek to prove wrong Richard Wagner’s prediction that the traditions of instrumental music—music thinking pursued autonomously on its own terms—were incompatible with the…
Grażyna Bacewicz, Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion
Born February 5, 1909 in Łódź, Poland Died January 17, 1969 in Warsaw, Poland Composed in 1958 Premiered in 1959 at the Warsaw Autumn Festival Performance Time: Approximately 19 minutes Upon hearing the words Music for Strings…and Percussion in the title of a composition, one immediately thinks of Bartók’s masterpiece from the year 1936, where the missing word in the title is completed by ‘celeste.’ Bartók’s music found a particularly…
Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 6, Fantaisies symphoniques
Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 6, Fantaisies symphoniques by Peter Laki Written for the concert Triumph of Art, which was performed on December 7, 2017 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Born December 8, 1890, in Polička, Czechoslovakia Died August 28, 1959, in Liestal, Switzerland Composed in 1951–53 Premiered on January 7, 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Performance Time: Approximately 28 minutes Bohuslav Martinů said about his Fantaisies symphoniques,…
Grażyna Bacewicz, Violin Concerto No. 7
Born February 5, 1909 in Łódź, Poland Died January 17, 1969 in Warsaw, Poland Composed in 1965 Premiered on January 13, 1966 at the Grande Salle de Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels, with Augustín León Ara and the Belgian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Sternfeld Performance Time: Approximately 20 minutes Bacewicz was trained as a virtuoso violinist, which explains the large number of works for violin, and strings…
Alfred Schnittke, Symphony No. 5
Born November 24, 1934 in Engels, Russia (Soviet Union) Died August 3, 1998, in Hamburg, Germany Composed in 1988 Premiered on November 10, 1988 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly Performance Time: Approximately 37 minutes Almost twenty years after his death, it is becoming increasingly clear that Alfred Schnittke was one of the few composers for whom the traditional genres of symphony (with more than 200 years…
Music and Democracy
During the past century—the hundred years since America entered World War I—what has been (and still might be) the connection between the essentially European traditions of orchestral and symphonic music and the ideals, demands, and predicaments of American democracy? The historical precedents of form and expression that preoccupied the American composers on today’s program emerged from a political world quite different from the American experience. Classical and Romantic concert music…
Aaron Copland, Canticle of Freedom
Born November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York Died December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York Composed in 1955 Premiered in 1955 at Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, Massachusetts Performance Time: Approximately 13 minutes On May 26, 1953, Aaron Copland appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) chaired the committee; the committee’s infamous chief counsel Roy Cohn was present. The anti-Communist crusader McCarthy called Copland to…
Roger Sessions, Symphony No. 2
Born December 28, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York Died March 16, 1985 in Princeton, New Jersey Composed in 1944–46 Premiered on January 9, 1947 by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pierre Monteaux Performance Time: Approximately 26 minutes Roger Huntington Sessions was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hadley, Massachusetts. His ancestors included Samuel Huntington, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and the Rt. Rev. Dan…
Leonard Bernstein, Symphony No. 3, Kaddish
Born August 25, 1918, in Lawrence, Massachusetts Died October 14, 1990, in New York City Composed in 1961–63; Revised in 1977 Premiered on December 10, 1963 in Tel Aviv by the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein with mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel Performance Time: Approximately 41 minutes As Leonard Bernstein’s biographer Humphrey Burton notes, “Between 1957 and 1971, the year of the Mass, [Bernstein] completed only two works: the Kaddish Symphony (No….
Religion and Music in England at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Edward Elgar’s two monumental masterpieces for chorus and orchestra, The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles, mirror the tensions and contradictions that surrounded religion at the end of the Victorian era. Elgar, a Catholic, had experienced isolation and prejudice, particularly in his younger years. But he also witnessed a Catholic revival in England, the rise to prominence of John Henry Cardinal Newman as an influential English voice (Newman was the…
Elgar’s The Apostles
In the usual narrative of Edward Elgar’s career, the composer sprang overnight from provincial obscurity to international fame with the 1899 premiere of his Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, now known as the Enigma Variations. Unsurprisingly, the truth is more complicated: Elgar was already becoming well known through a series of acclaimed choral works, such as The Black Knight, Op. 25 (1892), Scenes from the Saga of King…
AFTER DVOŘÁK AND SMETANA: CZECH MUSIC IN THE 20th CENTURY
The four composers on this ASO program were major twentieth-century figures in the musical tradition of a region in Central Europe: the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, famed for contributions to European culture, particularly in music. The historic capital of Bohemia, Prague is now the capital of the Czech Republic. Before this, it was the capital of a nation spliced together after the end of World War I—Czechoslovakia—which existed…
Vítězslav Novák, In the Tatras
Born December 5, 1870, in Kamenice nad Lipou, Southern Bohemia Died July 18, 1949, in Skuteč, Czech Republic Composed in 1902 Premiered on November 25, 1902 in Prague by the Czech Philharmonic conducted by Oskar Nedbal Performance Time: Approximately 25 minutes Vítězslav Novák was a gifted and prolific composer who was at the core of Czech musical life in the first decades of the 20th century. Composing in virtually every…
