Month: November 2022

Saint-Saëns’ Second Symphony: Adventures in Form

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Camille Saint-Saëns was 24 years old when, during the summer of 1859, he composed Symphony No. 2 in A minor. It is a work which is both youthful and convention-defying. Intimate and compact, this music is far removed from the monumental grandeur of the “Organ Symphony,” which Saint-Saëns wrote some thirty years later. It bends symphonic form in surprising and adventurous ways. The first movement (Allegro marcato – Allegro appassionato) begins with …

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Anna Netrebko Sings Rimsky-Korsakov: “Ty, Tsarevich, Moy Spasitel” from “The Tale of Tsar Saltan”

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Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, is based on a fairy tale poem by Alexander Pushkin.Premiering in November, 1900 in Moscow, it tells the story of three sisters. Tsar Saltan chooses the youngest of the three to be his wife, while he appoints the others to be his royal cook and weaver. Soon after the Tsar goes off to war, the Tsaritsa gives birth to a son, Gvidon. The jealous …

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Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet”: From Ballet Score to Concert Suite

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Character lies at the heart of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1935 ballet score, Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64. In the opening bars, the alternating forces of darkness and light become metaphysical “characters.” Demonic dissonances in the brass roar and subside, revealing an angelic string “choir” which seems to have been present all along. It is this battle between the baseness of the world and transcendent higher powers which underlies Shakespeare’s story. A heavy, groaning …

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Handel’s Trio Sonata in B Minor, HWV 386: Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music

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Handel’s six Trio Sonatas, Op. 2 (HWV 386-391) were written between 1717 and 1719 and circulated in a bootleg edition until their official publication in 1733. Following the “slow-fast-slow-fast” model of the Italian Sonata da chiesa (“church sonata”), these Sonatas represent the culmination of a form popularized by Arcangelo Corelli in the 1680s. Handel’s Trio Sonatas were scored for “two violins, two oboes, or two flutes and basso continuo.” In the Baroque period, composers …

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Daniel Behle Sings Mozart: “Un’aura amorosa” from “Così fan tutte”

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In the opening scene of Mozart’s 1789 comic opera, Così fan tutte (“Women are like that”), two military officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, boast that their fiancées, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, would never be unfaithful. Don Alfonso makes a wager that, within a day, he can prove the officers wrong. He believes that all women are ultimately fickle. Accepting the wager, Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to go off to war, but then return in disguise and attempt to seduce the …

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Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, “Dissonance”: The Sixth Child

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The introduction which opens the first movement of Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C Major, K. 465 foreshadows the mystery and Romantic pathos of late Beethoven. At moments, it even flirts with the twentieth century atonality of Arnold Schoenberg. In the first bars, the viola and two violins enter, one at a time, over a pulsating “C” in the cello. Their chromatic lines wander across a haunting and barren landscape, shrouded …

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