Month: October 2023

“Long as You Know You’re Living Yours”: Keith Jarrett’s European Quartet

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Long as You Know You’re Living Yours is the third track on the 1974 album, Belonging, featuring the American jazz pianist, Keith Jarrett, with saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer, Jon Christensen. Jarrett’s collaboration with the three Scandinavian musicians resulted in a group which became known as the “European Quartet.” Infamously, Long as You Know You’re Living Yours heavily influenced Gaucho, the title track of Steely Dan’s seventh studio album, released in …

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Piazzolla’s “Tangazo”: A Passionate, Unspoken Dialogue

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Originating in the working class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires during the mid-19th century, the tango grew out of a fusion of European, African, and native Argentine influences. When the composer, Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), moved this sultry street music into the concert hall, at first, traditionalists objected vehemently. By the time the heckling and boos faded, Piazzolla had revolutionized the tango with a fusion of new elements, which included jazz and twentieth century …

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Michael Torke’s “October”: Autumn Music

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Although usually free of a literal program, the music of the American composer, Michael Torke, is highly evocative. Even if we don’t share the composer’s experience of synesthesia, in which musical keys are involuntarily associated with specific colors, Torke’s suite of Color Music from the 1980s makes us feel the essence of green, bright blue, and ecstatic orange. Other orchestral pieces such as Run (1992) and Javelin (1994) convey an exhilarating sense of motion, while December suggests …

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Beethoven’s “King Stephen” Overture: A Hungarian Celebration

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In 1811, Beethoven received a commission to compose incidental music for two Hungarian-themed plays by August von Kotzebue, King Stephen and The Ruins of Athens. The plays were written to commemorate the opening of a magnificent new theater in the Hungarian city of Pest on the banks of the Danube (now the eastern part of unified Budapest). The theater’s construction was funded by Franz I, the last Holy Roman Emperor and the …

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Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto: A Quirky Drama With a Mind of Its Own

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Usually, we assume that, when writing a piece of music, the composer is firmly in control of the process as musical ideas are organized, refined, and developed. Yet, on occasion, the music seemingly comes alive, takes on a mind of its own, and dictates to the composer what it wants to be. This was Sergei Prokofiev’s experience when composing the Piano Concerto No. 5 in G Major, Op. 55. “Having accumulated a …

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Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A-flat Major, BWV 886: Lofty and Sonorous

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While recording the second book of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier as part of its All of Bach initiative, the Netherlands Bach Society chose twelve locations around the Dutch city of Utrecht. The Prelude and Fugue No. 17 in A-flat Major, BWV 886 was recorded on a top floor of the high-rise seat of Utrecht’s Provincial Council. Christine Schornsheim, the outstanding German harpsichordist who performs the entire Book II set, found the location, …

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