Month: November 2024

Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major: Impressions and Reveries

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Composed during the summer of 1816, the Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101 is the first of Beethoven’s five “late period” piano sonatas. It is music filled with mystery and divine revelation. Isolated from the world as a result of nearly total hearing loss, Beethoven, in his final years, conceived of music unlike anything which came before. Gone is the classical charm, and ferocious revolutionary struggle of the earlier periods. …

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Shunske Sato Plays Vivaldi: “Autumn” from “The Four Seasons”

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Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) is one of the earliest and most iconic examples of programmatic music. Vivaldi composed the collection of four violin concerti, each depicting a season of the year, during his tenure as music director at the court chapel of Mantua. Together with eight additional concerti, the works were published in Amsterdam in 1725 under the enticing title, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The Contest Between Harmony and …

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Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures”: Five Excerpts From a Kabuki Musical

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Patrons of Broadway were met with a surprise when, on the evening of January 11, 1976, they packed the Winter Garden Theatre for the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s Pacific Overtures. Sondheim later called the show “the most bizarre and unusual musical ever to be seen in a commercial setting.” (Finishing the Hat) Directed and produced by Hal Prince, with a book by John Weidman, Pacific Overtures chronicles the 1853 American “gunboat diplomacy” of …

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Ives’ “Elegie”: A Yankee Take on the French Chanson

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Charles Ives’ 1901 song, Elegie is haunting and hypnotic. Its gloomy and forlorn text, a setting of a poem by Louis Gallet, expresses the heartache of a narrator whose beloved is forever gone. The blue skies and birdsongs of springtime are replaced with late autumnal chill. The vocal line rises over an unrelenting rhythmic ostinato which begins to render time infinite and unmeasurable. French composer Jules Massenet wrote a song using the …

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Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001: James Ehnes at Home

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J.S. Bach’s six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin are technical and musical marvels. They transform the violin, an instrument usually associated with a single melodic line, into a vehicle of dazzling polyphony. The collection begins with the purity and resonance of G minor, a key which is centered on the open fifths of the violin’s lowest two strings. The Adagio which opens the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV …

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Handel’s Sinfonia in B-flat Major, HWV 339: Ensemble Diderot

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The Sinfonia in B-flat Major, HWV 339 is music of the young George Frideric Handel. It was probably composed in Hamburg between 1704 and 1706, in the years before Handel’s move to London. No autograph manuscript exists, and it remained unpublished until 1979. The Sinfonia unfolds in three movements (fast-slow-fast). As a composer, Handel was skillful at borrowing and adapting existing music. The Sinfonia’s opening movement (Allegro) was taken from the composer’s …

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