Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra

In 1915, while working on his Fifth Symphony, Jean Sibelius ventured into the Finnish landscape where he saw sixteen swans take flight into the midday sky, circle, and disappear “into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon.” The experience inspired the pivotal theme of the Symphony’s final movement, which emerges majestically in the horns. Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–2016), perhaps the most significant Finnish composer of the second half of the 20th century, …

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

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. Along 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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Schumann’s Six Fugues on B-A-C-H and Six Canonic Etudes: Contrapuntal Explorations

“What art owes to Bach is to the musical world hardly less than what a religion owes to its founder,” said Robert Schumann. (Eric Frederick Jensen) Championed in part by Mendelssohn, the first half of the 19th century saw a revival of interest in the music of J.S. Bach. Nine days after their wedding, Robert and Clara Schumann began an extensive study of Bach’s counterpoint together. The occasion was documented by Clara …

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Schumann’s Second Symphony: Drums, Trumpets, and Triumph

“For several days, drums and trumpets in the key of C have been sounding in my mind,” wrote Robert Schumann to Felix Mendelssohn in a September, 1845 letter. “I have no idea what will come of it.” These recurring musical reveries were the seeds of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61, sketched over the course of two weeks in December of 1845, and completed a year later. As he …

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Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1: “A True Turning Point”

Arnold Schoenberg completed the Chamber Symphony No. 1, Op. 9 in July of 1906, a year after Mahler finished his Seventh Symphony. Both works can be heard as daring glimpses into a disquieting modernist future. Nineteenth century Romanticism was crumbling under its own weight, and an over-waltzed Vienna was entering the turbulent twilight years of the Habsburg Empire. Mahler delayed the Seventh Symphony’s premiere until 1908, anxiously anticipating the audience’s bewildered response. …

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