Month: July 2025

Vivaldi’s “Sonno, se pur sei sonno” from “Tito Manlio”: Lucio’s Lament

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Antonio Vivaldi’s opera, Tito Manlio, composed over the course of five days in December of 1718, centers around a turbulent moral dilemma. Love and loyalty to family come into conflict with duty and rigid adherence to the law. Here is a brief synopsis, provided by Naxos.com: Titus Manlius is engaged in war with the people of Latium. Conflicts of love and duty arise with his daughter Vitellia, in love with the Latin …

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Remembering Roger Norrington

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Sir Roger Norrington, the English conductor known for historically informed performances, passed away last Friday, July 18. He was 91. Born in Oxford, Norrington rose to prominence in the 1960s when he revived and championed the choral music of the 17th century German composer, Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672). In 1962, Norrington founded the Schütz Choir. He went on to found the London Classical Players, an ensemble he led until 1997. In later years, he …

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Ives’ “The Pond”: A Dreamy Elegy

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Composed by Charles Ives in 1906, The Pond is a shimmering, atmospheric fragment, or, in the words of the composer, “a song without voice.” Evocative of a rippling pond on a lazy afternoon, the work is so brief that it unfolds as a fleeting dream. The Pond was the composer’s nostalgic elegy for his father, George Ives (1845–1894), a cornet player and bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War. In Ives’ musical fragment, …

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Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 1 in B Minor: Classical Foundations

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The impetus for Sergei Prokofiev’s First String Quartet came from America. In 1930, Prokofiev received the commission from the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress. The Brosa Quartet premiered the work in Washington, D.C. on April 25, 1931. At the time, Prokofiev lived in exile in Paris, having fled his native land shortly after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In 1936, he would return home, telling friends, “I must see …

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Beethoven’s Bagatelle, Op. 33 No. 4: Paul Lewis, Live at Wigmore Hall

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From his teenage years in Bonn until the end of his life, Beethoven composed piano bagatelles. These brief, unpretentious pieces, which the composer called Kleinigkeiten, or “trifles,” were published in three sets (Op. 33, Op. 119, and Op. 126). They set the stage for the Romantic character pieces of later composers, such as Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms. Pianist Paul Lewis writes, “Beethoven, the architect of massive, great formal structures, shows himself in …

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Prokofiev’s Overture on Hebrew Themes: Klezmer Conversations

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When the February Revolution of 1917 broke out in Petrograd, Sergei Prokofiev resettled in the United States, stating that his native Russia “had no use for music at the moment.” Soon after arriving in New York, the 28-year-old Prokofiev received a commission from Zimro, a touring Soviet ensemble made up of Russian Jewish immigrants. The new sextet was to be based on themes from a notebook of Jewish folksongs. In his autobiography, …

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Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet”: Overture-Fantasy After Shakespeare

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Perhaps as a result of his turbulent personal struggles, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was drawn to stories of doomed love. It is a theme which runs through the Pushkin-inspired operas, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, the ballet Swan Lake, the Manfred Symphony, and the hellish Dante-inspired tone poem, Francesca da Rimini. Predating all of these works was the Overture-Fantasy on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, composed in 1869 by the 29-year-old Tchaikovsky. The …

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