Michael Torke’s “Unseen” (No. 7): Embracing an Ecstatic Groove

The first single from Unseen, the newest work by American composer, Michael Torke, was released last week. (The full album will be available on May 10). The excerpt, No. 7 from a piece which unfolds in nine brief movements, delivers a visceral and ecstatic sense of groove. Scored for a larger ensemble, Unseen continues in the direction of Torke’s recent chamber albums, Being (2020), Psalms and Canticles (2021), and Time (2022). The composer writes, Unifying these four projects is the …

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Nikolai Tcherepnin’s Prelude to “La Princesse Lointaine”: A Celebration of Orchestral Color

Edmond Rostand’s 1895 play, La Princesse Lointaine (“The Distant Princess”), was inspired by medieval romantic legend, and the archetype of the knight errant pursuing an unattainable, idealized love: On the enchanting coasts of Provence, and under its bright blue skies, an echo bears from east to west news of a lady divinely beautiful, the pearl of Byzantium, the famous Princess Melisande. A young troubadour, Prince Geoffroy, hears of the beautiful princess. She …

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Scriabin’s Fantasie in B Minor: A Dramatic Tour de Force

The story, recounted by the Russian musicologist, Leonid Sabaneyev, is so incredible that it may have been apocryphal. One day, while in Alexander Scriabin’s Moscow flat, Sabaneyev sat down at the piano and began to play a theme from Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28. The composer called out from the next room, “Who wrote that? It sounds familiar.” “Your Fantasie,” was the response. “What Fantasie?” Composed in 1900 during Scriabin’s …

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Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D Major: A Triumphant Farewell to London

With Symphony No. 104 in D Major, Franz Joseph Haydn bid a triumphant farewell to London. Composed in 1795, this was the last symphony Haydn would write, and the final installment in the set if 12 “London” symphonies the composer presented over the course of his two trips to the bustling English capital. For 29 years between 1761 and 1790, Haydn was employed as kapellmeister of Esterházy Court. Isolated in the Austrian-Hungarian …

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Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Major: Klezmer Strains

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68 over the course of 19 days in September of 1944. He had just completed the haunting Second Piano Trio, and (a year earlier) the Eighth Symphony. While the Second World War still raged, the tide had turned, and a Soviet victory over the Nazis was all but assured. Shostakovich found refuge at a “house of rest and creativity,” a …

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Shostakovich’s “The Execution of Stepan Razin”: A Dramatic Cantata À La Russe

In 1670, the Cossack leader, Stepan Razin, led an army of 7,000 oppressed peasants in an open rebellion in southern Russia against the Tsar’s government. The following year, after numerous bloody battles, he was captured, hoisted onto a scaffold in Moscow’s Red Square, and publicly executed by beheading. Razin’s gruesome demise is the subject of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1964 cantata, The Execution of Stepan Razin, Op. 119. The dramatic work is scored for …

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John Adams’ “I Still Play”: Jeremy Denk

Pianist Jeremy Denk describes John Adams’ I Still Play as “a piece about a long friendship, and about connection and farewell.” Adams composed the fleeting set of variations for solo piano in 2017 to commemorate the retirement of Robert Hurwitz, the longtime president of Nonesuch Records. The piece, which the composer has characterized as “Satie meets Bill Evans,” unfolds over a restless chromatic bass line as a dreamy, haunting waltz. Fragments from Bach’s …

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