Symphony

Remembering Yuri Temirkanov

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Yuri Temirkanov, the renowned Russian conductor, passed away last Thursday, November 2, in St. Petersburg. He was 84. From the time of his appointment as artistic director in 1988, Temirkanov was credited with restoring the brilliance of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Between 2000 and 2006, he served as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Additional titles included principal guest conductor of …

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Mahler’s First Symphony: The Titan

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Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major is music rooted in nature and song. It is the work of a 28-year-old composer who was rapidly rising as one of Europe’s premier conductors, and who was coming out of a stormy love affair with Marion von Weber, the wife of the grandson of composer, Carl Maria von Weber. It is music which synthesizes the Romantic influences of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Liszt, and Bruckner, …

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Schubert’s Third Symphony: Effortless Music from a Miraculous Year

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1815 has been called Franz Schubert’s “miracle year.” In those twelve months, while working as a full-time schoolteacher, the 18-year-old composer wrote more than 20,000 bars of music. Among other works, he completed two symphonies (Nos. 2 and 3), two masses, a string quartet, two piano sonatas, and 145 songs (including the famous Erlkönig). Schubert’s biweekly composition lessons with Antonio Salieri during this period remind us that, even for the most intuitive …

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Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C Major, “Il Distratto”: Music for the Comic Stage

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Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 60 in C Major, Il Distratto, (“The Absent-Minded Gentleman”) has been called “the funniest piece of symphonic music ever written.” (Kenneth Woods) The six-movement Symphony was conceived originally as incidental music for a 1774 German-language adaptation of Le Distrait, a farcical comedy by the French playwright, Jean François Regnard. The play centers around the buffoonish misadventures of a man who is so absent-minded that he nearly forgets …

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Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C Major, “Linz”: A Hurriedly Written Masterpiece

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In 1783, Mozart traveled to Salzburg with his new bride, Constanze, in an attempt to reconcile with his father, who did not approve of the marriage. On the return trip to Vienna, the couple spent three weeks in the Upper Austrian town of Linz as guests of Count Johann Thun-Hohenstein, an old friend of the Mozart family. In a letter dated October 31, Mozart wrote to his father, When we reached the …

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William Walton’s First Symphony: Sensuous and Searing

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Sir William Walton’s Symphony No. 1 in B-flat minor begins with a magical coalescing of elements. Voices awaken, and the Symphony springs to life with a sense of suddenness and inevitability. There is a hushed B-flat timpani roll, the warm sonic blur of three successive horn tones (B-flat, F, and G), a pulsating heartbeat in the violins, the plaintive song of the oboe, a response in the bassoon, and darting, descending lines …

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Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony: Music from Another World

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With his Symphony No. 2 in C minor, composed between 1888 and 1894, Gustav Mahler grappled with the most fundamental metaphysical questions. In a letter, he wrote, “Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke? – We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living – indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!” The person in whose …

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