Twentieth Century

Michael Torke’s “Javelin”: A Glistening “Sonic Olympiad”

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In August of 1996, Gramophone magazine hailed American composer Michael Torke (b. 1961) for writing “some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years.” Two months earlier, the New York Times described Torke as “a master orchestrator whose shimmering timbral palette makes him the Ravel of his generation.” We hear all of this in Torke’s glistening 1994 overture, Javelin. Described as a “sonic olympiad,” the work was …

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Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante Défunte: A Dreamy Evocation

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A stately, processional dance, the pavane was popular in European courts throughout the Renaissance. With dreamy nostalgia, Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (“Pavane for a Dead Princess”) evokes visions of these distant times. The brief work was composed in 1899 for solo piano, and orchestrated in 1910. Ravel chose the title because he liked the sound of the words. He insisted, Do not attach any importance to the title. I …

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Rachmaninov’s “Blessed Is the Man”: Meditative Music from the “All-Night Vigil”

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Blessed is the Man forms the third movement of Sergei Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 (also known as the “Vespers”). Scored for a cappella chorus, the All-Night Vigil was composed over the course of two weeks in January and February of 1915. It has been called “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church.” The monumental liturgical work, completed during the First World War, represents the culmination of a sacred musical tradition which included music …

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Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony: Shadowy and Austere

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If the popular Stalin Prize-winning Fifth Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev, composed in 1944, delivers triumph, heroism and emotional catharsis, the Sixth, by comparison, is shadowy, austere, and enigmatic. It reveals itself fully after repeated attentive listenings. Arriving at the height of post-war Soviet Stalinism, Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111 was initially well received when Evgeny Mravinsky led its premiere in Leningrad on October 11, 1947. A month later, when …

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William Walton’s “Portsmouth Point” Overture: Thrillingly Chaotic

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Portsmouth Point, an 1814 etching by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson, depicts a bustling and bawdy port scene on England’s southern Hampshire coast. The thrillingly chaotic scene inspired William Walton, in 1925, to compose an exuberant overture of the same title. The opening bars came to Walton as he rode through lively London streets atop a double decker bus. Led by Volkmar Andreae, the premiere took place in June of 1926 in Zurich …

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George Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow”: A Musical Illustration

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It is hard to read the biography of English composer George Butterworth without imagining what might have been. A close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Butterworth traveled England’s “green and pleasant land,” collecting more than 450 folk songs. Butterworth’s music was influenced by these songs, and by the land itself. Butterworth signed up for military service enthusiastically at the outbreak of the First World War. Before leaving home, he took inventory of …

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Remembering Sofia Gubaidulina

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The renowned Russian composer, Sofia Gubaidulina, passed away yesterday at her home near Hamburg, Germany. She was 93. Born in the rural Tatar region of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954. Soviet authorities conducted raids in the school’s dormitories, in search of Western contemporary music scores, which were banned at the time. Gubaidulina later recalled, “We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly.” While …

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