Twentieth Century

Sibelius’ “The Dryad”: A Fleeting, Impressionistic Tone Poem

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Jean Sibelius’ impressionistic tone poem, The Dryad (Dryaden), Op. 45, No. 1, is magical and fleeting. It begins with hushed, searching melodic strands which seem to drift over a dark, desolate, and frigid nordic landscape before coalescing into a high-spirited dance. At moments, the woodwinds erupt in cackling laughter and shrieks of merriment. Tonal colors capture the shimmering brilliance of sunlight on snow. The wood nymphs, upon which the piece is based, come …

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Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5: Summoning Mysterious Forces

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Alexander Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5 arrived amid a six day burst of creative energy in December of 1907. In a letter, the composer’s wife, Tatyana Schloezer, reported, Sasha has already managed… to compose a fifth sonata!!! I don’t believe my ears, it is unbelievable! The sonata flowed from him in a kind of stream. […] What you have heard is nothing, the sonata is unrecognizable, it cannot be compared with anything. …

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Scriabin’s “The Poem of Ecstasy”: The Spirit Takes Flight

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For the Russian composer, Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), music formed a mystical passageway to a transcendent level of consciousness. In the final years of his short life, Scriabin, a virtuoso pianist, moved beyond the early influences of Chopin and Liszt to a series of boundary-pushing symphonic works which, in the words of the conductor Marin Alsop, “break down the traditional tonal structure and experiment with new methods of organizing sound.” For Scriabin, who experienced synesthesia, …

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Arvo Pärt’s “In Spe”: Building With Primitive Materials

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For eight years, beginning in the late 1960s, the Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), entered into a period of compositional “silence.” When Pärt resumed his work, the music which emerged was far removed from that of his earlier modernist style. Ultra-complexity and dissonance were gone, replaced with a sense of timeless, meditative serenity. Pärt embraced the sanctity of a single note, or a glowing triad. “The complex and many-faceted only confuses me, …

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Henry Cowell’s Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 10: Early American Strains

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Among the twentieth century’s boldest and most innovate musical mavericks was the American composer, Henry Cowell (1897-1965). Cowell’s occasionally riot-inducing experiments included tone clusters (approaching the piano keyboard with arms and fists), graphic notation, polytonality, non-Western modes, and “a complex pitch-rhythm system that correlated the mathematical ratios of the pitches of the overtone series with rhythmic proportions.” (Richard Teitelbaum) Cowell treated the piano as a percussion instrument. Through “prepared piano” techniques, and …

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Barber’s Cello Concerto: Music Which Stands on Its Own Terms

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Lushly Romantic, nostalgic, and autumnal, Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto, Op. 22 has, in recent years, begun to emerge from the shadows of obscurity. Completed in November of 1945, around the time of Barber’s discharge from wartime service in the United States Air Force, it is the second of the composer’s three concerti, bookended by the Violin Concerto (1939) and Piano Concerto (1962). The work’s neglect has been attributed to its extreme technical …

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André Watts Plays Gershwin: “The Man I Love,” “That Certain Feeling”

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On a Sunday afternoon recital at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1976, the late André Watts placed the piano music of Gershwin and Schubert side by side. A reviewer at the time noted that it was the habit of both composers, when at parties, to take a seat at the piano and dazzle attendees with their most recent music. The music of George Gershwin remained a staple of Watts’ repertoire. An …

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