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 …
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 …
As one of music history’s greatest melodists, George Frideric Handel left behind ripe material for later composers. For example, consider the way allusions to the iconic Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah resurfaced in the music of composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Mahler. Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel is based on the Aria con variazioni which concludes Handel’s Suite in B-flat Major, HWV 434 for solo keyboard. With this monumental piece, the …
In 1894, a team of French archeologists discovered the toppled ruins of elaborate caryatids which adorned the Acanthus Column near the Temple of Apollo in the Ancient Greek city of Delphi. As sculptures representing female figures, caryatids form pillars throughout Greek architecture. The graceful, flowing Dancers of Delphi, constructed around 330 BC and now forever free of their structural burden, remain frozen in motion. The first of Claude Debussy’s 24 Préludes for solo …
For several years, beginning in the summer of 1906, the young Béla Bartók traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document age-old folk music with the aid of the phonograph. Eventually, his travels extended to villages in Slovakia, Transylvania, and Bulgaria, and resulted in the transcription of over a thousand folk songs. Throughout the project, Bartók was assisted by his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály. The pentatonic harmony which ran through ancient …
Among the timeless and unforgettable melodies of George Gershwin is Someone to Watch Over Me. The song was composed in 1926 for the musical, Oh, Kay!, where it was performed by Gertrude Lawrence, who sang it as a lonely, impassioned soliloquy to a rag doll. Although the lyrics were written primarily by Ira Gershwin, Howard Dietz assisted while the former was hospitalized for six weeks as a result of a ruptured appendix. …
Seiji Ozawa, the internationally renowned Japanese conductor, passed away in Tokyo last week (February 6, 2024) as a result of heart failure. He was 88. Ozawa’s 29-year tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra began in 1973. Prior to the appointment, he served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969) and the San Francisco Symphony (1970-1977). In 1984, he founded the Saito Kinen Orchestra in Matsumoto, Japan. In …