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 …
The Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), was living in Paris when, in 1927, he composed the score for the zany ballet in one act, La Revue de Cuisine (“The Kitchen Review”). The plot of the ballet centers around the romantic entanglements of a menagerie of kitchen utensils which have come to life. The happy marriage of the Pot and the Lid is threatened by the seductive Twirling Stick. While the Pot is …
In 1908, the young Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály, traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document the peasant folk music of the Magyars. This is the ethnic group which occupied the region between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. before migrating west to form present-day Hungary. The colorful inflections of this music, as well as the jagged, irregular …
Béla Bartók’s symbolist opera in one act, Bluebeard’s Castle, begins with a spoken prologue which asks, “Where is the stage, outside us or within us?” What follows is a chilling psychological horror story, based on an account of a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The Gothic drama, set in a gloomy castle with seven locked doors, involves only two characters, the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his young wife, Judith. Here is …
Tōru Takemitsu’s ephemeral 1977 orchestral piece, A Flock Descends Into the Pentagonal Garden, grew out of a dream. The Japanese composer attributed his vision of a flock of birds descending into a five-sided garden to an iconic photograph he viewed earlier in the day, which showed the artist, Marcel Duchamp, posing with the back of his head shaved in the “form of a star-shaped garden.” Takemitsu described the resulting piece as a “shifting panorama of …
The Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s final work. The score was completed on July 5, 1975, a day before the composer entered the hospital where, just over a month later, he would succumb to the effects of terminal heart disease and lung cancer. Shostakovich seems to have considered the Viola Sonata to be a final farewell. All three of its movements conclude with the instruction, morendo, or “dying …
Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 109 inhabits a world of elegance and dreamy nostalgia. It is music characterized by soft edges, buoyant motion, and an effortless sense of melody. Composed in the summer of 1917, this is one of two cello sonatas Fauré completed in the final decade of his life. During these years, Fauré, who served as the head of the Paris Conservatoire until 1920, continued to compose despite …