Twentieth Century

Michael Daugherty’s “Desi”: Reawakening the Latin Big Band

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Vivid cultural allusions abound in the music of Michael Daugherty (b. 1954), an American composer famous for his five-movement Metropolis Symphony, inspired by the Superman comics. Daugherty’s Desi is an exuberant romp for symphonic band, composed in 1991. Its conversing instrumental “characters,” at once spirited, comic, and menacing, sweep us into a dangerous and  exhilarating party. It’s easy to imagine ghosts from the audience of Desi Arnaz’ Hollywood big band reawakening and forming …

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Barber’s Toccata Festiva: A Celebratory Flourish for Organ and Orchestra

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On a day in 1960, Mary Curtis Zimbalist phoned Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with exciting news. The wealthy patron and founder of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music had decided to provide the Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home at the time, with a pipe organ. Additionally, Zimbalist would commission Samuel Barber, the esteemed American composer who had enrolled in Curtis’ first class in 1924, to write a piece …

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Gershwin’s “Catfish Row”: A Symphonic Suite on “Porgy and Bess”

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Set in the Catfish Row tenement of sultry 1920s Charleston, George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, tells the story of a tumultuous love triangle poised between darkness and redemption. Abandoned by her violent, drug-dealing lover, Crown, Bess turns to the caring, disabled beggar, Porgy, for support. Their newfound happiness is cut short when Crown abruptly returns. The stormy human drama is underscored by an approaching hurricane. Vowing to protect Bess, Porgy kills Crown …

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Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Major: Cool and Classical

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An enticing coolness and classicism surrounds Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 5 in C Major, Op. 38. Brilliant and austere, it is the music of a composer who, early on, developed a reputation as a brash enfant terrible with piano-playing fingers of steel. Here, as in much of his music, Prokofiev, the cunning and aggressive master chess player, plays the game of quirky extended melodies, which often seem to reach a harmonic dead …

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Strauss’ “Metamorphosen”: In Memoriam

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When the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the 1930s, Richard Strauss was ambivalent at first. He only wanted to be left alone to compose the next opera. In a letter, Strauss observed, with grudging pragmatism, “I made music under the Kaiser…I’ll survive under this one as well.” For a while, Strauss placated the Nazis, attempting to use his position as a preeminent composer to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and her …

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Strauss’ Four Symphonic Interludes from “Intermezzo”: A Portrait of Matrimony

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In a letter to his wife, Pauline, Richard Strauss listed the three areas which gave his life meaning: “nature, notes, and family.” (Bryan Gilliam) Musically, Strauss celebrated his stable family life with the autobiographical 1904 tone poem, Symphonia Domestica, Op. 53. When the work’s subject matter was criticized as trivial, Strauss responded, What could be more serious than married life? Marriage is the most profound event in life and the spiritual joy …

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Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace”: The Kronos Quartet

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American composer Ben Johnston (1926-2019) was a pioneer of just intonation (pure intervals tuned as whole number ratios) and microtonality (the use of intervals smaller than a half step). At the age of 17, following a concert of his music, Johnston gave an interview in which he predicted, “with the clarification of the scale which physics has given to music there will be new instruments with new tones and overtones.” He went …

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