Twentieth Century

Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings: Folk Music Meets the Concerto Grosso

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Béla Bartók wrote the Divertimento for String Orchestra over the course of fifteen days in August of 1939. The three-movement piece was commissioned by the Swiss conductor and patron Paul Sacher, who provided Bartók with a comfortable chalet in the Alpine village of Saanen, Switzerland. Three years earlier, Sacher had commissioned the composer to write the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Now, he requested …

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Night Voyages: Salonen’s “Insomnia” and Sibelius’ “Nightride and Sunrise”

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Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 2002 orchestral tone poem, Insomnia, takes us on a haunting nocturnal voyage. The opening bars slip into a restless, looping stream of musical “thoughts” which toss and turn with prickly persistence in the woodwinds. As the piece develops, the insomniac’s obsessive mental chatter becomes a colorful tonal dreamscape which is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing. Gradually, restlessness dissolves into the serenity of near sleep in the final minutes, only to be interrupted …

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Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto: Parody and Sardonic Humor

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Dmitri Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor is the musical equivalent of a smirking jokester. It is a rule-breaking, Neo-baroque romp filled with sardonic humor, parody, and fleeting musical quotes. Completed by the young Shostakovich in 1933, it is actually a double concerto in which the solo trumpet and piano converse against the backdrop of a string orchestra. (The alternate title is “Concerto for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra”). By …

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Remembering James Buswell

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The violinist, conductor, and educator James Buswell passed away on Tuesday. He was 74. At the age of seven, Buswell became the youngest soloist ever to appear with the New York Philharmonic. He went on to perform with the world’s top orchestras and as a regular member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. From 1986 to 2014 he served on the faculty of New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. …

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Youthful Webern: “Im Sommerwind,” Idyll for Large Orchestra

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The Austrian composer Anton Webern (1883-1945) is remembered as one of the principal exponents of the Second Viennese School. This group, which included Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, pioneered the atonal and serial techniques which dominated much of twentieth century music. Webern explored this striking new kind of music with sparse, compact pieces such as Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5 and the quirky, twelve-tone Concerto for Nine Instruments, Op. 24. Im Sommerwind (“In the Summer …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Summa”: Renaud Capuçon and Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne

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In 1994, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) said, I have developed a highly formalised compositional system, which I have been using to write my music for twenty years. Summa is the most strict and enigmatic work in this series. Beginning in the 1970s, Pärt’s music represented a radical departure from the atonal modernism that was prolific during much of the twentieth century. Instead, what emerged was music which was simultaneously …

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Nino Rota’s First Symphony: Sweeping Cinematic Grandeur

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Nino Rota is remembered as one of the great film composers of the twentieth century. Born in Milan, Rota lived in Rome for most of his life. From 1933 until his death in 1979, he wrote scores for more than 150 films, including Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). Fellini, who worked with Rota for decades said, The most precious collaborator I have ever had, I say it straightaway …

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