Twentieth Century

Michael Daugherty’s “Flamingo”: A Great American Road Trip

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Flamingo by the American composer Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) is as quirky, colorful, and unapologetic as the plastic pink ornaments which have long adorned lawns. Written in 1991 for chamber orchestra, the piece showcases a cast of zany instrumental characters. It blends the blues with the tambourine-infused sounds of a Spanish flamenco dance. At moments, it suggests a TV or film chase scene soundtrack. It delivers action-packed suspense, outrageousness, and furious rhythmic intensity. …

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Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto: A Radiant Farewell Gift

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Béla Bartók composed the Third Piano Concerto during the summer of 1945. He was in the final months of his life, battling terminal leukemia and financial hardship. The music which emerged can be heard as a radiant musical “farewell” at a time of personal darkness and defeat. Five years earlier, Bartók and his wife, Ditta Pásztory, fled their native war-torn Hungary and emigrated to the United States. For a while, Bartók found …

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Louis Andriessen’s “De Tijd”: At the Intersection of Time and Eternity

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Louis Andriessen, the most influential Dutch composer of his generation, passed away on July 1 at a care home in Weesp, Netherlands. He was 82. An early proponent of serialism, Andriessen evolved into a rebellious and irreverent iconoclast of the avant-garde. His distinctive style emerged in the 1970s with music which blended the American minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley with elements of jazz, rock, Indonesian Gamelan, and neoclassicism. …

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Michael Torke’s “Unconquered”: A Tone Poem for Saratoga

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Unconquered, an orchestral tone poem by the American composer Michael Torke, is music of celebration. The four-movement work was written in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. For decades, SPAC has served as a summer home for the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet. In 1777, with the defeat of the large invading force of British General John Burgoyne, the Battles of Saratoga marked …

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“Berceuse Romantique”: Kreisler’s Journey into Impressionism

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The legendary violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) composed numerous short pieces “in the style” of earlier composers. Kreisler performed these works as encores at his concerts and successfully passed them off as originals (discovered in some dusty corner of a French monastery) until the hoax was uncovered in 1935. In addition to these clever exercises in pastiche, Kreisler wrote cadenzas for many of the standard violin concertos, four operettas, and popular songs such as Madly …

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Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra: Aftertones of Mahler

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On May 22, 1911, a quiet funeral was held for Gustav Mahler at Vienna’s Grinzing Cemetery. A wreath, laid on the grave by Arnold Schoenberg and a group of his students, included a card which read, “This rich man through whom we have come to know the deepest sorrow—the loss of the saintly Gustav Mahler—has left us, for life, a model we cannot lose: his work and his works.” Nowhere are the aftertones …

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Vivaldi and Piazzolla: Two Visions of Summer

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Antonio Vivaldi’s collection of violin concerti, The Four Seasons, composed between 1718 and 1720, remains some of the most famous, virtuosic, and evocative music ever written. Concerto No. 2 in G minor “Summer” begins under a burning summer sun. The opening bars suggest an oppressive, sultry haze. As the music unfolds, nature comes alive with the song of the cuckoo, turtledove, and finch. The sounds of a shepherd herald the approach of a storm. …

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