Twentieth Century

William Walton’s “Portsmouth Point” Overture: Thrillingly Chaotic

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Portsmouth Point, an 1814 etching by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson, depicts a bustling and bawdy port scene on England’s southern Hampshire coast. The thrillingly chaotic scene inspired William Walton, in 1925, to compose an exuberant overture of the same title. The opening bars came to Walton as he rode through lively London streets atop a double decker bus. Led by Volkmar Andreae, the premiere took place in June of 1926 in Zurich …

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George Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow”: A Musical Illustration

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It is hard to read the biography of English composer George Butterworth without imagining what might have been. A close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Butterworth traveled England’s “green and pleasant land,” collecting more than 450 folk songs. Butterworth’s music was influenced by these songs, and by the land itself. Butterworth signed up for military service enthusiastically at the outbreak of the First World War. Before leaving home, he took inventory of …

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Remembering Sofia Gubaidulina

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The renowned Russian composer, Sofia Gubaidulina, passed away yesterday at her home near Hamburg, Germany. She was 93. Born in the rural Tatar region of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954. Soviet authorities conducted raids in the school’s dormitories, in search of Western contemporary music scores, which were banned at the time. Gubaidulina later recalled, “We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly.” While …

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Judith Weir’s “Heroic Strokes of the Bow”: Music Inspired by Art

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English composer Judith Weir’s Heroic Strokes of the Bow (“Heroische Bogenstriche”) was inspired by a work of twentieth century art. The Swiss-born artist Paul Klee’s 1938 work of the same title, currently displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is a blue and black painting on pink newspaper. “Said to be a tribute to the famous violinist Adolph Busch, whom Klee knew personally, it seems to show a simple pattern of violin …

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Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”: A Communion with Nature

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Begun in 1914 on the eve of the First World War and completed in 1920, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending is a shimmering, impressionistic ode to the serene English countryside. Gently rising ever higher, the solo violin depicts the courting flight of the skylark, which glides over the green hedgerow-stitched landscape during spring and early summer. Wordsworth described the bird as the “ethereal minstrel.” Filled with a sense of nostalgia and lament, …

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Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini: Virtuosity with a Twinkle in the Eye

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As a musical form, the “theme and variations” is pure fun. For the composer and performer, it can represent the ultimate display of cleverness—as if to say, “listen to what I can do!” We can imagine Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert showing off at a party with a series of increasingly intricate keyboard variations on a given theme. Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 is filled with this kind …

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Janáček’s “Mládi” (Suite for Wind Sextet): A Memory of Youth

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Czech composer Leoš Janáček had just turned 70 when, in July of 1924, he composed the wind sextet, Mládi, JW 7/10 (“Youth”). In a letter to Kamila Stösslová, Janáček described the work as “a kind of memory of youth.” The four movement suite formed a musical reminiscence of his student days at the Augustinian monastery of St Thomas in the old Moravian city of Brno. For Janáček, these formative years were marked …

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