Twentieth Century

George Crumb’s “Dream Images”: Echoes of Faintly Remembered Music

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In the score of his Dream Images (Love-Death Music) (Gemini), the American composer George Crumb (b. 1929) writes, “musingly, like the gentle caress of faintly remembered music (flexible and expressive).” This fleeting and atmospheric work for solo piano is the eleventh of twelve Fantasy-Pieces after the Zodiac which make up Crumb’s 1972 collection, Makrokosmos, Volume I, modeled after Bartók. In addition to its reference to astrology, the poetic title suggests the Liebestod (“love death”) of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Notated without …

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Elgar’s Violin Concerto: Venturing into the Inner World

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Two worlds collide in the music of Sir Edward Elgar. Outwardly, there is heroism and swashbuckling adventure, tempered with a distinctly English sense of regal majesty. This is the composer of the brilliant tone poem, In the South, and the stately Pomp and Circumstance Marches. Yet, as this facade melts away, an intensely intimate inner world emerges in much of Elgar’s music. These moments are sometimes slightly unsettling, filled with haunting mystery, tenderness, nostalgia, and …

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Astor Piazzolla at 100

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This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992), the Argentine tango composer and virtuoso bandoneon player. The tango, a seductive dance made up of African, Native American, and European cultural influences, originated in the 1880s in the impoverished districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Similarly, Piazzolla’s music simmers in a rich melting pot which blends sultry tango rhythms with jazz and classical elements. Piazzolla played a major …

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John Corigliano’s “Voyage”: Sailing into a World of Obsessive Imagination

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Regarding the dreamy and sensuous Voyage for Flute and String Orchestra, the American composer John Corigliano (b. 1938) writes, Voyage for flute and string orchestra (1983) is an instrumental version of a 1971 a cappella choral work that was a setting of Richard Wilbur’s translation of Baudelaire’s famous L’Invitation au voyage. Wilbur’s poignant setting pictures a world of obsessive imagination — a drugged version of heaven full of sensual imagery. The music echoes the …

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Stravinsky’s “Orpheus”: Melancholy, Love, and Mystery

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“Myths never were, but always are,” wrote the 4th century Roman commentator, Sallustius. So it is with the story of Orpheus, which inspired Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine in mid-twentieth century Hollywood as deeply as it did Claudio Monteverdi in 1607 and the lyric poet Ibycus in the 6th century BC. In 1946, Stravinsky received a commission from Balanchine and the impresario, Lincoln Kirstein, for a contemporary treatment of the Orpheus story. The resulting …

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Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 6, “Celestial Gate”: Entering a New Dimension

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Alan Hovhaness’ Symphony No. 6, “Celestial Gate” is modest by some measures. The work, composed in 1959, is scored for a chamber orchestra. It unfolds in a single movement which lasts just over twenty minutes. Yet once we move beyond this finite formal “container,” we enter a musical space which feels infinitely vast and timeless. Perhaps this is the serene, mystical, and ambient world on the other side of the “Celestial Gate” of …

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Ligeti’s Etude No. 5, “Arc-en-ciel,” Khatia Buniatishvili

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György Ligeti composed a cycle of 18 solo piano études between 1985 and 2001. Étude No. 5 from Book 1 is titled Arc-en-ciel, or “rainbow.” Its lines rise and fall in glistening, ephemeral arches of color and light, and ultimately evaporate. Ligeti provides the additional marking, Andante con eleganza, with swing. Ligeti, who has acknowledged the influence of Thelonius Monk and Bill Evans once called Arc-en-ciel “almost a jazz piece.” The hazy, magical vocabulary of jazz …

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