Twentieth Century

George Enescu and the Sounds of Romania

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Today marks the 139th anniversary of the birth of George Enescu (1881-1955), the great Romanian composer, violinist, pianist and conductor. Pablo Casals described Enescu as “the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart.” Born in the small town of Liveni, Romania, he entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of 7 and graduated with distinction before the age of 11. In 1895, he continued his studies in Paris, studying violin with Martin Pierre Marsick and …

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Remembering Julian Bream

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Julian Bream, the English classical guitarist and lutenist has passed away. He was 87. Bream played a significant role in promoting the classical guitar as a solo instrument. He expanded the repertoire, inspiring new works by numerous twentieth century composers, including Benjamin Britten, Sir William Walton, Sir Michael Tippett, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Toru Takemitsu. One of the most influential works written for Bream is Benjamin Britten’s 1963 Nocturnal After John Dowland, Op. …

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Sibelius’ Third Symphony: Classical and Austere

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Jean Sibelius’ music is filled with the magic and mystery of ancient northern woods. It can be simultaneously icy, brusk, brooding, austere, and eternally soulful. Often, it unfolds in a way which feels static and circular, seemingly influenced by Finland’s land of the midnight sun, where the cycle of day and night is replaced by extended periods of light alternating with darkness and gloom. Similar circular, repeating phrases can be found throughout Finnish folk …

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Heifetz in Hollywood: Miklós Rózsa’s Violin Concerto

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Miklós Rózsa’s career as a composer was built on a fascinating dichotomy. Beginning in 1937, Rózsa produced some of the twentieth century’s most memorable and spacious film scores, including the Arabian fantasy The Thief of Bagdad (1940), the Alfred Hitchcock film noir psychological thriller Spellbound (1945), and the epic historical drama Ben-Hur (1959). The composer, who emigrated to the United States from his native Hungary in 1940, also created numerous enduring concert works, infused with …

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Fauré and Debussy: Two Charming Settings of Paul Verlaine’s “Mandoline”

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Gabriel Fauré’s 1891 song cycle, Cinq mélodies “de Venise”, Op. 58, begins with music which is as charming and infectious as it is brief. Mandoline is a setting of a poem from the 1869 collection, Fêtes galantes, by the French Symbolist, Paul Verlaine. The poem was inspired by a series of paintings by Jean-Antoine Watteau depicting (as Robert Gartside writes) “18th century nobility in their fêtes champètres, those elegant picnics redolent of a mixture of gaiety, …

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Fauré’s Second Piano Quintet: “Youth and Serenity”

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The Piano Quintet No. 2 in C minor, Op. 115 was one of Gabriel Fauré’s final pieces. Completed in 1921, three years before the composer’s death, it retreats into the lengthening shadows of late afternoon. It’s filled with the subtle and inexplicable sense of mystery and revelation we hear often in the late works of the most canonical composers. Dedicated to Paul Dukas, it was written in secret, seemingly for posterity, at a …

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Roy Harris’ Third Symphony: Sounds of the Rugged American Frontier

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Roy Harris (1898-1979) was born in a log cabin on the Oklahoma prairie and grew up as a farmer in the rural San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. He went on to write what the legendary Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitzky called “the first great symphony by an American composer.” That work was Harris’ Symphony No. 3, completed in 1938 and premiered the following year by Koussevitzky and the BSO. It’s music …

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