Twentieth Century

Bartók’s Études, Op 18: Daring Technical Exercises for Solo Piano

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Béla Bartók’s three Études, Op 18 for solo piano are daring, both technically and musically. Composed in 1918, they were intended to push the limits as pedagogical studies. The influence of Chopin, Debussy (whose piano Études were written three years earlier), and Schoenberg is evident. The three brief Études follow the traditional fast-slow-fast format. The first unleashes an exhilarating, demonic motor, punctuated with the accents of Hungarian folk music and language. In …

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Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4: Fearful Symmetry

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The greatest music requires deep, active listening. You can’t just put it on in the background and allow it to waft over you as you go about other tasks. It demands undivided attention. Initially, it may seem wildly incomprehensible. Its meaningfulness may be revealed gradually over the course of repeated listenings. Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4, composed in Budapest during the summer of 1928, is one of those mysterious and monumental …

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“Dark Pastoral” for Cello and Orchestra: David Matthews’ Completion of a Vaughan Williams Fragment

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A four-minute fragment of music, sketched by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1942, is all that exists of a cello concerto the composer intended to write for Pablo Casals. In 2010, contemporary English composer David Matthews (b. 1943) developed the fragment, which would have become the concerto’s slow movement, into the elegiac Dark Pastoral for cello and orchestra. Vaughan Williams’ original two-stave short score set out the movement’s A section, with only a few instrumental …

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Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra: An Homage to Bach and the Country Fiddler

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In Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra (“Concerto Accademico”), vibrant neoclassical counterpoint meets the sunny strains of an English country fiddler. Completed in 1925, the Concerto was dedicated to the Hungarian violinist, Jelly d’Aranyi, who gave the premiere with Anthony Bernard and the London Chamber Orchestra on November 6, 1925. Initially, the work was called “Concerto Accademico,” but Vaughan Williams came to dislike the title and withdrew it prior …

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Michael Daugherty’s “Desi”: Reawakening the Latin Big Band

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Vivid cultural allusions abound in the music of Michael Daugherty (b. 1954), an American composer famous for his five-movement Metropolis Symphony, inspired by the Superman comics. Daugherty’s Desi is an exuberant romp for symphonic band, composed in 1991. Its conversing instrumental “characters,” at once spirited, comic, and menacing, sweep us into a dangerous and  exhilarating party. It’s easy to imagine ghosts from the audience of Desi Arnaz’ Hollywood big band reawakening and forming …

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Barber’s Toccata Festiva: A Celebratory Flourish for Organ and Orchestra

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On a day in 1960, Mary Curtis Zimbalist phoned Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with exciting news. The wealthy patron and founder of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music had decided to provide the Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home at the time, with a pipe organ. Additionally, Zimbalist would commission Samuel Barber, the esteemed American composer who had enrolled in Curtis’ first class in 1924, to write a piece …

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Gershwin’s “Catfish Row”: A Symphonic Suite on “Porgy and Bess”

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Set in the Catfish Row tenement of sultry 1920s Charleston, George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, tells the story of a tumultuous love triangle poised between darkness and redemption. Abandoned by her violent, drug-dealing lover, Crown, Bess turns to the caring, disabled beggar, Porgy, for support. Their newfound happiness is cut short when Crown abruptly returns. The stormy human drama is underscored by an approaching hurricane. Vowing to protect Bess, Porgy kills Crown …

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