Ravel’s Rapsodie Espagnole: Color, Atmosphere, and Dance

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Maurice Ravel, the quintessential French musical impressionist, was the son of a Swiss engineer-inventor father and a mother of Basque-Spanish heritage. The Basque influence can be heard throughout Ravel’s music. Nowhere is it more vibrantly on display than in Rapsodie espagnole, completed in 1908. Manuel de Falla praised the four-movement orchestral suite as “surprising one by its Spanish character, achieved through the free use of the modal rhythms and melodies and ornamental …

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Mozart’s “Don Giovanni”: Zerlina’s Tenderly Seductive Aria, “Vedrai, Carino”

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Blending comedy, melodrama, and the supernatural, Mozart’s 1787 opera, Don Giovanni, tells the story of an arrogant, promiscuous nobleman, who, before the final curtain, receives the ultimate hellish comeuppance. Don Giovanni attempts to seduce the peasant girl, Zerlina, and disarm her jealous fiancé, Masetto. At the beginning of the second act, Masetto and his friends look for Don Giovanni in order to kill him, but they are outsmarted by the cunning, disguised …

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Remembering Barre Phillips and Tom Johnson

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Two adventurous pioneers of American music passed away just before the arrival of the new year. Born in San Francisco, Barre Phillips was a virtuoso jazz and avant-garde bassist. His 1968 album, Journal Violone, featuring a series of solo improvisations, is credited as the first solo double bass record. Active in the free jazz movement, Phillips collaborated with artists including Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp. In the 1970s, Phillips was a member …

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John Adams’ “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”: An Ecstatic Fanfare

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What better way to ring in the new year than with a fanfare? Composed in 1986, John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine is a fanfare for an age of streamlined sports cars and space travel. It is an ecstatic musical joyride which, in the words of the composer, evokes a combination of “excitement and thrill, just on the edge of anxiety or terror.” The inspiration came from Adams’ memory of a harrowing …

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Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F Minor: Krzysztof Urbański and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony

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From childhood, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was drawn to the music of Mozart. The four-year-old Tchaikovsky was moved to tears when he heard a St. Petersburg orchestra play excerpts from Don Giovanni. Later, he recalled the experience as “a pure revelation…During several weeks I did nothing but play this opera through from the piano score; even as I fell asleep I could not part with this divine music, which pursued me long into my happy …

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The Artistry of Ferruccio Busoni: Historic Recordings from 1922

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Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), who died 100 years ago last July, was a musical renaissance man. The Italian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, writer, and editor has been called “the first truly modern composer.” He is also remembered for numerous enduring transcriptions of the music of J.S. Bach. Busoni associated with such a disparate group of contemporaries as Schoenberg, Sibelius, and Edgard Varèse. His small circle of students included Kurt Weill. The pianist Alfred …

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Bells and the Rebirth of Notre Dame

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Merry Christmas! Every year at this time we honor the memory of the great German-American musicologist, Karl Haas, host of the nationally syndicated radio program, Adventures in Good Music. Airing between 1970 and 2007, it was radio’s most widely listened-to classical music program. Following the show’s theme music, the second movement of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, Haas would utter his trademark greeting, “Hello everyone.” One of the most popular episodes, The Story of the Bells, aired …

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