“Daphnis and Chloe”: Ravel’s Shimmering “Symphonie Chorégraphique”

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Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé was conceived as a ballet score for Sergei Diaghilev’s Paris-based Ballets Russes. It premiered on June 8, 1912, two years after Stravinsky’s The Firebird and a year before the same composer’s riot-inducing Le Sacre du printemps. Yet this radical and monumental work—the closest Ravel ever came to writing a symphony—boldly transcends its original purpose. Scored for a massive orchestra and chorus and unfolding in three parts with four recurring leitmotifs, Ravel referred …

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Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite in Two Flavors

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J.S. Bach was a composer who wrote for the occasion more than for posterity. Often, this entailed an organ fugue or choral cantata for Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, where Bach was music director from 1723 until his death in 1750. Less often, Bach was called upon to produce festive, celebratory orchestral music. The four Orchestral Suites fall into this category. The Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068 was probably composed around 1730 …

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Fritz Kreisler Plays “La Gitana”: 1938 Recording

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Over the past few days, I haven’t been able to stop listening to this brief 1938 recording of the great Austrian-born violinist, Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962). There is something deeply alluring about Kreisler’s playing. Listen carefully to the distinct quality of his sound, with its warm soulfulness and far-off nostalgia. Also, notice the elegant phrasing and the way one note moves to another. Kreisler was fond of writing short pieces which imitated the …

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“Ode to Death”: Holst’s Haunting Walt Whitman Setting

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English composer Gustav Holst completed Ode to Death, Op. 38 in 1919 as a memorial to friends lost in the First World War. The haunting and transcendent work for chorus and orchestra is a setting of the final lines of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Walt Whitman’s 1865 elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. Holst drew inspiration from Whitman “as a New World prophet of tolerance and internationalism as well as a new breed …

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Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata: Five Key Recordings

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Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47—better known as the “Kreutzer” Sonata—was first performed on May 24, 1803. 216 years ago today, Beethoven and the Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower (1778-1860) premiered this convention-shattering music at Vienna’s Augarten Theatre. Beethoven was so late in completing the manuscript that Bridgetower was forced to sightread the performance, at times looking over the composer’s shoulder at the full score. Originally, the manuscript was inscribed with the lighthearted …

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“Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March”: Klaus Tennstedt and the LPO, Live in 1988

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The final act of Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”), the last of the four operas that make up Wagner’s Ring Cycle, is about annihilation and renewal. The gods are brought down by their desire for absolute power. As Todd Sullivan writes in his program notes, The whole world of the gods crumbles in Act III of Götterdämmerung. The long-awaited hero, Siegfried (the misbegotten son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, twin offspring of the god Wotan), …

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Copland’s “Quiet City”: The Trumpet’s Mystic Call

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HARK, some wild trumpeter, some strange musician, Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night. I hear thee trumpeter, listening alert I catch thy notes, Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, Now low, subdued, now in the distance lost. – opening lines of “The Mystic Trumpeter,” Walt Whitman Aaron Copland’s Quiet City begins with primal open intervals (fourths and fifths) which seem to emerge from a vast, wide-open landscape. The expansive pandiatonicism of …

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