Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”: A “Rhapsodic Ballet” Born in the Jazz Age

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In the spring of 1928, George and Ira Gershwin traveled to Europe for a three-month sojourn. The brothers, among the most celebrated composer-lyricist teams on Broadway, had just finished work on the musical, Rosalie, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, and they relished the time off. It was during this trip that George Gershwin set to work on a commission he had received from the New York Philharmonic. The result was the vividly evocative …

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Michael Torke’s “Unseen” (No. 7): Embracing an Ecstatic Groove

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The first single from Unseen, the newest work by American composer, Michael Torke, was released last week. (The full album will be available on May 10). The excerpt, No. 7 from a piece which unfolds in nine brief movements, delivers a visceral and ecstatic sense of groove. Scored for a larger ensemble, Unseen continues in the direction of Torke’s recent chamber albums, Being (2020), Psalms and Canticles (2021), and Time (2022). The composer writes, Unifying these four projects is the …

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Nikolai Tcherepnin’s Prelude to “La Princesse Lointaine”: A Celebration of Orchestral Color

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Edmond Rostand’s 1895 play, La Princesse Lointaine (“The Distant Princess”), was inspired by medieval romantic legend, and the archetype of the knight errant pursuing an unattainable, idealized love: On the enchanting coasts of Provence, and under its bright blue skies, an echo bears from east to west news of a lady divinely beautiful, the pearl of Byzantium, the famous Princess Melisande. A young troubadour, Prince Geoffroy, hears of the beautiful princess. She …

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Scriabin’s Fantasie in B Minor: A Dramatic Tour de Force

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The story, recounted by the Russian musicologist, Leonid Sabaneyev, is so incredible that it may have been apocryphal. One day, while in Alexander Scriabin’s Moscow flat, Sabaneyev sat down at the piano and began to play a theme from Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28. The composer called out from the next room, “Who wrote that? It sounds familiar.” “Your Fantasie,” was the response. “What Fantasie?” Composed in 1900 during Scriabin’s …

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Haydn’s Symphony No. 104 in D Major: A Triumphant Farewell to London

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With Symphony No. 104 in D Major, Franz Joseph Haydn bid a triumphant farewell to London. Composed in 1795, this was the last symphony Haydn would write, and the final installment in the set if 12 “London” symphonies the composer presented over the course of his two trips to the bustling English capital. For 29 years between 1761 and 1790, Haydn was employed as kapellmeister of Esterházy Court. Isolated in the Austrian-Hungarian …

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Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Major: Klezmer Strains

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Dmitri Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68 over the course of 19 days in September of 1944. He had just completed the haunting Second Piano Trio, and (a year earlier) the Eighth Symphony. While the Second World War still raged, the tide had turned, and a Soviet victory over the Nazis was all but assured. Shostakovich found refuge at a “house of rest and creativity,” a …

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Shostakovich’s “The Execution of Stepan Razin”: A Dramatic Cantata À La Russe

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In 1670, the Cossack leader, Stepan Razin, led an army of 7,000 oppressed peasants in an open rebellion in southern Russia against the Tsar’s government. The following year, after numerous bloody battles, he was captured, hoisted onto a scaffold in Moscow’s Red Square, and publicly executed by beheading. Razin’s gruesome demise is the subject of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1964 cantata, The Execution of Stepan Razin, Op. 119. The dramatic work is scored for …

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