Liszt’s “Au Lac de Wallenstadt” from “Années de Pèlerinage”: Sighing Waves

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…Thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwell in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring. These lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage form the poetic caption for Franz Liszt’s Au lac de Wallenstadt (“At Lake Wallenstadt”). Following the exalted La chapelle de Guillaume Tell, with its distant Alpine horn calls, Au lac de Wallenstadt is the second movement of Liszt’s …

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William Walton’s “Portsmouth Point” Overture: Thrillingly Chaotic

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Portsmouth Point, an 1814 etching by the satirist Thomas Rowlandson, depicts a bustling and bawdy port scene on England’s southern Hampshire coast. The thrillingly chaotic scene inspired William Walton, in 1925, to compose an exuberant overture of the same title. The opening bars came to Walton as he rode through lively London streets atop a double decker bus. Led by Volkmar Andreae, the premiere took place in June of 1926 in Zurich …

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George Butterworth’s “The Banks of Green Willow”: A Musical Illustration

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It is hard to read the biography of English composer George Butterworth without imagining what might have been. A close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Butterworth traveled England’s “green and pleasant land,” collecting more than 450 folk songs. Butterworth’s music was influenced by these songs, and by the land itself. Butterworth signed up for military service enthusiastically at the outbreak of the First World War. Before leaving home, he took inventory of …

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Nicola Matteis II’s Fantasia in A Minor: Inmo Yang

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Hailed as “a second to Corelli,” Nicola Matteis (c. 1650-1713) was the earliest Italian Baroque virtuoso violinist to settle in London. He is credited with introducing to England something closer to the modern bow hold. His son, Nicola Matteis II (1670-1737), a violinist and composer as well, left England in 1700 for Vienna, where he composed ballets for the imperial opera. His Fantasia in A minor for solo violin was written in …

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Remembering Sofia Gubaidulina

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The renowned Russian composer, Sofia Gubaidulina, passed away yesterday at her home near Hamburg, Germany. She was 93. Born in the rural Tatar region of the Soviet Union, Gubaidulina graduated from the Kazan Conservatory in 1954. Soviet authorities conducted raids in the school’s dormitories, in search of Western contemporary music scores, which were banned at the time. Gubaidulina later recalled, “We knew Ives, Cage, we actually knew everything on the sly.” While …

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Judith Weir’s “Heroic Strokes of the Bow”: Music Inspired by Art

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English composer Judith Weir’s Heroic Strokes of the Bow (“Heroische Bogenstriche”) was inspired by a work of twentieth century art. The Swiss-born artist Paul Klee’s 1938 work of the same title, currently displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is a blue and black painting on pink newspaper. “Said to be a tribute to the famous violinist Adolph Busch, whom Klee knew personally, it seems to show a simple pattern of violin …

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Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “Komm, süsses Kreuz”: Music of Desolation

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The bass aria, Komm, süsses Kreuz (“Come, sweet Cross”), comes near the end of the second part of J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244, first performed in 1727. Its text speaks of the suffering of Christ in his final days. Arriving in the story’s most desolate moments, the veiled accompaniment of the viola da gamba (often played by the cello in modern performances) hovers as a gloomy and inescapable presence. The …

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