Rachmaninov’s “Blessed Is the Man”: Meditative Music from the “All-Night Vigil”

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Blessed is the Man forms the third movement of Sergei Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 (also known as the “Vespers”). Scored for a cappella chorus, the All-Night Vigil was composed over the course of two weeks in January and February of 1915. It has been called “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church.” The monumental liturgical work, completed during the First World War, represents the culmination of a sacred musical tradition which included music …

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Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony: Shadowy and Austere

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If the popular Stalin Prize-winning Fifth Symphony of Sergei Prokofiev, composed in 1944, delivers triumph, heroism and emotional catharsis, the Sixth, by comparison, is shadowy, austere, and enigmatic. It reveals itself fully after repeated attentive listenings. Arriving at the height of post-war Soviet Stalinism, Symphony No. 6 in E-flat minor, Op. 111 was initially well received when Evgeny Mravinsky led its premiere in Leningrad on October 11, 1947. A month later, when …

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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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