Roxanna Panufnik’s “Celestial Bird”: Ex Cathedra

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Roxanna Panufnik (b. 1968) is one of Britain’s most prominent composers. The daughter of the Polish composer and conductor, Andrzej Panufnik, she has written numerous choral works, including Westminster Mass, premiered by London’s Westminster Cathedral Choir; the oratorio, Faithful Journey – a Mass for Poland; and Across the Line of Dreams, a work for two conductors, two choirs, and orchestra, which was premiered by Marin Alsop, Valentina Peleggi, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. …

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Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto: Poetic Music Born of Beethoven

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The inspiration for Sir Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto came in a single moment in 1950. The occasion was a rehearsal of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with Walter Gieseking as soloist. Recalling this “precise moment of conception,” the English composer commented, “Under the influence of an exceptionally poetic yet classical performance of the Beethoven movement, I found myself persuaded that a contemporary concerto might be written, in which the piano is used once …

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Henry Cowell’s “The Banshee”: Haunting Sounds From Inside the Piano

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If you listen to Henry Cowell’s The Banshee without the benefit of seeing how the sound is being produced, you might never guess that it is music written for the piano. In fact, it is a piece which requires no piano bench, bypasses the ivories all together, and moves inside the piano to reveal a haunting new sonic landscape. At the time of its completion in 1925, The Banshee, and other works by Cowell, …

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Mahler’s “Erinnerung”: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Leonard Bernstein

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Composed in the 1880s, prior to the First Symphony, Erinnerung (“Remembrance”) is one of the early songs of Gustav Mahler. It is the second in a collection of fourteen Lieder und Gesänge (“Songs and Airs”) published in 1892. The text, by the German poet, Richard Leander (1830-1889), reflects on the intermingling of love and song. Mahler’s setting is shrouded in dreamy melancholy and quiet anguish. The lamenting melody drifts over a hypnotic stream of …

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Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major: Sublime and Valedictory

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Franz Schubert completed the String Quintet in C Major in the late summer of 1828, less than two months before his death at the age of 31. Sublime and valedictory, it is music which inhabits mysterious and celestial spaces. It achieves the “heavenly lengths” (Robert Schumann’s words) of Schubert’s “Great” Symphony No. 9 in C Major, which was finished two years earlier. We get a sense of the monumental expanse of Bruckner …

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Bach’s Sonata No. 2 in A Major for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1015: Canons of Joy

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With the Six Sonatas for violin and harpsichord (BWV 1014-1019), J.S. Bach spectacularly reimagined the Baroque trio sonata. Traditionally, the form, developed by composers such as Arcangelo Corelli, consisted of two solo instruments and continuo. The continuo involved a partially improvised accompaniment in which the keyboard player would be given the bass line and the harmonic “short hand” of figured bass notation. It was an arrangement which was not unlike the harmonic …

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Mussorgsky’s “Mysterious Powers” from “Khovanshchina”: Dolora Zajick

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Modest Mussorgsky’s opera, Khovanshchina, is set in a dark and politically unstable period of Russian history. The five-act “national music drama,” composed in Saint Petersburg between 1872 and 1880, tells the story of the 1682 rebellion, led by Prince Ivan Khovansky and the Old Believers, against Peter the Great. Additionally, the plot involves the disloyalty of the corrupt Prince Vasily Golitsyn. At its center, the conflict is between the continuation of a …

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