American conductor David Robertson, who served as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2018, is regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of the music of John Adams. He describes Adams’ music in cinematic terms: The main thing that you find in every single one of his pieces is that it is a journey through a landscape. And as you proceed, you see similar types of trees …
In 1814, after witnessing the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor, Francis Scott Key penned the famous words that would become the American National Anthem. At the end of the battle, the 15 stars and stripes of the young nation’s flag continued to fly defiantly above the Fort, forming the poem’s defining image. Composed in 1866, a year after the end of the American Civil War, Dudley Buck’s Concert Variations …
William Booth was the English Methodist minister who, along with his wife, founded the Salvation Army in 1865. The charitable organization established a military-like structure, and the highest ranking officer, the “General,” is purported to be chosen by God. Booth’s death in 1912 inspired American poet Vachel Lindsay to write a colorful ballad depicting the General’s entry into heaven. It is a grand procession which “Booth led boldly with his big bass …
Strange, theatrical surprises abound in Franz Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 65 in A Major. Numbered out of sequence, the Symphony may have originated as incidental music for a play presented at the private theater of Haydn’s patron, Prince Esterházy. Scholars such as Elaine Sisman have speculated that the play may have been Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The year of composition, perhaps 1768, is uncertain. Regardless, the music captures the free-spirited experimentation of a composer working in the splendid …
It’s one of the most beautiful and infectious melodies ever written, and it forms the emotional climax of Franz Lehár’s 1905 comic operetta, The Merry Widow. Coming at the end of Act III, Lippen schweigen (“Lips are Silent”) is the duet in which Hanna (The Merry Widow) and Count Danilo express their love for one another. Throughout the operetta, the graceful Viennese melody is woven into the background as a dance piece, foreshadowing …
With its sultry, bluesy second movement, Maurice Ravel’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in G Major, M. 77 is an homage to American jazz. It was Ravel’s final chamber work. He completed it in 1927, shortly before the trip to America where he met George Gershwin. By the early 1920s, the jazzy strains of Harlem, New Orleans, and W.C. Handy’s St Louis blues had found their way into Parisian cafés. …
It is stunning to consider that Schauspiel Overture, Op. 4 is the work of a 14 year old boy. Composed in 1911, the first orchestral piece of Erich Wolfgang Korngold unfolds with Romantic melodies and lush, shimmering orchestration. It delivers the fully formed sound world of Korngold’s Hollywood film scores of the 1930s and 40s. The title translates as “Overture to a Drama.” Tense, turbulent, and adventurous, the first theme gives way …