Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony, “Italian”: “Blue Sky in A Major”

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In October of 1830, the 21-year-old Felix Mendelssohn traveled to Italy. Over the course of ten months, he visited Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. With this trip Mendelssohn, who as a child emerged as an astounding musical prodigy and polymath, entered adulthood with the customary Grand Tour, an educational rite of passage for upper-class Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries. Travels to Britain a year earlier provided the seeds for the …

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Louis Andriessen’s “De Tijd”: At the Intersection of Time and Eternity

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Louis Andriessen, the most influential Dutch composer of his generation, passed away on July 1 at a care home in Weesp, Netherlands. He was 82. An early proponent of serialism, Andriessen evolved into a rebellious and irreverent iconoclast of the avant-garde. His distinctive style emerged in the 1970s with music which blended the American minimalism of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley with elements of jazz, rock, Indonesian Gamelan, and neoclassicism. …

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Michael Torke’s “Unconquered”: A Tone Poem for Saratoga

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Unconquered, an orchestral tone poem by the American composer Michael Torke, is music of celebration. The four-movement work was written in 2016 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. For decades, SPAC has served as a summer home for the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Ballet. In 1777, with the defeat of the large invading force of British General John Burgoyne, the Battles of Saratoga marked …

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“Berceuse Romantique”: Kreisler’s Journey into Impressionism

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The legendary violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) composed numerous short pieces “in the style” of earlier composers. Kreisler performed these works as encores at his concerts and successfully passed them off as originals (discovered in some dusty corner of a French monastery) until the hoax was uncovered in 1935. In addition to these clever exercises in pastiche, Kreisler wrote cadenzas for many of the standard violin concertos, four operettas, and popular songs such as Madly …

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Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel”: The Groundbreaking “Bench Scene”

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Stephen Sondheim once called the “bench scene” from the first act of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical, Carousel, “the singular most important moment in the evolution of contemporary musicals.” Indeed, this extraordinary 12-minute-long love scene, anticipated in earlier Hammerstein works such as Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943), set the stage for the late twentieth century Broadway of Sondheim. According to the scholar Thomas Hischak, the scene “is considered the most completely integrated piece of music-drama in the American …

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Remembering Jeanne Lamon

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Jeanne Lamon, the American-Canadian violinist and early music specialist, passed away on June 20 following a brief battle with cancer. She was 71. Lamon was music director of the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra from 1981 to 2014. In a recent statement, the ensemble credits Lamon with establishing Tafelmusik’s “enviable reputation as ‘one of the world’s top baroque orchestras’ (Gramophone), growing from its modest beginnings to the cutting-edge period ensemble it is today under …

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Schubert’s “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern”: Song of the Spirits Over the Waters

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At the Staubbach Falls, west of the village of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, an Alpine stream plunges over a jagged cliff and cascades 974 feet to the valley floor below. A visit to this topographical wonder in October of 1779 inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to write Gesang der Geister über den Wassern (“Song of the Spirits over the Waters”). Set in six stanzas, the poem compares the mystical journey of the soul to the cycle of …

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