Composers Datebook

• A pre-premiere premiere by John Corigliano

  SynopsisOn today’s date in 1997, violinist Joshua Bell and the San Francisco Symphony gave the premiere performance of an 18-minute Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra by American composer John Corigliano.This music was a concert offshoot of Corigliano’s film score for Francois Gerard’s movie The Red Violin, but debuted months before the film itself was completed.Corigliano said, “I was delighted when asked to compose the score for Francois Girard’s new film. How could I turn down so interesting and fatalistic a journey through almost three centuries, beginning as it did in Cremona, home of history’s greatest violin builders? I also welcomed the producer’s offer to separately create a violin and orchestra concert piece, to be freely based on motives from the film.“I’d assumed that, as usual in film, I wouldn't be required to score it until it was completed, except for a number of on-camera “cues” … Then plans changed. Filming was pushed back. So the present Chaconne was built just on the materials I had; a good thing, as it turns out, because I now had the freedom, as well as the need, to explore these materials to a greater extent than I might have had I been expected to condense an hour’s worth of music into a coherent single movement.”Music Played in Today's ProgramJohn Corigliano (b. 1938): Selections from The Red Violin; Joshua Bell, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Sony 63010

  --------  

  2:00

  --------

  2:00
• Tailor-made music by Walter Piston

  SynopsisOn today’s date in 1955, the Boston Symphony was celebrating its 75th anniversary season with the premiere performance of a brand-new symphony — the sixth — by American composer Walter Piston. At the time, he was teaching at Harvard, and his association with the Boston Symphony went back decades. Even so, he paid the orchestra an extraordinary compliment, crediting its musicians as virtual partners in its composition:“While writing my Symphony No. 6, I came to realize that this was a rather special situation. I was writing for one designated orchestra, one that I had grown up with, and that I knew intimately. Each note set down sounded in the mind with extraordinary clarity, as though played immediately by those who were to perform the work. On several occasions it seemed as though the melodies were being written by the instruments themselves as I followed along. I refrained from playing even a single note of this symphony on the piano,” he wrote. This symphony may have been tailor-made for the Boston players, but Piston was practical enough to know other orchestras would be interested, and so added this important footnote: “The composer’s mental image of the sound of his written notes has to admit a certain flexibility.”Music Played in Today's ProgramWalter Piston (1894-1976): Symphony No. 6; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3074

  --------  

  2:00

  --------

  2:00
• Two Tchaikovskys, one skull

  SynopsisOn today’s date in 1888, Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky premiered his Hamlet-Fantasy Overture. He had been asked to write an overture for a gala charity benefit staging of Act III of Shakespeare’s famous play at the Mariinsky Theatre. Alas, the charity was, as Hamlet might say, “not to be.” But Tchaikovsky so liked the idea of a piece inspired by the mood and characters of Hamlet that wrote the overture anyway.As Hamlet said, “the time is out of joint,” and we fast forward our story almost 100 years to 1982 and another Tchaikovsky — André Tchaikovsky (no relation to Peter Ilyich). André Tchaikovsky was a Polish composer who was also a virtuoso pianist of some note and a wanna-be actor to boot. When André Tchaikovsky died in 1982, he’d asked that his skull be donated to the Royal Shakespeare Company, hoping it would be used for the skull of Yorick in their productions of Hamlet. André Tchaikovsky got his wish in 2008, when his skull was finally held aloft by David Tennant in a series of performances of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon, a production that proved so famous that an image of Tennant as Hamlet holding Tchaikovsky’s skull ended up on a British postage stamp.Music Played in Today's ProgramPeter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Hamlet-Fantasy Overture; Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; Leonard Bernstein, conductor (DG 477670)

  --------  

  2:00

  --------

  2:00
• Colorful music by Scriabin and Torke

  SynopsisA question: do you see colors when you hear music? No, we’re not going psychedelic on you, and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today’s edition of Composers Datebook.It’s just that many composers do — see colors, that is.Romantic Russian composer Alexander Scriabin would describe the key of F-sharp Major as very definitely being “bright blue.” His colleague Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, however, thought F-sharp Major more a greyish-green hue. While many composers confess to seeing certain musical keys as certain colors, the fact is they don’t always agree on which color matches which key.Which brings us to American composer Michael Torke, who gave the title Bright Blue Music to an orchestral piece that premiered on today’s date at Carnegie Hall at a concert of the New York Youth Symphony.In 1985, when this music premiered, Torke was just 24 years old, but had already been composing music for most of his young life. In addition to a string of other “colorful” scores, with titles like The Yellow Pages and Ecstatic Orange, Torke has also gone on to write a number of ballet scores and vocal works, including a TV opera and, in 1999, a big choral symphony for the Disney Corporation to celebrate the Millennium.Music Played in Today's ProgramAlexander Scriabin (1872-1915): Etude No. 4; Piers Lane, piano; Hyperion 66607Michael Torke (b. 1961): Bright Blue Music; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor

  --------  

  2:00

  --------

  2:00
• Roger Sessions' 'Kennedy Sonata'

  SynopsisAmerican composer Roger Sessions is an acquired taste for most classical music fans, and, truth be told, his works don’t show up on concert recital programs all that often.He was born in the 19th century, 1896, when Grover Cleveland was president, and died in 1985, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.Session’s early music, written when he was in his twenties and thirties, was neo-classical in style, but as the 20th century progressed, Sessions’ style did also, moving from harmonically complex tonality to frankly atonal works. His music became increasingly “gnarly,” you might say, but there was always a lot of emotion in his music, whatever technique he employed.Take, for example, his Piano Sonata No. 3, nicknamed The Kennedy Sonata. It was written in reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on today’s date in 1963. The last movement of Sessions’ Piano Sonata was written as an elegy for the slain president, and includes a climax of three sharply accented chords. For American pianist William Grant Naboré, one of just a handful of artists who have recorded this work, those three chords suggest the three sharp rifle shots that shattered the air in Dallas the day Kennedy died.Music Played in Today's ProgramRoger Sessions (1896-1985): Sonata No. 3 (Kennedy Sonata); William Grant Naboré, piano; DRC 3002

  --------  

  2:00

  --------

  2:00

Meer Muziek podcasts

Trending Muziek -podcasts

Over Composers Datebook

Composers Datebook: Podcasts in familie