Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich are the two composers who stood above the rest of those who labored during the years of the Soviet Union. Unlike Shostakovich, however, Prokofiev enjoyed part of his career living and composing in the West, voluntarily returning to the USSR in 1936. Like his compatriot...
Category: Program Notes
Global Warming
Claude Debussy composed the three movements of his Nocturnes for orchestra between 1897-99. The early reception of this work was not wholly enthusiastic by any means, and they continued to receive mixed reviews...
Global Warming
With a “keen ear for musical color and a deft ability to adapt structural elements from popular music into the symphonic idiom” (Houston Chronicle), contemporary composer Michael Abels has...
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
In the spring of 2020, Yale University School of Music undertook a project titled Postcards from Confinement, in which they asked faculty, students, and alumni to create musical media in honor of the victims of COVID-19....
Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge
Twentieth-century British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) was a precocious child. By the age of fourteen, he had already composed more than one hundred works. Recognizing his talent, his viola teacher introduced the boy to Frank Bridge, a highly acknowledged composer of the time....
African Suite
The music of Fela Sowande (1905–1987) is an excellent example of biculturality—music that blends elements of different socio-political artistic traditions. Born in Oyo, Nigeria, Sowande grew up in an upper-middle class family. This was almost forty-five years after Great Britain had declared Nigeria...
Concerto Grosso Op. 3 No. 11
Son of a St. Mark’s Cathedral violinist, Venetian composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) was guided toward the priesthood from an early age. He entered a seminary in 1693 and...
Bal masqué, op. 22
Pianist-composer Amy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a remarkable woman whose life and career may have turned out very differently had she lived at a different time. Beach was born on her grandfather’s New Hampshire farm just after the American Civil War, the only child of a paper maker and his wife.
Symphony No. 103 in Eb Major "Drum Roll"
Haydn’s nicknames—“Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet” are well earned. His sixty-plus quartets and over one hundred symphonies standardized the genres and inspired other great composers of the era such as Joseph Bologne, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491
In 1778, the twenty-one year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) was in Paris, performing and peddling his own music in hopes of finding employment outside his hometown of Salzburg. In the next decade, his desire for an appointment in one of the great European courts grew desperate.
Symphony No. 1
A long, overdue revival of the music of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799) has taken root in recent years. Saint-Georges, a mixed-race French courtier, musician, and military man, led a multi-faceted life, highlighted by his exceptional athletic and artistic skills.
Symphony no. 1 in B-flat,
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1841 Duration: 35 minutes It is easy to forget that there was quite a bit...
Ge Xu (Antiphony)
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1994 Duration: 8 minutes Chen Yi is just one of a noted group of composers...
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1894 Duration: 10 minutes Debussy was a critical figure in the transition from 19th-century romanticism...
Children's Corner, arr. Caplet
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Date of Composition: 1908/1910 Arranged for orchestra by André CapletDuration: 17 minutes 1905 marked a special time in...
Suite of Dances
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes The music of Florence Price has experienced a renaissance in recent years. Price worked hard to overcome racism...
Mozart, Horn Concerto no. 3 in Eb Major, K. 447
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Unless you are a horn player, the horn is not the instrument usually associated with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart....
Symphony no. 4 in A Major,
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes In 1830, the world was Felix Mendelssohn’s for the taking. Just barely into his twenties, the young German...
Adagio for Strings
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes … Wistful. Nostalgic. Touching. Few pieces bring to mind as many emotion-filled adjectives as Samuel Barber’s Adagio for...
Serenade for Strings
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Few composers have possessed the ability to reflect emotions within their music as well as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky....
Memorial to Martin Luther King
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Oskar Morawetz was one of Canada’s most successful composers. Yet many audiences have not heard his music. Morawetz...
Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Igor Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments displays several sides of the Russian-French-American composer’s compositional personality. Its clear form,...
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman no. 1
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes American composer Joan Tower certainly fits into the category of “uncommon.” As a female composer coming of age in the...
Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, op. 55, “Eroica”
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes If just one adjective were offered to describe Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the word “more” might come to mind....
Piano Concerto no. 1 in G Minor, op. 25
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes It is sometimes easy to forget that Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) died at just 38-years-old, perhaps because his published...
Grass: Poem for Piano, Strings, and Percussion
Program Notes by Dr. K. Dawn Grapes Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the...
Carmen Suite
Russian pianist-composer Rodion Shchedrin (b. 1932) is young enough to have avoided the worst of Stalin’s “Reign of Terror” years, but still spent most of his career maneuvering Soviet expectations and restrictions. To his credit, he was one of the most successful and prolific...
Serenade after Plato's Symposium
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to attend dinner with a carefully selected group of historical figures? What would the conversations be? How would guests respond to one another? After reading Plato’s Symposium, Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) was inspired to musically depict just that scenario. Serenade for Violin, Harp, Strings, and Percussion shows Bernstein’s intellectual approach to creating music.
The Brandenburg Concertos
Three hundred years ago, in August 1721, Johann Sebastian Bach was at a crossroads. For four years, he had been in the employ of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. A true music lover, the prince was quite supportive of...
The Tender Land Suite (1954/1996)
America of the 1950s was a very different place than that of the 1940s. Gone were the New Deal politics of Franklin Roosevelt and the...
Church Street Serenade (2005)
Aaron Copland and Adolphus Hailstork (b. 1941) have several things in common: both were born and raised in New York—Copland in the city and Hailstork...
Appalachian Spring: Ballet for Martha (1944)
What is it about Copland’s music that evokes such feelings of nationalism and nostalgia? Some would point to the composer’s use of open intervals of...
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Beethoven’s fifth symphony is the iconic work of classical music. It pervades the whole world of symbols and imagery of musical art as an evocation of a welter of ideas. In a sad way it is almost impossible to escape all...