Various threads or chunks of history or music organized into strings of posts.
(Spring Song) performed by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä If ever there was a piece that felt like one of those rare, never-to-be repeated moments in life, blue sky, sun’s warmth on your back, in a picture-perfect landscape … Continue reading Sibelius: Vårsång
performed by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä En saga is the expression of a state of mind. I had undergone a number of painful experiences at the time and in no other work have I revealed myself so … Continue reading Sibelius: En Saga, op. 9
performed by the USSR Symphony Orchestra under Eugene Svetlanov The golden cloud slept through the night Upon the breast of the giant-rock While Rachmaninoff composed a number of symphonic poems and things, his real contribution to classical music, at least … Continue reading Rachmaninoff: The Rock, op. 7
performed by the Staatskapelle Dresden under Rudolf Kempe Somehow… Despite excerpts from Don Juan being on the auditions for like, every instrument ever, and it being (I feel, right?) an outstandingly popular tone poem, I was super late to the party and … Continue reading Strauss: Don Juan, op. 20
performed by the Staatskapelle Dresden under Rudolfe Kempe We’re finally doing Strauss! It’s about darn time. (Featured image is the View of the Ponte Nomentano in the Roman Campagna, by Jean Achille Benouville) As one of the few multi-movement tone poems in our … Continue reading Richard Strauss: Aus Italien
performed by the Radio Symphony Orchester Berlin under Ferenc Fricsay (but I also muchly enjoyed Antoni Wit’s reading with the Polish National Radio Symphony) What else is our life but a series of preludes to that unknown Hymn, the first … Continue reading Liszt: Les Preludes
performed by the Gewandhausorchester under the late Kurt Masur Tasso loved and suffered at Ferrara, he was avenged at Rome, and even today lives in the popular songs of Venice. These three moments are inseparable from his immortal fame. To … Continue reading Liszt: Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo
performed by The London Philharmonic Orchestra under Bernard Haitink Mendelssohn beat us to the punch with his overture/symphonic poem, but as we discussed in our introduction to this series, it’s Franz Liszt who ‘invented’ the concept of the symphonic poem, … Continue reading Liszt: Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne
performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Claudio Abbado In order to make you understand how extraordinarily the Hebrides affected me, I send you the following, which came into my head there. Coming off the NSO’s New Year Concert of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer … Continue reading Mendelssohn’s ‘The Hebrides’ Overture
I don’t know how much ‘into this’ I can get in one article, but maybe we’ll talk about it more throughout this series. Coming off the three-month Russian Symphony Series I’d been planning (and writing) for so long, I got … Continue reading Series: The Symphonic Poem
Well, we’ve come a long way. Almost 100 years, to be exact, with some leaps and skips here and there, and there’s obviously plenty we didn’t get to. If you haven’t been following along, you can reach the entire series … Continue reading The Russian Symphony Series: A Wrap-up
performed by The London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, or as below I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul. What … Continue reading Prokofiev Symphony no. 5 in B-flat, Op. 100
performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev movement 2 movement 3 movement 4 So we’re back… for the same symphony, just eighteen years later, as in, after his fifth and sixth symphonies, but we’re going to address the real revisit (I originally … Continue reading Revisit: Prokofiev Symphony no. 4, op. 112
performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, or in a version below with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra Here we are again at another revisit, from the days when I (still) didn’t know how to talk about music, but more importantly … Continue reading Revisit: Prokofiev Symphony no. 4, op. 47
performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Marriss Jansons One of the largest symphonies in the standard repertoire, along with most of Mahler, bits of Bruckner, and some Shostakovich (but this is his longest). This recording comes in at around … Continue reading Shostakovich Symphony no. 7 in C major, op. 60 ‘Leningrad’
performed (this time) by the Scottish National Orchestra under Neeme Järvi or below with the younger Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Another revisit! I will admit I didn’t quite get this piece or Shostakovich at the time of writing the previous article on … Continue reading Revisit: Shostakovich Symphony no. 1 in Fm, op. 10
performed by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov (this piece is featured on a list of pieces I heartily recommend to music directors for inclusion on their season programs. Check out the article here.) (I also recently wrote … Continue reading Myaskovsky Symphony no. 6 in E flat minor, op. 23
performed by the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov playlist of the entire work here Yesterday we talked a bit about Myaskovsky’s early life and his second symphony. Today we’ll talk a bit more about his life and his … Continue reading Revisit: Myaskovsky Symphony no. 3 in Am, op. 15
performed by the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra under Evgeny Svetlanov or the same conductor with the Orchestre National de France in a studio recording here So this must be by far the most obscure work in everything that we’ve talked … Continue reading Sergei Lyapunov: Symphony no. 2
In case you didn’t realize, this topic is nothing I can speak about from personal experience, nor is it anything I really know much about. It is also an incredibly large, complicated, and even sensitive topic, about a very dark … Continue reading Music in the Soviet Era
performed by the Columbia Symphony under the composer’s baton To think that this is the first Stravinsky piece we’ve touched in our more-than-two-years here… better late than never. For those of you who think of Stravinsky as a wild, imaginative … Continue reading Igor Stravinsky: Symphony in Eb major, op. 1
Fugue for Thought 