In 1885 the New York philanthropist Jeannette Thurber founded the National Conservatory of Music of America, and in 1892 recruited Dvořák to be its director. In the words of H. L. Mencken, he was hired to “introduce Americans to their own music.”
Led by the clarinetist Simeon Bellison, the Zimro Ensemble grew out of the Jewish art music movement. Prokofiev agreed to write a piece for them based on Ashkenazic melodies.
You can hear the icy snow and the “harsh breath of a horrid wind.” Rarely if ever before had instrumental music so vividly depicted real-life scenes.
George Walker’s Lyric for Strings elegizes his grandmother, who was born into slavery but lived long enough to see her grandson solo with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The longest gap in Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonic output was the eight years between his Symphony No. 9, in 1945, and No. 10, in 1953. In between, he was denounced by Soviet authorities for a second time, accused of “formalism”—writing music without a proper social purpose.
Both Sergei Rachmaninoff and Niccolò Paganini were virtuosos of their eras. There the similarities seem to end.
Bacewicz wrote her Overture (Uwertura in Polish) in Warsaw in 1943 under German occupation. It was not premiered until September 1945, in a very different world.
In about nine weeks over the summer of 1788, Mozart wrote three symphonies that embraced an idiosyncratic personal vision.
The opera Cavalleria rusticana is musically gorgeous, dramatically gripping, slyly inventive, and historically significant. “It was like a door that suddenly blew open onto a sealed room. A fresh, cool wind from the country blew away the faint smell of mildew,” remembered one Italian critic.
Maurice Ravel’s Introduction et allegro is really a little harp concerto commissioned by the Érard instrument company in response to a competitor, Pleyel, commissioning Claude Debussy’s similar Danse sacrée et danse profane. The two companies were engaged in harp war, each championing a different technology.