Bohuslav Martinů didn’t appear to have any particular interest in writing a symphony until the Second World War, when he was forced to move to the United States and restart his career in a country where he was hardly known. A large commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra was a good beginning.
Long before a symposium was a dry, academic conference, it was an after-dinner party with a lot of wine. Plato’s Symposium, written around 360 BCE, imagines such a party, and it became the framework for Bernstein’s multi-movement work for solo violin and an orchestra of strings and percussion.
Sibelius’s Second Symphony is tightly composed with a compelling yet abstract trajectory. The rippling opening bars propel everything that follows, unfurling into a first movement that is inevitably called brisk or bracing.
If you think Beethoven looms large over classical music today, imagine being a young composer in 1853—just 26 years after his death—and being declared his second coming.
It took Holst almost four years to complete The Planets and then it was another three years before a complete performance was staged. The piece quickly became extremely popular, and the shy and humble Holst achieved a level of celebrity he never really sought nor wanted.
This violin concerto was likely premiered by Bologne with the Concert des Amateurs, and was published around 1775 by Antoine Bailleux. Look out for the sudden entry of peasant pipes and fiddles, crashing the elegant ambiance—a musical anticipation of the French Revolution to come.
In this work, Saariaho captures the sweep and depth of the winter sky, its stinging cold and clarity, the slow drift and play of the constellations as they rise and set, and the immensity of it all.
To Mussorgsky, Russianness meant gritty realism and embracing his musical intuition—or “utter technical incompetence,” as Rimsky-Korsakov called it.
Kammermusik Nr. 2 reflects Paul Hindemith’s knack for recontextualization and revival—evoking something modern and old at the same time.
The four cello sonatas on today’s program are all interconnected. Frank Bridge was Benjamin Britten’s teacher, Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich were friends across the Iron Curtain, and Shostakovich taught Karen Khachaturian. They are also linked by the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who recorded the Bridge and Shostakovich sonatas with Britten on piano, and to whom the Britten and Khachaturian sonatas are dedicated.