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Luisi Conducts Mahler and Brahms

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Gustav Mahler in 1893, by E. Bieber

The great German baritone Matthias Goerne recently performed selections from Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Fabio Luisi. I wrote about the program, taking some time to digress about the so-called War of the Romantics, one of the dumbest but funniest culture wars ever to consume the second half of any century.

I had hoped to include some supplementary boxes, but I fear those might have been cut from the program, so here is the (unedited by anyone but myself) version of the notes.

Luisi Conducts Mahler and Brahms

By René Spencer Saller

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Mahler accepted his first paid conducting gig when he was only 20, presiding over third-rate operettas at a spa in Upper Austria. From then on, the ambitious and cash-strapped composer spent his entire life as a professional conductor, holding posts in Ljubljana, Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and, at the end of his life, New York City. From the podium, he demanded much from each musician but gave even more, responding to the orchestra with an electric empathy and an intense physicality. Widely considered among the greatest conductors in the world, he applied his galvanizing intelligence to other composers’ scores, reinvigorating the repertoire and setting the interpretive bar impossibly high for future generations of professional maestros. 

By 1888, when he began his Second Symphony, he was, if not as famous as he would someday become, widely well-regarded—as a conductor. As a composer, however, he felt misunderstood and undervalued, the eternal underdog. He wasn’t wrong. The disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in late 1889 hit him hard. Because of certain ugly socio-political and cultural realities—most obviously, an antisemitism so pervasive that it’s only remarkable in its occasional absence—Mahler’s career would be rocky, never mind his formidable talent and drive and his voluntary conversion to Catholicism. 

After receiving a terminal diagnosis of heart disease in 1907, Mahler resolved to compose as much music as possible, of the highest possible quality, culminating in a flurry of late-life masterpieces, including Das Lied von der Erde, Symphony No. 9, and the unfinished Tenth. And despite being fired regularly for factors unrelated to his job performance, he kept conducting, leading the New York Philharmonic in the last two years of his life. He died at age 50, from complications of the heart condition that had been diagnosed four years earlier.

Wondrous Wunderhorn

In Mahler’s distinctive sound world, song and symphony are closely intertwined, even interdependent. His first four symphonies are called his Wunderhorn symphonies because they incorporate so many of his settings of texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). This fanciful collection of German folk poetry, originally published between 1805 and 1808, was praised by literary luminaries like Goethe, who wrote of his hope that “this little book would find a place in every house where bright and vital people make their home…. Best of all, [that] this volume might lie on the piano of the amateur or master of musical composition so that these songs might come into their own by being matched to familiar and traditional melodies, that they might have appropriate tunes fitted to them, or that, God willing, they will inspire new and significant melodies.”

Eventually consisting of three volumes and a thousand or so poems, the Wunderhorn collection did indeed inspire a generation or two of Romantic composers and their successors. Among many others, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Schoenberg all wrote settings of these provocative and often grotesque fairy-tale poems, which touch on everything from famine to frivolous flirtation; from doomed drummers to fish prophets; from the magical riverine journey of a mower’s golden ring to the brutal execution of a child. The tales are spooky and preachy, pious and violent, funny and profound. For years they ignited Mahler’s imagination like nothing else.

Between 1887 and 1902, the year of his momentous marriage to Alma Schindler and the completion of his Fifth Symphony, Mahler set more than a dozen poems from the Wunderhorn collection for voice and piano or orchestra, and a half-dozen or so of these story-songs surfaced in the first five symphonies. In 1899 he published 12 of the Wunderhorn songs in the collection titled Humoresken (Humoresques)—informally, and confusingly, also known as Mahler’s “Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.” Although Mahler had originally conceived these songs for voice and orchestra, he was shrewd enough to create alternative arrangements for voice and piano, tailored to the growing sheet-music market for amateur musicians.

Not all of the poems in the Wunderhorn collection are actual folk relics; some appear to be imitations or homages. The two editors, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, could also be described as authors—not so much disciplined collectors and compilers as resourceful recyclers and fabulists. The authenticity of any given tale mattered less to them than its entertainment value, and if they needed to invent certain details in the service of a greater truth, so be it. At any rate, Mahler, who was almost as sensitive to poetry as he was to music, took additional liberties with his source material, adding lines and verses as he saw fit. In fact, he wrote his own text for the 1892 song “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), which also served as the penultimate movement of his Fourth Symphony.

In addition to “Das himmlische Leben,” five other Wunderhorn songs functioned as pivotal movements in Mahler’s symphonies, including two featured in this concert: “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” and “Urlicht,” which did double duty in his Second Symphony as the Scherzo and fourth movement, respectively. Nicknamed the “Resurrection” Symphony, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor deals with death and rebirth, in the Christian tradition.

Born into a large and poor Jewish family, Mahler was still technically Jewish at the time of its composition. His interest in the spiritual aspects of Christianity predated his official conversion to Catholicism, in 1897, when he was 37 years old. Part of the reason he needed to make his faith a matter of public record was pragmatism, or self-preservation: the ever-worsening antisemitism of late 19th-century Austria made it impossible for a Jewish man, even an eminently qualified one, to land the desirable conducting posts, especially in Vienna, where Richard Wagner’s widow Cosima, the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt, and a vicious antisemite, still exerted enormous influence. 

A Closer Listen


1. “Rheinlegendchen” (Little Rhine Legend). Set in G major, with a 3/8 meter reminiscent of a Ländler, the richly evocative “Rheinlegenchen” is lightly scored—just a wind quintet with strings. It was so popular at its first performance that the audience demanded an immediate encore. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of a lovelorn young mower, who imagines what might happen to a ring tossed into the Rhine. The ring eventually ends up in the belly of a fish served at the King’s table, at which point, the mower predicts, the absent sweetheart will be unable to resist returning the ring—and returning the mower’s love. Throughout the song, Mahler sprinkles folk-inflected, improvisational-sounding riffs and licks, imparting a rollicking, rural flavor to the “little Rhine legend.”  

The world premiere of the song took place at the Hamburg Konzerthaus, in October 1893,  sung by Paul Bulss and performed by the Julius Laubesche Kapelle under Mahler’s own baton.

2. Composed in the summer of 1898 and published the following year, “Wo die schönen Trompete blasen (Where the Splendid Trumpets Sound), in C minor, is a strangely subdued song in which the singer assumes two roles: an ardent young woman and the soldier she loves, who may be a ghost—or, if not yet a ghost, a future ghost. Mahler contrasts the swooning, almost hallucinatory waltz of the lovers’ union with the doomy, inexorable 2/4 beat of the marching army, with its “splendid trumpets,” which are typically and unexpectedly soft when not actually muted. The song was first performed, along with “Das irdische Leben,” on January 14, 1900, sung by soprano Selma Kurz, with Mahler conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.

3. Completed in 1892 and first performed that December, in Berlin, “Verlor’ne Müh” (Wasted Effort) is another he-said-she-said dialogue song, with the singer again performing both male and female roles. Mahler deploys a lilting, Ländler-like 3/8 rhythm, along with sassy interjections and imitations. The comical lyrics are in the Swabian dialect (related to Alsatian and other Swiss-adjacent forms of German) and dramatize a persistent village maiden’s failed seduction of a young man, who not only rejects her offerings of “tender morsels,” “nibbles,” and “my heart,” but persists in insulting her, with increasing harshness, as a “foolish girl.” Her beloved, an obstinate and unloving prig, might get the last word, but the maiden gets the last laugh. (It’s safe to say that most of us, including the long-dead Mahler, would greatly prefer a leisurely meal with this agreeable, lamb-tending creature than another negging session with Buzzkill Boy.)  

4. Mahler composed “Das irdische Leben” (The Earthly Life) sometime after early spring 1892. He shortened the source poem, originally titled “Verspätung” (Delay), but retained the haunting poignancy that befits a song about a child who begs his mother for bread until he starves to death: “And when at last the bread was baked/The child lay dead upon the bier.” Divided—and typically muted—strings convey the bereaved parent’s torment, that churning grief and choking helplessness. Early on, Mahler conceived of his Fourth Symphony (1899–1901) as a six-movement work that would also feature “Das irdische Leben” (The Earthly Life). This gritty ballad, a kind of proto-Kindertotenlied, serves as a dramatic counterpart to the celestial joy and abundance of “Das himmlische Leben” (The Heavenly Life), the spiritual climax of the Fourth Symphony.

5. Set in the remote key of D-flat major, “Urlicht” (Primal Light) functions in the Second Symphony as a transition, or a kind of introduction, to the finale. Mahler composed it in 1892 and orchestrated it the next year. His tempo indication is “Sehr feierlich, aber schlicht” (Very solemn, but simple). Originally written for mezzo-soprano or contralto, the singer’s radiant innocence transforms a simple declaration of faith into a passionate rhapsody. Listen to the winds curling around the singer’s voice; they seem to complete his thoughts, much as birdsong bends the night sky toward morning:

I am from God, I want to return to God.
The loving God will grant me a little light,
Will light my way to blissful life eternal and bright.”

6. Mahler repurposed “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt” (Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish,” in C minor, as the third-movement scherzo of his Second Symphony. Composed in summer 1893 and set in a dreamy 3/8, the song is marked “In ruhiger fließender Bewegung,” which in English means “In quietly flowing motion,” a fair description of its sound, if not its ironic humor.  A magically twisty clarinet melody slips through skittery cross-currents of pizzicato and bowed strings as the singer describes the aquatic audience’s rapt attention to Saint Anthony. Like any good joke that lands, the song builds suspense through repetition, concluding with this devastating punchline on misplaced piety:

  
The crabs still go backwards,

The cod are still bloated,

The carp are still gorging,

The sermon’s forgotten.

The sermon was pleasing.

All stay as they were.

7. The intense and jarring “Revelge” (Reveille), also in C minor, depicts a death march: rattle-trap drums and strident trumpets, stomping feet and rotting corpses. The soldiers might as well be zombies, grimly enacting their pointless rituals at every predawn reveille, compulsively charging and slaughtering. The speaker is an army drummer, an adolescent, in fact, who has been wounded in battle and is now being left for dead, even trod on, by his marching comrades. The young drummer’s lament is all the more heartbreaking for its growing self-awareness:

“I will well play my drum

or else I will lose myself completely.

The brothers, plentiful sowed

tralali, tralalei, tralalera,

they lie as if they’ve been mowed.”

A revenant, he returns to his darling’s home, not yet aware that he’s dead. (Listen for the col legno strings, meant to mimic the grinding, scraping sound of bone on bone.) That morning, in a ghoulish twist, the drummer’s bones and those of his comrades appear arranged “in rank and file, like tombstones” at her front door, with the drum out in front “so that she can see him.” Mahler composed this song in July 1899.

8. Composed in summer 1901, around the time that he was beginning his Fifth Symphony, “Der Tambourg’sell” (The Drummer Boy) was the last of Mahler’s Wunderhorn settings—and wouldn’t you know it, it’s another song in C minor from the perspective of a doomed young drummer. This time the singer and first-person narrator is in prison, not underfoot on a bloody battleground, but he’s dying all the same: marched from his cell to the gallows. Never mind that he’s still a child—too young to fight, but old enough to be killed. The music, a protracted funeral march, is somber, even sepulchral. 

As with “Revelge,” Mahler conjures up all manner of spooky effects from col legno strings. In an elegiac address to everything he can see on his march to the scaffold, the singer ticks off a series of farewells, repetitively, almost self-soothingly—think Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, only infinitely sadder—before closing with a pair of final, heartbreakingly understated “Gute Nacht”s. Mahler’s indications call for the first “good night” to start loud, then go suddenly quiet; the second is supposed to be sung “mit brechender Stimme” (with broken voice).

If all this sounds a bit morbid, it might help to remember that Mahler had almost died that February, when he woke in bed to find the sheets soaked in blood from a hemorrhage. He would marry the next year, but he would die within the decade, after suffering the grievous loss of his eldest daughter, Maria, who succumbed to scarlet fever. 

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Technical Tip

Col legno is a shorter form of the musical term col legno battuto, which is Italian for “with the wood being struck.” It’s essentially an instruction from the composer to strike or, more rarely, scrape the violin, viola, cello, or bass strings using the wooden part of the bow, normally used as the handle, instead of gliding the hair part over the strings in the conventional way. The col legno technique turns the stringed instrument into a distinctive percussion instrument. Hector Berlioz famously exploited the hollow, unearthly timbre in Symphonie fantastique, transforming the strings into cavorting skeletons.

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Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Symphony No. 3

In May 1883, Brahms turned 50. Richard Wagner, his esteemed adversary, had died a few months earlier; Clara Schumann, his intimate friend, cheerleader, and steadfast muse, was nearly 64 and quite frail; he had already outlived many friends and musical mentors. Yet he was robustly healthy, if somewhat fat, and had a lust for life—as well as for young women. That summer he followed one of them, the contralto Hermine Spies, to Wiesbaden, on the Rhine. There he composed his Symphony No. 3. It had been six years since his previous symphony, another product of a single fertile summer. 

Although he continued to tweak the score until its publication, the Third was a triumph from the start. After he sent the score to Clara, she gushed, “From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of the woods and forests…. [By the finale] one’s beating heart is soon calmed down again for the final transfiguration which begins with such beauty in the development that words fail me!” 

Except for the predictable demonstration from the Wagner Club, whose members briefly disrupted the Vienna premiere, Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 was hailed as a masterpiece by audiences and critics alike.  

A Closer Listen

The shortest of Brahms’s four symphonies, the Third is formally rigorous and tonally inventive, thematically integrated and rhythmically complex. Unusually, all four movements end softly, even the seemingly heroic finale. The first movement begins with two audacious wind chords, a strong F major succeeded by a more tentative diminished chord—preparation for a series of wrenching major and minor shifts. Harmonic ambiguities and metrical instabilities abound. The figure that haunts all four movements, in various configurations, is the bass line: F–A-flat–F, Brahms’s personal motto. It stands for “Frei aber froh” (Free but happy), a play on his friend Joseph Joachim’s motto “Free but lonely.”

The more lyrical main melody is borrowed from Robert Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony. First presented by the strings, this theme imbues the entire work. It is an obvious tribute to Brahms’s late friend, the man who hailed the 20-year-old tavern pianist from Hamburg as the next Beethoven and set him up as his musical proxy in the so-called War of the Romantics—as the foil to Wagner and all that he represented. But as biographer Jan Swafford persuasively argues, Brahms’s Third recalls another Rhine besides Schumann’s, another monumental forefather: Wagner’s “atmospheric string textures,” his “grand triadic leitmotifs and themes” echo throughout. Ever the reconciler, Brahms united his mentor and his supposed rival in a symphony that ultimately stands for nothing beyond itself. 

Free but happy indeed. 

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Progressive Versus Conservative

Aside from the occasional duel, the War of the Romantics was mostly bloodless, but it galvanized concert-music culture during the second half of the 19th century. Every critic, composer, musician, and reasonably well-educated person in Central Europe wound up in one camp or the other. The opposing sides made Wagner and Brahms their proxies in a culture war that dragged on for years after the composers’ deaths. Although 20 years older than Brahms, Wagner represented the progressive faction. Part high priest, part revolutionary, he aimed to create the “music of the future,” a distillation of all the arts culminating in his “universal music drama.” Liberal-minded and relatively modest (or at least not messianic), Brahms was cast, perhaps by default, as the conservative. Most of his compositions could be classified as absolute music—free, at least explicitly, of any programmatic associations—and he chose to adapt conventional forms rather than invent new ones. 

Yet the composers admired each other, in a lopsided way. During a visit in 1864, Brahms, a superb pianist, played for the maestro, who intoned equivocally, “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.” In his diary he recorded, somewhat grudgingly, that Brahms was “no joke.” Brahms, by contrast, collected and studied Wagner scores, repeatedly declaring that he was “the best of Wagnerians.” When he was notified of Wagner’s death, he put down his conductor’s baton and announced, “Today we sing no more. A master has died.” 

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Copyright 2023 by René Spencer Saller

Christian Schmitt Organ Recital at the Meyerson

By Posted in Admirable Others, classical, Music Writing, Program Notes, Rants and Appreciations, Various Worthwhile Things Tagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment
César Franck, criminally underrated by everyone except organists

A very fine organist passed on a fellow very fine organist‘s compliments on my recent annotations to his recital today on the Lay Family Organ at the Meyerson in Dallas, and he even urged patrons to read them, which goes way beyond my wildest expectations for this Sunday. Obviously, getting compliments is a nice boost in general (unless, I guess, the compliments are coming from actual Nazis—poor Orff!), but for me, someone who is constantly aware of my overall organ ignorance, especially when it comes to the technical details that are at the very heart of organ artistry, I know just about enough to feel unequal to the task. At any rate, I’m always especially nervous about writing organ notes because I’m not an organist. I do know several organists, though, and I know how scrupulous and knowledgeable they are (and how likely to notice errors). One of my favorite classical critics, the prolific freelancer and longtime Dallas Morning News critic Scott Cantrell, trained as an organist, and I know he attends all those concerts. I have extra incentive not to screw up and embarrass myself in front of someone I respect so much.

Most of all, though, I don’t want to mess up the organ notes because I genuinely believe that more people would be interested in the pipe organ and its glorious repertoire if they knew more about it. I do not want to be a bad ambassador. Speaking for myself, I probably wouldn’t have become interested in the pipe organ if I hadn’t happened to have wandered into a free recital at the Notre-Dame Cathedrale in Paris, when I was a cash-poor and awe-struck 19-year-old fille au pair from Missouri who had never visited a city bigger than Chicago or older than New Orleans. If there was a program, I didn’t see it, and to this day I can’t remember what I heard, only that I loved the way the chords inhabited my body for a time, how the sounds could be felt as well as heard, inscribed on my musculoskeletal system like notes on staff paper.

To this day I feel certain that more lives would be greatly enriched by regular exposure to the king of instruments. You could listen to nothing but J.S. Bach fugues for the rest of your life and still find plenty to discover, but you don’t have to stop there, and you won’t want to after you get to the rest of the repertoire. Maybe you will find yourself drawn to the Bachian rigors of Max Reger, or the trance-inducing tintinnabulations of Arvo Pärt, or the languorous chromaticism and birdsong mimicry of Olivier Messiaen, or the sublime and inimitable Franckness of César Franck, but I urge you to give it a shot, especially if you associate the pipe organ with dreary sermons or civic occasions (in which case, I prescribe an immediate dose of Charles Ives’s organ music, stat!).

I’m already falling behind on both my blog content goals and my annotation schedule from my miraculously patient clients, so here are my program notes for the wonderful Christian Schmitt program. Insofar as all my links seem to be going bad, I’ll just cut and paste them from my Word document rather than linking you to the Dallas Symphony website, where they also appeared, as well as in the printed program. I extend my eternal thanks to all the organists who keep this vital art form alive. And the rest of you should try to find a local pipe organ recital in your cities and see if this music speaks to you the way it does to me and so many others.

Schmitt Organ Recital

By René Spencer Saller

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750): Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 582

Although regionally famous for his mind-bending organ improvisations and locally infamous for his hot temper, Bach lived in relative obscurity. He spent his entire life in Germany, where he was born. As an organist, a court musician, a choir master, a music teacher, and the father of 20 children, he was probably too busy to tour the continent. Yet somehow he cranked out more than a thousand compositions, in every major genre except opera. Many scholars estimate that he wrote about twice that much. Although few of his compositions were published during his lifetime and most of his original manuscripts were lost, his contributions to the solo organ repertoire are incalculable: at least 200 known works.


The Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor is among the finest of these. The passacaglia form calls for a series of variations over a repeated bass figure (basso ostinato—Italian for “obstinate bass”), usually in 3/4 or 3/2 meter. The genre was already more than a century old when Bach composed this, his only surviving organ passacaglia, probably in Weimar between 1708 and 1712. Somewhat unconventionally, he crossed the passacaglia with a chaconne—a related form that also features a basso ostinato—and created a spectacular double fugue.

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Annum per annum for Solo Organ

When Pärt was born, his native Estonia was an independent Baltic state. Five years later, the Soviet Union launched an occupation that would last for the next half-century (not counting a three-year stint under German rule). Although he attended conservatory, Soviet bureaucrats went to great lengths to prevent Pärt and his peers from hearing any music created outside the Soviet Union, aside from a few contraband scores and tapes here and there.

Although commentators today call him a “holy minimalist,” Pärt first embraced the neoclassicism of Bartók, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev before shifting to the serialism of Schoenberg. Most of the music Pärt preferred was banned by Soviet censors. Frustrated, he immersed himself in the study of plainsong and Gregorian chant—the sacred roots of early European polyphony. By focusing on the distant past, he found an original voice: austere, tonal, liturgical, and deceptively simple. He was particularly inspired by a technique he called tintinnabulation, which refers to the ringing of bells, or more specifically, to the way that sound resonates, how it blooms and decays in space over time.

In 1980 Pärt fled the Soviet Union for Vienna, later settling in Berlin. That same year he composed the organ mass Annum per annum for the 950th anniversary of the Speyer Dome Church. The mass is dedicated to Saint Mary, Mother of God and the guardian of the dome; to Emperor Conrad II, the founder of the dome; to St. Cecilia, the patroness of musicians; and to Leo Krämer, the organist at Speyer Dome Church who premiered the piece. 

Annum per annum consists of five movements, all variations on cantus firmus, the literal Latin translation of which is “firm song.” In polyphonic music the term refers to the foundational melody, the source from which all subsequent musical procedures spring. Each of the five movements contains an introduction and coda, although Pärt indicates in the score that these may be omitted by the organist if desired. The movements are distinguished by the letters K, G, C, S, A, which refer to the five ordinary parts of the Catholic mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei). 

Annum per annum is best known for its dramatic opening, in which the organist holds a gargantuan, loud-as-God chord, and then lets the notes dissipate as the air is shut off. The effect is experienced by the body as much as the mind—and who knows, maybe even the soul.

César Franck (1822–1890): Choral No. 3 in A Minor

As a composer, Franck was something of a late bloomer, although his life in music began quite early. His greedy father bullied him into the role of child prodigy on the piano-recital circuit, and he was relieved when the passage of time ended that phase of his career. Introspective and painfully awkward, he preferred poring over his counterpoint exercises and experimenting with new organ registrations. After angering his father by leaving the family home in his early 20s, he supported himself by teaching music. 

A few years later, after his marriage, Franck became a church organist, a position he cherished and retained for the rest of his life. He was widely beloved by his apprentices and students at the Paris Conservatoire, who called him Pater seraphicus (Seraphic Father). His harmonic language was indelibly marked by the magnificent Cavaillé-Coll instrument that he played for more than 30 years at Ste. Clotilde. Its rich array of stops allowed Franck to create the unique sounds and textures that characterized his compositions.

In the summer of 1890, Franck suffered a head injury after a horse-drawn trolley collided with the cab in which he was riding. Although he dismissed his symptoms as minor, they quickly worsened, and before long he could barely walk, much less fulfill his duties at the Conservatoire. He hoped to recover over vacation, and he felt well enough to compose three remarkable Chorals in just two months, completing Choral No. 1 on August 10, Choral No. 2 on September 12, and Choral No. 3 less than two weeks later. But almost as soon as he resumed teaching, he caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. He died on November 8, 1890.

The Choral No. 3 in A Minor, the last of the set, opens with a glittering two-part Toccata surrounding a lyrical Adagio, which introduces a new theme, rapturously sung by the Trompette over soft accompaniment. Although the Choral is consistent with genre conventions, Franck finds ingenious ways to combine his three main themes, weaving them into a spectacular polyphonic tapestry. You might detect the influence of Liszt, particularly his “Weinen, Klagen” Variations, as well as traces of Bach and Beethoven, but Franck retains his unmistakable Franckness throughout: psychedelic but also heavy, an unlikely mixture of the delicately ornate and the sludgy-visceral.  

A quick note on nomenclature: the word choral, as Franck understood it, refers not to the chorale, or Lutheran hymn-melody, but simply to an original theme harmonized in the style of a chorale. 


Theo Brandmüller (1948–2012): “Die Kruezigung” (The Crucifixion) and “Pieta” from Sieben Stücke zurPassionszeit (Seven Works for Passiontide)

Born in Mainz, Germany, Brandmüller began making his first public appearances as a pianist and composer while still in his teens. From 1968 to 1972, he studied music education and sacred music in Mainz and Detmold. He underwent additional training in composition with Giselher Klebe from 1970 to 1975, then with Mauricio Kagel in Cologne and Cristóbal Halffter in Madrid. In 1977 and ’78, Brandmüller studied organ with Gaston Litaize and composition with Olivier Messiaen in Paris before transitioning to a teaching career. At the time of his death in 2012, following a sudden illness, Brandmüller was a professor of composition, analysis, and organ improvisation at the Hochschule für Musik Saar, in Saarbrücken, Germany, and the recipient of many international awards and prizes. 

Brandmüller composed Sieben Stücke zur Passionsveit, from which “Die Kruezigung” and “Pieta” are extracted for this performance, in 1983. In addition to organ, it is scored for metronome and speaking voice. Brandmüller was at the console for the world premiere on April 26, 1983, at the St. Georg parish church in Mainz.  

The Composer Speaks

“The thoughts of the seven small musically related pieces revolve around the events of the Passion. Realistically ‘described’ details of the passion theme become—increasingly clear—visions; melodic sound-shapes emerge from the rhythmically bizarre initial position; the central piece, The Sweat Cloth (of Veronica), thanks to its sound mirrored form, is a reflection of today’s situation, our current situation! 

“A sarabande (The Crucifixion) and a circular canon on ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (from Bach’s Mass in B Minor) conclude the cycle. 

“All seven pieces are inspired by the passion cycle of the sculptor Richard Hess, whose unembellished, deeply felt reliefs begin to speak musically.”  —Theo Brandmüller

 

Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937): Moderato from Symphony No. 10, “Romane,” Op. 73

Born in Lyon in 1844, Widor seemed destined to serve the king of instruments. His father was the organist at Saint-François-de-Sales for more than 50 years. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who revolutionized the pipe organ for the French Romantic age, was a family friend. In 1870 Widor was hired temporarily to play organ at Saint-Sulpice, in Paris. He held on to the job until 1934, just a few years before his death at 93. (He was even buried in the crypt of Saint-Sulpice.) Among his many compositions are 10 organ symphonies; three symphonies for orchestra with organ; and Bach’s Memento, six original arrangements of music by J.S. Bach. 

Nicknamed after the architectural style of the two churches to which they were dedicated—the gothic Saint-Ouen abbey church in Rouen and the Romanesque basilica of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse—Widor’s last two symphonies represent his crowning achievement for organ. The Ninth, or “Gothic,” repurposes the Christmas Day Introit “Puer natus est nobis” (Unto us a Child is born), and the 10th, or “Romane,” uses the Easter Gradual “Haec dies quam fecit Dominus” (This is the day the Lord has made). In honoring the churches, these two symphonies also pay tribute to the organ builder, Cavaillé-Coll, whose state-of-the-art instruments grace each structure—and inform the music of each symphony. Widor himself debuted the “Gothic” in its namesake church in Rouen.

Widor’s “Romane” Symphony takes full advantage of the rich sonorities available on the Saint-Sernin’s Cavaillé-Coll. In his later years, Widor came to believe that organ music should derive its themes from sacred music; his 10th Symphony, like its predecessor, is steeped in plainsong. 

In his preface to the published score, Widor described his Easter Gradual “Haec dies” theme as “an elegant arabesque ornamenting a text of several words—about 10 notes per syllable—a vocalise as elusive as birdsong; a sort of pedal-point conceived for a virtuoso free of restraint. The only means of holding the listener’s attention with so fluid a theme is to repeat it incessantly. Such is the plan of this movement that sacrifices everything to the subject. Here and there the composer has somewhat timidly embarked in development, but this departure is quickly abandoned and the original plan of the work resumes.” 

Franz Liszt (1811–1886): “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”—Präludium nach J. S. Bach

Franz Liszt, the first superstar piano virtuoso, retired from concertizing at the peak of his fame, when he was 35 years old. A year later, the handsome and charismatic Hungarian set up house in Weimar with Princess Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein, whom he had met on his last tour and hoped to marry, pending a papal dispensation. While Liszt served as Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, he also cultivated a flock of eager young acolytes, including his daughter Cosima’s future first husband, Hans von Bülow. Up to that point Liszt had only played organ once in public, but he was a quick study. He composed most of his organ music during these Weimar years, while also conducting the works of other composers he admired, especially Beethoven; Berlioz; and his second future son-in-law, Richard Wagner, for whom Cosima left Bülow. 

One composer Liszt held in particular esteem was J.S. Bach, who had, more than a century earlier, spent several productive years in Weimar.  In fact, Bach was working in Weimar when he composed the church cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (“Weeping, lamenting, fretting, fearing”), BWV 12, for Jubilate, the third Sunday after Easter. He led the first performance at the court chapel in Weimar on April 22, 1714, the same year that he was appointed Konzertmeister, a post that required him to write and perform a new church cantata every month. 

One reason for Liszt’s renewed interest in the organ: Bach’s complete organ works, which had only recently been published for the first time. Among Liszt’s first completed works in Weimar were his piano transcriptions of a half-dozen of Bach’s preludes and fugues for organ. 

Liszt composed his variations on “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” in 1859, as a prelude for solo piano. After his daughter Blondine died in 1862, he extended the prelude into a set of 30 variations, turning it into a kind of elegy for her. He transcribed the work for organ the next year, while living in Rome, where he had moved in a last-ditch (and ultimately futile) effort to get the Pope to annul his lover’s marriage. 

Copyright 2023 René Spencer Saller

Alsop Conducts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in Ortiz, Montero, and Rimsky-Korsakov

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The Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero

On February 23 through February 25, Marin Alsop conducts the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a fantastic program featuring two contemporary works and one beloved warhorse. The concert takes place at the Meyerson, as usual, and you can buy tickets on the website.

Rather than post a link or embed the notes in a pdf, I’m just going to cut and paste them here. They’re also published on the DSO website and in the printed program books if you’re lucky enough to visit the Meyerson this weekend.

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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously observed. In Scheherazade’s case, the meaning of “live” is literal: her very survival depends on her gift for the gab. The stories she uses to captivate her murderous sultan-spouse aren’t her own inventions, but they don’t need to be. Her voice compels. It keeps her alive in the story, in every possible sense. 

Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov based his 1888 symphonic suite Scheherazade on a translation of The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales so ancient they might as well be encoded in our DNA. But before Scheherazade, which closes the concert, Maestro Alsop presents two equally colorful and compelling, if less familiar, offerings from the 21st century. In these richly imagined works, both composed within the past five years—by two distinctive Latin American women who happen to share the first name Gabriela—the woman’s voice never falters: it’s at the forefront, no longer exoticized or filtered through a male composer’s imagination and centuries of legend. Defiantly alive, emphatically themselves, Ortiz and Montero live by their own stories.

Gabriela Ortiz (born 1964): Antrópolis

Born in Mexico City to folk-musician parents, Ortiz started playing piano at eight and knew that she wanted to be a composer before she entered her teens. She studied at the National Conservatory of Music with Mario Lavista and at the National University of Mexico with Federico Ibarra. In 1990, after receiving the British Council Fellowship, she studied in London with Robert Saxton at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1992 she received a scholarship from the University of Mexico that funded a doctorate in electroacoustic music composition with Simon Emmerson at The City University in London. She currently teaches composition at the Mexican University of Mexico City, and her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes.

The recipient of many honors and awards, including the National Prize for Arts and Literature (Mexico), as well as Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, Ortiz has composed operas, orchestral works, music for chamber ensembles, and dance and film scores. Recent commissions include Clara for orchestra (The New York Philharmonic); Altar deCuerda for violin and orchestra (The Los Angeles Philharmonic); and Tzam for orchestra (Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra).

Ortiz was named a member of El Colegio Nacional (The National College) in 2022. Created in 1943 by presidential decree, this exclusive honorary academy brings together Mexico’s leading artists and scientists, who deliver lectures and seminars in their areas of expertise. Also in 2022 Ortiz was appointed curator of the Pan-American Music Initiative in conjunction with The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, an enthusiastic promoter of Ortiz’s career.

Ortiz’s parents cofounded Los Folkloristas in 1966, when Ortiz was a toddler. Members of this legendary ensemble continue to serve as ambassadors of traditional Latin folk music, which is also Ortiz’s goal—or one of them, anyway. Loaded with intoxicating polyrhythms and spiky syncopation, the orchestral piece Antrópolis evokes and reimagines the popular Mexican dance music of the 1940s and ’50s. Antrópolis, which might be translated as “Human City,” is scored for an unusual array of percussion instruments (bongos, maracas, cowbells, glockenspiels, and more) and opens with a spirited, lengthy—and dare I say deeply funky? —drum solo. 

Fulfilling a commission by the internationally renowned Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, Ortiz completed Antrópolis in early 2018. Prieto led the Orquestra Sinfónica in the world premiere on April 1, 2018, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, in Mexico City. 

The Composer Speaks

“I really enjoy dancing, for many years I went to all the clubs, visiting the Colonia Hall, the Los Angeles Hall, the Mexico Hall…. I really like the mambo; I am an admirer of Pérez Prado….

“I have always wanted to do an orchestral piece… but suddenly, why not, make it fun, sometimes everything is so intense, so why not do this side of enjoyment, pastiche, potpourri of dance clubs and lounges, especially the old ones, which are the ones that I like best.”—Gabriela Ortiz, excerpted from a 2018 interview

Gabriela Montero (born 1970): Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin”

An improviser of breathtaking skill and ingenuity, Montero ranks among the most original pianists on the planet. Like Ortiz, she collaborates regularly with the conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. In 2015 Montero won a Latin Grammy Award for her album Ex Patria, a meditation on her native Venezuela. She combines virtuosic technique with a prodigious imagination, capable, at a moment’s notice, sometimes at the request of an audience member, of whipping up a complex set of variations, adorned with harmony, counterpoint, and an infinite array of rhythmic patterns and procedures. Like a seasoned jazz musician, she can compose so fluently, so spontaneously, that it seems like a form of thinking out loud, or some kind of spooky prescience. She reminds us that the word “prodigy” is derived from the Latin word prodigium, which means “omen” or “monster.”  

Montero performed the world premiere of her Piano Concerto No. 1,”Latin,” in 2016, at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and released a recorded performance of it with Prieto and the Orchestra of the Americas on Orchid Classics three years later.

The Composer Speaks
“My story is a modern one, in many ways. I was born and raised in Venezuela until the age of eight, at which point my family moved with me to the United States for a decade. I landed at the Royal Academy of Music in London in my early 20s. I am a globalized, Latin American woman raised on a diet of European classical music with multiple, circumstantial side dishes of Pan-American folklore.

“I also consider myself to be a musician whose primary role is to tell stories that reflect the wide gamut of human experience across both time and geography. Every era and continent has its story to tell, however joyful or troubling, from Renaissance Europe to the contemporary Americas, and composers are well positioned not only to tell it, but to provide a unique form of social commentary.

“The piano is my chosen instrument as a performer, but not my only narrative tool as a composer and communicator. It should come as no surprise, then, that my first concerto should be written for the piano as solo instrument, and that it should employ traditional, European musical structures to tell my contemporary story as a well-traveled Latin-American woman.

“In a process of musical osmosis—a natural consequence of the globalized, interconnected world in which we now live—my Piano Concerto No. 1, the ‘Latin’ Concerto, honors the musical traditions that have shaped me, while inviting the cultural idioms of my native continent to the concert halls of Europe and the wider world. European formalism and the informality of Latin America’s rich, rhythmical identity merge in a complementary dance of both the joyful and macabre.

“Writing my Concerto, I set out to describe the complex and often contradictory character of Latin America, from the rhythmically exuberant to the forebodingly demonic. Unlike my previous work for piano and orchestra—the specifically Venezuelan polemic Ex Patria (2011), a musical portrait of a country in collapse—the ‘Latin’ Concerto draws upon the spirit of the broader South American continent. For every suggestion of surface celebration in the first-movement Mambo, for instance, there are undercurrents of disruption. The third-movement Allegro Venezolano, which cites the well-known Venezuelan Pajarillo, is interrupted at times by the dark arts of black magic, a symbolic reminder of the malevolent forces that, too often, hold our continent hostage to tyranny in its multiple guises. —Gabriela Montero

Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908): Scheherazade, Op. 35

The American novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten once called the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov “a musical Eurasian.” To 21st-century ears, that label sounds problematic (not to mention inaccurate), but Van Vechten—a white man deeply committed to the Black-led Harlem Renaissance artistic movement—meant it as a compliment. 

Scheherazade was inspired by The Arabian Nights or A Thousand and One Nights, an ancient compendium of Arabic, Persian, and Indian tales. Rimsky-Korsakov titled his symphonic suite for the heroine whose dilemma frames the tales: Scheherazade, who keeps her homicidal freak of a husband from killing her by hooking him on her fiction. After each new cliffhanger, the story-loving sultan postpones her execution, night after night, until finally he decides to spare her.

Although Rimsky-Korsakov acknowledged that Scheherazade consisted of “separate, unconnected episodes and pictures from The Arabian Nights,” with a unifying theme representing Scheherazade herself, he tried not to get bogged down in too much extramusical detail. In his memoir he described his artistic goals: “All I had desired was that the listener, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale marvels and not merely four pieces played one after another and composed on the basis of themes common to all four movements.”

Seascapes and Soundtracks

Rimsky-Korsakov’s descriptive titles refer to iconic scenes in the collection, not to specific stories. The first, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” juxtaposes a harsh, articulated theme, which may represent the Sultan or possibly Sinbad, and a sinuous legato motif, sung by solo violin, that suggests the beguiling voice of Scheherazade herself. The concerto-like second movement, “The Story of the Kalender Prince,” highlights various solo instruments and instrumental groupings as it enacts the many transformations of a masquerading prince. The most overtly Romantic movement, “The Prince and the Princess” is a rapturous romp that wouldn’t sound out of place on the soundtrack of a late-1940s Hollywood melodrama. 

Shipwrecks, Seductions, and Salvation

The finale contains three parts: “Festival at Baghdad,” “The Sea,” and “The Ship Is Dashed Against a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior.” Like the first movement, it opens with dramatic elaborations of the contrasting Sultan and Scheherazade themes. The mood is lively, almost nerve-wracking in its profuse variations. Strings scurry, brass stutters, and as the hysteria mounts, in come the lordly trombones intoning their grim message against a maelstrom of strings, winds, and percussion. A more ominous passage ensues, pierced by the doomy clash of a gong. Then, accompanied by gentle winds and delicate harp, Scheherazade sashays back with an acutely seductive take on her by now familiar violin theme. She has saved her own life and maybe the soul of a despot, too. As the suite closes, the violin holds one long, impossibly sweet and sustaining high note.

Copyright 2023 René Spencer Saller.

Please email me at rene.saller@att.net if you would like to reprint these notes.

Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (March 2-5)

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Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn by Wilhelm Hensel. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra, for which I am the longtime annotator, is putting my program notes online again, on their elegant and well-appointed website, which means I no longer need to download pdfs (although I might end up doing this eventually, if the links wind up as broken as the ones on some of my other pages, a deficiency of which I am regrettably aware and that I have resolved to correct eventually). But in the meantime, yay! Even though I have a backlog of program notes (hundreds of batches by now, I’m thinking), I prefer talking about concerts before they happen, if at all possible, because that means a few more people who might not have known about the concert otherwise will benefit from the advance notice and buy tickets for what promises to be a transcendent experience.

I wrote about Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony, sometimes referred to as his Symphony No. 2, for the upcoming performance on March 2-5, at the glorious and acoustically superb Meyerson. Conducted by Paul McCreesh, it should be a fantastic concert: also on the program is Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, a setting of a Milton poem. Along with the DSO and the DSO Chorus, the roster includes sopranos Susanna Phillips and Sari Gruber and tenor Nicholas Phan.

You can read my program notes here (just scan down a bit, and be sure to click on the little plus-sign icon on the right to read the full essay for each composer/work). I do retain the copyright, so if you have any interest in reprinting them, please email me at rene.saller@att.net

Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony

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Gustav-Mahler

(Gustav and Alma Mahler)

Tonight Xian and I are going to Powell Hall to hear the SLSO and SLSO Chorus, conducted by new music director and all-around swell fellow Stéphane Denève, perform Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”). Although I didn’t write the notes for that concert—or any notes for the SLSO since the beginning of last season—I did feel inspired to post my program notes (dsopn121317 ) for Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, originally published for a 2018 concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at the Meyerson in Dallas.

I’m  going to be thinking about resurrections and rebirths (René means reborn, not that I chose my own name or anything), and possibly updating this site more regularly than every several months. I do have a lot of new chamber music writing that I could add, for a Tippet Rise concert season that just ended. Tonight, at Powell Hall, I’m going to be enjoying the dulcet tones of my friend Patty Kofron and her peerless colleagues in the SLSO Chorus. Patty also helped me purchase my tickets, with the usual stipulation that I’d much rather hear well than see well. She’s a gem, and I love talking with her about music as much as I enjoy dishing the musical dirt with her.

Since this is my personal blog I should probably take the opportunity to muse more about Mahler and bring up all the Mahlerian matters that I can’t discuss in the genre of Professional Notes I Get Paid For. If I were more of a Lester Bangsian annotator, I might bring up a decades-past experience involving an illicit psychedelic substance and a recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s staggering interpretation of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. I might mention, or even reproduce, a minutely handwritten letter to a friend that I was writing while listening to this Children Death Songs cycle, over and over again, in the company of the aspiring composer I was living with, co-captain of our extremely boring-to-recount-and-yet-harrowing-to-experience trip). For several consecutive hours, neither of us wanted to listen to anything else except this song cycle about dead children, and I must thank the unnamed aspiring composer (and indirectly his professor) for hooking us up with the good stuff, that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recording, still my favorite, which was that night branded into my brain forever and ever amen. This is my favorite song in the cycle, the one I couldn’t quit hitting repeat on: “Nun will die Sonn so hell aufgehn.” If the link doesn’t work (I won’t seem to spring for the premium plan, all you profiteering WordPress executive scoundrels), just search Youtube or your favorite streaming service for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing it, and you won’t regret it.

My mind was already primed for the over-the-top intensity verging on kitsch sentimentality of the dead-child concept, thanks partly to the great Dolly Parton and her vast canon of ballads about victimized children. Listen to a lot of classic country music (Dolly and the Louvin Brothers and Leadbelly and the Carter Family and George and Tammy), as I was doing at the time of my primal, hallucinogen-enhanced Mahler encounter, and the theme of dead kids is going to come up again and again, the same way it does in Renaissance poetry and my daily newspaper (St. Louis City, my heartbreaker of a hometown, maintains a high tally of murdered children, among them my husband’s recently murdered coworker’s recently murdered 10-year-old daughter). The details change, but the acute and particular grief of surviving a child is eternal. The pain of that loss barely seems endurable, and yet millions and millions have endured it or are enduring it right now. They can’t go on, they go on.  Mahler and Dolly and the Louvin Brothers and Shakespeare and Dickens and Beckett and Morrison, so many unsung others, turn our constant sorrow into a tribute, a consolation, a promise. A grief-stained joy almost seems possible.

Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish)

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God on Trial

 by René Spencer Saller

 According to Jewish tradition, mourners recite the Kaddish to prove that they still praise God, even in their grief. Although the title for his third symphony explicitly refers to the Jewish prayer for the dead, Bernstein’s Kaddish focuses on the living. More specifically, it deals with our need to find meaning in an absurd and indifferent universe. In the emotionally fraught original text that shapes this dramatic narrative, Bernstein’s speaker and stand-in hectors God, who remains maddeningly silent; after much pleading and recrimination, the speaker eventually finds, if not peace, at least a way to go on.

In Judaism, arguing with God is a time-honored tradition. From the Old Testament’s Job to the American poet Allen Ginsberg (whose Beat epic Kaddish, dedicated to his late mother, had appeared a few years earlier), Jews had been taking the Creator to task for thousands of years. Although Bernstein expected that his Kaddish would be controversial, this challenging and underrated symphony left audience members and critics more perplexed than outraged. The score presented various difficulties, mostly owing to its outsize ambition. It juxtaposed a crisis of faith with an underlying faith in humanity; it dramatized the dream of peace in a world of strife as a struggle between harmony and dissonance. As the music shifts from sublime melodies to unsettling 12-tone excursions, the narrator accuses, negotiates, and consoles.

Written for a large orchestra, a full mixed choir, a boys’ choir, a soprano soloist, and a narrator, Kaddish asks tough existential questions and doesn’t settle for pat or reductive answers. Even though it is nominally a prayer for the dead, it never mentions death at all. Instead, it grapples with the human drive toward self-destruction, the elusiveness of faith, the infinite ways we betray and redeem one another. In English, Hebrew, Aramaic, and an even greater number of musical languages, the symphony builds a Babel, a welter of voices. Our civilization remakes itself in crisis; out of the welter of voices comes a fragile, tentative hope. The final movement ends with a resolution, but it’s an uneasy one. Whereas a conventional Christian Requiem would end on a note of triumph, Bernstein’s Kaddish closes with a dissonant, suspense-laden chord.

Bernstein was finishing up the scoring of Kaddish on November 22, 1963, when the U.S. President, whom he not only supported but considered a friend, was assassinated in downtown Dallas. Stunned and grief-stricken, he dedicated the symphony “to the beloved memory of John F. Kennedy.” A few weeks later, in Tel Aviv, Bernstein led the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the world premiere. A month after that, he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the U.S. premiere, with his spoken text recited by his wife, Felicia Montealegre. Dissatisfied with the recitation’s excessive length, he revised the work in 1977 and recorded it for the Deutsche Grammophon label. In 1981, he conducted a performance of Kaddish in Rome, where the Pope, who had recently survived an assassination attempt, was in attendance. In 1985, Bernstein led the European Community Youth Orchestra in a performance to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Do yourself a favor and track down the Youtube video. By the final movement, the Maestro’s face is wet with tears.

Copyright 2015 by René Spencer Saller

Fabio Luisi conducts the DSO

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American composer and conductor William Grant Still

On April 18, 2019, Music Director Designate Fabio Luisi led the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in a concert featuring William Grant Still’s Poem for Orchestra (1944), Frank Martin’s Concerto for Wind Instruments, Percussion, and String Orchestra (1949), and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (1813).

If you weren’t lucky enough to be present at the Meyerson, you can still check out the concert thanks to the wonders of Vimeo. The video is available to stream until May 23, 2019. It’s an exciting program, and the first two works aren’t programmed nearly often enough.

Here is a link to the concert. Remember to watch it before it disappears on May 23:

https://tinyurl.com/y2bvn482

Here are my program notes:

stillmartinbeethoven

And just for the hell of it, here is another photo of Still, because he’s a brown-eyed handsome man:

William-Grant-Still-010

Copland, Rachmaninoff, Hanson

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howard-hanson-1

The time is nigh for a Howard Hanson revival.

This weekend (April 14 and 15), Music Director David Robertson leads the SLSO in works by Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Serge Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, “Romantic” (the source of the most memorable tune from the Alien soundtrack). The soloist for the Rachmaninoff piano concerto is Simon Trpceski.

My program notes can be read here:

https://tinyurl.com/yb2w3wsn

If you can’t make it to Powell Hall in person, tune in Saturday night at 8 PM CST to St. Louis Public Radio. That’s FM 90.7 for those of you in the broadcast range, or you can click on the livestream here:

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/#stream/0

Tüür, Rautavaara, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Respighi

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erkki-sven_tueuer_foto_muusikaelu.ee

(Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, whose Solastalgia receives its U.S. premiere in these concerts.)

On Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon (March 24 and 25), St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Resident Conductor Gemma New leads the SLSO in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, Rautavaara’s Cantus Articus, Tüür’s Solastalgia (a U.S. premiere, featuring SLSO principal piccolo Ann Choomack), and Respighi’s Pines of Rome.

As usual, my program notes can be read on the SLSO website, in the Plan Your Visit section, but here is a somewhat longer version, minus the fancy formatting and cool photos:

TuurRespRaut

If you can’t make it to Powell Hall tonight or Sunday afternoon (good tickets are still available!), be sure to tune in to the live stream on St. Louis Public Radio at 8:00 PM Central Time:

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/#stream/0

Britten, Saint-Saëns, Vaughan Williams

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Camille_Saint-Saëns_in_1900_by_Pierre_Petit

This weekend (March 10 and 11), guest conductor Cristian Macelaru leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in works by Britten, Saint-Saëns, and Vaughan Williams. Special guest soloist James Ehnes performs Saint-Saëns’s Third (and final) Violin Concerto.

My program notes begin on p. 26 and can be read here:

https://tinyurl.com/yc3ahfvv

Tune in at 8 PM CST to St. Louis Public Radio on Saturday, March 10. That’s FM 90.7 for those of you in the broadcast range, or you can click on the livestream here:

http://news.stlpublicradio.org/#stream/0