Vaughan Williams Norfolk Rhapsody Program Notes The Rhapsody evokes Norfolk County in Northern England, and its seaside town, Norwich. Vaughan Williams was one of the first to collect and publish English folk songs, and quotes two in this piece. The first is a sad ballad, The Captain’s Apprentice, introduced Read more…
Vaughan Williams Lark Ascending Program Notes English poet George Meredith (1828-1909) wrote his beautiful pastoral poem The Lark Ascending in 1881. The 61 rhyming couplets of the poem, over one sentence, depict the voice of a lark, celebrating life, nature and the countryside over which he flies. Vaughan Williams Read more…
Ulric Cole Sunset Channel Program Notes Ulric Cole was born in New York in 1905 and studied in Los Angeles, then at Juilliard with Rubin Goldmark, and in 1927 in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Blitzstein, Gershwin, Glass, Menotti and countless others). After the success of Cole’s Serenade for Piano Read more…
Tchaikovsky The Tempest Program Notes Tchaikovsky’s reading of Shakespeare’s final, and most mysterious play, led to this Fantasy-Overture, perhaps a deeper work than the more popular Romeo & Juliet. It presents the major characters and themes programmatically, and also suggests the moral ambiguity of nature. Prospero, the Duke of Milan, Read more…
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 Program Notes Tchaikovsky waited until his twenties before devoting himself to composition, quitting his Civil Service law job to study music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1860s St. Petersburg, he would have heard the concerts given by Hector Berlioz, and the French composer’s innovations in orchestral Read more…
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 Program Notes Ten years before this Fifth symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth stood out from the three earlier symphonies, with its fatalistic, anxious, and unsettled first movement. It was written in a time of personal crisis and despair, which included his unsuccessful marriage to a former student (two and Read more…
Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 3 Program Notes While not one of Tchaikovsky’s three final, fatalistic and most performed symphonies, the Third is rightly popular, not least for its use by George Balanchine in his 1967 evening-length ballet Jewels. Interestingly, Tchaikovsky had ballet on the mind when composing the Third Symphony, as Read more…
Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations Program Notes The Rococo Variations, for cello and orchestra, is a very different piece to some of the other works Tchaikovsky completed in 1876, including the ballet Swan Lake, or the tone poem Francesca da Rimini (scored for a large orchestra and inspired by Dante’s depiction of murdered Read more…
Tchaikovsky Nutcracker Suite Program Notes Young Clara Stahlbaum, in the story by E. T. A. Hoffman, is given a nutcracker doll with the appearance of a prince, by her godfather (and a magician), Drosselmeyer, at a Christmas party. After midnight, with nearly everyone asleep, the doll transforms into the prince it Read more…
Britten The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell Program Notes Not too long after returning from Lenox, Massachusetts, where he’d workshopped his new opera Peter Grimes with the students at Tanglewood (and their young conductor, Leonard Bernstein), English composer Benjamin Britten was brought Read more…