Strauss Fledermaus Overture Program Notes Strauss’s Fledermaus has a convoluted plot with many comedic opportunities. Prince Orlofsky is throwing a ball (in the original version it was to be a New Year’s party), and there are all sorts of ploys at hand. The character Falke is trying to visit revenge Read more…
Strauss Death and Transfiguration Program Notes Three themes of the Romantic era are love, nature or death, and the Romantics focused on creating a personal and subjective response in the audience, to have them feel what they felt. Stunningly, Strauss was 24 years old when he began this piece. (It Read more…
Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition Program Notes Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition. Like other members of The Mighty Handful (Rimsky-Korsakoff, Borodin, et al), Modest Mussorgsky aimed to create a Russian musical sound. As a very young child, he’d been drawn to the piano, musically retelling his nanny’s Russian tales. In St. Read more…
Kent Kennan Night Soliloquy Program Notes Kent Kennan composed little, if anything, in his last 65 years. Yet Howard Hanson recorded some of his music with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra for Mercury Records, and he probably received encouragement to compose more. Instead, he concentrated on his teaching, which for most of Read more…
John Adams The Chairman Dances Program Notes It’s an amazing thing to see “Nixon in China” in the theater. Set in 1972, the opera is about the three days Nixon spent in Beijing, along with Pat Nixon, Secretary of State William Rogers, and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who had Read more…
Anthony Mosakowski Concert Overture Program Notes It’s always exciting to introduce a piece of music to an audience for the first time, especially a work like Anthony Mosakowski’s Concert Overture, with its great energy, artistry, sense of melody and craft. The Overture, for an orchestra of single winds, varied percussion, harp, piano Read more…
Ann Wyeth McCoy A Christmas Fantasy Program Notes A young Ann Wyeth composed this piece and, aged 19, entered it in a competition for young composers held by the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was premiered the next December, conducted by music director Leopold Stokowski. Ann’s father N.C. Wyeth first came from Read more…
Beethoven Egmont Overture Program Notes We can’t appropriate Beethoven’s exact politics (although thousands have tried), but we can be certain he identified with the concept of freedom (setting Schiller’s Ode to Joy, with its defeat to the lying brood of undeserving crowns). Egmont is no exception, Beethoven enthusiastically writing incidental music Read more…
Duke Ellington Harlem Program Notes Duke Ellington’s prolific composing and performing career led to approximately 1000 works, such as songs “Take the A-Train,” “Caravan,” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” as well as some longer works, including tone-poems, and fascinating “Swinging Suites,” jazz versions of both Grieg’s Peer Gynt incidental Read more…
Dukas La Péri Fanfare Program Notes In Persian mythology, a Péri, like the Western folkloric Fairy, has a morally ambiguous position: its magical powers can be used for positive ends or otherwise. For the 1911 Paris season of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev commissioned Dukas to compose a fantastical one-act Read more…