Emilie Luise Frederica Mayer was a German Romantic composer who became one of the most prolific female composers of the 19th century. Often called the “Female Beethoven,” Mayer composed eight symphonies and numerous chamber works, piano sonatas, and orchestral overtures. Despite the limited opportunities for women in professional music during her time, she achieved wide recognition and public performance of her music across Germany. —Wikipedia
Debussy composed Children’s Corner between 1906 and 1908. He dedicated the suite to his daughter, Claude-Emma (known as “Chou-Chou”), who was born on 30 October 1905 in Paris. She is described as a lively and friendly child who was adored by her father. She was three years old when he dedicated the suite to her in 1908. The dedication reads: “A ma chère petite Chouchou, avec les tendres excuses de son Père pour ce qui va suivre. C. D.” (To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows).
The suite was published by Durand in 1908, and was given its world première in Paris by Harold Bauer on 18 December that year. In 1911, an orchestration of the work by Debussy’s friend André Caplet received its premiere, and was subsequently published.
The suite is in six movements, each with an English-language title. This choice of language is most likely Debussy’s nod towards Chou-Chou’s English governess. The pieces are:
Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum
Jimbo’s Lullaby
Serenade for the Doll
The Snow Is Dancing
The Little Shepherd
Golliwogg’s Cakewalk
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was a British composer and conductor. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 23. Coleridge-Taylor sought to draw from traditional African music and integrate it into the classical tradition, which he considered Johannes Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák with Bohemian music.
After Coleridge-Taylor’s death in 1912, musicians were concerned that he and his family had received no royalties from his Song of Hiawatha, which was one of the most successful and popular works written in the previous 50 years. (He had sold the rights early in order to get income.) His case contributed to their formation of the Performing Right Society, an effort to gain revenues for musicians through performance as well as publication and distribution of music.
King George V granted Jessie Coleridge-Taylor, the young widow, an annual pension of £100, evidence of the high regard in which the composer was held.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (May 29, 1897 – November 29, 1957) was an Austrian composer and conductor, who fled Europe in the mid-1930s and later adopted US nationality. A child prodigy, he became one of the most important and influential composers in Hollywood history. He was a noted pianist and composer of classical music, along with music for Hollywood films, and the first composer of international stature to write Hollywood scores.
Korngold had vowed to give up composing anything other than film music, with which he supported himself and his family, until Hitler had been defeated. With the end of World War II, he retired from films to concentrate on music for the concert hall. The Violin Concerto was the first such work that Korngold wrote. The concerto was dedicated to Alma Mahler, the widow of Korngold’s childhood mentor Gustav Mahler. —Wikipedia
Overture from the incidental music composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1909. It was written for the Cambridge Greek Play production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was Vaughan Williams’ first of only three forays into incidental music. —Wikipedia
The seventh of the twelve London symphonies (Hoboken numbers 93–104) written by Joseph Haydn. This symphony was written in 1793 in Vienna in anticipation of his second trip to London.
The work was premiered on February 10, 1794 at the Hanover Square Rooms in London, with Haydn directing the orchestra seated at a fortepiano.
George Theophilus Walker (June 27, 1922 – August 23, 2018) was an American composer, pianist, and organist, and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996.
Originally titled Lament, the Lyric for Strings was first composed as the second movement of Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 in 1946 while he was a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music. The piece was given its world premiere later that year by the student orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music conducted by Seymour Lipkin.
In 1990, Walker expanded the work for string orchestra, retitling it Lyric for Strings; this new arrangement subsequently became Walker’s most performed composition. The work is dedicated to Walker’s grandmother, Melvina King, a formerly enslaved person, who died shortly before its completion. —Wikipedia
The composer dedicated the concerto to Natalie Ouchkoff, his fiancé, whom he married the year of the composition’s premiere. The work’s production came at a time of little repertoire for the double bass, which was often considered as an instrument only for ensembles.
Some bassists argue that Koussevitzky did not write the entire concerto himself, instead receiving help from his friend, Reyngol’d Glière. But others argue that the concerto is tailored too closely to the double bass to have been written by someone who does not play the instrument.
The sole passacaglia of J.S. Bach (1685-1750) was first composed for a double-manual pedal harpsichord, and subsequently transcribed for organ. He worked on this masterpiece between 1708 and 1712 — when he was only in his 20’s! Borrowing from the solo chaconne form, this meditation in space opens with a solemn eight-bar ostinato theme in C minor. Eventually, the anchoring theme in the pedals moves to upper voices in twenty variations, and the theme transforms again when it concludes with a double fugue. This fugue is built on the first part of the passacaglia theme in combination with a countertheme in eighth notes. The work closes with a massive climax of suspended harmonies and full instrumental sonority, using all the colors of the orchestra. Robert Schumann described the variations of the passacaglia as “intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed.”
Leopold Stokowski, who created this symphonic transcription, said of this piece, “Bach’s passacaglia is in music, what a great Gothic cathedral is in architecture – the same vast conception – the same soaring mysticism given eternal form. He left us no orchestral compositions of this grandeur, probably because the orchestra was too little developed in his time. His Brandenburg Concerti and the Orchestral Suites are more intimate works written for the salon. The most free and sublime instrumental expressions of Bach are his greater organ works, and one of the greatest of these is the Passacaglia in C Minor. Many do not often enough have the opportunity to hear it, and so to bring it nearer to those who love Bach’s music, I have made this symphonic transcription.
“This passacaglia is one of those musical conceptions whose content is so full and significant, that its medium of expression is of relative unimportance. Whether played on the organ, or by the greatest of all instruments — the orchestra — it is one of the most divinely inspired creations ever conceived.”
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail (b. 1983) originally wrote Rosa De Sal for soprano and piano, using text from Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neurda’s Sonnet XVII. Esmail is known for interweaving raag with traditional Western orchestral colors. A raag is a melodic framework in Indian classical music, used for improvisation and evoking specific emotions in the listener. The word originates from the Sanskrit word for “color,” meaning it “colors the mind” with feelings like joy, sadness, devotion, or romance. Each raag has a unique set of rules and melodic structures, often associated with a particular time of day or season, and forms the basis for improvisation in the music. This version for trumpet and orchestra was commissioned by Mary Elizabeth Bowden, and premiered in 2023.
In Esmail’s own words, “The poetry of Neruda is at once so direct and so subtle. How better to capture the beautiful, intimate, subtle sensation of loving another person? The sensation of the poem led me to a setting based on the Hindustani raag of Puriya Dhanashree — which is also dark and longing, which reaches out past those quotidian comforts into the vast complexity of desire. I could say more — but the text says it better than I ever could:”
Sonnet XVII
Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Taspcott
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other waythat this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.