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
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.
Peter Warlock was a British composer and music critic who was well-known for his interest in and reinvention of early music, particularly Elizabethan and Renaissance styles, and was also recognized for his original compositions, mostly songs. He was also known for his colorful and bohemian lifestyle. Peter Warlock, born Philip Heseltine, adopted several pseudonyms, with “Peter Warlock” being the most famous. He chose this name to reflect his fascination with the occult, as “Warlock” implies a practitioner of witchcraft. For his music reviews, Heseltine also used other playful pseudonyms, including “Rab Noolas” (“Saloon Bar” spelled backwards).
His Capriol Suite, composed in 1926, evokes the spirit of Renaissance dance. The piece is based on tunes from Thoinot Arbeau’s 1589 Orchésographie, a manual of French Renaissance dances. Warlock reimagined these historic tunes, infusing them with his own flair and creating a work that feels both nostalgic and modern. Each of the suite’s six short movements is inspired by a different dance form.
The opening Basse-Danse sets the tone with its stately rhythms, evoking the grandeur of a Renaissance court and is followed by the haunting Pavane. The energetic Tordion (from the French “tordre”, meaning “to twist”) lightens the mood with its brisk tempo while the Bransles (from the French “branler”, meaning “to sway”) provides a rustic charm. The gentle Pieds-en-l’air (meaning feet in the air) offers a serene interlude with its dreamy melody, leading into the bold, high energy final movement, Mattachins (Sword Dance).
Originally composed as a piano duet, the Capriol Suite is most often performed by string orchestras. It’s a perfect piece for both musicians and audiences, blending ancient melodies with modern flair.
The idea for Tzigane (from the generic European term for “gypsy”) may have come in 1922 after an evening when Ravel heard violinist Jelly d’Aranyi play his new Sonata for Violin and Cello. One account suggests that Ravel was so impressed by d’Aranyi’s playing that after the recital he stayed and asked her to play “gypsy” tunes from her native Hungary all night. These tunes may have served as inspiration for Tzigane, completed in 1924, but Ravel also drew ideas from Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies and Paganini’s Caprices.
Ravel described Tzigane as “a virtuoso piece in the style of a Hungarian Rhapsody.” The first iteration of the composition was written for violin and piano with an attached device called a luthéal, which allowed the piano to mimic the Hungarian hammered dulcimer sound. Later that year Ravel composed an orchestral accompaniment.
The virtuosic piece starts slowly with a lengthy cadenza-like section for solo violin that is nearly half the length of the entire composition. The technical demands for the violinist are significant and include arpeggios, multiple stops, octaves, and left-hand pizzicatos. In fact, Ravel wrote in a letter to d’Arányi. “You have inspired me to write a short piece of diabolical difficulty.”
As the orchestra enters, it heralds the main dancelike portion of the composition. The gradually picks up speed as it accelerates towards the final “Presto”. Over the 100 years since this crowd-pleasing work was composed, Tzigane has been described as “fiery”, “dazzling”, “full of fireworks”, and “scorching.”
In 1924, a gifted 19-year-old student at Petrograd Conservatory began his senior composition project. Soon after completion, with enthusiastic faculty recommendations, including that of the director and composer Alexander Glazunov, the First Symphony was performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic under Bruno Walter, and the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopoldo Stokowski. Dmitri Shostakovich had become an immediate international sensation.
But the path to success was fraught with upheaval. At ten years old, his middle-class life was upended by the communist revolution, which ended 400 years of the Romanov dynasty.
Shostakovich and his family endured famine and fuel shortages. After his father died, he helped bring in extra money by improvising on piano at silent movie theaters. (Despite his ambivalence about the medium, he became a fan of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.) This job developed Shostakovich’s fluency in translating drama and story into musical language, so it is unsurprising that the piano, typically not found in the orchestra, is one of the most prominent instruments. The piano provides expressive melodic sweeps and aggressive punctuation — sometimes commenting on the action (like a film) and at other times being the main focus.
Shostakovich’s distinct and original musical voice is already present in Symphony No. 1. While less known than many of his later works, it’s a thrilling piece full of sardonic edginess, pained introspection and dramatic outbursts, and closing with a blaring finale. Shostakovich’s works should always be a little rough around the edges — especially the musical outpourings of an unstable teenager whose world was uncontrollably changing. We hope you are captivated by his power, seduced by his wit, and enchanted by his many musical surprises.
22 minutes. Instrumentation: 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 1 trumpet, timpani, percussion, strings, and solo oboe.
Ruth Gipps, born into a British musical family, was a prolific composer, accomplished oboist, pianist, conductor, and educator. As a child prodigy on the piano, she won performance competitions against much older contestants and performed her first composition at the age of 8.
As an oboist, married to a clarinetist, and mother of a horn player, Gipps composed with a deep understanding of wind instruments. Her oboe concerto, written in 1941 when she was only 20, is no exception and draws on pastoral themes of Gipps’ surroundings.
A dark and stormy theme opens the piece, with a foreboding ostinato (persistent motif) in conflict with the lyrical solo oboe. Throughout the movement, an uneasy call and response passes throughout the orchestra. The second movement is a wistful dialogue between oboe, clarinet, and solo violin, accompanied by strings. The pastoral third movement begins with the oboe plummeting into a sprightly jig. The energy shifts to a quasi-improvisational oboe interlude accompanied by a drone in the winds reminiscent of a Scottish reel. The oboe closes out the movement with a fiery cadenza and a return to spinning, dancing, and joy.
Gipps’ career encompassed orchestral playing, solo performances, studying, teaching, conducting, and composing until age 33, when an injury forced her to focus mainly on composing and conducting. Her compositions often draw inspiration from Vaughan Williams. Because she rejected the evolving trends in modern music, such as serialism and twelve-tone music, people began to think of her music as old-fashioned. Affected by gender discrimination, she was limited from the performing, recording, and broadcasting of her work during her lifetime.
It took 80 years for her Oboe Concerto to have its American premiere, with the Richmond Symphony in 2021. Her work has begun a revival, which is something she predicted would happen: “I know I am a real composer, perhaps they will only realise it when I am dead.” This afternoon’s performance is the concerto’s New York premiere.
