Claude Debussy composed the Children’s Corner suite between 1906 and 1908. He dedicated the suite to his daughter, Claude-Emma (known as “Chou-Chou”), who was born on October 30, 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).
Claude-Emma died in 1919 at only 13 years old, just a year after her father. The suite was published by Durand in 1908, and was given its world premiere in Paris by Harold Bauer on December 18 of that year. In 1911, an orchestration of the work by Debussy’s friend André Caplet received its premiere. The suite is in six movements, each with an English-language title.
Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum is a knowing reference used for many centuries for instructional books and music, literally translated as “steps to Parnassus.” It nods to the tedium of scale practice, transforming the mundane to his characteristic washes of sound and grand gestures.
In Jimbo’s Lullaby, a child’s stuffed elephant is lovingly brought to life, presumably mis-named after P. T. Barnum’s magnificent mammal Jumbo. The opening melody lumbers in the lower basses, representing our happy elephant.
Serenade for the Doll depicts the conversations of a Chinese porcelain doll, and of course, what musical element is more appropriate (clichéd?) than to use the five-note musical scale and frequent intervals of a fourth?
In The Snow Is Dancing, Debussy paints an icy landscape with shivering strings and floating winds.
Classical music fans will hear nods to Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun in The Little Shepherd, with an oboe leading the pastoral descent.
Golliwogg’s Cakewalk is the most famous and lively of the movements, and is emblematic of French society’s enthrallment with the new sound of jazz, which was emerging in the United States at that time. The cakewalk was a dance that was a mainstay of American minstrel shows, and characterized by syncopations and vigorous, strutting rhythm. “Golliwogg” was a black, stuffed doll, dressed in stereotypical minstrel show garb, and completely en vogue at the time; Chouchou may have owned one.
Debussy’s nod to jazz bookends a satirical reference to Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, barely masking the composer’s contempt for the German master.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was a well-known British composer at the turn of the last century. The son of an Englishwoman and a father from Sierra Leone, he started violin lessons at age five, and quickly established himself as a composer and conductor.
He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In 1898 Coleridge-Taylor composed the “African Suite” for solo piano after meeting with the African-American poet Paul Dunbar, who encouraged him to explore his African heritage. Coleridge-Taylor arranged the last movement (“Danse Nègre”) for full orchestra, and it has since become a well-known showpiece. It features lively dance rhythms framed in a Victorian musical idiom, with contrasting lyrical sections featuring a late-romantic sensibility.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the son of Julius Korngold, the most influential music critic in early 20th-century Vienna. His parents, who came from a bourgeois Jewish background, gave their son his middle name in honor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He grew up in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a world capital of music – the city of Brahms, Strauss and Mahler. Korngold was regarded as one of the most avant-garde Viennese composers of his day. A musical prodigy, he started composing at the age of six. When he was 10, his father took him to meet the great Gustav Mahler, who pronounced him “a genius.” His works, including piano pieces, a piano trio, and a ballet-pantomime, started being published in his early teens. Numerous other compositions followed, including operas (such as “Die tote Stadt”), piano sonatas, chamber music, songs, and other stage works.
He thrived up until the mid-1930s, when the threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany started to loom large. In 1934, Korngold was asked by Max Reinhardt, a prominent director with whom Korngold had collaborated in Europe, to travel to Hollywood to work on scoring music for motion pictures. His first film score in 1934 was for a film version of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and was a success. Despite that, Korngold was not comfortable in Hollywood and went back to Vienna in 1937. As the Nazi threat to Austria loomed, Korngold fortunately was offered another Hollywood contract to score films and took it, leaving Vienna in early 1938 right before the Nazi takeover of Austria.
Once in Hollywood Korngold became the most celebrated film composer of cinema’s “golden age.” Drawing on his musical background in concert music, opera and operetta, he wrote scores for such celebrated films as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Captain Blood,” Elizabeth and Essex,” “The Sea Hawk,” “Green Pastures,” and many others, winning two Oscars for film scoring. Through his film scores, Korngold created the “Hollywood style” of film music, which still influences film composers up to the present day.
During World War II, Korngold focused exclusively on his film scores. After 1945, he began once again to compose classical pieces – among them two concertos, a symphony and a string quartet. His violin concerto – with its soaring lyricism, virtuosic demands, and cinematic drama – quickly became a favorite of the solo violin repertoire. It was premiered by Jascha Heifetz in 1947 and was an artistic triumph, quickly becoming a staple of the violin concerto literature. Its style is hyper late-romantic, with Korngold’s lush tonal colors and typical instrumentation featuring vibraphone, harp, celesta, glockenspiel and bells.
The concerto is in three movements, each of which is based on themes taken from his 1930s film scores. The Moderato nobile is in a traditional format (exposition, second theme, development, recapitulation, and coda). Its opening soaring theme (in fourths and fifths) is taken from his film “Another Dawn.” Its second lyrical theme comes from “Juarez.” The meditative Romance is a prolonged meditation on a love theme (”Anthony Adverse”), and features a “mysterioso” section in the middle which pushes harmonic boundaries. The Finale is based on themes from “The Prince and the Pauper,” featuring a rollicking initial motif introduced by the soloist, and a dramatic second-theme climax leading to a triumphant ending.
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.
