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.
Just fifteen years ago, piles of sheet music and writings were discovered in an abandoned house slated for demolition. Inside were dozens of unpublished scores, including a symphony and two violin concertos. The house had been the summer residence of Florence Price, a child prodigy who was valedictorian at 14 and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music. She was a pianist, organist, teacher, and composer who had written over 300 pieces of music: four symphonies, four concertos, choral works, vocal work, chamber music, and solo pieces, as well as popular songs. She achieved a degree of success, but during her lifetime she faced challenges in achieving recognition and performance opportunities due to racial and gender bias. Despite that, her “Symphony in E minor” was performed by the Chicago Symphony orchestra in 1933, making her the first Black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra.
The Second Violin Concerto, completed a year before her death (and later found in the abandoned house), was written in a single movement in the form of a rhapsody. It is framed in the western classical structure, combining lyrical romanticism, impressionist harmonies, and elements of West African and African American spiritual and dance traditions. It is a compact single movement work, richly orchestrated, with contrasting motivic sections and bravura solo violin passages.
As Antonin Dvorak had incorporated folk and national elements into his music, Price, along with other composers of the time, sought to further expand the classical canon with a fusion of traditional and vernacular. Alex Ross, in the New Yorker, wrote, “This terse, beguiling piece has an autumnal quality reminiscent of the final works of Richard Strauss. It deserves to be widely heard.”
Here’s a video of the orchestra’s performance on February 24, 2024. Ashley Horne is the violinist, Michael F. Tietz conducts.
Violin Concerto No. 2 written by Florence Price used by permission of G. Schirmer, Inc., Publisher
Satie was a musical iconoclast who sought to lead French music from Impressionism to a more minimalist, experimental approach. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on a number of modern artists, including John Cage, Philip Glass, and Brian Eno.
His formal musical training began in 1879, when at age 12 he was enrolled in the preparatory piano class at the Paris Conservatoire. However, he strongly disliked it, and a few years later was expelled for unsatisfactory performance. Rejecting his restrictive, traditional upbringing, he embraced an eccentric, bohemian lifestyle and earned a living as a cabaret pianist, adapting more than a hundred compositions of popular music for piano, or piano and voice.
He became involved in avant-garde music and art circles in the early 20th century, becoming a friend and collaborator of many famous artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and James Joyce. He composed music for Cocteau’s play “Parade,” which featured set and costume designs by Picasso. His close friend, Claude Debussy, was a kindred spirit in his experimental approach to composition. Both were bohemians, enjoying the same café society and struggling to survive financially. Satie composed most of his works for solo piano, including two “Gymnopédies” in 1888 (plus another in 1895), and “Gnossiennes” in 1889.
In 1897 Debussy arranged two of the Gymnopédies for orchestra (the ones we are performing today). “Gymnopédie” may refer to a classical Greek annual festival where young men danced naked – or perhaps simply unarmed. The source of the title has been a subject of debate. The Gymnopédies are characterized by slow tempos, simple melodic lines, at once melancholic and atmospheric. The Gymnopédies are among the most publicly recognizable of Satie’s works. They have been featured in many artists’ arrangements, movies, and television shows.
Mabel Wheeler Daniels (1877-1971) was an American composer, conductor, and teacher. Based in Boston, Daniels studied at Radcliffe College, The Royal Conservatory in Munich, and with composer George Chadwick.
Daniels was inspired to write “Deep Forest” after many summers at the MacDowell Colony, a storied retreat in New Hampshire for American poets, artists, and composers. Enveloped in nature, Daniels composed an atmospheric tone poem to reflect her tranquil surroundings.
Originally scored for small orchestra and performed in 1931, “Deep Forest” in its full orchestral form was first performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra under Nicolai Sokoloff in 1934. It was later played by orchestras in Washington DC, Rochester, Harrisburg, London, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.
“Deep Forest” was Daniels’ first purely orchestral work and shows her background in vocal writing. Listen for lyrical lines in the winds, the horns’ atmosphere and drama, and lush string chords. Tritones and diminished chords abound, adding to the sense of mystery.
What do you hear as you venture into the Deep Forest?
This lovely work, which Debussy composed in 1904, had its genesis in a rivalry between two harp makers. Sebastian Erard had perfected the pedal harp early in the 19th century. Pedal harps use foot pedals to raise or lower the pitch of a harp’s strings, and have become the standard instrument played by harpists. However, seeking to improve upon this design, in 1894 Gustave Lyon of the Pleyel firm invented a “chromatic” harp, an instrument with strings for every half step (similar to the white and black keys on a piano).
To publicize his new instrument, the Pleyel company commissioned Debussy to write a piece showcasing the abilities of the chromatic harp. This turned out to be his 2-movement Danses Sacrée et Profane for harp and strings, which he dedicated to Gustave Lyon. While the chromatic harp is now mostly relegated to museums, fortunately this work can also be played on pedal harp, and it has become a beloved mainstay of the harp repertoire.
The first, “sacred,” dance begins in a slow and stately mood set by unison strings, joined by the harp in an uplifting reverie, with numerous ascending and descending chromatic passages. The “secular” dance, which follows without a break, is in the form of a lilting waltz, with various statements of the main theme traded back and forth between the harp and strings. Towards the end of the piece, a short introspective reverie makes its appearance. The waltz then resumes at a joyous pace, followed by a majestic and sonorous ending.
Between 1930 and 1945, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos composed a series of nine pieces titled “Bachianas Brasileiras.” Scored for different combinations of instruments and voices, they feature a mix of Brazilian harmonic and rhythmic elements while also reflecting contrapuntal and other baroque, Bachian elements. This Aria is arguably Villa-Lobos best-known work. The lyrics are by Ruth Correa:
In the evening, a dreamy, pretty cloud, slow and transparent, covers outer space with pink. In the infinite the moon rises sweetly, beautifying the evening, like a friendly girl who prepares herself and dreamily makes the evening beautiful. A soul anxious to be pretty shouts to the sky, the land, all of Nature. The birds silence themselves to her complaints, and the sea reflects all of Her [the moon’s] wealth. The gentle light of the moon now awakens the cruel saudade [nostalgic or melancholic longing] that laughs and cries. In the evening, a dreamy, pretty cloud, slow and transparent, covers outer space with pink.
We are performing this moving piece as a memorial to Kurt Behnke, who passed away from Covid-19 early in the pandemic (March 2020). Kurt was an outstanding ‘cellist, member of our orchestra, and good friend to many of us. It is our way of honoring him and all the victims of the pandemic.
Can youheara sunrise and sunset? Besides his well-known six symphonies, Danish composerCarl Nielsenwrote many short orchestral works, including the“Helios Overture.”
In 1902, Nielsen signed a contract with the publisher Wilhelm Hansen, which allowed him to go to Athens, Greece to join his wife Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, a sculptor who was making copies of the bas-reliefs and statues in the Acropolis Museum. From his practice room in Athens, he watched the sun rising and setting over the Aegean Sea, and was inspired to write an overture after the Greek god of the sun.
While theHelios Overturewas inspired by triumphant Greek myths, it’s easy to hear the influence of his Danish roots— listen for the opening horn tones echoing through frozen fjords!
On the score, Nielsen wrote,
“Silence and darkness,
The sun rises with a joyous song of praise,
It wanders its golden way
and sinks quietly into the sea.”
