Composers Datebook

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Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.

  1. 11시간 전

    Libby Larsen’s Trio

    Synopsis Angel Fire is a village in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, home to ski slopes and hiking trails, plus a summer mountain-bike park and zip line. And, since 1983, it’s also the home of a late summer music festival called Music from Angel Fire. Early on, violinist Ida Kavafian was invited to serve as the Festival’s Artistic Director, a position she maintained through 2019. Kavafian returned on today’s date in 2001 to perform in the premiere of a newly commissioned trio by Libby Larsen — along with cellist Peter Wiley and pianist Melvin Chen — this just one of over 45 premieres that have taken place at the Festival to date. The trio is a classically-proportioned work in three movements: the first movement, Sultry, and the third, Burst, are rhythmic, fast, and hauntingly jazz-like. In between, the second movement, Still is serene, free flowing, and quiet. Larsen said, “I compose music for the concert hall. I chose this type of music because I love physics. Flutes, cellos, trumpets, tubas, all of the orchestral instruments emit natural sound, and they operate on the laws of physics. I can hear those laws working in the air when those instruments play.” Music Played in Today's Program Libby Larsen (b. 1950): Movement 3 (Bursts) from Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano; Curtis Macomber, violin; Norman Fischer, cello; Jeanne Kierman, piano; Navona Records NV-6014

  2. 1일 전

    Bingham's Secret Garden

    Synopsis At the BBC Proms on today’s date in 2004 Proms a new piece by the British composer Judith Bingham was premiered by the BBC Chorus. The Secret Garden was inspired by several events: a conversation about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, a BBC TV series, The Private World of Plants, some rather racy descriptions of the sex life of plants by the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and a disturbing news story about the bombing of the so-called “Adam Tree” in Iraq at a site that locals believe was where the Garden of Eden once stood. Bingham wrote her own text, which includes many Latin names of plants, which led to The Secret Garden’s subtitle: Botanical Fantasy. “This is meant to be a magical piece. It has a Christian framework with opening and closing quotations from Genesis and Matthew … but the piece also seems to wonder whether the world is better off without humans, and that, should humans cease to exist, Paradise would very soon re-establish itself …” she said. Music Played in Today's Program Judith Bingham (b. 1952): The Secret Garden; BBC Symphony Chorus; Thomas Trotter, oboe; Stephen Jackson, conductor; Naxos 8.570346 (live Proms recording of the premiere performance)

  3. 4일 전

    Monteverdi gets mugged (and a new job)

    Synopsis August 1613 proved to be an especially eventful month in the life and career of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. The previous summer his old employer, Duke Vincenzo of Mantua, had died, and Monteverdi was looking for a job. Fortunately, the position of Master of Music for the Republic of Venice opened up, and, on today’s date Monteverdi was probably rehearsing musicians for a trial concert of his music at St. Mark’s Cathedral. The concert was a success. Monteverdi got the job, a generous salary, and even a cash advance to cover the move from his home. So much for the good news — on his trip back home, Monteverdi was robbed by highwaymen armed with muskets. In a surviving letter, Monteverdi described the incident in some detail, noting that the muskets were very long and of the flint-wheel variety, and that he lost more than a hundred Venetian ducats. Despite the trauma — and the humiliation of being strip-searched for valuables by one of the robbers — Monteverdi recovered his fortunes in Venice. In addition to his church duties at St. Mark’s, he became famous writing a newfangled sort of commercial entertainment called opera, and lived to the ripe old age of 77. Music Played in Today's Program Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): “Che dar piu vi poss’io” from Fifth Book of Madrigals; Consort of Musicke; Anthony Rooley, conductor; L’oiseau Lyre 410 291

  4. 5일 전

    Arvo Part's "Brothers" in Salzburg

    Synopsis In 1980, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt emigrated from his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Austria. Since the 1960s, Pärt’s increasingly spiritual and overtly religious music, imbued with mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, did not sit well with the communist authorities, and Pärt found it increasing hard to live and work in Estonia. On today’s date in 1980, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, another Baltic artist, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, gave the premiere performance of a new violin-piano arrangement of Part’s Fratres, or Brothers — an instrumental work from 1977 that Pärt subsequently rescored for a variety of ensembles. In the version commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, the original harmonic material resides in the serene piano part, while the violin plays virtuosic variations above it. That serenity is the result of Pärt’s effort to — as he put it — “learn to walk again as a composer.” He came up with a term, tintinnabulation, for the simplicity and directness of expression he sought. “Tintinnabulation is like this,” writes Pärt. “I am alone with silence. I work with very few elements … The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.” Music Played in Today's Program Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Fratres; Gidon Kremer, violin; Keith Jarrett, piano; ECM 1275

  5. 6일 전

    Gershwin and Daugherty go Latin

    Synopsis In the 1950s, if you said the words “Cuban music,” perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing Babaloo might come to mind. These days, it’s more likely the Buena Vista Social Club. On today’s date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his Cuban Overture under its original title Rumba. Cuban dance music has always proved appealing to North American composers and long before Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works. In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song “America” in Bernstein’s hit musical, West Side Story. And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line, Desi, a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of Ricky Ricardo. Music Played in Today's Program George Gershwin (1898-1937): Cuban Overture; New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, conductor; Teldec 46318 Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Desi!; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor; Argo 444 454

  6. 8월 15일

    Leon Theremin's good vibrations

    Synopsis When a flying saucer circled over Washington, D.C. in the classic 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, it did so to music played on an electronic instrument known as the Theremin. Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1896. In 1927 he traveled to America, where he obtained a patent for an electronic instrument he called the Thereminovox. In the 1930s, he arranged concerts for his creation at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Then, in 1938, without explanation, he disappeared. Some said it was because he was in debt, others because he was married to two women at the same time. The truth was even stranger: Theremin was a spy. He had been passing on American technical information to the Soviets. Ironically, when he returned home, he was immediately thrown into a Soviet prison for seven years. While incarcerated, he developed miniature electronic eavesdropping devices for the Soviet government. Decades later, in 1989, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, 92-year old Theremin again showed up in New York to be honored at a festival of electronic music, amazed his name and instrument were even remembered. Music Played in Today's Program Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975): The Day the Earth Stood Still; National Philharmonic; Bernard Herrmann, conductor; London 443 899 Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Berceuse from The Firebird; Clara Rockmore, theremin; Nadia Reisenberg, piano; Delos 1014

  7. 8월 14일

    A posthumous premiere for Richard Strauss

    Synopsis There was a time when German opera houses would have fought over the chance to premiere an opera by Richard Strauss. But by 1940, when he finished the mythological opera, The Love of Danae, there was a war on and Strauss had fallen out of favor with Germany’s Nazi rulers. A scheduled premiere in Dresden had to be cancelled. In Leipzig, the orchestral parts for the new opera were lost in a fire, and in Munich an Allied air raid damaged the opera’s sets and scenery. By the summer of 1944, when conductor Clemens Krauss was rehearsing handpicked vocal soloists and the Vienna Philharmonic for the opera’s belated premiere at the Salzburg Festival, the collapse of the Third Reich was imminent. On August 1, an order was issued from Berlin canceling all music festivals and closing all theaters. Somehow Salzburg managed to get a dispensation, and rehearsals for Strauss’ opera were allowed to continue. A private dress rehearsal of The Love of Danae took place in Salzburg on August 16, 1944. The 80-year old composer attended, and, with tears in his eyes, thanked the performers with these words: “Perhaps we shall meet again in a better world.” Music Played in Today's Program Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Die Liebe der Danae (Symphonic Fragment); Toronto Symphony; Andrew Davis, conductor; CBS 45804

  8. 8월 13일

    Of Wagner, Tubas and Gyorgy Kurtag

    Synopsis It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum — and so, apparently, did Richard Wagner, who devised a brass instrument to bridge a gap he perceived between the horns and the trombones in the orchestra of his day. And so the Wagner tuba was born, a brass instrument Wagner designed for the 1876 premiere of his cycle of four Ring operas in Bayreuth, Germany, which began on today’s date that year with Das Rheingold — the first opera in the Ring cycle. Other composers have also scored for Wagner tubas, including Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss, both ardent Wagner fans, and also Igor Stravinsky, who, though certainly not a Wagnerite, did include Wagner tubas in the early versions of some of his famous ballet scores. Some contemporary composers include parts for the Wagner tuba in their works as well, and a quartet of these instruments appears in a 1994 score Hungarian composer György Kurtág wrote for the Berlin Philharmonic and its then music director, Claudio Abbado. Kurtág is noted for his short, epigrammatic and introspective chamber works, and Stele is his first major work for a large, conventional, arranged symphony orchestra. Music Played in Today's Program György Kurtág (1926-2019): Stele; SWR Symphony; Michael Gielen, conductor; Hänssler 93001

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Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.

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    Composers Datebook

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