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Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

Strauss’ “Salome”: The Grisly Final Scene February 1, 2023

Perhaps, as Alex Ross suggests in the opening pages of his bestselling book, The Rest is Noise, twentieth century music was born with the first scandalous performances of Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera, Salome. Set in one act, the opera was inspired by Oscar Wilde’s French play based on characters from the Gospel of Saint Matthew. The imprison […]

Chopin’s Nocturnes, Op. 15: Songs of the Night January 30, 2023

Composed between 1830 and 1833, Frédéric Chopin’s three Op. 15 Nocturnes for solo piano are haunting, dreamy, and intimate songs of the night. They unfold as bel canto arias without words, in which the piano becomes a singing voice. Chopin’s 21 Nocturnes popularized and expanded a form which was developed a generation earlier by the Irish p […]

Samuel Barber’s “Let Down the Bars, O Death”: Conspirare January 27, 2023

It was during the summer of 1936 that Samuel Barber composed the String Quartet that would give rise to the iconic Adagio for Strings. During the same summer, Barber created an a cappella choral setting of Emily Dickinson’s 1891 poem, Let Down the Bars, O Death. It unfolds as a somber, homophonic chorale. As with the Adagio, it reaches upwa […]

Janáček’s “In the Mists”: Four Coloristic Pieces for Solo Piano January 25, 2023

In the Mists is a cycle of four solo piano pieces, written in 1912 by the Czech composer, Leoš Janáček (1854-1928). The pieces are intimate, fleeting, and tinged with melancholy. Vivid impressionistic colors blend with elements of Moravian folk music. They reveal psychological “mists,” perhaps of a composer who suffered the tragic death of […]

Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Third Symphony: Landscapes and Ruins January 23, 2023

In July of 1829, during his first trip to Britain, the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn embarked on a walking tour of Scotland with his friend, Karl Klingemann. After visiting the ruined abbey at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, Mendelssohn wrote in a letter to his family, In the deep twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived an […]

David Diamond’s “Rounds for String Orchestra”: Freedom and Adventure January 20, 2023

In 1944, the American composer David Diamond (1915-2005) received a commission from Dimitri Mitropoulos with a simple and specific instruction. “These are distressing times,” he wrote. “Most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.” Mitropoulos, then principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, had become d […]

Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto: Straddling the Tonal Precipice January 18, 2023

Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, Op. 38 is lushly cinematic. It is an exhilarating drama between two dueling titans—the brazen, summit-scaling solo piano and the twentieth century orchestra, with its vast sonic power. The Concerto’s expansive Neo-Romantic lines straddle the precipice between tonality and serialism. The music never loses its […]