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Latest Listeners’ Club Posts

David Raksin’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” Suite: A Classic Film Score December 6, 2024

David Raksin (1912-2004) was widely regarded as the “Grandfather of Film Music.” He composed over 100 film scores and 300 television scores, including the iconic main theme of the 1944 film noir drama, Laura. Throughout Laura, the theme recurs as a haunting idée fixe as the protagonist, a detective investigating a murder, becomes increasing […]

Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 in E-Flat Major: The “Drumroll” December 4, 2024

Franz Joseph Haydn’s twelve “London” Symphonies (Nos. 93-104) arrived at a thrilling moment in music history. It was the early 1790s, and the tumultuous effects of the American and French Revolutions were rippling through society. London’s Hanover Square Rooms reflected the birth of the modern public concert hall, and gave “architectural ex […]

Michael Torke’s “December”: Feelings, Impressions, and Memories December 2, 2024

Setting aside its evocative title, we can appreciate December, a 1995 work for string orchestra by American composer Michael Torke (b. 1961), as pure music. Developing from a single spirited motive seed, heard in the opening measures, December unfolds as a spirited contrapuntal conversation. At moments, its shifting bass line forms an ostin […]

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, “Pathétique”: Juraj Valčuha and the Houston Symphony November 29, 2024

Founded in 1913 by philanthropist Ima Hogg, the Houston Symphony has long been regarded as one of America’s major league orchestras. Its past music directors include Andrés Orozco-Estrada (2014–2022), Christoph Eschenbach (1988–1999), André Previn (1967–1969), John Barbirolli (1961–1967), and Leopold Stokowski (1955–1961). Stokowski and the […]

Remembering Pavel Karmanov November 27, 2024

Pavel Karmanov, the Russian post-minimalist composer and rock musician, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly last Saturday, November 23. The cause of death was heart failure. He was 54 years old. Born in Siberia, Karmanov was once described as “a romantic dressed in a minimalist gown.” A flutist and pianist, he was a permanent member of th […]

Bartók’s First Violin Concerto: A Portrait of Idealized Love November 25, 2024

For fifty years, Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36 was treated much like a forgotten love letter relegated to the bottom of a dusty drawer. Completed in 1908, thirty years before Bartók wrote the monumental work we now know as Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, the First Concerto remained unpublished until 1956, after the composer’s […]

Ives’ “The Unanswered Question”: Perennial Mysteries in a Cosmic Expanse November 22, 2024

The fifth installment of Leonard Bernstein’s 1973 Harvard lecture series, The Unanswered Question, takes on “The Twentieth Century Crisis.” Drawing upon linguistics and its subcategory of phonology, Bernstein outlines an aesthetic crisis: the gradual over-saturation of ambiguity which, amid increasing chromaticism, stretched tonality and 19 […]