Four Essays for Orchestra (Cztery Eseje) is an orchestral composition by Polish composer Tadeusz Baird written in 1958. It was prized in the 1959 UNESCO Rostrum of Composers, the first of three works by Baird to attain this distinction, and it also won the Grzegorz Fitelberg Competition. [1] The first performance of this work took place at the second Warsaw Autumn Festival in 1960, performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic conducted by Witold Rowicki. [2] Each of the four movements is scored for different instrumental combinations, and they are marked as follows:
Essay 1 is orchestrated for string (frequently solo), and two harps. Essay 2 is scored for woodwind, timpani, percussion, celesta, xylophone, two harps, piano and strings. The 3rd essay is written for brass, timpani, percussion, bells, xylophone, celesta and two pianos. The 4th essay uses woodwind, timpani, celesta, two harps, two pianos and strings. [2]
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Sz. 106, BB 114 is one of the best-known compositions by the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. Commissioned by Paul Sacher to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the chamber orchestra Basler Kammerorchester, the score is dated September 7, 1936.
Symphony No. 3 was Aaron Copland's final symphony. It was written between 1944 and 1946, and its first performance took place on October 18, 1946 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing under Serge Koussevitzky. If the early Dance Symphony is included in the count, it is actually Copland's fourth symphony.
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34, is a 1945 musical composition by Benjamin Britten with a subtitle Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. It was based on the second movement, "Rondeau", of the Abdelazer suite. It was originally commissioned for the British educational documentary film called Instruments of the Orchestra released on 29 November 1946, directed by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Malcolm Sargent; Sargent also conducted the concert première on 15 October 1946 with the Liverpool Philharmonic in the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, England.
Polish composer Witold Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra was written in the years 1950–54, on the initiative of the artistic director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, Witold Rowicki, to whom it is dedicated. It is written in three movements, lasts about 30 minutes, and constitutes the last stage and a crowning achievement of the folkloristic style in Lutosławski's work. That style, inspired by the music of the Kurpie region, went back in time to the pre-1939 years. Having written a series of small folkloristic pieces for various instruments and their combinations, Lutosławski decided to use his experience of stylisation of Polish folklore in a bigger work. However, the Concerto for Orchestra differs from Lutosławski's earlier folkloristic pieces not only in that it is more extended, but also in that what is retained from folklore is only melodic themes. The composer moulds them into a different reality, lending them new harmony, adding atonal counterpoints, and turning them into neo-baroque forms.
The Warsaw Philharmonic, as it is formally known in English, or Orkiestra Filharmonii Narodowej w Warszawie, as it is legally set up, is a Polish orchestra founded in 1901, one of the nation's oldest musical institutions. Its home is the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall.
Witold Rowicki was a Polish conductor. He held principal conducting positions with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Witold Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra was dedicated to him.
The Symphony No. 2 in E minor and C major by Arnold Bax was completed in 1926, after he had worked on it for two years. It was dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky, who conducted the first two performances of the work on 13 and 14 December 1929.
The Wooden Prince, Op. 13, Sz. 60, is a one-act pantomime ballet composed by Béla Bartók in 1914–1916 to a scenario by Béla Balázs. It was first performed at the Budapest Opera on 12 May 1917 under the conductor Egisto Tango.
The Serenade, after Plato's Symposium, is a composition by Leonard Bernstein for solo violin, strings and percussion. He completed the serenade in five movements on August 7, 1954. For the serenade, the composer drew inspiration from Plato's Symposium, a dialogue of related statements in praise of love, each statement made by a distinguished speaker. The seven speakers who inspired Bernstein's five movements are:
The Symphony in F-sharp, Op. 40, is the only symphony by 20th-century Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, although as a teenager in 1912 he had written a Sinfonietta, his Op. 5. Using a theme from the 1939 film The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, the symphony was completed in 1952 and dedicated to the memory of American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died seven years earlier.
Mi-parti is an orchestral work by the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski, composed from 1975 to 1976 on a commission from the City of Amsterdam for the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The name broadly means in two equal but different parts, referring to the treatment of the material rather than the large-scale structure of the piece.
Polish composer Witold Lutosławski wrote his Symphony No. 4 in 1988–92, completing it on 22 August 1992.
The Cello Concerto No. 2, W516, was composed by Heitor Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro in 1953. It was commissioned by the cellist Aldo Parisot, to whom the score is dedicated. A reduction for cello and piano was published in Paris by Max Eschig.
The Harp Concerto by Alberto Ginastera was composed in 1956 and first performed in 1965. It was commissioned by Edna Phillips, the harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Phillips had retired by the time the work was ready to be premiered, so the solo part was played by the Spanish harpist Nicanor Zabaleta with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Harpist Heidi Lehwalder began performing the concerto by the 1970s and performed it with nearly every professional orchestra in the United States, sometimes more than once and sometimes several times. She established it as standard repertoire, almost de rigeur for aspiring soloists. By 1985, it was the most-performed work by Ginastera, making him one of the top earners for its publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. It has since been performed worldwide and recorded many times. In the repertoire of the harp, it is one of the ten most-performed concertos, and probably one of the five most-performed concertos.
The Concerto Fantasy for Two Timpanists and Orchestra is a double timpani concerto written by Philip Glass in 2000. It is paired with the Cello Concerto on Vol. I of Glass' Concerto Project, a set of eight concerti by the composer. A typical performance of the work lasts 25–28 minutes. It was written for Jonathan Haas and later recorded by Evelyn Glennie, and was premiered by Haas and Svet Stoyanov with the American Symphony Orchestra in Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, conducted by Leon Botstein. The work was commissioned jointly by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Peabody Symphony, the Milwaukee Symphony, the St. Louis Symphony and the Phoenix Symphony. In 2004, a transcription for wind ensemble was written by Mark Lortz, which debuted at Peabody Institute in 2005.
The Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op. 9, was completed by Ernő Dohnányi in 1901, when the composer was 24. It was his second venture into orchestral writing, his Symphony in F written in 1896 was not published. The symphony in D minor was premiered in January 1902 in Manchester, England, under the baton of Hans Richter. The Hungarian premiere followed in 1903. Although audibly influenced by the prevailing voices of the time, including Bruckner, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler and Brahms, the work nonetheless demonstrates a formidable handling of complex compositional techniques and is a notable precursor to what would become Dohnányi's distinctive neoromantic style. As with most of his public work, Dohnányi published the composition under the Germanized version of his name, Ernst von Dohnányi. The symphony is 50–55 minutes in duration.
The Symphony No. 1 by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki was composed in 1973. It was published by Polish Music Publishing House and Schott Music and has never been expanded or revised.
Gerardo Gandini was a pianist, composer, and music director, who became one of the most relevant figures of contemporary Argentine music of the second half of the 20th century. He studied composition with Goffredo Petrassi and Alberto Ginastera, and piano with Roberto Caamaño, Pía Sebastiani, and Ivonne Loriod. He was Astor Piazzolla's pianist in the Sexteto Nuevo Tango formed in 1989.
Russian composer Alfred Schnittke's Symphony No. 7 was composed in 1993. It is dedicated to conductor Kurt Masur who gave its world premiere performance in New York with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on 10 February 1994.