Week of April 4, 2022 - Invitation to the Dance, Part II Five hours of music composed for the stage, opera, and ballet — or music composed for dramatic representations. We start with Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian-born French composer, instrumentalist, and as Bills says, “the most ‘dancingist’ composer who ever lived.” We’ll also focus on ballet music by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Schubert and even Beethoven! We’ll dance to Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin suite and The Wooden Prince, Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, and a charming suite of dances from Manuel de Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat.
W Week of April 11, 2022 - St. Matthew Passion Composed in 1727, it’s one of two surviving JS Bach accounts of the last days of Jesus. Bill begins by examining the history of the Lutheran church in Germany and the early musical representations of Christ’s last days, including Bach’s earlier St. John Passion. Before the week is over, we will also sample Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ and Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión Según San Marcos.
Week of April 18, 2022 - Homage The gift of immortality through the hands of great composers. How would you like to be the subject of a composition by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or Mozart? In many cases, the fame of the music has outlasted that of its honoree, but we’ll explore some of these heartfelt gestures and the composers who made them. This week will include Handel’s Water Music and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Week of April 25, 2022 - The Symphony, Part III Part three in our continuing series on that most revered of classical music forms: the symphony. Starting in Denmark with Niels Gade’s first symphony, Bill will introduce us to the mid-nineteenth century orchestral music of Rubenstein, Raff, and Dvořák. We’ll also hear the Brahms Serenade No. 1 for orchestra, composed in six movements and published many decades before his four symphonies.
