Franck was slow to win recognition as a leading figure of the French Romantic school. Groomed by his father for a career as a concert pianist, he spent much of his early life in pursuit of a prize that eluded him, despite his brilliance as an improviser. Not until age 50 did he achieve the equivalent of a tenured position as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire, where he counted Debussy and Bizet among his pupils.
In 1859, Franck inaugurated the famous organ built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll for the Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, where the composer served as organiste titulaire, or principal organist, for the last 33 years of his life. It was for this magnificent “symphonic”-style instrument that Franck composed the Prélude, fugue et variation, one of Six Pieces for Grand Organ published in 1868. These were essentially written-down versions of the improvisations that Franck played after church services, which drew organ aficionados from far and wide.
Dedicated to Franck’s fellow composer-organist Camille Saint-Saëns, the Prélude, fugue et variation was made to order for the wide-ranging tonal resources of the Cavaillé-Coll organ (although Franck himself later transcribed the work for piano duet). This rich palette of colors is inevitably toned down in the transcription by English pianist Harold Bauer, starting with the wistful, tenderly flowing oboe-stop theme that dominates the Prélude and returns, lavishly ornamented, in the final Variation. On the other hand, the transparency of Franck’s textures makes the piano version of the central Fugue no less contrapuntally clear and compelling than the original.
Born in Tashkent in 1943, Dilorom Saidaminova belongs to a small cohort of classically trained Uzbek composers whose music has gained a toehold beyond the borders of the Central Asian republic. Her son, the violinist Tigran Shiganyan, has performed and recorded her compositions throughout the United States and Europe, and James Houlik premiered the first movement of her virtuosic Saxophone Concerto at Carnegie Hall in 2004. Among Saidaminova’s teachers was the Russian avant-gardist Edison Denisov, whose music was well received in the West but periodically censured in the Soviet Union.
The Walls of Ancient Bukhara, a cycle of eight short tone poems in the tradition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, dates from around the time of Saidaminova’s studies with Denisov in the early 1970s. The music evokes various monuments and historical figures associated with Uzbekistan’s seventh-largest city, whose well-preserved medieval core—designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993—was a major center of Islamic culture from the 10th to the 17th centuries. Some 10 acres of “ancient” Bukhara are given over to a massive citadel, or “ark,” surrounded by stone walls more than 50 feet high.
Much of Saidaminova’s resolutely atonal music has a similarly flinty, forbidding aspect. Although The Walls of Ancient Bukhara opens and closes with free, chant-like declamations that reveal the city’s Islamic heritage, harsh dissonances and percussive rhythms prevail in “Samanid Kingdom” and “Minaret of Death,” an ornate mud-brick tower that doubled as a place of execution. The sepulchral gloom that shrouds the “Tomb of Ismail Samani,” the founder of the Samanid dynasty, is offset by the sparkling note-clusters of “Stars over Bukhara,” while “Domes” and “Shadows of Ancestors” are characterized by dogged repetitions of short rhythmic and melodic cells.
Ravel, 13 years younger than Debussy, made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with his masterful String Quartet and a group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces, including the Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess), Jeux d’eau (Waterworks), and Miroirs (Mirrors). Over the ensuing decades, he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the “definitive clarity” that was his professed ideal. Ravel’s repeated failure to win the Prix de Rome, a rite of passage for French composers seeking establishment approval, only stiffened his resolve to forge his own path. Not until 1920 was he awarded the prestigious Légion d’Honneur, an honor that he rebuffed with undisguised satisfaction.
Composed in the summer of 1908, while Ravel was at work on his light-hearted “Spanish” opera L’heure espagnole, Gaspard de la nuit (Gaspard of the Night) takes its title from a cycle of poems by Aloysius Bertrand. Indeed, Ravel identified his triptych as “three poems for piano” and reproduced Bertrand’s fantastical, image-laden prose lyrics in the score. “My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words,” he explained. In the last piece, he deliberately sought to surpass such benchmarks of virtuosity as Balakirev’s Islamey and Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes; he described the fiendishly difficult “Scarbo” as “an orchestral transcription for the piano.”
“Ondine,” with its shimmering tremolos and gossamer, billowing passagework, is suffused with the watery imagery associated with the carefree nymph whose unrequited love for a mortal has inspired many composers and writers since the 19th century. By contrast, “Le gibet” (“The Gallows”) is lugubrious and death-ridden, its slow, labored rhythms—possibly suggesting the swaying of a hung corpse—punctuated by relentlessly throbbing B-flats. The third piece evokes the nocturnal antics of the impish Scarbo in music whose frenzied momentum, nightmarishly dissonant outbursts, and kaleidoscopic sonorities make exceptional demands on the performer.
As an African American woman in the field of classical music, Price was doubly discriminated against due to her sex and her race. Although the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered the first of her four symphonies in 1933, and her vocal music was championed by the likes of Marian Anderson, she was forced to eke out a living by composing popular songs under a pseudonym, teaching piano, and making choral and orchestral arrangements for a Chicago radio station. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and educated at the New England Conservatory, Price moved to the Windy City in 1927 to escape the toxic racial environment of the South. She continued to compose prolifically in her adopted home, eventually compiling a catalogue of some 300 works, virtually all of which remained unpublished for decades.
Price’s conservatively tonal harmonic language, lightly spiced with chromaticism, reveals virtually no trace of modernist influences. Her lifelong interest in incorporating African American themes and idioms can be heard in the first of four works entitled Fantasie nègre (Negro Fantasy), written in 1929 and revised three years later. The music owes a discernible debt to Dvořák in its skillful synthesis of vernacular and concert hall traditions. In 1936, another pioneering Black artist, Katherine Dunham, choreographed Price’s fantasy for the dance stage.
Unlike its three sequels, the first Fantasie nègre is based on an authentic African American spiritual, “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” After an introductory flourish, the sturdy melody shines forth in plangent E minor. Thereafter, it moves from one voice to another in a variety of harmonic settings, inlaid with elaborate pianistic filigree in the bravura vein of the European concert fantasy. The more relaxed second theme, in sunny G major, leads to an even more brilliantly virtuosic recap of the spiritual.
Prokofiev rose to fame as a leader of the Russian avant-garde on the strength of such driving, acerbically dissonant works as the Scythian Suite and the Second Piano Concerto. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, he emigrated from the Soviet Union and flung himself into the cosmopolitan culture of the West. In Europe, he was eclipsed by his fellow émigré Stravinsky, while in the United States he shared the limelight with Rachmaninoff, another pianistic powerhouse. Many of his best-loved works date from this period of self-imposed exile, including the fairytale opera The Love for Three Oranges and the Third Piano Concerto. But the pull of Mother Russia remained strong and in 1936, discounting the warnings of friends, Prokofiev returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow.
Prokofiev’s lifelong fascination with the stage bore fruit in eight operas and nine ballets, as well as film scores and incidental music for plays. Romeo and Juliet, his first full-length story ballet, got off to a rocky start on its way to becoming a landmark of 20th-century Russian ballet. Commissioned by the Bolshoi Ballet in 1935, but ultimately rejected as too difficult for the dancers, it didn’t reach the stage of Leningrad’s Kirov Ballet until 1940. Yet Prokofiev’s masterpiece had already won popularity in the concert hall through the three suites—two for orchestra and one for piano—that he extracted from it. (A third orchestral suite would follow in 1946.)
The episodic, almost cinematic structure of the Romeo and Juliet libretto resulted in a series of sharply focused choreographic pictures that highlighted the full spectrum of Prokofiev’s musical expression, from the violent street battle between the feuding Montagues and Capulets to the transcendent lyricism of the play’s love scenes. Prokofiev and his collaborators toyed with the idea of giving Shakespeare’s tragedy a happy ending, on the pragmatic grounds that “living people can dance, but the dead cannot dance lying down,” but ultimately rejected it. In the Op. 75 Suite, the composer deftly sidestepped the issue by closing with a luminously lyrical image of the star-crossed lovers making what only we, the listeners, realize will be their final farewell.
—Harry Haskell