Orchestra of St. Luke’s premiered Valerie Coleman’s Fanfare for Uncommon Times at the 2021 Caramoor Festival. Commissioned during the “uncommon times” of the coronavirus pandemic and social justice protests, the piece on one level recalls previous American fanfares written by composers like Aaron Copland and Joan Tower. At the same time, it subverts the traditional “celebratory” expectation of a fanfare. It heralds not a lofty figure but a communal sense of struggle and endurance. Coleman’s orchestration takes Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man as a model while expressively expanding the percussion section to infuse the Black experience into the work. The writing for all the players is virtuosic, beginning with the ethereal opening, marked “sung like a spiritual,” and continuing into the rhythmically intense second half of the piece. The score annotation “A People’s Rise & Demand for Justice” at the pivot point reinforces the fanfare’s connection to “uncommon times” and, to borrow Coleman’s words, the “regenerative, renewable hope” that sees us through them.
Tradition long held that Joseph Haydn wrote his Cello Concerto No. 2 in D Major for Anton Kraft, a friend and colleague employed in the orchestra of the composer’s patron, the Hungarian Prince Esterházy. For a time, Kraft’s relatives erroneously branded him as the concerto’s composer. Extensive scholarly work, however, has corrected these errors and promoted a reassessment. Written in 1783, the Cello Concerto in D Major premiered in 1784 in London with English virtuoso James Cervetto as the soloist. Furthermore, the rediscovery of Haydn’s autograph manuscript in 1951 displaced rumors and spurious versions of the score circulating since the 19th century. As a result, the Cello Concerto has emerged as one of the gems of the instrumental repertoire of the period and another masterwork by the composer.
Haydn scored the piece for a small ensemble of woodwinds, brass, and strings. The Allegro moderato features the soloist and orchestra in a lithe sonata-form movement. The mood relaxes in the central Adagio, with the cello’s lyrical solo weaving its way through a soundscape of A major with the only the strings as a partner. Jocular and gamboling, the rondo final movement sees the soloist and full ensemble in concert once again.
The mention of Ludwig van Beethoven’s name immediately conjures a host of clichés: a ruffled and tempest-tossed Romantic genius, his fiery musical Sturm und Drang, and his place atop the classical “canon” in all its varieties. The long shadow of Beethoven is indeed formidable but not as monolithic as we may suppose. His life and creations are continual objects of study, yielding new streams of discovery just as we expect them to run dry. As we approach the bicentenary of the composer’s death in 2027, we round out another phase of our cultural and musical fascination with this titanic figure.
Beethoven’s activity as a symphonic composer spans the three “periods” biographers traditionally have used to divide up his career: early, starting after he arrived in his adopted city of Vienna in 1792; middle, said to begin with the onset of Beethoven’s deafness in 1802 and the application of musical “heroism” in his works; and late, from around 1810 to Beethoven’s death. From 1801 to 1824, each of his nine completed symphonies received their premiere performances in Vienna. The wealth of surviving sketch material left by Beethoven shows how he took many creative twists and turns into fashioning his indisputably original and athletic musical style. The result was a “symphonic ideal” that imparted a sense of journey across the movements of a work. It also contained a precious alchemy that transformed basic musical grammar into some of the most recognizable themes ever heard in the world’s concert halls.
After a summer rest cure in the Austrian spa town of Teplitz, Beethoven returned to Vienna and commenced work on the Seventh Symphony in the autumn of 1811. He completed it the following spring before continuing straightaway on the Eighth Symphony. The Seventh, however, waited until December 1813 for its first performance at a benefit concert for Austrian soldiers wounded during the Battle of Hanau during the Napoleonic War of the Sixth Coalition. (The program also contained a genuine Beethoven curiosity: the “battle symphony” Wellington’s Victory, now regarded as a patriotic oddity.) The orchestra roster for the occasion notably boasted composer-performers like Louis Spohr, Antonio Salieri, and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Their accounts attest to the warm public reception afforded the concert and the symphony in particular.
Commentaries on the Seventh Symphony regularly invoke the imagery of “dance” because of its highly kinetic use of rhythm throughout and elaborate repetitions of musical ideas. The opening movement (Poco sostenuto—Vivace) contains its share of surprises, including the extended introduction that eventually transmutes into the actual sonata-form movement. After this bright outing in A major, the A-minor Allegretto movement breaks in like a funeral knell. Its haunting harmonic language and orchestration (especially the writing for strings) have consistently bewitched audiences since the first performances in 1813, where it was heartily encored. Beethoven cast the third movement of the Seventh Symphony as a rollicking scherzo in F major coupled with a grandiose Trio in D major introduced by the woodwinds. After this movement closes with an impish Beethovenian ending, the final Allegro con brio leaps into action, sending every player (and ideally, the audience) into a Bacchic frenzy.
—Ryan M. Prendergast