Category: Orchestral Works
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Smetana’s Má vlast (My Fatherland)
Six Poems for a Nation's Soul
Smetana began Má vlast in 1874, the same year he went completely deaf. Hearing nothing, he composed six symphonic poems tracing Bohemian myth, landscape, and history—from the ancient fortress of Vyšehrad to the Hussite warriors sleeping in the mountain of…
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Smetana’s Vltava (The Moldau)
A River Song from a Deaf Composer
Two flutes open like trickling mountain springs, join into a single melody, pass through a peasant wedding and a moonlit water-nymph dance, and arrive at the broad flow past Prague's ancient fortress. Written in eighteen days by a man who…
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Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32
Astrology Reborn as Orchestral Thunder
Holst gave each planet its astrological character: Mars, the Bringer of War; Venus, the Bringer of Peace; Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. He composed 'Mars' in 1914, its grinding 5/4 rhythm predicting the sound of mechanized warfare months before the…
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Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
Walking Through a Gallery with an Orchestra
Mussorgsky visited a memorial exhibition for his friend Viktor Hartmann and in three weeks composed a raw piano suite depicting what he saw. The recurring 'Promenade' theme is the composer himself moving between the pictures, his mood shifting with each…
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Respighi’s Pines of Rome
Ancient Trees — Modern Orchestral Power
Respighi's score contains an instruction found nowhere else: at the end of the third movement, play a gramophone recording of a real nightingale. From children playing at the Villa Borghese to Roman soldiers marching on the Appian Way at dawn,…