At A Glance
Steven Stucky was one of the preeminent American composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He wrote Radical Light for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, intending it as companion to symphonies by Jean Sibelius. The title comes from a poem by A.R. Ammons: “He held radical light / as music in his skull: music / turned, as / over ridges immanences of evening light rise. . .”
John Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is a piano concerto inspired by a line in an old New Yorker article about the radical Catholic social justice activist Dorothy Day (echoing a quote attributed to various sources). The first movement’s theme derives from a 1950s TV show tune, while the second tries to weave a longer, enduring melody from wisp-like fragments. The finale is reminiscent of a tarantella, the south Italian dance inspired by a tarantula bite.
Jean Sibelius must have still been feeling the glow of his recent successful visit to America when on his return home, he heard the news of the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. He had scarcely settled into his life again when, to his horror and disbelief, virtually all Europe was at war. Sibelius had jotted these words in his notebook: “In a deep valley again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend..... God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”
From notes by Thomas May and Michael Steinberg
John Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is a piano concerto inspired by a line in an old New Yorker article about the radical Catholic social justice activist Dorothy Day (echoing a quote attributed to various sources). The first movement’s theme derives from a 1950s TV show tune, while the second tries to weave a longer, enduring melody from wisp-like fragments. The finale is reminiscent of a tarantella, the south Italian dance inspired by a tarantula bite.
Jean Sibelius must have still been feeling the glow of his recent successful visit to America when on his return home, he heard the news of the assassination at Sarajevo of the heir to the Austrian throne. He had scarcely settled into his life again when, to his horror and disbelief, virtually all Europe was at war. Sibelius had jotted these words in his notebook: “In a deep valley again. But I already begin to see dimly the mountain that I shall certainly ascend..... God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”
From notes by Thomas May and Michael Steinberg
