One of Wynton Marsalis’s most recent pieces is Herald, Holler and Hallelujah!, a fanfare for orchestral brass, timpani, and percussion. As a trumpeter himself who straddles the jazz and classical worlds, he wrote the piece as a celebration of the brass family and its traditional role in religion, warfare, and ceremony.
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto didn’t please everybody, beginning with its dedicatee, Leopold Auer, who thought it was poorly written for the violin, and its first reviewer, Eduard Hanslick, who wrote a notoriously scathing 1881 review calling it “music that stinks to the ear.” But ever since then, it’s pleased nearly everyone else, becoming a beloved cornerstone of the violin repertoire.
Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony is an enormous musical narrative of a mountain ascent and descent, told by a massive orchestra filled with nearly every instrument available to a late Romantic composer. Still, not everything is just about a day hike from sunrise to sunset—this being Strauss, there are metaphysical and perhaps egomaniacal implications, as the composer-climber-hero finds his way out of thickets, has a vision, and sings an elegy (probably for himself).
