Larsen's symphonies

Synopsis

In 1985, the musical world was celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Georg Frideric Handel. On today’s date that year, Minnesota-based composer Libby Larsen, then in her mid-30s, was celebrating the premiere performance of her Symphony No. 1.

Larsen titled her symphony Water Music and says its first movement was a deliberate homage to Handel’s famous Water Music. As a resident composer of a state with over 10,000 lakes, Larsen admits her love of sailing also had something to do with the symphony’s descriptive title.

Since 1985, Larsen has gone on to write a few more symphonies, each with its own particular title. And she frequently gives individual movements of each symphony a descriptive tag. For example, one movement from her Solo Symphony (No. 5), from 1999, is titled “The Cocktail Party Effect.”

Rather than the wallop of a stiff drink, Larsen says she means the ability of human hearing to pick out a single voice among the extraneous noise one encounters at a crowded cocktail party.

“It’s a kind of musical ‘Where’s Waldo?’” she says. “In this case, Waldo is a melody, introduced at the beginning … then hidden amid the other music.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Libby Larsen (b. 1950) Symphony: Water Music; Minnesota Orchestra; Neville Marriner, cond. Nonesuch 79147; and Solo Symphony; Colorado Symphony; Marin Alsop, cond. Koch 7520

On This Day

Births

• 1697 - German composer and flutist Johann Joachim Quantz, in Oberscheden, Hannover;

• 1861 - French-born American composer Charles Martin Loeffler, in Alsace;

• 1862 - German-born American composer and conductor, Walter Damrosch, in Breslau;

Deaths

• 1963 - French composer Francis Poulenc, age 64, in Paris;

Premieres

• 1724 - Bach: Sacred Cantata No. 81 ("Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?") performed on the 4th Sunday after Epiphany as part of Bach's first annual Sacred Cantata cycle in Leipzig (1723/24);

• 1735 - Bach: Sacred Cantata No. 14 ("Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit") performed in Leipzig on the 4th Sunday after Epiphany;

• 1892 - Rachmaninoff: “Trio élégiaque” No. 1 in G minor (Gregorian date: Feb. 11);

• 1893 - Brahms: Fantasies for piano Nos. 1-3, from Op. 117 and Intermezzo No. 2, from Op. 117, in Vienna;

• 1917 - Zemlinsky: opera "A Floretine Tragedy," in Stuttgart at the Hoftheater;

• 1920 - Frederick Converse: Symphony in c, by the Boston Symphony, Pierre Monteux conducting;

• 1942 - Copland: Orchestral Suite from "Billy the Kid" ballet, by the Boston Symphony;

• 1948 - Harold Shapero: "Symphony for Classical Orchestra," by the Boston Symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein;

• 1958 - Walton: "Partita" for orchestra, in Cleveland;

• 1959 - Hindemith: "Pittsburgh Symphony," by the Pittsburgh Symphony, conducted by the composer;

• 1970 - William Schuman: "In Praise of Shahn," in New York;

• 1985 - Libby Larsen: Symphony ("Water Music"), by the Minnesota Orchestra, Sir Neville Marriner conducting.