Torke's 'Overnight Mail'

Synopsis

Yes, Juliet, a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a catchy title alone can’t help a piece of music that’s uninspired or just plain boring. An intriguing title, however can sometimes help put audiences into a more receptive frame of mind — or at least pique their curiosity.

From the very beginning of his career in the 1980s, the young American composer Michael Torke had the knack of coming up with evocative titles. His early works had titles like Ecstatic Orange and Bright Blue Music. A piece composed for the 1994 Olympic Games in Atlanta was titled Javelin, and this music, an orchestral suite that premiered in Amsterdam on today’s date in 1997, was titled Overnight Mail.

And each of the three movements of his orchestral suite had an additional title, as Torke explains:

“The titles of the suite’s three movements, Priority, Standard, and Saturday Delivery present the options for expediency when sending things, but musically, they represent different reactions to an abstract compositional problem I set up for myself … for me this was important, because I want to write music that follows all the old rules of voice leading and counterpoint, but sounds fresh.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Michael Torke (b. 1961): Overnight Mail; Orkest de Volharding; Jurjen Hempel, conductor; Argo 455 684

On This Day

Births

• 1673 - French flutist and composer Jacques-Martin Hottetere, in Paris

Deaths

• 1977 - Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin, 78, in Paris

Premieres

• 1918 - Holst: The Planets, at Queen’s Hall, London

• 1921 - Sigmund Romberg: operetta Blossom Time, in New York City

• 1949 - Bliss: opera The Olympians, in London

• 1968 - Henze: Piano Concerto No. 2, in Bielefeld, Germany

• 1969 - Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14 (to poems of Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker, and Rilke), in Leningrad, by the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Rudolf Barshai conducting, with vocal soloists Galina Vishnevskaya and Yevgeny Vladimirov

• 1983 - Lutoslawski: Symphony No. 3, in Chicago

• 1997 - Michael Torke: Overnight Mail for chamber ensemble, in Carre, Amsterdam, by the Orkest de Volharding, Jurjen Hempel conducting

• 2000 - Tan Dun: Crouching Tiger Concerto, at the Barbican Festival in London, by the London Sinfonietta

Others

• 1739 - Handel completes in London his Concerto Grosso No. 1 (Gregorian date: Oct. 10)

• 1789 - Mozart completes his Quintet for clarinet and strings in Vienna, written for clarinetist Anton Stadler, who gave the first public performance of the new work in December of that year.