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As a man who espoused fifteen minutes of Bible-reading every day, Gounod's thoughts were never far away from the next big brimstone-and-treacle epic that might have them cowering in the aisles. Mors et Vita ('death and life' it doesn't get any more broad brush) was premiered in Birmingham in 1885, and featured a judge, who sits on a throne, intoning his judgments. That judge (Judex) owns possibly the most beautiful music in the whole piece. It has certainly become a firm favourite with Classic FM listeners and the Judex tends to eclipse the rest of the work.
At the very time that Tchaikovsky was composing his nationalistic, powerful and undeniably noisy 1812 Overture, he was also writing this: the graceful, poised and rather sedate Serenade for Strings. While both pieces are undeniably 'Tchaikovsky' in style, the 1812 Overture has become known for its bombastic closing section, complete with its unusual addition to the orchestra: cannons. It is now considered one of the late Romantic era's definitive compositions. Tchaikovsky based the sonatina-style first movement on Mozart while the second movement, a Valse, has become a popular piece in its own right.
The three sections, which take around 12 to 15 minutes to perform, are a setting of verses by Goethe about a misanthropic character who is urged to throw off his suffering and turn to spirituality to end his pain.
Aside from being an acclaimed composer, Liszt was a phenomenally accomplished pianist. His ability to play the sheer number of notes that he did, at such speed and with such precision, amazed all who heard him. So it's not surprising that in his solo piano repertoire, Liszt stretches the capabilities of both the instrument and the soloist to their limits. Nowhere is there a better example of this than in his famous Hungarian Rhapsody No.2. This particular rhapsody actually comes from a set of twenty such pieces, all composed for solo piano, although some were later orchestrated. As well as being a vehicle for demonstrating the performer's virtuosity, they also convey some of the greatest elements of Hungarian folk music, which Liszt painstakingly researched before lovingly composing this set.
This gorgeous work for solo piano was never published in Chopin's lifetime but it has become one of the composer's best-loved and most-performed works. It was written for the Baroness d'Este in 1834 and is similar to the final movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata. Both pieces include melodies made up of furious semi-quavers and, like the Beethoven, Chopin's piece in C sharp minor. The term Impromptu first came about in the Romantic period and implies freedom, something which Chopin perfectly captures in his dizzying, joyful Fantaisie-Impromptu.
Like many composers, Max Bruch was captivated by both the idea and the sound of folk music. Nowhere is this more evident than in his Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra. Despite the fact that Bruch was a virtual stranger to Scotland at the time he wrote his Scottish Fantasy, there is nothing to suggest that the work is based on anything other than wholly authentic Scottish melodies. Interestingly, Bruch uses a harp in the Scottish Fantasy strongly suggesting he thought the instrument was a central part of authentic Scottish folk music. Whether he had actually heard a Celtic harp played at the time he wrote the piece is still very much open to debate.
A work of infectious lyricism from quintessentially British composer Finzi. Building on his charming bagatelles for clarinet, Finzi composed his Clarinet Concerto after the war, and it now stands among his best remembered works. It was premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1949, taking place that year in Hereford. Sadly, within just a couple of years, Finzi was struck by Hodgkin's Diesease, and he died in 1956, aged 55.
Ignacy Paderewski is surely one of the most interesting (and perhaps unjustly overlooked) musicians of his time. In a career that saw him not only conquer the concert stage but also make a real impact to the history of his native Poland by becoming its Prime Minister for 10 months.
The mind-bending sci-fi movie combines an emotional drama with stunning dreamscape imagery, and old hand Zimmer's music more than matches up. Tense, quietly pulsing drums and strings are used to bring the dreams of Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Caine and others to life. To inspire himself, Zimmer read the book, Gdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter because, the composer said, it combined 'the idea of playfulness in mathematics and playfulness in music'. What emerged was an imaginative, electronic sound world. At one point, while working on the score, Zimmer incorporated a guitar sound reminiscent of Ennio Morricone and brought in Johnny Marr, former guitarist of The Smiths, to play the part. dith Piaf's song 'Non, je ne regrette rien', which features in the film is also integrated into Zimmer's score. The film's iconic brass instrument fanfare is reminiscent of a slowed-down version of the song.
He composed several large-scale and successful soundtracks, including the Emmy-nominated main title theme for Prison Break. In 2011, he was selected to compose the score for the award-winning television series Game of Thrones and has been nominated for and won several awards himself for his soundtrack.
After seeing the animated title sequence, Djawadi felt inspired to write the piece and aimed to capture the overall impression of the show within the theme. He chose cello as the main instrument for the piece as he felt it had a dark sound that suited the show.
Debussy's Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune was planned originally as merely the first part of a trilogy. The composer intended the final set of three pieces to have included an Interlude and a Paraphrase finale. In the end, for reasons best known to himself, Debussy decided to combine all his thoughts on Mallarm's poem The Afternoon of a Faun to just one single movement. The composer was 32 years old when he wrote it and it was eighteen years later when Nijinsky danced to it in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production in Paris.
The original piano version of the Pavane pour une infante defunte was composed in 1899 and dedicated to the Princess Edmond de Polignac, a French-American musical patron. The orchestral arrangement wasn't premiered for another eleven years. While it's literally true that the French should be translated as 'Pavane for a dead Princess', Ravel was at pains to point out that it 'is not a funeral lament for a dead child, but rather an evocation of the pavane that might have been danced by such a little princess as painted by Velzquez'.
Another film music hit for Ennio Morricone, scoring this dramatic and mischievious Italian film. A celebration both of childhood and the medium of film, Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 drama Cinema Paradiso has become one of the most cherished slices of world cinema in recent years. In keeping with the film's study of a relationship between a child and a father figure, Morricone collaborated with his son Andrea for the film's score. The two originally first wrote music together for a series of Italian crime dramas called Ultimo, before their work on Cinema Paradiso won them a Bafta.
Composed in 1828, Berlioz subtitled these five movements 'Episodes in the life of an artist'. Each movement describes a different scene e.g. the 2nd at the ball and the 3rd in the country. In the 4th movement ('March to the Scaffold'), you can clearly hear the footsteps as the condemned man approaches the scaffold, the roll of the snare drums just before the execution, the one last thought of his loved one played by the clarinet, the fall of the guillotine and, finally, the bounce of the severed head falling into the basket.
Rather than fireworks, derring-do or adventuring, Williams concentrates instead on the penetrating dread of the alien invaders. With Steven Spielberg directing, Tom Cruise topping the cast list and Williams himself on soundtrack duties, you might expect a more traditional effort, but the film is resolutely low-key (in-between the sections of CGI mass-destruction, that is). And while War Of The Worlds took an absolute packet at the box office, it's encouraging to note that it was in no small part due to Williams's uncharacteristically gritty soundtrack.
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's John Williams, with yet another hefty soundtrack fit for this iconic movie. Still hot from hitting the stratosphere with Star Wars, Williams pulled out another thrilling march for Christopher Reeve's debut in the spandex body suit. In complete contrast to the long process of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Williams's score for Superman was one of the last aspects of the film to be added. Brought in to replace Jerry Goldsmith, who scored director Richard Donner's film The Omen two years earlier, Williams conducted the London Symphony Orchestra through a very entertaining score.
Musically speaking, the time of the String Quartet No.2 was the beginning of the end for Borodin. It was written when he was in his late forties and at exactly the period when finding time for music was becoming nigh on impossible. As a successful chemist he felt compelled to devote more and more of his time to his important scientific work, at the expense of his music. Nevertheless, when he was forty-eight, and just one year after the composition of In the Steppes of Central Asia, he found himself with a free summer to compose his String Quartet No. 2. As with most things Borodin wrote, it is not short of tunes, something that proved a blessing when the writers of the musical Kismet came to use his music. The jaunty second movement provided them with 'Baubles, Bangles and Beads', while the third stumped up the show-stopping 'This is My Beloved'.
Rossini's 1817 opera The Thieving Magpie was allegedly the quickest stage work Rossini had ever produced. He was already legendary for the speed at which he could write an opera, once saying, 'Give me a laundry list, and I will set it to music.'
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