Carlos Gomes — Overture to Il Guarany
 

Until Heitor Villa-Lobos, Antônio Carlos Gomes was Brazil’s most recognized classical composer, and one of few non-European composers to be fully accepted into Italian operatic culture during its “Golden Age.”

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Born in 1836 in Campesinas in the Brazilian province of São Paolo, he moved—against his father’s will—to Rio de Janeiro, where he served as assistant conductor of the city’s Ópera Lírica Nacional, getting first-hand experience of the operas of Verdi, Bellini, and Donizetti which would go on to greatly influence his work. After some successful opera premieres in Brazil, he received a government scholarship to study in Italy. 

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Il Guarany, Gomes’s opera that premiered at La Scala in 1870, was a huge success. Franz Liszt said the opera “display[ed] dense technical maturity, full of harmonic and orchestral maturity.” It was staged in Europe multiple times over the next few years, and has been revived for modern-day orchestras, most notably by Washington National Opera in 1996 with Placido Domingo in the lead role. Its overture is punchy, dramatic, and thoroughly Verdian.

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Emmanuel Chabrier – España

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For many years, Emmanuel Chabrier toiled away at a desk job in the French interior ministry. In 1880, and approaching forty, Chabrier resigned to focus on music, and two years later, he embarked on a tour of Spain, taking in the main cities. What was billed as a tour turned into a research trip; born in the rural French region of the Auvergne, Chabrier had an ear for folk dances and rhythms, and he set about summarising what he found in composition.

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Originally titled Jota, after a dance from Aragon, he renamed it España to reflect his stylistic melange of dances, rhythms and colour from the whole country. Chabrier didn’t think much of it, calling it “a piece in F and nothing more,” but it drew many admirers. You can certainly see elements of Gustav Mahler’s approach to symphonic form in España: the focus is on orchestral colour and rustic charm. Indeed, Mahler told musicians of the New York Philharmonic that España represented “the start of modern music.”
 

Arturo Márquez — Danzon No. 2

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The danzón is the official national dance of Cuba. It’s derived from the contradanza, which itself comes from the contredanse of English and France, introduced to the island by the Spanish in the 1500s. As well as Cuba, the danzón became popular in the Mexican gulf coast state of Veracruz, due to the Cuban influence on the region, and danzón later flourished in Mexico City and Oaxaca.

Arturo Márquez, a Mexican composer born in 1950, wasn’t widely known outside of Mexico until he began incorporating specific dance forms into his compositions in the 1990s. His Danzones—especially No. 2—were given a huge boost by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, who have programmed the piece extensively in their international performances.

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Marquez’s relationship with the danzón form was not intuitive; he began research trips to Veracruz and Mexico City to learn more about the form. Quickly, he realised it could be a vehicle for emotional expression: “a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their own emotional world.” The resulting composition is not a strict idiomatic dance, more like rhapsody on a theme of the danzón, with swirling, seductive melodies delivered with romance and passion.

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--- INTERVAL ---

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Pyotyr Ilyich Tchaikovsky — Symphony No. 5

 

For Tchaikovsky, thoughts of a new symphony began in spring 1888, but he was battling his own bad health and lack of inspiration. “Now I am gradually, and with some difficulty, squeezing a symphony out of my dulled brain,” he wrote in May of that year. Nevertheless, by August, he had finished, inspiration renewed. “Thank God that I still have the will to work,” he wrote to a close friend. “But my urge to produce is so great that even two lifetimes would barely be sufficient to carry out all my plans.”

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Tchaikovsky’s journey from darkness into light has become one of the composer’s most enduringly popular symphonies. Tragic and balletic, yet continuing the punchy pathos of the Fourth, it revolves around a recurring heard at the beginning in the clarinet. Its recurrence suggests an underlying emotional narrative to the symphony. (Manuscripts show Tchaikovsky toyed with the idea of casting his Fifth as a narrative symphony.)

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The end concludes in a blaze of glory—but is this triumph full, or shallow? That Tchaikovsky went on to write an even gloomier symphony, his Sixth, shows internally, his thoughts around fate and death were far from resolved. The process of getting there is where the beauty lies. Prepare for some of classical music’s most ravishing tunes.