Hailed as “one of the most successful women composers of all time” by the New Yorker, Joan Tower has become one of America’s most important living composers. Over her career she has won the Grawemeyer Award, been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and most recently was named the first composer in Ford’s Made in America composer of the year residency program.

Ms. Tower wrote her Concerto for Violin in 1991 and dedicated it to violinist Elmar Oliveira, who premiered it. Ms. Tower alternates between driving rhythmic propulsion and soaring, sweeping lines. Listen also for a haunting sense of loss and desolation during the piece. Oliveira’s brother, John, who was also a violinist, was dying of cancer when the work was being written.

Featured here; the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra performing the Boston premier of the work with violinist Peter Zazofsky.

Performed by the Hot Spring Music Festival Orchestra, Cynthia Woods, guest conductor Considered one of Shostakovich’s most emotionally devastating works, the Chamber Symphony -an arrangement of his String Quartet No. 8 –was written in three days during a trip to bombed out Dresden and was dedicated to the victims of fascism and war.  It is based on his personal motive DSCH and quotes from several of his most famous works including the Piano Trio, the Cello Concerto and his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District.  The third movement, Largo heard here, contains the DSDC motive in augmentation- now no longer slow and ominous as in the first movement, but fast and pressing-sharply punctuated by the three sharps knocks of the KGB over an eerily still g# pedal in the solo violin.  Highly suicidal according to friend Lev Lebindsky, at the time written, Shostakovich thought this work would serve as his epitaph.   This proved untrue as he was to go on to compose another 7 string quartets as well as many other great works.

Performed by the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, Cynthia Woods Music Director

By far his most successful opera, Saint-Saens first began work on Samson et Dalila in 1868. It was given its premier at the request of Franz Liszt in Weimer, Germany in 1877 with performances in Paris following shortly.  The libretto is taken from the Old Testament-the mighty Hebrew warrior Samson, while undefeated in battle, is destroyed by the treachery of the Philistine woman Dalila.  The Bacchanal takes place after the great warrior has been captured and the Philistines celebrate his downfall.

As the first African American to have his works performed by a professional orchestra and to conduct a professional orchestra, William Grant Still was a pivotal composer in the early twentieth century. He was born in 1895, in Woodville Mississippi and was raised in Little Rock Arkansas where he studied violin and oboe. From there he would continue his studies at Oberlin Conservatory and eventually at the New England conservatory.

His first symphony, the Afro-American Symphony, was written in 1930 over a space of three months and first performed by the Rochester Philharmonic under the direction of Howard Hanson in 1931. The following except is from a Cambridge Symphony Orchestra Benefit Concert in support of the Habitat for Humanity Musician’s Village of New Orleans.