wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Hour one takes us on a journey from Elizabethan English consort music, through a Purcell 18th-century theater work, a 19th-century French suite by Godard, and back again to the mid-1600s Austria of Johan Heinrich Schmelzer, whose violin compositions paved the way for Biber. Lou Harrison’s “Suite for Symphonic Strings” is a multi-movement work composed after he received a commission from BMI. As he constructed the suite, Harrison extensively reworked six earlier unpublished pieces, adding three movements to the whole, which we hear performed by the New Professionals Orchestra of London under the baton of Rebecca Miller—this being the first complete recording on CD.

After our usual Thursday film-music segment, we come to the Shostakovich Symphony No. 11, subtitled “The Year 1905,” Mstislav Rostropovich conducting the National Symphony Orchestra. The work was composed on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, and is dedicated to the 1905 surpressed uprising of the people. It’s themes of tyranny, prison, night, hope, power, grief, vision of freedom, and struggle also reflect, according to his own “Testimony,” the much later suppression of the Hungarian uprising. You can experience this work live at Lincoln Center, as the American Symphony Orchestra performs it under Leon Botstein on January 16th.