J.S. Bach was the greatest of a large family of German musicians spanning several generations. Although he spent most of his life as a hard-working church musician, his contemporaries knew him best as a celebrated virtuoso on the organ and harpsichord. The six keyboard Partitas are among his greatest works in suite form. When they were first published as a set in 1731, the influential composer and critic Johann Mattheson felt compelled to warn potential purchasers that they weren’t just easy-to-play dances, but formidably challenging exercises. “Etudes need to be practiced, and anyone who ventured to read them off at sight would be undertaking something very foolhardy, thinking that with his juggler’s tricks he could impose on his listeners’ credulity—were he the arch-harpsichordist himself.” Despite the Partitas’ technical difficulty, however, Bach disarmingly advertised them on the title page as “galanteries, composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits.”

The Fifth Partita’s bright, annunciatory Preambulum has the feel of a written-down improvisation, with rippling scales and undulating arpeggios punctuated by short, sharp chords. In the Allemande, long chains of dancing triplets flow from one hand to the other, their smoothly gliding motion offset by athletic leaps and subtle syncopations. Despite its propulsive triple meter, the Corrente is more foursquare in its rhythmic impulse, its repeating kaleidoscopic patterns standing out all the more clearly for the lucid two-voice texture. The Sarabande offers a vivid contrast of pace and character; its stately melodic line, bedecked with appoggiaturas and passing notes, is sweetly harmonized in thirds and sixths. A bouncy Tempo di Minuetto, artfully combining triple and duple meters, leads to an equally energetic Passepied—a triple-time dance closely related to the minuet—and the suite ends with a bracing Gigue, whose sharply etched fugal subject is flipped on its head in the second half.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

It was as a barn-storming pianist that Beethoven first captured the attention of Viennese audiences in the 1790s, but his rapid maturation as a composer was no less remarkable. By his 30th birthday, he had to his credit a clutch of masterpieces that would have done any composer proud. Over the next dozen years, a stream of ambitious and formally innovative works flowed from the composer’s pen, including the opera Fidelio, the “Eroica” Symphony, the three “Razumovsky” string quartets, and the three Op. 31 piano sonatas. According to his secretary Anton Schindler, Beethoven was indirectly responsible for giving the Sonata in D minor its popular title: when Schindler, intrigued by the “poetic ideas” that Beethoven expressed in his music, asked him to provide a “key” to the work, the composer is said to have replied, “Read Shakespeare’s Tempest.”

Although Schindler’s story may be apocryphal, there is no mistaking the stormy character of the D-minor Sonata, the second of a set commissioned by a Swiss publisher in 1802. The arpeggiated figures, fantasia-like episodes, and moodily atmospheric harmonies make the work a natural companion to Beethoven's earlier “Moonlight” Sonata. The “Tempest” opens with a slowly unfurling arpeggio, pregnant with possibility, followed by a shower of dancing eighth notes; these two contrasting ideas generate much of the first movement’s dynamic energy. There is a magical moment in the development section when Beethoven reprises the opening arpeggios, this time with plaintive, recitative-like elaborations, before bolting off into wild and uncharted harmonic regions. Another rolled chord signals the beginning of the Adagio, an incandescent rainbow emerging from the Allegro’s darkling clouds. Both here and in the finale, Beethoven explores wide expanses of register, from gruff, subterranean bass to celestial treble. The Allegretto is characterized by syncopated rhythms and rippling arpeggios in interlocking configurations that recall the sonata’s foregoing movements.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, William Grant Still studied at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and launched his professional career as an arranger for blues master W. C. Handy during World War I. He became a major voice in the Harlem Renaissance and became known as the “Dean of African American Classical Composers.” Still said that his goal was “to elevate Negro musical idioms to a position of dignity and effectiveness in the fields of symphonic and operatic music,” as illustrated by works like the “Afro-American” Symphony and the opera Troubled Island, with a libretto by Langston Hughes about the Haitian Revolution. The piano suite Three Visions dates from 1936, the same year Still made headlines by conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program of his own music. “Summertime,” the second of its three movements, is a short, delicately shaded tone poem in the tradition of Debussy. The title alludes to the promised afterlife of the Spiritualist religion—and also, perhaps, to the Spiritualist enclave of Summerland, California, just up the coast from Los Angeles.  

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Together with his symbolist opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s great piano and orchestral pieces have long defined musical impressionism in the popular mind. Although critics often linked him with painters like Manet, he steadfastly maintained that his music depicted not superficial “impressions” but essential “realities.” It was at least partly to counteract the distasteful impressionist label that he called his later piano works “preludes” and “etudes,” eschewing earlier titles like Images and Estampes that evoked the visual arts. In a further effort to discourage such associations, he insisted on relegating programmatic titles to the end of the pieces. But the two books of Préludes are programmatic only in the most general sense of arising in response to extramusical stimuli; and those stimuli were as likely to be literary, environmental, or even theatrical as visual. The two dozen tonal sketches immerse the listener in Debussy’s unmistakable sound world, an enchanted fantasyland of shimmering harmonies, sinuous roulades, and richly embroidered melodies. “La fille aux cheveux de lin” (The Girl with Flaxen Hair), inspired by a poem by Leconte de Lisle, is all folklike simplicity and tenderness, while “Bruyères” (Heather) suggests the gentle murmuring of the shrub’s bell-like flowers in the moorland breeze.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Beatrice Price was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She received early musical tuition from her mother, followed by formal studies in Boston, where Price attended New England Conservatory, studying composition and gaining qualifications as a piano teacher and an organist. She embarked on a succession of teaching posts, including a spell as head of the music department at Clark University, Atlanta, before moving to Chicago in 1927. While the Chicago Symphony premiered the first of her four symphonies in 1933, composing for radio became a useful source of income alongside her other freelance activities as a piano teacher and cinema organist accompanying silent films. She compiled a catalog of some 300 works, virtually of which remained unpublished for decades.

Her lifelong interest in African-American themes and idioms is reflected in the first of four works entitled Fantasie nègre (Negro Fantasy), which owe a debt to Dvořák in their skillful synthesis of vernacular and concert-hall traditions. No. 1 is based on the spiritual “Sinner, Please Don’t Let This Harvest Pass.” After an introductory flourish, the sturdy melody shines forth in the treble in plangent E minor. Thereafter, it moves from one voice to another in a variety of harmonic settings, inlaid with elaborate pianistic filigree in the bravura vein of a European concert fantasy. The more relaxed second theme has a similarly folklike quality and leads to an even more brilliantly virtuosic recap of the spiritual.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Having graduated at age 19 from Warsaw’s High School of Music, Chopin struck out to conquer Europe and eventually landed in Paris, where he would make his home for the rest of his short life. He threw himself into the city’s glittering social and musical life, turning out dozens of waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, and other solo piano pieces that gave new meaning to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms in the 1820s and 1830s. Chopin is often credited with inventing the genre of the instrumental “ballad,” a term hitherto reserved almost exclusively for vocal music. In his lexicon, the word ballade retained its literary associations, in keeping with the Romantic interest in program music. But despite Debussy’s observation that “Chopin was a delightful teller of tales of love and war,” the composer known as the “poet of the piano” was more interested in evoking generalized moods and emotions than specific stories.

In that vein, the four Ballades can be thought of as abstract tonal dramas: extended multisection works featuring sharply characterized themes and subtle shadings. In constructing these large-scale edifices, Chopin used the composer’s basic tools of repetition, variation, and contrast, enhanced by his phenomenal command of harmony, texture, and figuration. The Ballade in A-flat major is predicated on the contrast between two rhythmic motives, the first a crisply strutting dotted-note figure, the second smoother, more relaxed, and lightly syncopated. Further rhythmic complexities abound in the F-minor Ballade, one of Chopin’s supreme masterpieces. It begins with a shower of softly pulsing eighth-note triplets, the metrical bedrock on which he erects his ornate structure. Scintillating passagework alternates with ruminative interludes, where Chopin seems to be pondering where to go next, and the work ends with a display of bravura fireworks.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Having graduated at age 19 from Warsaw’s High School of Music, Chopin struck out to conquer Europe and eventually landed in Paris, where he would make his home for the rest of his short life. He threw himself into the city’s glittering social and musical life, turning out dozens of waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, and other solo piano pieces that gave new meaning to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms in the 1820s and 1830s. Chopin is often credited with inventing the genre of the instrumental “ballad,” a term hitherto reserved almost exclusively for vocal music. In his lexicon, the word ballade retained its literary associations, in keeping with the Romantic interest in program music. But despite Debussy’s observation that “Chopin was a delightful teller of tales of love and war,” the composer known as the “poet of the piano” was more interested in evoking generalized moods and emotions than specific stories.

In that vein, the four Ballades can be thought of as abstract tonal dramas: extended multisection works featuring sharply characterized themes and subtle shadings. In constructing these large-scale edifices, Chopin used the composer’s basic tools of repetition, variation, and contrast, enhanced by his phenomenal command of harmony, texture, and figuration. The Ballade in A-flat major is predicated on the contrast between two rhythmic motives, the first a crisply strutting dotted-note figure, the second smoother, more relaxed, and lightly syncopated. Further rhythmic complexities abound in the F-minor Ballade, one of Chopin’s supreme masterpieces. It begins with a shower of softly pulsing eighth-note triplets, the metrical bedrock on which he erects his ornate structure. Scintillating passagework alternates with ruminative interludes, where Chopin seems to be pondering where to go next, and the work ends with a display of bravura fireworks.

© Harry Haskell, 2025