Category: Dec2025

Arturo Márquez (b. 1950)

Arturo Marquez wrote the following notes for the premiere of Danzón No. 2:

The idea of writing the Danzón 2 originated in 1993 during a trip to Malinalco with the painter Andrés Fonseca and the dancer Irene Martínez, both of whom [have] a special passion for the danzón, which they were able to transmit to me from the beginning, and also during later trips to Veracruz and visits to the Colonia Salon in Mexico City. From these experiences onward, I started to learn the danzón’s rhythms, its form, its melodic outline, and to listen to the old recordings by Acerina Mariano Merceron and his Danzonera Orchestra. I was fascinated and I started to understand that the apparent lightness of the danzón is only like a visiting card for a type of music full of sensuality and qualitative seriousness, a genre which old Mexican people continue to dance with a touch of nostalgia and a jubilant escape towards their own emotional world; we can fortunately still see this in the embrace between music and dance that occurs in the State of Veracruz and in the dance parlors of Mexico City.

Danzón 2 … endeavors to get as close as possible to the dance, to its nostalgic melodies, to its wild rhythms, and although it violates its intimacy, its form and its harmonic language, it is a very personal way of paying my respects and expressing my emotions towards truly popular music. 

The music opens with a sultry clarinet melody, soon joined by gently swaying rhythms that evoke the dance floor’s poised anticipation. Gradually, the tempo quickens, and the piece bursts into vivid color—strings shimmer, brass blaze, and percussion drives the pulse forward with irresistible momentum. The rhythm alternates between restraint and abandon, mirroring the dancers’ flirtatious interplay. Energetic, sensual, and irresistibly rhythmic, Danzón No. 2 has become a favored finale, its vibrant pulse providing a compelling and memorable close to many orchestral programs.

About Arturo Márquez

Arturo Márquez, born in 1950 in Álamos, Sonora, is one of Mexico’s most widely recognized contemporary composers. His early musical education began after his family relocated to La Puente, California, where he started formal studies in the mid-1960s. He later returned to Mexico to pursue training in piano and theory at the Conservatory of Music, eventually continuing his compositional studies at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes under Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras, Héctor Quintanar, and Federico Ibarra. Márquez broadened his artistic perspective through additional work in Paris with Jacques Castérède and later at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Morton Subotnick, Stephen Mosko, Mel Powell, and James Newton.

Márquez’s music—particularly his celebrated series of Danzones—has earned him a distinguished place in Latin American concert music. His catalog includes numerous commissions from prominent cultural and musical institutions, among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Organization of American States, the San Antonio Symphony, UNAM, the Universidad Metropolitana, Festival Cervantino, and others. Throughout his career he has received support from organizations such as Mexico’s Institute of Fine Arts, the French Ministry of Culture, the Fulbright Foundation, and Mexico’s national arts council, which awarded him a major composition fellowship in 1994.

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962)

Blue…like the sky. Where all possibilities soar. Cathedrals…a place of thought, growth, spiritual expression…serving as a symbolic doorway into and out of this world.

Blue represents all potential and the progression of journeys. Cathedrals represent a place of beginnings, endings, solitude, fellowship, contemplation, knowledge and growth. As I was writing this piece, I found myself imagining a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky. Because the walls would be transparent, I saw the image of clouds and blueness permeating from the outside of this church. In my mind’s eye the listener would enter from the back of the sanctuary, floating along the corridor amongst giant crystal pillars, moving in a contemplative stance. The stained glass windows’ figures would start moving with song, singing a heavenly music. The listener would float down the aisle, slowly moving upward at first and then progressing at a quicker pace, rising towards an immense ceiling which would open to the sky…as this journey progressed, the speed of the traveler would increase, rushing forward and upward. I wanted to create the sensation of contemplation and quiet peace at the beginning, moving towards the feeling of celebration and ecstatic expansion of the soul, all the while singing along with that heavenly music. 

These were my thoughts when The Curtis Institute of Music commissioned me to write a work to commemorate its 75th anniversary. Curtis is a house of knowledge–a place to reach towards that beautiful expression of the soul which comes through music. I began writing this piece at a unique juncture in my life and found myself pondering the question of what makes a life. The recent loss of my younger brother, Andrew Blue, made me reflect on the amazing journeys that we all make in our lives, crossing paths with so many individuals singularly and collectively, learning and growing each step of the way. This piece represents the expression of the individual and the group…our inner travels and the places our souls carry us, the lessons we learn, and the growth we experience. In tribute to my brother, I feature solos for the clarinet (the instrument he played) and the flute (the instrument I play). Because I am the older sibling, it is the flute that appears first in this dialog. At the end of the work, the two instruments continue their dialogue, but it is the flute that drops out and the clarinet that continues on in the upward progressing journey. This is a story that commemorates living and passing through places of knowledge and of sharing and of that song called life. This work was commissioned and premiered in 2000 by the Curtis Institute of Music. –Jennifer Higdon

About Jennifer Higdon

Jennifer Higdon is one of America’s most acclaimed and most frequently performed living composers. She is a major figure in contemporary classical music, receiving the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto, a 2010 Grammy for her Percussion Concerto, a 2018 Grammy for her Viola Concerto and a 2020 Grammy for her Harp Concerto. In 2018, Higdon received the Nemmers Prize from Northwestern University which is given to contemporary classical composers of exceptional achievement who have significantly influenced the field of composition. Most recently, the recording of Higdon’s Percussion Concerto was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Higdon enjoys several hundred performances a year of her works, and blue cathedral is today’s most performed contemporary orchestral work, with more than 600 performances worldwide. Her works have been recorded on more than seventy CDs. Higdon’s first opera, Cold Mountain, won the prestigious International Opera Award for Best World Premiere and the opera recording was nominated for 2 Grammy awards. Her music is published exclusively by Lawdon Press. (Source: jenniferhigdon.com)

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide (1956) is a dazzling burst of wit, charm, and virtuosity—a frequently performed concert opener in the orchestral repertoire. Drawn from his operetta Candide, based on Voltaire’s satirical novella, the overture encapsulates the work’s irrepressible energy and biting humor in just four whirlwind minutes.

About the Overture, Bernstein scholar Jack Gottlieb, also a colleague and friend of the composer, wrote in 1964:

Candide (1956) is operetta in the vein of Offenbach and Gilbert and Sullivan. Its music has all the wit, élan, and sophistication that is associated with that genre. This is immediately apparent in the Overture (who ever wrote a special overture—in sonata form, no less—for a musical comedy?). It begins with a fanfare built on the interval of a minor seventh, followed by a major second—typically Bernstein, which serves as a motto and as a basis for development, throughout the entire operetta. This seventh sets up an expectation of B-flat major; but, instead, there is a stumbling, like a pratfall, into E-flat. This, in the body of the show, becomes “battle scene” music. Next, a lyrical contrast from the duet “Oh Happy We” is stated. This entire section is then repeated with lighter orchestration (note the devilish glee of the solo violin) and is succeeded by a brilliant codetta derived from the end of the aria “Glitter and Be Gay.” The Overture concludes with a shower of musical sparks utilizing fragments of everything already heard. (source: leonardberstein.com)

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E Minor (“From the New World”) was composed in 1893 during the Czech composer’s stay in the United States. It reflects both his homesickness for Bohemia and his fascination with the musical spirit of his temporary American home.

When Dvořák accepted the directorship of New York’s National Conservatory of Music, he was asked to help define an authentically “American” sound. He found inspiration in the melodies he heard around him—spirituals, Native American music, and folk tunes—and saw in them the same sincerity and vitality he cherished in his own country’s folk songs. While none of the symphony’s themes directly quote these sources, Dvořák absorbed their rhythmic character and modal inflections to create music that feels rooted in the American landscape yet unmistakably bears his personal voice.

The symphony opens with a mysterious introduction that soon gives way to one of Dvořák’s most dramatic movements. The Allegro brims with restless energy and bold contrasts—echoes of the bustling new world that surrounded him in New York City. The second movement, Largo, is often associated with the song “Goin’ Home” (adapted later by Dvořák’s student William Arms Fisher) and evokes nostalgia and longing for distant places and familiar comforts.

The Scherzo unfolds with incisive rhythmic vigor and an unmistakable sense of propulsion, its syncopations and angular gestures suggesting the impression Native American and African American musical traditions made on Dvořák during his stay in America. Even so, the movement’s structural clarity and refinement remain firmly rooted in the European symphonic lineage he inherited from Beethoven and Brahms. The concluding movement, marked Allegro con fuoco, gathers the symphony’s thematic strands with compelling urgency, recalling earlier motifs and driving them toward a sweeping, unifying resolution.At its premiere by the New York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall in December 1893, the symphony was an immediate triumph. Critics hailed it as a work that captured the “spirit of America,” though Dvořák himself modestly insisted that he had simply written “music that anyone with a heart could understand.” In the years since, From the New World has remained a symbol of cross-cultural creativity: a meeting of Old World craftsmanship and New World imagination.