Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Chadwick and Salonen go Greek
In the early years of the 20th century, a hauntingly beautiful piece of Grecian sculpture, the head of the goddess Aphrodite, was donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Art. There it inspired this orchestral work by Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick. Chadwick's symphonic tone poem "Aphrodite" was—in the words of the composer—"an attempt to suggest in music the poetic and tragic scenes which may have passed before the sightless eyes of such a goddess." Chadwick composed this music during East Coast holidays on Martha's Vineyard, inspired, he said, by the play of light and wind on the sea before him. It received its premiere at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut on this date in 1912. On today's date in 1999, at a summer musical festival on the opposite coast of America, another musical work inspired by ancient Greece received its first performance. This music was entitled "Five Images after Sappho," inspired by texts of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho, and written for the remarkable voice of a modern American soprano, Dawn Upshaw. It was premiered at the Ojai Festival in California, and written by the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.