Karina Canellakis & Barbara Hannigan met Barber, Ives & Stravinsky

'Things we've lost'

'This is Prophetic' comes from John Adams' opera Nixon in China and is a scene in which Nixon's wife paints a peaceful future for the world. That picture is cruelly disrupted by the 'Dance of Vengeance', a concert piece based on Samuel Barber's ballet suite Medea . Medea's husband's infidelity makes her murderous. He wrote the original suite in 1946, and presumably Barber's anger and revulsion regarding the Second World War are also expressed in it. Two years later, he composed the much sweeter Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in a short time. 'It gives expression to the feelings of loneliness, wonder, and loss of identity of a child, in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.'

Folk tunes

Charles Ives takes us to three places in New England, the far northeast of the United States. It is the early twentieth century, and he sketches a distinct atmosphere for each place. Quotations of catchy, folk tunes regularly crisscross his music, typical of Ives. Adams, Barber, and Ives share the stage with Stravinsky, who was naturalized as an American citizen in 1945. In that same year, Stravinsky completed his Symphony in Three Movements . He himself conducted the New York Philharmonic at the premiere in early 1946. He is said to have called the work his 'war symphony,' but Stravinsky also states that the work is not programmatic. 'Composers combine notes. That is all. How and in what form the things of this world are incorporated into their music is not for them to determine.'