Program Notes

Einojuhani Rautavaara
A Requiem in Our Time, Op. 3 (1953)
Approximate duration: 11 minutes

Einojuhani Rautavaara was a composition student at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki when he won first prize in a prestigious competition with A Requiem for Our Time, a four-movement score for brass and percussion that he dedicated to the memory of his mother. Finland’s living legend Jean Sibelius took note and selected Rautavaara for a scholarship to study at The Juilliard School in New York, setting Rautavaara on course for a distinguished career in which his melodic, mystical style made him the true heir to Sibelius as a composer of distinctly Finnish and highly personal symphonies.

In the period when he composed his instrumental Requiem, Rautavaara was heavily influenced by the neoclassical sound that Stravinsky had cultivated over the previous 30 years, with its sharp-edged juxtapositions, churning momentum and winking references to old musical traditions. The opening Hymnus evokes the brass ensembles of the late Renaissance period, while the Credo et dubito explores the collisions between two vastly different tempos and moods. Dies irae, that fiery portion of the Latin liturgy detailing the “day of wrath,” builds a menacing, stuttering soundscape around linear melodies with the flavor of Medieval plainchant. The tearful Lacrymosa text from the requiem Mass inspired the prayerful final movement.

Steve Reich
Double Sextet (2007)
Approximate duration: 22 minutes

In the early 1960s, when Steve Reich found himself disenchanted with the arcane European techniques being taught in American conservatories, he left to go live in San Francisco and pay his way as a taxi driver while he experimented with tape looping and other forms of trance-like repetition. His early efforts, along with those of fellow seekers like Terry Riley, gave birth to the compositional style now known as “minimalism.”

Reich moved to New York and formed a large ensemble to perform his multi-layered, pulsing scores that drew upon African and Asian percussion patterns, as exemplified by Music for 18 Musicians, a hypnotic score that become a surprise crossover hit for ECM Records in 1978. Even as mainstream ensembles continued to ignore him, new generations of composers flocked to Reich’s path of music built from repetitive cycles, and conservatory-trained musicians clambered to perform his intricate and deeply meditative compositions.

The establishment that Reich left behind finally caught up in recent decades, as exemplified by the Pulitzer Prize bestowed upon the 72-year-old composer for the Double Sextet composed in 2007 for the upstart chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird. In an interview in the liner notes for their recording released by Nonesuch Records, Reich recalled his initial resistance to working with that ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion. “I don’t work with one-of-a-kind instruments,” he explained; “I work with pairs and multiples of identical instruments, so I can have the unison canons that have been the backbone of my music since It’s Gonna Rain in 1965.” He ultimately turned to the same solution he had used in earlier works like Different Trains and Electric Counterpoint, in which live performers play along with pre-taped recordings of themselves, navigating Reich’s signature patterns of pulsing, interlocking rhythms. This approach worked for the initial performances and recording by Eighth Blackbird, but as Reich noted, “they and I both agree that the piece is best in live performance when you have 12 players.”

Igor Stravinsky
Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920; revised 1947)
Approximate duration: 12 minutes

Igor Stravinsky’s music had never been played outside of his native Russia when the Ballets Russes brought The Firebird to Paris in 1910. That sensational production made Stravinsky a household name, and by the time he had followed up with Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring over the next three years, he had positioned himself as an uncompromising leader of modern music. But just as the world was adjusting to the earthy, strident sound of those breakthrough ballets, Stravinsky made a surprising pivot toward a clean and restrained new style rooted in music’s past.

The vestiges of Stravinsky’s Russian roots and the seeds of his neoclassical reinvention intersect in the Symphonies of Wind Instruments he composed in 1920 as a memorial for the French composer Claude Debussy. In his autobiography, Stravinsky described the work as “an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments,” creating a call-and-response dynamic that channels the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox church. The textures of winds and brass allow for maximal transparency, and their crisp articulations highlight the precise, churning layers that became hallmarks of Stravinsky’s neoclassical style. Giving this short work the plural title Symphonies shows how Stravinsky reckoning with history, as he looked beyond the 18th-century model of a classical symphony and aligned himself with Gabrieli’s “sacred symphonies” of the late 1500s (composed for early brass ensembles) and the inherent meaning of a word derived from the Ancient Greek for “sounding together.”

Dmitri Shostakovich
Chamber Symphony in C minor, Op. 110a (1967)
Approximate duration: 20 minutes

By the age of 53, Dmitri Shostakovich had been through more than a lifetime’s worth of highs and lows: becoming the Soviet Union’s most famous composer in his 20s; surviving Stalin’s scorn (twice); writing music that made him an international hero of World War II; writing populist schlock out of self-protection while stashing his best works for an unknown future; becoming widowed; getting remarried, only to divorce; having his marriage proposal rejected by a former student (twice); learning that he had a form of polio that was robbing him of the use of his hands and causing him to fall and break bones.

Shostakovich was in a dark mood and reflecting on all of it when he traveled to Dresden in July 1960 to work on the score for a film commemorating the devastation of that German city during World War II. Once there, his muse led him in an unexpected direction; he explained in a letter to a friend, “However much I tried to draft my obligations for the film, I just couldn’t do it. Instead I wrote an ideologically deficient quartet nobody needs. I reflected that if I die some day, then it’s hardly likely anyone will write a work dedicated to my memory. So I decided to write one myself. You could even write on the cover: ‘Dedicated to the memory of the composer of this quartet.’”

With Shostakovich’s blessing, the Russian conductor and violist Rudolf Barshai adapted that work from Dresden, the String Quartet No. 8, into this Chamber Symphony in C minor, Op. 110a. The intensely personal nature of the music is evident from the very first notes: They spell out D–E-flat–C–B, or, as the notes are called in German, D–S–C–H, signifying the composer’s first initial and last name. This motto theme had appeared in earlier compositions, but here the motive’s lugubrious rise and fall becomes a morbid obsession. The score also quotes other Shostakovich works, with passages referencing the First and Fifth Symphonies and the Second Piano Trio. The work unfolds as a continuous arc of five connected movements, opening and closing in a slow Largo tempo and encompassing central episodes of greater urgency and agitation.

– © 2026 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece as a collective call for justice.