Tag Archives: Tone Poem Tuesday

Jean Sibelius and the virtual national classical music work of Finland. Here’s Finlandia. (Worth watching in HD fullscreen.)

As much as I love the Russian Romantics, the work of Modest Mussorgsky has always left me a little cold. However, it’s the Halloween season, and Night on Bald Mountain is a staple of scary music, so…here it is. Kind … Continue reading →

American music before the rise of jazz — roughly, prior to George Gershwin’s rise to prominence — presents a kind of odd musical landscape. The musical culture here was still greatly steeped in European traditions and formal approaches, and attempts … Continue reading →

I found this while searching for recordings by Sir Neville Marriner for yesterday’s post on his passing. Marriner seems to be best known for conducting Baroque and Classical-era music, but he was far from limited to those periods. Frederick Delius … Continue reading →

I hated Debussy for years, but I started coming around a decade or so ago, when I began to appreciate his atmospherics more than I had before. La mer is, quite simply, a musical depiction of the sea, in three … Continue reading →

Closely related to the tone poem is the Concert overture, which is the forerunner of the tone poem in many ways. Also a single movement work, a concert overture was often intended to kick off a program of symphonic music, … Continue reading →

[Oops. Saved as draft and forgot to publish, as I do. Frequently.] This work by Richard Wagner is about as far as you can get from his huge, enormous, dense opera scores. Wagner composed this tone poem for chamber orchestra … Continue reading →

Antonin Dvorak wrote five major symphonic poems in his life, of which we hear the last today. A Hero’s Song has no specific program to describe or illuminate its action, and some have concluded that it is partially autobiographical. I … Continue reading →