Dalia Stasevska
Karen Gomyo Leonard Bernstein
Antonín Dvořák

“Creating a score for full orchestra can feel like simultaneously standing on a mountaintop, scrubbing your kitchen floor, swimming in the middle of a lake, riding the subway during rush hour, and gently holding someone’s hand,” Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) wrote at the premiere of The Observatory in 2019. 

Composer Caroline Shaw has received the Pulitzer Prize and Grammy for best composition. She wrote the orchestral piece The Observatory for the LA Phil, referencing a visit to the city’s famous Griffith Observatory, where she studied both the city and the sky above.

She describes the piece: “There are some very large chords, and some very large spaces. (...) There are references to Strauss’ Don Juan, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 (...) There is celebration and criticism of systems. There is chaos and clarity.”

During the summer of 1951, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was on vacation in the Mexican city of Cuernavaca when he received a commission for a new orchestral work. He was in the middle of reading philosopher Plato’s famous dialogue Symposium, directly translated to Drinking Party.

Many of Bernstein’s most famous works are based on literary classics. The new piece, which took shape as a violin concerto and was finished in 1954, was named Serenade. As a form of music, the serenade has a light touch and has often been played in the evening, often with romantic undertones.

In Plato’s Symposium, the guests rejoice in love and the god Eros. The movements in Serenade are named after the speakers - the sophist Phaedrus, the naturalist Eryxmachus, the writers Aristophanes and Agathon and the philosopher Socrates, who is cheerfully interrupted by the drunken politician Alcibiades.

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) moved to New York in 1892 to become the director at The National Conservatory of Music of America. During three years in the United States, he wrote some of his most popular works and one of his most-played symphonies: Symphony No. 9, entitled From the New World.

Dvořák quickly absorbed impressions from his new surroundings and started working on a new symphony after four months in the US. One of the students sang spirituals to him, and they became one of his most important sources of inspiration. Symphony No. 9 was premiered in 1893 and became an enormous success.