The title of Hector Berlioz’s 
concert overture Le Corsaire
relates it—if indistinctly—
to Lord Byron’s semi
autobiographical, nautical, poetical 
tale The Corsair. The overture’s original 
title, however, was La tour de Nice
(The Tower of Nice). When Berlioz 
completed it provisionally in 1844, 
he was actually staying in a tower 
perched on a rocky outcropping 
overlooking Nice, where he had gone 
to recover from jaundice and mourn 
the collapse of his marriage. It was 
premiered under that title in 1845, 
but later he changed its name to Le 
corsaire rouge—the French translation 
of The Red Rover, a marine adventure 
tale by James Fenimore Cooper, 
whose works Berlioz adored. When 
he finally revised and published the 
piece, in 1852, he deleted the “rouge,” 
yielding the title Le Corsaire, with its 
Byronic overtones—and that is the 
name that has stuck. After conducting 
the premiere of the work’s revised 
version, Berlioz reported: “With a large 
orchestra and a conductor with an 
arm of steel this piece comes over 
with a certain swagger.” That it does; 
and if it is programmed less often 
than it was formerly, it’s not the fault 
of its exciting, propulsive spirit. After 
its initial flurry, the work builds from a 
lyrical chapter through a prickly fast 
section to a blazing conclusion with 
throbbing timpani and stirring brass 
sonorities

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was 
one of history’s most extraordinary 
child prodigies. His mother, asked 
later in life about when her son 
began playing the piano, replied, 
“Erich always played the piano.” 
When he was a teenager in Vienna, 
renowned composers like Richard 
Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, and Jean 
Sibelius scrambled for superlatives 
to describe his music. In 1934 the 
theatrical director Max Reinhardt 
invited him to travel to Hollywood to 
compose the soundtrack for his film 
adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s 
Dream. It was a fateful and fortunate 
invitation. Hollywood agreed with 
Korngold, and Korngold, being Jewish, 
assuredly would not have agreed 
with Austria had he remained there. 
During this second phase of his career 
Korngold would create masterful 
symphonic scores for 20 motion 
pictures, including Captain Blood, 
The Prince and the Pauper, Anthony 
Adverse (which brought him his first 
Academy Award), Robin Hood (which 
earned him his second), The Sea 
Hawk, and Kings Row. If, listening to 
his Violin Concerto, you think you hear 
echoes of familiar film music, you’re 
right. Most of its themes are drawn 
from Korngold’s soundtrack scores: 
in the first movement, from Another 
Dawn (1937) and Juarez (1939); in the 
second, from Anthony Adverse (1936; 
the movement’s misterioso middle 
section is original to the concerto); in 
the mercurial finale, from The Prince 
and the Pauper (1937).

In 1939, Benjamin Britten and 
his spouse, the tenor Peter Pears, 
left England for the United States to 
wait out the war, but they returned 
to England in 1942 and were granted 
status as conscientious objectors, 
leaving them to pursue their musical 
projects. While in the United States, 
they became engrossed in the long 
poem “The Borough,” by British poet 
George Crabbe (1754-1832), and 
together they extracted from it the 
tale of Peter Grimes, a rough East 
Anglian fisherman who abused his 
apprentices, lost his sanity, and died.

Their colleague Montagu 
Slater developed the story into a 
libretto, and Britten carried out the 
composition from January 1944 to 
February 1945. Peter Grimes emerged 
as a compelling tale bursting with 
what would become “Brittenesque” 
fingerprints: sympathetic portrayal of 
a social outcast, undertones of sexual 
ambiguity and abuse, exposing the 
hypocrisy of an intolerant community 
easily given to scapegoating, and a 
leading tenor part crafted specifically 
for Pears. The opera opened in London 
on June 7, 1945, less than a month 
after VE Day, and it established Britten 
as the leading British composer of his 
era. Six “Sea Interludes” separate the 
opera’s seven scenes, depicting the 
sea at various times and in differing 
“moods.” Britten extracted four as 
his Four Sea Interludes, a testimony 
to his penchant for expressive, often 
haunting orchestration

The Ballets Russes, led by 
impresario Sergei Diaghilev, were 
at the center of Parisian performing 
arts in the second decade of the 
20th century. They specialized in 
dancing pieces inspired by Russian 
folklore, and The Firebird was perfectly 
suited to the company’s designs. 
The tale involves the dashing Prince 
Ivan Tsarevich, who, assisted by a 
Firebird with magic tail-feathers, 
navigates the snares of evil King 
Kaschei, and wins a Princess, with 
whom he will live happily ever 
after. The Firebird was the first of 
Stravinsky’s truly original Diaghilev 
scores (previously he had provided 
only some orchestrations of pieces by 
Chopin), and it contributed mightily 
to the ballet’s smashing success 
when it was premiered, in 1910. The 
ballet was well established by the 
time Stravinsky assembled several
of its movements into a symphonic 
suite in 1919. He had described the 
original orchestration as “wastefully 
large,” but even with the somewhat 
slenderized instrumentation of the 
1919 Suite it remains a dazzling 
showpiece of orchestral possibilities. 
Some of the effects are startling, such 
as when strings play eerie glissandos 
over their instruments’ fingerboards 
to evoke the mystery of the garden 
at night, or when the overlay of wind 
orchestration makes us believe that 
the dancing Firebird’s feathers must 
indeed sparkle with magic.