Concert Program: November 2025 A
in which we go off the beaten Scandinavian path
Photo by Daniel J. Schwarz on Unsplash
This month’s concert program, the third ever, is the first with a real obscure piece of music on it. We’ve played it safe so far, with some very familiar names and even somewhat overplayed pieces.
We’ve got an old standard this month, but the second half of the program brings us something entirely different and is the first time I might eventually be making an animated score video exclusively for this series (i.e. that I haven’t already made for a lecture yet).
And yes, I know that Wagner is not Scandinavian, but he’s certainly an important jumping-off or starting point for so much music of the second half of the 19th century, and I feel there’s a certain parallel to be drawn between the Wagner and the symphony that makes up the latter half of the program, which overall makes for a slightly shorter concert program than we’ll be having most of the time, but there’s a particular perfection in including these three pieces as a bundle, so bear with me. Our program for November is as follows:
We know Wagner, and this overture was the first piece of his that I was able to program in four years of online lecturing because an entire opera is out of the question and I don’t do excerpts. The overture is a perfectly manageable piece of music that has all the hallmarks of Wagner’s Woice: the Romantic richness, the literary connections, themes representing people or ideas, this propulsive momentum throughout, it’s all there.
And then, like the Plinko game ball, with Wagner as a starting point, we can go lots of places. Sibelius may not be the first stop you think of, nor might a violin concerto, but it works in my opinion. It’s a concerto we know and love, and it’s one of the few that despite being played with such regularity by everyone everywhere, I don’t tire of it. I’d sure like to hear other, more varied programming, but the Sibelius is a gem.
Lastly is the first symphony of Per Nørgård, who died almost exactly six months ago at the age of 92. I wrote about this piece before over at Fugue for Thought some nine years ago, which is a wild thing to think about. I’ve listened to a number of the composer’s other symphonies lately and I’ll say this one is the most immediately symphony-ish or Sibelius-esque, and the connection to Wagner comes in the form of his use of motifs or thematic cells that generate a fair bit of the content and unity in this piece.
What a spectacular thing it would be to be able to hear this symphony on a concert program. I really don’t think it would even be that much of a reach for even a more conservative audience to accept.
So that’s the intro for this month’s program. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to get more of this stuff, including access to the growing library of music resources, score videos and hopefully a lot more other cool stuff.
For ease of navigation, even though I’ve linked it above, you can click the link below (and at the bottom of each of the subsequent articles to get to the next piece on the program).