Programs · Episode

Overture 5

Aired: Friday, March 23, 2018 @ 9:00 am
Hosted by Miles Hoffman

Miles Hoffman concludes this week's discussion about popular overtures in this episode of A Minute with Miles. 

Full Episode:

An important development of the 19^th century, the Romantic period in music, was the form known as the concert overture, a precursor of the form that Franz Liszt would call the symphonic poem.  The concert overture doesn’t introduce anything; it’s an independent, one movement orchestral work usually inspired by a literary, artistic, historical idea or by a scene from nature.  Famous concert overtures include the Hebrides Overture by Mendelssohn, the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Overture, and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

Concert overtures are by no means the only overtures that stand on their own, however.  Many opera overtures have led long and independent lives in the concert hall and many have far out lived the operas to which they were originally attached. Think of Rossini’s William Tell, the opera itself is hardly ever performed now, but the overture is immortal.

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