At the same time, Dessner is a sought-after composer who has been commissioned by leading international orchestras. One of eight San Francisco Symphony Collaborative Partners, he is additionally the Creative Chair of the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra as well as artist-in-residence at London’s Southbank Centre and with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

“I don’t consider myself a different person when I’m doing these things,” Dessner said when the National Symphony Orchestra presented his music as part of the DECLASSIFIED^® series several years ago. In 2021, the NSO also programmed his Concerto for Two Pianos, written for the Labèque sisters. Mari was co-commissioned by the NSO and Gianandrea Noseda with several other orchestras.

Born in 1976 in Cincinnati (where his latest concerto for the pianist Alice Sara Ott received its American premiere just last week), Dessner has developed a richly eclectic style that combines inspiration from such sources as the classical repertoire (particularly Baroque and later Romantic composers), folk music, and Minimalism (he regards Steve Reich as an artistic father figure).

The impetus for Mari was Dessner’s personal experience of artistic isolation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic from his home on the Basque coast of France. He describes his reflections prompted by the sudden shutdown of live performances: “I thought a lot about the impermanence of so many things that we imagine to be eternal. An orchestra can sometimes seem like the most lasting form of performance: every major city has an orchestra, and the masterpieces they perform seem like eternal pillars of our culture. But what if those orchestras never played again? What if these great works of art become but mere echoes, gradually fading in our memory?”

“At the outer reaches of our memory, would the sounds of those works combine into a kind of woven tapestry of fragments and recollections? Could it all slow down into a beautiful aquatic drone?” Dessner recalls thinking about “how the act of composing, conjuring sounds from one’s mind or imagination, is very similar to this feeling. A kind of reverence for a world of music we have shared, how memories combine into something original, a spark of creativity or imagination or a dialogue with something that came before.”

Commissioned to write an orchestral concert opener for the conductor Semyon Bychkov, to whom the score is dedicated, Dessner was prevented early in the pandemic from visiting his colleague, even though Bychkov lived nearby. “On many long walks through these beautiful forests and mountains, I imagined him reflecting on those great pieces in his own vast repertoire and how the sounds of the forest and the quiet of the beautiful natural world might intertwine with his own musical memories,” he writes.

Named after Mari, the pre-Christian Basque goddess of the forest—who is also associated in the mythology with fire, thunder, and wind—Dessner’s composition is in this sense “a reflection on the pastoral, and it weaves together several textures and fragments of material from historic works through a kind of abstraction and altered context to something new.” In particular, Mari alludes to a melody from the first movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony as well as the nocturnal textures from the fourth movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 (which sets a text by Friedrich Nietzsche for solo alto, with a prominent role for the solo oboe as the cry of an owl).

“As a concert opener,” adds Dessner, “it felt appropriate to let these notes pass through my fingers and open a new doorway through which my own voice could emerge. The music of Dvořák and Mahler feels timeless but also distinctly modern, especially now as we emerge again into a new world and listen for what comes next.”

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, two harps, celesta, bass drum, bells (deep), cowbells, tam tam, triangle, crotales, glockenspiel, marimba, two vibraphones, xylophone, snare drum, tom toms, light snare (towel and rods), strings

Still, the image of Liszt as himself a super-virtuoso has distorted his stature as a composer. His works for orchestra and piano correspond to different phases in this multifaceted artist’s career, beginning with his early period as a concertizing celebrity at the keyboard. For a spell during the late 1830s, Liszt retired from his restlessly peripatetic lifestyle touring all across Europe. But news that a projected Beethoven monument in Bonn could not be financed goaded Liszt to return to the concert circuit to raise funds for the project. He finally abandoned his public touring career when he accepted a position as music director at the court of Weimar in 1848, where he could channel his creativity into composition and conducting. Liszt became a standard bearer for the “progressive” movement in the field of instrumental music—largely on the basis of the symphonic poems he composed during the Weimar years.

It was during this period as well that Liszt refined his three published concertante works for piano, drawing on material dating back to the 1830s. These include the two numbered concertos and Totentanz (“The Dance of Death”), a piece that fuses elements of the symphonic poem with the concerto. (The Piano Concerto No. 3, a much later posthumous discovery, likely dates from earlier in Liszt’s career.)

Using sketches that date back to his teenage years, Liszt completed an early version of the Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1849 but continued to revise the piece before publishing it in 1856. This lengthy genesis helps explain the varied identities embedded in the work: the young Liszt who was a “rock star” performer and the innovative composer interested in exploring new compositional techniques.

To be sure, Liszt does not stint on the virtuoso side: splashy cadenzas and thundering octaves abound in this score. But in its content and presentation, the First Concerto seeks to integrate the solo voice with the orchestra—concerto symphonique, implying a synthesis of concerto and symphony, was one of Liszt’s preferred terms for this type of composition. Though cast in four short movements, these are seamlessly bound to give the impression of a larger single-movement work. Even the musical material of these different sections is related, constantly transformed into new guises.

Additionally, the harmonic language introduces a kind of ambiguity not typically associated with the concerto. This becomes increasingly prominent as the opening Allegro maestoso segues without pause into later contrasting sections. In the final pages, Liszt supplies a wildly assertive coda, as if wrapping up an ordinary virtuoso concerto rather than the unusual vision to which we have just been made witness.

Instrumentation: Two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, cymbals, triangle, strings

Berlioz’s discovery of Shakespeare also triggered his obsession with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, who played Ophelia and Juliet with a touring theater company that visited Paris. A little later, he experienced a similar epiphany when the symphonies of Beethoven were introduced to Paris. Berlioz found a model for the Symphonie’s five-movement design in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony (Pastoral).

All of these threads are woven together in Berlioz’s original concept for the Symphonie fantastique. It centers around an unnamed Artist’s obsession with a woman who represents his ideal of love. Berlioz published an elaborate program detailing a narrative about the Artist’s conflicting emotions as he moves from “the tumult of a festive party” to “the peaceful contemplation of the beautiful sights of nature …. everywhere, whether in town or in the countryside, the Beloved’s image keeps haunting him…”

Anxiety that his Beloved has betrayed him gnaws at the Artist. In despair, he takes a large dose of opium but instead succumbs to hallucinations that he has murdered the Beloved and is in fact witnessing his own execution. The final movement continues this nightmare with an excursion into hell, where the Artist participates in a witches’ sabbath celebrating his funeral. Even the Beloved takes part in their revels.

A slow, melancholy introduction to the first movement (“Reveries, Passions”) evokes the Artist in his solitude, incomplete without this love. When the Allegro starts several minutes in, Berlioz presents a theme representing the Beloved (flutes and violins), whom he sees for the first time in real life after dreaming of her. He calls this theme the idée fixe—a “fixed idea” because it not only represents the artist’s obsessive image of the Beloved but plays a key part in the musical pattern and recurs at crucial moments, each time in a varied context. The melody’s yearning quality suggests how much the idée fixe is actually a projection of the Artist’s own desire.

The dance-centered second movement (“A Ball”), with its scintillating harp textures, foregrounds the classical side of Berlioz, who also numbered Mozart and Gluck among his idols. The third movement (“Scene in the Countryside”) is the longest and most enigmatic—the impulses from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony are most obvious here. The oboe and English horn evoke duetting shepherds overheard by the self-conscious Artist. The natural setting translates his subjective angst into menacing weather.

If the first two movements focus on the idealism of the Artist’s love, the last two trace his descent into hell. “The March to the Scaffold” includes a chilling image of the barbaric crowd whose curiosity has been aroused by the prospect of a death sentence. At the end, the clarinet’s reprise of the idée fixe suggests the final image flashing before the Artist’s eyes before the guillotine, graphically depicted by Berlioz, decapitates him.

“Witches’ Sabbath” incorporates some of Berlioz’s most striking orchestral special effects. The idée fixe morphs into a mocking, high-pitched taunt on the clarinet, launching the witches’ orgy, while the ancient Dies Irae melody from the Catholic Requiem is similarly also parodied in a frenetic (and terribly exciting) passage in which Berlioz combines it with the witches’ dance.

Violins and violas striking their instruments with the wood of the bow, graveyard bells mixed with bellowing tuba: Berlioz’s unrelenting curiosity pressed him to explore sonic extremes that redefined assumptions about what music itself could express. The Symphonie fantastique not only provided the composer with a means of catharsis for his own turbulent experience of personal relationships but signaled a revolutionary new approach to music as a medium for autobiographical, subjective expression.

Instrumentation: two flutes (second doubles piccolo), two oboes (second doubles English horn), two clarinets (first doubles Eb clarinet), four bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, two cornets, three trombones, two tubas, four timpani, two harps, two bass drums, cymbals, field drum, two bells, strings