Fridays in Lent: composers beginning with the letter T

There was a memorial concert for the founder of Albany Pro Musica, David Griggs-Janower on January 25, 2014 at the Cathedral of All Saints. He was a tremendous musical treasure in the area, and continues to be missed.

Several of the groups he initiated were among the performers. The first piece, by Orchestra Pro Musica, was a Tchaikovsky composition. Here’s an ensemble performing Elegy for strings.

The penultimate piece before the intermission

N is for Nutcracker

You are almost certainly familiar with the music from The Nutcracker, a two-act ballet, with “a score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto is adapted from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. It was given its première at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg on Sunday, 18 December 1892… Although the original production was not a success, the twenty-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracted from the ballet was.” Jaquandor shared a link to all the music.

The Nutcracker Suite is also “an album by American pianist, composer and bandleader Duke Ellington recorded… in 1960 featuring jazz interpretations of ‘The Nutcracker’ by Tchaikovsky, arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.”