Jessie Montgomery

Coincident Dances

Jessie Montgomery was born in New York City in 1981. Coincident Dances was first performed by the Chicago Sinfonietta, Mei-Ann Chen conducting, on September 16, 2017. It is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, Timpani, percussion and strings. It lasts about 12 minutes in performance.

*****

Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. Her works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life,” (The Washington Post) and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. She was named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. She serves on the Composition and Music Technology faculty at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music.

The composer writes: “Coincident Dances is inspired by the sounds found in New York’s various cultures, capturing the frenetic energy and multicultural aural palette one hears even in a short walk through a New York City neighborhood. The work is a fusion of several different sound-worlds: English consort, samba, mbira dance music from Ghana, swing, and techno.”

“My reason for choosing these styles sometimes stemmed from an actual experience of accidentally hearing a pair simultaneously, which happens most days of the week walking down the streets of New York, or one time when I heard a parked car playing Latin jazz while I had rhythm and blues in my headphones. Some of the pairings are merely experiments. Working in this mode, the orchestra takes on the role of a DJ of a multicultural dance track.”

This piece can serve as a perfect introduction to Jessie Montgomery’s music, if you’ve never heard her work before. It is immediately attractive, full of varied incident, colorful, and rhythmic. There is an excellent mind at work here; the piece is carefully constructed, sophisticated and polished. It is not easy to play. You could listen to it more than once and each time find new things to like about it. There is a long history in the US of classical music that juxtaposes several pieces at the same time, giving the impression of bands marching toward each other into joyful cacophony and then separating again. Visionary composer Charles Ives devoted many compositions to depicting his childhood in Danbury, CT, which seems to have featured a string of conflicting parades. Montgomery brings this tradition into the 21st century.

– Martin Webster

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Maurice Ravel

Concerto for Piano & Orchestra in G major

Maurice Ravel was born in Ciboure, France in 1875 and died in Paris in 1937. Though he used music composed as early as 1914, he did not complete the concerto until 1931. It was first performed in Paris the following year by Marguerite Long, piano, with the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Henri Rabaud. The concerto is scored for piano solo, flute, piccolo, oboe, English horn, clarinet, E-flat clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, trumpet, trombone, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

*****

With this work Ravel intended to compose “a concerto in the truest sense of the word: I mean that it is written very much in the same spirit as those of Mozart and Saint-Saëns. The music of a concerto should, in my opinion, be lighthearted and brilliant, and not aim at profundity or dramatic effects. It has been said of certain great classical concertos that they were written not for but against the piano. I heartily agree.”

These kinds of comments are usually aimed at composers like Brahms, but one wonders: is not Ravel’s own Concerto for the Left Hand (written just prior to this concerto) intense, dark, dramatic? Are not many of Mozart’s concerto movements profound? Ravel’s concerto doesn’t answer these questions, but it does set an example. There is no heavy concept weighing it down. The orchestral texture is transparent, lightly and ingeniously scored. And the piano is always to the fore. The concerto is, in fact, “lighthearted and brilliant.”

Much is made of the influence of jazz and blues in the first movement—like many Europeans, Ravel was fascinated by jazz more than most American composers were—but there are Spanish colors here, too, and it’s hard to miss the allusions to Petrouchka in the opening bars. It is the second movement that keeps listeners coming back to this concerto. The piano begins alone with a melody that seems endless, yet never repeats itself. Other instruments join from time to time, with an especially lovely English horn solo. It all sounds so simple, yet Ravel said he struggled with it, two bars at a time, constantly referring to the slow movement of the Mozart Clarinet Quintet, which he used as a model. (Sometimes the “simplest” music is the hardest to write.) The Finale is frenzied, witty, and full of raucous interjections.

Even in his own time, critics complained that Ravel’s music was superficial. In part, this is true: Ravel was greatly concerned with the “surfaces of music”—its sound, its orchestration. But he also said: “I am Basque, and while the Basques feel deeply, they seldom show it, and then only to a very few.” If the generous beauty, ready wit, and sheer fun of his concerto are superficial, then we should not hesitate to lay the profundities aside for the while.

– Mark Rohr

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Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Scheherazade, Op. 35

Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born in Tikhvin, Russia in 1844 and died in Lyubensk in 1908. He composed Scheherazade in 1888, and it was first performed the following year in St. Petersburg. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

*****

The stories of the Arabian Nights were more than a thousand years old by the time Rimsky set down this work, yet the adventurous tales of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, and Aladdin held a popularity that continues to this day. According to the legend, the Sultan Schahriar is convinced of the faithlessness of women, and swears to kill every one of his wives the next day. But the Sultana Scheherazade comes to him and tells him these tales for a thousand and one nights; the Sultan, ever curious to hear more, puts off her death night after night, and eventually abandons his murderous plan.

The music of Scheherazade has two principal themes. The first is heard at the very beginning, in the bombastic, stentorian notes that no doubt represent the vengeful Sultan himself. The second theme arrives in short order. It is spoken softly by the solo violin, and represents the wily, sinuous voice of Scheherazade. Most of the other themes heard in the piece are in some way derived from these two. This gives them a surprising familiarity, and helps to bind the work together.

The two themes recur throughout Scheherazade, but their meanings change according to the context of the moment. The “Sultan’s theme,” for example, may be found scattered all over the work, clearly not always representing the Sultan. (Its return at the end of the piece, this time in a major key, may represent the Sultan finally appeased.) Similarly, the “Scheherazade theme” is always her voice when played by the solo violin, but it, too, is used to represent many other things along the way, according to the mood.

Although Rimsky gives descriptive titles for the four sections of his work, this isn’t really programmusic as such: it gives the flavor of the many stories without creating a true narrative of any one of them. Rimsky wondered if people would hear that in the music: “I meant these hints to direct but slightly the listener’s fancy on the same path that my own fancy traveled. All I desired was that the listener, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should carry away the impression that it is beyond doubt an oriental narrative of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders, and not merely four pieces played one after the other and composed on the basis of themes common to all four movements.” He needn’t have worried: the sensuous voice of Sultana Scheherazade is irresistible.

– Mark Rohr

Mark Rohr was the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s Bass Trombonist from the mid-1980’s and program annotator from 1991 until his passing in 2019. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes at his bequest.