Jani, the Dallas Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence, began classical training in piano and violin as a child. She became interested in composition in her late teens, and after graduating from high school, she studied music at the Conservatoire Jacques Thibaud in Bordeaux, France. Although she began college as an economics major, she recognized that her real passion was for music and went on to earn degrees from the University of Augsburg; the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich; and the Yale University School of Music, where she was supported by a Fulbright grant.

Jani’s compositions have been performed by the New Jersey Symphony, the Munich Symphony, the Bang on a Can ensemble, the Goldmund Quartet, and the vocal sextet Sjaella, as well as the Dallas Symphony, which debuted her 10-minute symphonic poem Flare last season.

Jani was the 2023 Musical Artist in Residence of the Arvo Pärt Center and a recipient of the APC Residency Fellowship. Her 2022 debut recording, Music as a Mirror, featuring her chamber works, received a nomination for the foremost German classical music prize, the Opus Klassik. Her second album, Six Pieces for Solo Violin, is available on Squama Recordings.

When she’s not writing music, Jani serves as one of the founders and artistic directors of Feet Become Ears, an initiative that commissions, presents and promotes contemporary chamber music.

The Composer Speaks

“I wrote I Wish You Daisies and Roses at a very special time in my life, as it was the first composition I worked on after the birth of my son Aaron. What really touched me in those first months as a new mother was the feeling of this immeasurable and infinite love that you feel as a parent and how much and with all your heart you wish your child the best for their future. I started writing this piece out of that energy, and I think it guided me through the whole process.

“In 19th-century floral language, daisies represent health and happiness and the joy of simple things, whereas roses stand for all sorts of things depending on the color, but generally represent the finer, nobler things and classically, as everyone knows, symbolize eternal love. I could never come up with a title that lists everything I wish for my son in his life, of course, but health, happiness and love are probably a pretty good choice to start this list and hopefully capture the idea of where this music is coming from.

“As I was working on this composition, I wondered how many times in history a female composer has been able to capture something as crucial as the first year with her child and the feelings associated with it in such an exposed work for large orchestra. Music history is full of great existential emotions, but the complex emotional world that comes with the first months of motherhood has rarely or never been explored in an orchestral work, let alone from a female perspective. Even though I missed my son every second I was away from him while working on this music, I realize that this piece is probably part of something bigger, because it’s a great proof that a lot has changed in the field of classical music in the last decades.

“I think I Wish You Daisies and Roses is one of the most intuitive compositions I have written so far. I surprised myself in so many ways, and I am proud and grateful to be able to give my son such a unique gift for his first birthday.” —Sophia Jani

Rachmaninoff completed his Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor in Russia and debuted it in New York. Deprived of a piano during the long voyage by ship, the composer practiced on a special wooden keyboard, his long fingers dancing in a silent blur. At home or at sea, it hardly mattered. “My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music,” he declared.

He began the concerto in summer 1909, at his family’s country estate, Ivanovka. He finished it that September, shortly before he left for a concert tour of the United States. “It is borrowed neither from folk song forms nor from church services,” he later explained. “It simply ‘wrote itself.’ If I had any plan in composing this theme, I was thinking only of sound. I wanted to ‘sing’ the melody on the piano, as a singer would sing it—and to find a suitable orchestral accompaniment, or rather one that would not muffle this singing.”

After arriving in New York, Rachmaninoff — one of the greatest virtuosos of his age or any other — performed it twice, first with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, and again, six weeks later, with Gustav Mahler and the New York Philharmonic. Rachmaninoff approved of Mahler’s rigorous approach. “According to Mahler,” Rachmaninoff wrote, “every detail of the score was important — an attitude which is unfortunately rare amongst conductors.”

Despite several successful performances, he hated his American sojourn. “Everyone is nice and kind to me, but I am horribly bored by the whole thing,” he confessed in a letter to his cousin. “I feel that my character has been quite ruined here.” Declining a job offer from the Boston Symphony, the homesick composer returned to Russia.

A Closer Listen

The Third Piano Concerto wasn’t an immediate hit. Long and relentlessly contrapuntal, it requires a rare combination of athleticism and delicacy, precision and passion. Organized in three fast-slow-fast movements, the D-minor concerto begins urgently, with a melancholy Russian tune. After some pianistic pyrotechnics, a gentler interlude ensues. The Adagio sets the stage with grave winds and brass before the piano tumbles in with an ardent new subject. Pockets of transparent bliss are punctured by fierce block chords. The feverish, shape-shifting finale culminates in a breathless coda: a magnificent chromatic racket.

Born in Miami to a family of New Yorkers, Arlene Sierra is a London-based American composer who holds degrees from Oberlin College-Conservatory, Yale University School of Music and the University of Michigan. Her work has been commissioned and performed by many leading ensembles, including the New York Philharmonic; the Boston, Detroit and Seattle symphonies; International Contemporary Ensemble; the BBC Philharmonic; and the London Sinfonietta. She recently served as Composer in Association with the Utah Symphony and has received the Takemitsu Composition Prize, a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship among other awards and distinctions. Her orchestral work Moler received a Latin GRAMMY nomination for best contemporary classical composition. Sierra’s music is featured on a critically acclaimed series of portrait discs with Bridge Records.

Kiskadee was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Kevin John Edusei led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere on October 19, 2023. Subsequent performances have been given by the Louisiana Philharmonic, Illinois Philharmonic and Wheeling Symphony, and a BBC broadcast premiere is scheduled for later this year.

The Composer Speaks

Kiskadee is the most recent of my works based on bird song, following directly from Bird Symphony (2021) commissioned by the Utah Symphony and Birds and Insects, Book Three (2023) commissioned by the Barbican Centre, London for pianist Sarah Cahill. As in many of my compositions based on ideas from the natural world, the processes of nature are the basis for my compositional approach, going beyond a simple reflection or meditation. In Kiskadee my transcriptions from field recordings of bird song are used as structural building blocks integral to the form of the work.

Kiskadees are described in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology database as “boisterous in both attitude and color: a black bandit’s mask, a yellow belly, and flashes of warm reddish-brown when they fly. [They] sit out in the open and attract attention with incessant kis-ka-dee calls and sallying flights.”

The work employs a transcription of the kiskadee’s call as well as transcriptions of sounds from its environment. Later, the call of another bird, the troupial, supplants the kiskadee, mirroring the behavior of territorial overtaking that occurs in the wild. The kiskadee call later reasserts itself with renewed power, prevailing with its characteristic boisterousness. —Arlene Sierra

By 1895, when Strauss completed Till Eulenspiegel lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks), he was a confident practitioner of program music, or, as he preferred to call his efforts in this form, tone poems. This extraordinary run began about a decade earlier, with Aus Italien (1886), and included up to that point Macbeth (1887), Don Juan (1889) and Tod und Verklärung (1889).

Whether Till Eulenspiegel ever actually existed as a historical figure is open to debate, but he lives on in the collective German imagination either way; a folkloric 14th-century prankster peasant who spoke truth to power — if truth speaking involves targeted flatulence, retaliatory defecation, impersonation of clergy and nonconsensual groping. Strauss considered writing an opera about Till but decided against it after his first opera, Guntram, flopped. Instead, he chose a form he felt sure he had mastered.

At about 15 minutes in length, Till Eulenspiegel is Strauss’s shortest tone poem, but most orchestral musicians rank it among the most daunting. Scored for a super-sized orchestra — triple winds, eight horns — this nonstop cavalcade of sonic pranks and rhythmic hijinks bristles with spiky syncopation and tricky, turn-on-a-dime meters. Tonally, Strauss demands both virtuosity and hilarity in equal measure: the horn soloist might fret and sweat over that effortless-sounding main hook, but because the theme represents the bratty miscreant-subject, it can’t sound too refined or noble. It needs to sound slippery and insolent, the spontaneous aria of a medieval Bart Simpson.

The Composer Speaks

Because his eponymous hero was well known to most of his audience, Strauss saw no reason to bother submitting an explanatory essay. “I really cannot provide a program for Eulenspiegel,” he confessed in a letter to Franz Wüllner, who conducted the first performance. “Any words into which I might put the thoughts that the several incidents suggested to me would hardly suffice; they might even offend. Let me leave it, therefore, to my listeners to crack the hard nut the Rogue has offered them. By way of helping them to a better understanding, it seems enough to point out the two Eulenspiegel motifs [Strauss sketched out the opening bars and the main horn theme here], which, in the most diverse disguises, moods and situations, pervade the whole up to the catastrophe when, after being condemned to death, Till is strung up on the gibbet. For the rest, let them guess at the musical joke a Rogue has offered them.”

A Closer Listen

Strauss’s score calls for a massive orchestra with a hefty percussion section, including a ratchet, or rattle, an appropriately obnoxious instrument. Till is represented by two connected themes. The first, sung by the horn, is a lyrical descending tune that spans nearly three octaves before concluding with three long, loud notes. The second, voiced by D clarinet, is sinuous and antic, a sneaky little motif that flounces off with a maddening giggle. The demure, slightly old-timey introductory music, which Strauss likened to a fairy tale, serves as a “once-upon-a-time” bookend, returning after Till’s grisly execution to keep the tone poem from ending on a downer. Between these musical bookends, Strauss supplies plenty of primo tone painting: Till gallops through a crowded marketplace and noisily destroys the vendors’ wares (ratchet time!); Till assumes the garb of a priest, along with his pompous demeanor (lugubrious bassoons and violas); Till fails to seduce some eligible ladies (comically overwrought strings); Till marches to the gallows and is performatively dispatched by the state (rolling snare drum and sinister trombones, garnished with a screaming clarinet to mark the moment of Till’s death).