Melancholy Death

Pianist/composer and 2021 Guggenheim Fellow Helen Sung celebrates the work of influential women composers on her latest album Quartet+, crafting new arrangements of tunes by Geri Allen, Carla Bley, Mary Lou Williams, Marian McPartland and Toshiko Akiyoshi while carrying the tradition forward with her own stunning new works. Co-produced by violin master Regina Carter, the album pairs Sung’s quartet with the strings of the GRAMMY® Award-winning Harlem Quartet in an inventive meld of jazz and classical influences.

After the successful premiere of Myaskovsky's Sixth Symphony, performed on May 4th, 1924 by Nikolai Golovanov & the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra and Chorus, critics and the audience had essentially two types of reactions toward this ultimately moving score. On the one hand, many deemed the work as the end of the musical era developed & cherished by among Russia's foremost composers: Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Rubinstein, the Russian Five (Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, & Cui) and, Tchaikovsky. And that tradition was carried on by the likes of Glazunov, Tanayev, Lyadov, Arensky. However, by the time Myaskovsky composed the Sixth, many of the composers either passed-on, emigrated, or stopped writing prolifically, especially in symphonic genres.