Meet the Composers

In a small village on the border of Bohemia and Moravia in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bohuslav Martinů was born in 1890 and spent the first years of his life at the top of the local church tower (his father was the church sexton and the family kept living quarters there)—an environment which he credited with inspiring, in part, his musical calling. His youthful talent as a violinist led to his enrollment at the Prague Conservatory, though his prowess as a performer and passionate interest in new musical movements was insufficient to prevent his eventual ejection, due to “incorrigible negligence.” After returning to his hometown, he completed his first compositions; when the Czech Republic announced its independence following the end of World War I, Martinů completed the celebratory Czech Rhapsody (Česká rapsodie), a popular success which propelled his career both as a composer and as a violinist. 

In 1923, Martinů moved to Paris, driven in part by his frustration with the musical status quo in the Czech Republic as well as an early appreciation of Claude Debussy. But Impressionism was already going out of style; Martinů was drawn instead to neoclassicism, working with French composer Albert Roussel, and studying Igor Stravinsky in particular. Martinů’s works from this time onward would incorporate elements of jazz and surrealism as well as Bohemian and Moravian folk music, Czech lullabies, and other vernacular works and styles. He wrote many ballets—including Istar (1921) and The Amazing Flight (1927), among others—though his presence in the NYCB repertory connects elsewhere to his oeuvre. 

For the 2015 ballet Heatscape, choreographed on Miami City Ballet and brought to the NYCB stage in the fall of 2025, Resident Choreographer Justin Peck selected Martinů’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Completed in 1925, the Concerto is reflective of the composer’s relative youth and early experimentations with neoclassicism. In a review of a recent performance of Heatscape, dance critic Marina Harss wrote of the score: “Martinů was a musical magpie, as well as an extrovert for whom enough was never enough. The concerto combines the verve of early Shostakovich with the brio of Neoclassical Stravinsky, all mixed together with a kind of musical exuberance, rich with layers, cadenza after cadenza, raucous fugues, and rainbow-hued washes of notes gushing from the piano, gorgeously played by Stephen Gosling.” Listen in for this exuberant quality in the clip below.

In 1941, Martinů was forced to flee France and the Nazi occupation, eventually landing in the United States, where he experienced a new degree of popularity. He taught at several major music institutions, including Mannes College of Music and Princeton, before returning to Europe in his final years, where he died in 1959. Though the “magpie” and singular qualities of his compositional style remained intact, his later works were often more lyrical; he’s quoted as saying, “music must be beautiful, or it wouldn’t be worth the effort.” This can be heard in the Sinfonietta La Jolla, composed in 1950, which Peck used as the score for an earlier ballet, 2013’s Paz de la Jolla.

“I consider Bohuslav Martinů’s Piano Concerto No. 1 a hidden gem,” Peck has said of the score for Heatscape. “It is a work rich in texture and innovation, yet profoundly dance-like and urgent. It possesses a sense of soaring freedom, playfulness, and emotional depth, all while maintaining a solid structure that serves as a guiding force.” You can “see” these musical effects when Heatscape again takes the stage.

Australian Jack Frerer is a composer as well as an orchestrator and arranger, and is currently a lecturer in composition at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts. His works include orchestral and wind ensemble commissions, and he is a previous fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and composer-in-residence with the Arapahoe Philharmonic. Frerer holds degrees from The Juilliard School and Yale School of Music; while a student at the former, he collaborated with Canadian choreographer Alysa Pires under the auspices of the New York Choreographic Institute—a process which led to the eventual commissioning of a new score by NYCB for Pires’ Standard Deviation, which premiered in 2023.

“We just really hit it off as people,” Pires shared of her initial meeting with Frerer. “I think that's a big part of collaboration that people don't necessarily think about—hanging-out-ability. You have to like being around the people that you're working with. Not to mention that he's supremely talented and a generous collaborator.”

In describing the thematic elements of their collaboration, Pires continued, “We talked about our lives, where we were at, what was going on, what we might want to say with this piece; we really built it together from the ground up. This idea of restriction versus freedom, or of sameness versus individuality, was coming up for both of us, especially working in institutions that have long histories and very defined traditions—how you can innovate inside of that was a theme that really struck us both.

“When I got the commission [for Standard Deviation], I immediately knew I wanted to work with Jack and keep doing this piece, because we both felt like we had more to say,” Pires said. “We felt like we had just scratched the surface of it. And we had such a great time working together, we wanted to do it again. He wrote this incredible score. A lot of the elements of the original are in there, but there are whole new sections, lots more depth, lots more nuance, I think, than the original. 

“I think I'm a little more willing to take risk, and I think Jack is a big part of that, too, because he’s pushed me,” she concluded back in 2023. “There are some parts of the score that are maybe a little less melodic or feel a little less comfortable to me. And I feel more ready to take those on now than maybe I did four years ago.” The broad influences and concatenation of shared ideas, narrative development, and bold, expressive qualities in Frerer’s composition can be heard in the clip from the ballet below.

Upon its premiere, Standard Deviation received special recognition for its original music; as Brian Seibert wrote in The New York Times, the ballet “benefits from an exciting original score by Jack Frerer that combines boom-crash orchestration with woozy portamenti and jazz elegance, especially in the saxophone playing of Chris Hemingway.” The Observer concurred: “It must be noted that Frerer’s original score for full orchestra and saxophone is a force to be reckoned with. It lies somewhere between an urban soundscape, a jazzy film score, and a sultry atmosphere thick enough to be scenery.” 

A Baroque composer born in Venice in 1671, Tomaso Albinoni is an interesting figure in that his works, though many in quantity and extensive in influence, have failed to make him a household name. Best known in his lifetime for his operas, which were performed throughout Italy—beginning with his first, Zenobia, regina de’ Palmireni, written when he was just 23 years old—Albinoni is now most recognized for his instrumental work. In particular, the “Adagio in G minor” has had lasting and broad popularity. This composition can be heard on film soundtracks and served as the score for a short film by Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada. It should be noted that the authorship of this piece is now generally attributed to 20th-century musicologist (and Albinoni biographer!) Remo Giazotto, though the Albinoni credits often remain.

What likely contributes to the staying power of such misattributions is the general lack of documentation of Albinoni’s life and work available today. For one, most of his operas, which total somewhere between 50 and 80 productions, were never actually published; and much that was published was lost when the Dresden State library was destroyed during World War II. 

When Albinoni first took on the concerto, it was still a relatively new form, and thus bears his foundational stamp today. Albinoni is credited with bringing his operatic touch to these pieces, from his use of the fast-slow-fast tripartite structure to the signature lyricism recognizable from his vocal music. Amongst Italian composers, Albinoni is also considered the first to write for solo oboe. The instrument was fairly new to Italy, and became a favorite of the composer’s; prior to his oboe concerti, he’d never written for wind instruments.

The music choreographer Edwaard Liang selected for his 2005 ballet Distant Cries comes from Albinoni’s Opus 9—specifically Oboe Concerto No. 2, which is the most famous from this collection of works. The melancholy mood of this adagio is established in part by the D minor key. The piece is often referred to as the composer’s “second Adagio,” and features the noble yet lyrical style for which he was celebrated both in life and long after. Albinoni would die at the age of 79 in relative obscurity, but his legacy persists. Bach, in particular, was an Albinoni fan, writing fugues for at least two of Albinoni’s themes and often using his compositions with his students. Fans of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, set to a Bach concerto for two violins, also in D minor, will likely find much to enjoy in the score for Distant Cries when it makes its return to the NYCB stage.

_{Header photo © Erin Baiano.}