Time and Transformation

Hungarian composer Erno Dohnanyi’s Symphonic Minutes is divided into five movements, each only one or two minutes in length. Each movement retains a typically classical form, including a rhapsody, a scherzo, a theme and variations, as well as a rondo. Florian Koltun and Xin Wang then perform Mozart’s Concerto for two pianos and orchestra—possibly composed as a work he could play with his sister. The concerto departs from the traditional concerto form that places the soloist in dialogue with the orchestra and instead frames the two solo pianos in dialogue with each other. Finnish composer Jean Sibelius structured his Symphony no. 2 from a rising three-note motif out of which all other themes are generated—a compositional practice Arnold Schoenberg described as “developing variation.” The first movement also bears a relationship to Richard Strauss’ famous tone poem, Tod und Verklärung: both have the main theme emerge in full only at the end, rather than the beginning.