Evening Music with Julie - Alan Hohvaness, Mysterious Mountain

Osda svhiyeyi.  It's 9:43 pm and this is Evening Music.

Alan Hovhaness (/hoʊˈvɑːnɪs/;[1] Armenian: Ալան Յովհաննէս, March 8, 1911 – June 21, 2000) was an American composer. He was one of the most prolific 20th-century composers, with his official catalog comprising 67 numbered symphonies (surviving manuscripts indicate over 70) and 434 opus numbers. However, the true tally is well over 500 surviving works since many opus numbers comprise two or more distinct works.

The Boston Globe music critic Richard Buell wrote: "Although he has been stereotyped as a self-consciously Armenian composer (rather as Ernest Bloch is seen as a Jewish composer), his output assimilates the music of many cultures. What may be most American about all of it is the way it turns its materials into a kind of exoticism. The atmosphere is hushed, reverential, mystical, nostalgic."

Symphony No. 2, Op. 132, Mysterious Mountain is a three-movement orchestral composition by the American composer Alan Hovhaness. The symphony was commissioned by conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Houston Symphony, and premiered live on NBC television in October 1955 on the Houston Symphony's first program with Stokowski as conductor. A popular recording of the work, released in 1958 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing under Fritz Reiner, is often regarded as the foremost performance of the piece.

The composition blends elements of consonant Western hymns, pentatonicism, and polyphonicism reminiscent of Renaissance music. The second movement also contains a reworking of ideas from Hovhaness's 1936 String Quartet No. 1.

Contemporary critical reception to Mysterious Mountain was positive and it remains one of Hovhaness's most popular works. In 1995, Lawrence Johnson of the Chicago Tribune said the symphony "still amazes today" and that it "anticipated by nearly 40 years the spiritual, meditative quasi-minimalism of composers such as Part, Tavener and Gorecki." Edward Greenfield of Gramophone noted similarities in the piece to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and favorably commented, "'Mountains and symbols, like pyramids, of man's attempt to know God', says the composer, and his spiritual purpose is expressed in the modal writing of the Andante outer movements, with overtones of Vaughan Williams pastoral as well as of Tallis, framing a central fugue characteristically smooth in its lines. The finale, at the start sounding like 'Tallis Fantasia meets Parsifal', culminates in a chorale leading to a grandiose conclusion."

Despite the popular success of the symphony, Hovhaness expressed having "mixed feelings" about the piece after its completion. In a 1987 interview, he was quoted saying:

I remember hearing celestial ballet in my head as I lay down to rest from writing the work. Later I transcribed what I heard in my sleep. After I wrote it, then heard it again in my sleep, certain versions were wrong. So I corrected it. Now I cannot bear to hear it [...] it's just certain parts move me. I go out of the hall whenever the piece is performed.

Gerard Schwarz leads the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.