In all, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki completed eight symphonies, and in 2013, to celebrate his 80th birthday, there appeared a box set of recordings billed as his “complete symphonies,” all conducted by their composer. But while that “complete” set included Symphonies Nos. 1-5 and 7&8, it was missing No. 6. The reason? Although Penderecki had begun work on his sixth symphony years earlier, it remained unfinished when the set was issued.

Fast forward to today’s date in 2017 for the out-of-sequence premiere of Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6, given in China by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. The venue was apt, since the symphony was subtitled Chinese Poems, and included settings for baritone and orchestra of eight ancient Chinese poems — with a Chinese instrument, the erhu, providing solo interludes.

Curiously, Penderecki chose to set German translations of the Chinese poems, translations published back in 1907 in the same collection Gustav Mahler had sourced for his unnumbered song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. And it’s probably no coincidence that Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6 sounds very much like he was trying to channel both the spirit and sound world of Mahler’s early 20th century song-symphony into own his 21st-century one.

Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020): Symphony No. 6 (Chinese Poems); Stephan Genz, baritone; Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Sopot; Wojciech Rajski, conductor; Accord ACD-270

If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck terror in many a nobleman’s breast.

During this anxious time Prince Nicholas Esterhazy the Second’s favorite composer Joseph Haydn composed a Latin mass Missa in Angustiis or Mass in Time of Fear. It opens in the key of D minor, the key employed by Mozart for the spookiest scenes in Don Giovanni, an opera that had made a big impression on Haydn at its premiere in Vienna ten years earlier. As Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon put it, in Don Giovanni, 18th century listeners were presented with ”the presence of real fear — nay terror.”

So, when word reached the rattled princes of Europe that British Admiral Nelson had destroyed the French fleet, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and, coincidentally, Haydn ends his Mass in the more optimistic key of D Major.

First performed on today’s date in 1798, Haydn’s work soon came to be known as the Lord Nelson Mass, and in Robbins Landon’s view stands as “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition.”

Franz Joseph Haydn: Missa in Angustiis (Lord Nelson Mass)

As the season begins, we offer you this Autumn Music — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. She said she wanted to write a companion piece to another famous woodwind quintet, Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Higdon’s Autumn Music was commissioned by Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honorary society, and premiered at their 1994 national convention in Pittsburgh.

“Autumn Music is a sonic picture of the season of brilliant colors. The music of the first part represents the explosion of leaves and the crispness of the air of fall. As the music progresses, it becomes more spare and introspective, moving into a more melancholy and resigned feeling,” she said.

Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn in 1962, and teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her chamber and orchestral pieces have been performed by ensembles coast to coast. She’s also active as a performer and, as she explained, as an enthusiastic member of the audience:

“I love exploring new works — my own pieces and the music of others — in a general audience setting, just to feel a communal reaction to new sounds. Music speaks to all age levels and all kinds of experiences in our lives. I think it can express anything and everything.”

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962): Autumn Music; Moran Woodwind Quintet; Crystal 754

Today’s date marks the 1925 premiere in New York City of a classic operetta The Vagabond King by Rudolf Friml, the source of many once-popular sentimental tunes, including “Love Me Tonight,” and “Only a Rose.”

Friml was born in Prague in 1879, and he studied composition there with no less a master than Antonín Dvořák. He started his career as a piano accompanist to the famous Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, then emigrated to the U.S. in 1906. In 1907, he appeared as a soloist in his own Piano Concerto No. 1 with the New York Symphony, and decided to make America his home.

Friml wrote two piano concertos, a symphony, solo piano pieces — and three film scores for Hollywood. But he’s remembered today chiefly for 24 stage works, beginning in 1912 with The Firefire, his first big musical success, and continuing with many others, including the 1924 operetta Rose Marie — which in 1936 was made into a successful film starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Their rendition of Friml’s “Indian Love Call” has become a campy cult classic.

Even Friml was occasionally embarrassed by the success of some of his flufflier pop works, and would publish some of these under the pseudonym of Roderick Freeman. He died in Los Angeles in 1972 at 92.

Rudolf Friml (1879-1972): Song of the Vagabonds from The Vagabond King; Eastman-Dryden Orchestra: Donald Hunsberger, conductor; Arabesque 6562

Rudolf Friml (1879-1972): Chanson ‘In Love’; New London Orchestra; Ronald Corp, conductor; Hyperion 67067

Today’s date commemorates the death, in 1957, of the most famous Finnish composer of modern times, Jean Sibelius. Born in 1865, Sibelius studied at the University of Helsinki, developed a strong sense of nationalism in the 1890s, and achieved world fame in the first years of the 20th century. He wrote little after the World War I, however, and lived his last 30 years in almost complete seclusion.

Even so, he was one of the most popular composers of his time. In 1938, a recording of his tone-poem Finlandia was selected as one of only three pieces of music to be deposited along with other artifacts of modern civilization in an indestructible time capsule buried on the site of the New York World’s Fair.

By 1957, the enormous acclaim that Sibelius enjoyed during his lifetime had faded somewhat, but these days his reputation seems on the rise once again, as does the influence of Finnish music in general.

A remarkable number of talented composers are thriving in that tiny nation today, and operas, orchestral works and chamber pieces by contemporary Finnish composers like Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhanni Rautavaara, Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho are increasingly finding worldwide audiences.

Sibelius would have been very pleased.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957): Alla Marcia from Karelia Suite; Finnish Radio Symphony; Jukka-Pekka Saraste, conductor; (RCA 7765)

On today’s date in 2002, a little over one year after two passenger jetliners had crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new work by American composer John Adams.

On the Transmigration of Souls, this high-profile commission sought to address a nation still in shock and grief at the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

“I realized right up front that the public didn't need any more reiteration of the narrative of that day,” Adams said in an interview. “Certainly it didn't need some tasteless dramatization of the events … If I was going to do something meaningful, I was going to have to go in the opposite direction.”

Adams chose to set some of the words scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by families searching for their loved ones. “They were a mixture of hope and a slowly dimming acceptance of reality,” Adams said. “When people are deeply in shock … they don't express themselves in fancy language … they speak in the most simple of terms.”

Adams said he hoped his new piece would provide “memory space,” a musical work that could be at once a platform for either communal or personal reflection.

John Adams (b. 1947): On the Transmigration of Souls; New York Philharmonic; Lorin Maazel, conductor; Nonesuch CD 79816

On this day in 1918, Russian composer Serge Prokofiev arrived in America to give a recital of his piano works in New York. He told interviewers that despite the revolution in his homeland and widespread conditions of famine, Russian musicians continued to work.

Prokofiev, however, stayed away from his homeland for years. His opera The Love for Three Oranges and his Piano Concerto No. 3 received their premieres in Chicago in 1921. From 1922 to 1932, Prokofiev lived mainly in Paris before eventually returning home for good.

Another temporary expatriate composer, Jón Leifs of Iceland, has an anniversary today, when in 1950, his Saga-Symphony was performed for the first time in Helsinki. Leifs was born in Iceland in 1899 and died there in 1968. He studied in Leipzig, where, in his words, he (quote) “began searching whether, like other countries, Iceland had some material that could be used as a starting-point for new music … some spark that could light the fire.”

Leif’s years in Germany coincided with the rise of the Nazis, who at first found him a sympathetic Nordic composer. When Leifs married a Jewish woman, however, he soon fell out of favor and eventually fled to Sweden with his family. After the war he returned home and today is honored as Iceland’s first great composer.

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): Piano Concerto No. 3; Martha Argerich, piano; Montréal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, conductor; EMI Classics 56654

Jón Leifs (1899-1968): Saga Symphony; Iceland Symphony; Osmo Vänskä, conductor; BIS 730

In 1962, American jazz composer, performer and bandleader Duke Ellington was 63 — an acknowledged master, but trends in American jazz were changing, and there were much younger figures emerging, with more challenging styles.

Take, for example, bassist Charles Mingus, Jr., a master of collective improvisation, and drummer Max Roach, a pioneer in the be-bop movement. Despite their age and stylistic differences, these three jazz titans went into a recording studio on today’s date in 1962 and, while tape rolled, using bare-bones charts provided by Ellington of melodies and harmonies, the three jazz titans improvised. The results were issued the following year as a classic LP, Money Jungle.

Despite his fame, Ellington did not have a recording contract in 1962, and, perhaps after decades experiencing the highs and lows of life as a Black jazz musician in a segregated society, Money Jungle reflects a certain bitterness. Along with the charts he gave Mingus and Roach, Ellington also provided poetic story lines for each track, like: “Crawling around on the streets are serpents who have their heads up; these are agents and people who have exploited artists. Play that along with the music.”

Duke Ellington (1899-1974), Charles Mingus (1922-1979) and Max Roach (1924-2007): Money Jungle; Blue Note 31461