Fantasies

On this episode of Arizona Encore, we’ll dive into the rich and open-ended musical genre of the “fantasy,” exploring what audiences can expect from music with this flexible title. Stemming from the baroque tradition of improvisation, a fantasy is characterized by its free-flowing structure and evolution through a range of musical material without predetermined constraints. We’ll explore an eclectic sampling of repertoire spanning roughly three hundred years and encompassing jazz, baroque, Romantic, and Renaissance styles.

The journey begins with the jazz world and child prodigy Hazel Scott’s Fantasy Pieces, Op. 3, which reinterpret classical staples such as Sergei Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor through jazz and blues idioms. Moving to the Romantic era, we hear a performance of Robert Schumann’s Fantasiestucke, Op. 73, a set of three poetic miniatures originally composed for clarinet and piano. The program continues with virtuoso flutist Albert Franz Doppler’s Fantasie Pastorale Hongroise, Op. 26, a fantasy that draws on Hungarian folk music tradition and moves through a dramatic sequence of characters and styles.

In order to examine the fantasy genre’s Renaissance and Baroque origins, we’ll learn about seminal lute composer John Dowland’s melancholic and harmonically advanced Chromatic Fantasy as well as Sylvius Leopold Weiss’s Fantasy in C Minor and Passacaglia in D Major, a two-movement work which illustrates the use of a fantasy as an introduction to a more structured composition. Finally, the program concludes with Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s expressive Piano Sonata or Sonata-Fantasie No. 2 in G-sharp Minor, Op. 19,  a moving and colorful work for solo piano which was inspired by Scriabin’s first encounter with the sea.