Sarah Kirkland Snider–the last composer commissioned by the Emerson String Quartet before they disbanded–wrote the present work for the New York Philharmonic which first presented it under Jaap van Zweden. Originally scheduled to be premiered in June 2020, the performance had to be postponed due to the pandemic; the work was finally introduced on June 10, 2022. The composer has provided the following program notes:

Forward Into Light is a meditation on perseverance, bravery, and alliance. The piece was
inspired by the American women suffragists — Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, Zitkála-Šá, and Mabel Lee Ping-Hua, to name but a few–who devoted their lives to the belief that women were human beings and therefore entitled to equal rights and protections under the law of the United States of America.

I wrote the music thinking about what it means to believe in something so deeply that one is willing to endure harassment, isolation, assault, incarceration, force-feedings, and life
endangerment to fight for it. Forward Into Light does not attempt to tell the story of the
American women’s suffrage movement, but rather to distill the emotional and psychological contours of faith, doubt, and what it means to persevere.

Forward Into Light features a musical quote from “March of the Women,” composed in 1910 by British composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth. The anthem of the women’s
suffrage movement, “March of the Women” was sung in homes and halls, on streets and farms, and on the steps of the United States Capitol.

The title of the piece derives from a suffrage slogan made famous by the banner that
suffragist Inez Milholland carried while riding a white horse to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade on March 3, 1913, in Washington, D.C.:

“Forward, out of error
Leave behind the night
Forward through the darkness
Forward into light!”

Some of the most original piano music in the first half of the 20th century was written by Maurice Ravel. In the early Jeux d’eau (1901) and the great cycles Miroirs (1904-05) and Gaspard de la nuit (1908), Ravel developed what he himself called “a special type of writing for the piano,” and he defended his priority against critics who tried to trace his style to that of Debussy. Himself a highly competent pianist, Ravel was a frequent performer of his own music (his performances survive on record). Thus, it is not entirely surprising that he should want to write a concerto; what is surprising is that it took him so long to do so.
Actually, Ravel had toyed with the idea of a concerto as early as 1906, according to biographer Arbie Orenstein. He was thinking about a concerto based on Basque themes, from his native region in the Pyrenees. But this project never quite got off the ground, and it
wasn’t until after his 1928 American tour that he began seriously to think about a concerto again. In the wake of this tour, Ravel wanted to return to the concert stage as a pianist, as his friend Igor Stravinsky had done a few years earlier. His work on the Concerto in G, which he was writing for himself, was interrupted by Paul Wittgenstein’s commission to write a concerto for the left hand only. Ravel worked on both concertos more or less at the same time. (In the event, his fatal illness prevented him from performing the G-major work.)
The two concertos could not be more different: where the G-major is buoyant and sparkling, the left-hand concerto is, for the most part, dark and brooding. The composer offered the following comments for the Paris premiere:

The initial idea for the concerto for the left hand, which I will soon conduct with the Paris Symphony Orchestra, dates from a trip I made to Vienna three years ago.

During my stay in Vienna, which was occupied by rehearsals at the Opera of L’enfant et les sortilèges and by Mme Ida Rubinstein’s performances in which I conducted La Valse and Boléro, I had the occasion to hear the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein. His right hand had been amputated following a war injury, and he performed a concerto for the left hand alone by Richard Strauss.

A severe limitation of this sort poses a rather arduous problem for the composer. The attempts at resolving this problem, moreover, are extremely rare, and the best known among them are the Six Etudes for the Left Hand by Saint-Saëns. Because of their brevity and sectionalization, they avoid the most formidable aspect of the problem, which is to maintain interest in a work of extended scope while utilizing such limited means.

The fear of difficulty, however, is never as keen as the pleasure of contending with it, and, if possible, of overcoming it. That is why I acceded to Wittgenstein’s request to compose a concerto for him. I carried out my task with enthusiasm, and it was completed in a year, which represents a minimum delay for me.

Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961), brother of the philosopher Ludwig, had commissioned works for left hand from Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Benjamin Britten. He himself always preferred the Strauss work, and even a composition by the completely forgotten Austrian Josef Labor, to Ravel’s masterpiece which he never really liked, although he performed it many times and even recorded it.
In an interview with critic Michael D. Calvocoressi, Ravel spoke about the jazz influences in the concerto’s fast section, and discussed the motivic links between the two sections. What he didn’t mention was the work’s haunting, gloomy undertone. In fact, dark colors predominate from the beginning as the work opens, most unusually, with a contrabassoon solo. It is quite possible that the encounter with Wittgenstein brought back some of Ravel’s own war memories. After all, he had also served in the war—on the opposite side from Wittgenstein—as a truck driver. Orenstein sees the Concerto for the Left Hand as “a culmination of Ravel’s longstanding preoccupation, one might say obsession, with the notion of death.”

In his above-mentioned article, Ravel gave the following formal outline of his work:

The concerto is divided into two parts which are played without pause. It begins with a slow introduction, which stands in contrast to the powerful entrance of theme one; this theme will later be offset by a second idea, marked “espressivo,” which is treated pianistically as though written for two hands, with an accompaniment figure weaving about the melodic line.

The second part is a scherzo based upon two rhythmic figures. A new element suddenly appears in the middle, a sort of ostinato figure extending over several measures which are indefinitely repeated but constantly varied in their underlying harmony, and over which innumerable rhythmic patterns are introduced which become increasingly compact. This pulsation increases in intensity and frequency, and following a return of the scherzo, it leads to an expanded reprise of the initial theme of the work and finally to a long cadenza, in which the theme of the introduction and the various elements noted in the beginning of the concerto contend with one another until they are brusquely interrupted by a brutal conclusion.

On the twenty-eighth of October, in 1893, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony in St. Petersburg. Nine days later, he was dead, a victim of the cholera epidemic that had broken out in the city. Although Tchaikovsky, at 53, was at the height of his creative powers and by all accounts in good health, he felt what his biographer David Brown described as a ‟deepening inner gloom.” It is probably the first major symphony to end with a tragic slow movement instead of a rousing fast finale.
The ‟Pathétique” (so called by the composer himself) is not only the most intensely emotional of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies. It is also the one in which Tchaikovsky reached the pinnacle of his art in terms of compositional technique and sophistication–and it is the combination of these two aspects–exceptional emotional richness and supreme craftsmanship–that makes the ‟Pathétique” Tchaikovsky’s crowning masterpiece.
Technical devices, such as the re-use of the bassoon theme of the opening Adagio as the first theme of the Allegro non troppo main section, produce an immediate dramatic effect, enhanced by the brilliant orchestration with divided violas and cellos answered by a quartet of woodwinds. The gulf between this ‟active” first theme and the expansive, warmly melodic second idea is maximized by the circumstance that the two themes are separated by a lengthy transition section raising our expectations, and a significantly slower tempo (Andante) for the second theme. The development section carries the tension to a high point through intense contrapuntal activity punctuated by violent syncopated figures in the woodwinds; then we hear tragic march that almost sounds like something Tchaikovsky’s younger contemporary Mahler would write. The rumbling bass accompaniment of this march is derived from the main theme. The full orchestral sonorities of the recapitulation change the character of the first theme from painful and languid to desperate and dramatic, with the return of the expansive second melody bringing much-needed solace. The subdued, morendo (“dying away”) ending of the movement foreshadows the fourth-movement Adagio lamentoso.
In between, however, there are two lighter movements: a graceful waltz with a limp (written in 5/4 time; in other words, every other 3/4 measure is shortened by a beat), and a lively march whose theme unfolds only gradually and that seems, at least momentarily, to suggest triumph and happiness. But in the end, the respite brought by the two middle movements proves to be only temporary.
The Finale is one of the most heart-rending Adagios in the history of music. Its doleful B-minor theme (whose notes are played alternately by first and second violins) is followed by a second idea that is no less sad in tone despite being in the major mode. Tchaikovsky marked this D-major theme con lenezza e devozione (‟softly and with devotion”). Twice, the music rises to triple fortissimo in a state of utter despair, only to fall back each time into the pianissimo in which the symphony finally dies away.