Zwilich's Third

As part of its 150th Anniversary celebration, the New York Philharmonic commissioned a number of new orchestral works. One of them premiered at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall on today’s date in 1993. The work is dedicated to the Philharmonic and Kurt Masur, its music director in those days.

This was the Third Symphony of the American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Zwilich knows the symphony orchestra from inside out: for seven years she was a violinist in the American Symphony Orchestra, a New York-based ensemble conducted by Leopold Stokowski when Zwilich was a player.

For her Third Symphony, Zwilich confessed she had an often-neglected section of the orchestra in mind: “I had noticed over the years the rising quality of viola playing,” she said in an interview, “and I thought that the Philharmonic’s section was absolutely amazing. So when I had this commission, I thought almost immediately of focusing on the violas. When you think of it, many sym