8 Musical Side Dishes

Most everyone can agree: the best part about Thanksgiving dinner is the sides, be it stuffing, mashed potatoes, yams, or decadently prepared vegetables. This got us thinking—what are some of the best musical side dishes? You know, the pieces that are often paired with larger works like symphonies or concertos on an orchestral program. No less worthy than grand masterpieces, these works can set the tone of a concert, act as a delightful palate cleanser, or introduce audiences to a new composer.

1. Gioachino Rossini: Overture to The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra)

Opera overtures are a great place to start when looking for a short and fulfilling musical side dish. Melodically dense, opera overtures usually distill the opera’s main musical themes and foreshadow the story’s dramatic arc.

Gioachino Rossini is especially known for his melodically enchanting and rhythmically vivacious overtures. Between 1810 and 1829, Rossini wrote 39 operas, both serious and comic and in both Italian and French. Many of his operas are still mainstays of the operatic repertoire today, like The Barber of Seville and Cinderella. But his overtures have gained a second life in popular culture (for example, in Looney Tunes and The Lone Ranger) and on the concert stage, even for operas that are no longer frequently performed.

One such overture is that of Rossini’s 1819 opera The Thieving Magpie (La gazza ladra). Conveying the opera’s militaristic theme, the overture opens with dramatic snare drumrolls and a pompous march. This militarism eventually gives way to one of Rossini’s most beloved waltz tunes.

2. Gabriel Fauré: Pavane

Gabriel Fauré’s reputation suffered unfairly due to the lack of large-scale works to his name. Aside from his highly popular Requiem, Fauré was best known for his chamber music and as the master of French song. His tendency toward self-criticism caused him to withdraw numerous large-scale orchestral works, including two symphonies and a violin concerto, destroying manuscripts or only keeping select movements to reuse themes in other works. This is not to say he did not write anything for orchestra, as he sometimes orchestrated piano or chamber works, thriving in miniature forms. Fauré wrote his most famous orchestral work, Pavane, in 1887. He also wrote a version that includes chorus and a version for piano in 1889. The work pays homage to the pavane, a slow processional dance that dates back to the 16th century. In Fauré’s interpretation, accompanimental plucked strings imitate a lute or guitar, while the modality of the sensuous flute melody gives the impression of antiquity.

3. Anna Clyne: This Midnight Hour

Some of the most delectable musical side dishes are discoveries of works by contemporary composers. Take British composer Anna Clyne’s (b. 1980) This Midnight Hour, composed in 2015. The work takes inspiration from two poems: Charles Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir” (“Evening Harmony”) and a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez that simply reads, “Music, a naked woman, running crazed through the pure night!” The propulsive energy of the opening creates an atmosphere of urgency and foreboding, heightened by sudden textural shifts, stark dynamic contrasts, and unsettling pauses. Lyrical melodies try to break through, but each attempt is slightly off-kilter, including a purposely out-of-tune organ grinder waltz (perhaps in reference to a repeated line in the Baudelaire poem, “Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!”). Eventually, an elegy arises from the tumult. Introduced by the solo bassoon, the melody is repeated by each wind section with a chromatically decorated descant in the horns, before a final timpani blow shatters this dream-like state.

4. Robert Schumann: Overture to Manfred

Robert Schumann was never known as a great dramatist; his only opera, Genoveva, was a flop when it premiered in 1850. However, immediately after completing Genoveva, Schumann set to work on writing incidental music for a theatrical production of Lord Byron’s verse drama Manfred.

As the son of a book publisher, Schumann was highly literate, and Byron was a particular favorite. Psychologically troubled as he was, Schumann identified with Byron’s tormented hero, Count Manfred. In the drama, Manfred wanders the Swiss Alps, tortured by a curse on his soul following the death of his beloved. He casts a spell summoning seven spirits, asking them to make him forget the past, but they cannot help him. He contemplates suicide, but fate won’t allow it. He ultimately succumbs to death but relinquishes his soul neither to heaven nor to hell.

Although the dramatic verse is seldom performed today, Schumann’s Overture to Manfred has survived as a popular concert piece. Three syncopated chords raise the curtain on the scene, with a slow prologue depicting the craggy mountain landscape. What ensues is a dark, unsettled musical sketch of Manfred’s inner torment, punctuated by the trumpet calls of fate.

5. Emmanuel Chabrier: España

A “musical side dish” might also be a work by a composer who is otherwise largely neglected in the repertoire. Such is the case with French composer Emmanuel Chabrier’s delightful musical postcard, España. Inspired by a six-month trip to the Iberian Peninsula, España is the only work of Chabrier’s played with any frequency today. The piece came at the height of French fascination with Spain in the late 19th century, which saw such works as Georges Bizet’s Carmen and Édouard Manet’s paintings of toreadors and Spanish dancers and musicians.

Speaking of Manet, Chabrier was a close friend and had posed for the painter shortly before his trip to Spain in 1882, potentially influencing his decision to compose this piece. The work is a reminiscence on the music and dance Chabrier encountered on his tour—full of folklike tunes and characteristically Spanish dance rhythms, which he had notated in great detail in his diaries during the trip.

6. Louise Farrenc: Overture No. 1

“Musical side dishes” can give long-neglected composers their due, as is in the case with French composer Louise Farrenc. Born in 1804, Farrenc broke barriers as a pianist, composer, teacher, and scholar, becoming the only woman to hold a permanent professorship at the Paris Conservatoire in the 19th century. Her first foray into orchestral composition came in 1834 with Overture No. 1 in E minor. The choice to compose an overture independent from any dramatic context was unusual, not least because women composers at the time were often relegated to smaller-scale forms such as songs and salon pieces for piano.

Although her orchestral works (including this overture) were never published during her lifetime, they saw performances across Europe, and she gained enough success with other compositions that she was eventually able to demand equal pay to that of her male colleagues at the Conservatoire.

7. Jennifer Higdon: blue cathedral

Just because a work is not symphonic in scope does not mean it does not possess great emotional depth. Take Jennifer Higdon’s (b. 1962) orchestral concerto blue cathedral. Commissioned to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute of Music in 2000, the piece gained extra emotional import during the composition process after the death of Higdon’s younger brother, Andrew Blue Higdon. The work became a form of sonic catharsis for Higdon and pays homage to her brother in its interplay between the flute (Jennifer’s instrument) and clarinet (Andrew’s instrument).

Higdon conceived of the piece as a journey through a glass cathedral in the sky, cathedrals “serving as a symbolic doorway in to and out of this world,” she writes in her program note. Ultimately uplifting and life-affirming, the work moves from quiet contemplation to the “ecstatic expansion of the soul.”