utubesucks2003's video: Alan Hovhaness - Storm On Mount Wildcat Op 2 No 2

Conducted by Gerard Schwarz Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra Album: Mysterious Mountains Liner Notes by Hinako Fujihara Hovhaness: When Alan was composing Symphony No. 56, To The Green Mountains, he expressed his fascination with composing storm music to me, "Rossini composed a storm in his opera, William Tell, and Sibelius in The Tempest. I would like to compose my storm." His storm was a New Hampshire mountain storm. When he was about twelve years old, his favorite uncle, Frank, often took Alan nature-painting to the high hills overlooking the New Hampshire White Mountains. (That was one of his few happy childhood memories.) He was not satisfied just painting a peaceful landscape, he wanted something dramatic, an awesome storm on the mountains. The Storm On Mount Wildcat was composed in 1931 when he was twenty years old. I hear the music influenced by his favorite composers, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, and others. He believed in beauty and ugliness, peace and destruction--all in good contrast as in nature, under the divine order.