Grand Canyon Suite

Inspired by a 1916 camping trip, Ferde Grofé finished Grand Canyon Suite, which would become his best-known composition, in 1931. Alongside nature-inspired suites dedicated to the Mississippi River, Niagara Falls, and other points of interest, this vividly pictorial and brilliantly orchestrated work solidified Grofé's reputation as a preeminent American tone poem composer. The five-movement Grand Canyon Suite opens, naturally enough, with "Sunrise," a slow accretion of sonorities and textures that burst into a glorious climax. "Painted Desert" offers Grofé a canvas on which to explore numerous orchestral pigments, especially those involving trumpets, woodwinds, and strings. Coconut-shell horse clops (yes, he invented those) made Grofé's "On the Trail" theme a de rigueur cartoon effect. And, after "Sunset" restfully calls it a day with ballooning orchestral swells, "Cloudburst" reemerges with inharmonious power before concluding the suite with a magnificent section Grofé called "Nature Rejoices In All Its Grandeur." Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, and Eugene Ormandy, among others, have all conducted Grofé's epic opus, and Walt Disney integrated it into a 1958 CinemaScope short.