In the fall of 1995, the American composer Andrew Waggoner received a commission from the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of the Czech Republic for a new orchestral work to be premiered the following year.

“I had a symphony in my mind for some time,” writes Waggoner, “and decided that this was the chance I needed to see it through.”

The resulting work, Waggoner’s Symphony No. 2, opens with a solo for the cello, an elegy, perhaps, for cellist Anna Cholakian, the founding member of the Cassatt Quartet, who had died from cancer while Waggoner was working on the piece. “Quite unexpectedly, and for the first time in my life as a composer, the piece began to draw from everything around it,” writes Waggoner, including some recycled elements from his First Symphony, a String Quartet written for the Cassatt Quartet, and his setting of one of the Holy Sonnets of the 17th century British poet John Donne.

Waggoner was born in New Orleans in 1960, and studied music at the Eastman School and Cornell University. In addition to his composition work, he’s worked as an announcer and producer for public radio stations WXXI in Rochester and WNYC in New York. He teaches music in Syracuse, and serves as co-director of a chamber music festival in Maine. His own chamber and orchestral music has been performed by a number of American ensembles, and his Second Symphony was recorded by the Czech orchestra that premiered it on today’s date in 1996.