Composers Datebook

Synopsis

A concerto, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a piece for one or more soloists and orchestra with three contrasting movements.” And for most classical music fans, “concerto” means one of big romantic ones by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, works in which there is a kind of dramatic struggle between soloist and orchestra.

But on today’s date in 2003, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and its concertmaster Stephen Copes premiered a Violin Concerto that didn’t quite fit that mold. For starters, it had four movements, and this Violin Concerto No. 2 by American composer George Tsontakis was more “democratic” than romantic — meaning the solo violinist seems to invite the other members of the orchestra to join in the fun, rather than hogging all the show. This concerto is more like a friendly, playful game than a life-and-death contest, and Tsontakis even titles his second movement “Gioco” or “Games.”

The new concerto proved a winner, being selected for the prestigious 2005 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. Even so, George Tsontakis confesses to being a little shy when sitting in the audience as his music is played, knowing full well, he says, that most people came to hear the Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, and not him.

Music Played in Today's Program

George Tsontakis (b. 1951):Violin Concerto No. 2;Stephen Copes, violin; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Douglas Boyd, conductor;Koch International 7592

Synopsis

It was on today’s date in 1944 that the ballet Fancy Free — with music Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins — was first staged by the Ballet Theater at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. It was a big hit. Bernstein himself conducted, and alongside Robbins took 20 curtain calls.

“The ballet is strictly wartime America, 1944,” Bernstein wrote. “The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamppost, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers making a dizzying backdrop. Three sailors explode onto the stage. They are on 24-hour shore leave in the city and on the prowl for girls. The tale of how they meet first one, then a second girl, and how they fight over them, lose them, and in the end take off after still a third, is the story of the ballet.”

In a curious parallel to the stage action described by Bernstein, the ballet had been first pitched to composer Morton Gould, who said he was too busy, then to Vincent Persichetti, who in turn suggested Bernstein as a third, and perhaps better choice to produce a more hip, jazzy, and danceable score.

Music Played in Today's Program

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990):Fancy Free Ballet;New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor;Sony 63085

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1887, readers of the Wiener Salonblatt, a fashionable Viennese weekly artspaper, could enjoy the latest critical skirmish in the Brahms-Wagner wars.

At the close of the 19th century, traditionalist partisans of the Symphonies, Sonatas, and String Quartets of Johannes Brahms rallied around the conservative Viennese music critic, Eduard Hanslick. In the opposing camp were equally passionate admirers of the music dramas of Richard Wagner and the symphonic tone poems of Frans Liszt, works this camp defined as “the music of the future.”

The April 17, 1887 edition of the Wiener Salonblatt contained a review of a chamber music program presented by the Rosé Quartet, Vienna’s premiere chamber ensemble in those days. Here’s what the critic had to say:

“What was provided on this occasion was not to our taste: Brahms — no small dose of sleeping powder for weak nerves. Such programming reeks of lethal intent and should really be forbidden by the police!”

That review was penned by Hugo Wolf, these days more famous as a composer than as a music critic, and regarded one of the greatest song composers of the 19th century after Schubert, Schumann — and Brahms!

Music Played in Today's Program

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903): Italian Serenade (I Solisti Italiani); Denon 9150

Synopsis

A century before crowds of extras and gigantic sets first filled the silver screen of Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood extravaganzas, the Paris Opera brought similar resources to the stage for their historical operas—offering shipwrecks, explosions, massacres, and other crowd-pleasing spectacles.

For example, on today’s date in 1849, the premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera “The Prophet,” included a ballet sequence that made audiences gasp in surprise when the dancers—supposed skating on a frozen lake—glided across the stage on roller skates!

Roller skates had been invented in Paris in 1790 but were considered a useless curiosity—after Meyerbeer’s opera, however, there was a booming demand for what was marketed as "Prophet Skates." Meyerbeer’s opera also included an on-stage sunrise, employing , for the first time at the Paris Opera, state-of-the art electric lights.

And just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun—electric or otherwise–in 1984, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight express,” a rock musical about roller-ball competitors, had singers racing around the stage on roller-skates. The musical proved a big hit in London, New York and Las Vegas, and, reminiscent of Meyerbeer’s frozen pond ballet, there has even been a version of “Starlight Express—On Ice.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864)The Prophet: Ballet of the Skaters: GalopBarcelona Symphony Orchestra/Michal NesterowiczNaxos 573076

Synopsis

At 2:20 a.m. on this date in 1912, the luxury liner S.S. Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Of the 2201 people of on board, only 711 reached their intended destination in New York. Eight British musicians, members of the ship’s band, stayed on board, reportedly playing a hymn tune as the ship went down.

In 1969, British composer Gavin Bryars prepared a multimedia musical work, The Sinking of the Titanic, which incorporated spoken interviews by Titanic survivors with a set of variations on the hymn tune played by the ship’s band. In 1985, the sunken wreck of the Titanic was rediscovered, and renewed interest led to a 1990 revival performance and recording of Gavin Bryars’s score.

A few years later, composer James Horner wrote an Oscar-winning film score for director James Cameron’s Titanic — an incredibly successful cinematic dramatization of the story.

Horner wrote other famous film scores like those for Aliens and Braveheart — but none quite as successful as Titanic. That film grossed more than $600 million at the domestic box office and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Ironically, considering this “titanic” success, the first film for which Horner composed a score was The Drought.

Music Played in Today's Program

Gavin Bryars (b. 1943): The Sinking of the Titanic; Gavin Bryars and ensemble;
Point Music 446 249

James Horner (1953-2015): Titanic sountrack; Studio Orchestra; James Horner, conductor;
Sony Classcial 63213

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  Gavin Bryars' website
  
  

Synopsis

Fiddler Jay Ungar wrote a melancholy tune in 1982 and titled it Ashokan Farewell. It reflected, he wrote, the wistful sadness he felt at the conclusion of a week-long, summer-time fiddle and dance program in the Catskill Mountains at Ashokan Field Campus of the State University of New York.

“I was embarrassed by the emotions that welled up whenever I played it,” Ungar recalled. It’s written in the style of a Scottish lament or Irish air, and Ungar says he sometimes introduced it as “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns heard a recording of Ungar’s tune and asked if he could use it as the theme for his PBS documentary series, The Civil War. In that context, the sadness in Ashokan Farewell takes on a whole different meaning.

The Civil War has inspired a number of other American composers, among them Roy Harris, whose Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg) was premiered on this date in 1944 by the Boston Symphony. It was written on commission from the Blue Network, the radio predecessor of the American Broadcasting Company. Each of the symphony’s movements is prefaced by a quotation from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Music Played in Today's Program

Jay Ungar (b. 1946): Ashokan Farewell; Jay Ungar, fiddle; Newman-Oltman Guitar Duo; MusicMasters 67145

Roy Harris (1898-1979): Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg); Pacific Symphony; Keith Clark, conductor; Varese-Sarabande 47245

Synopsis

One of the best-loved works of classical music, Handel’s oratorio Messiah, had its first performance on today’s date in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742. Handel wrote Messiah in a period of only four weeks, then put it aside until he received an invitation to present a new work in the Irish capital. Dublin gave Messiah an enthusiastic reception, but it took a few years before London recognized that Messiah was a masterpiece.

Baroque composers like Handel freely borrowed materials from previous works — or even other composers — to use in new ones. Among Handel’s own instrumental works, the Concerti Due Cori, for example, contain melodies familiar from Messiah.

American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich harks back to this baroque custom in her own Concerto Grosso 1985, in which she quotes directly from Handel’s Violin Sonata in D — which in turns quotes from no fewer than four of Handel’s own earlier compositions.

Born in Miami in 1939, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich studied at Juilliard with two noted American composers, Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, and in 1983 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony No. 1.

Music Played in Today's Program

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759): Sinfoni from Messiah; Boston Baroque Orchestra; Martin Pearlman, conductor; Telarc 80348

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939): Concerto Grosso 1985; New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, conductor; New World 372

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1933, the New York Philharmonic presented the premiere performance of Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

He was born in Florence in 1895 and enjoyed early success in Europe, but, because he was Jewish, the increasingly harsh racial policies of Mussolini forced Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his family to immigrate to the U.S. His passage was assisted by Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini and violin virtuoso Jasha Heifetz, who were also the conductor and soloist for the Carnegie Hall premiere of his new concerto.

Two weeks earlier, Toscanini and other prominent American musicians had signed a public cable to Hitler protesting the persecution of Jewish artists. For his part, Castelnuovo-Tedesco gave his new concerto a title: The Prophets.

“The title,” he wrote, “does not represent a precise and detailed program, but is intended only as an indication of the ethical environment … the choice of a solo violin might suggest the flaming and fanciful eloquence of the ancient prophets.”

Castelnuovo-Tedesco settled in California, where he taught and found work in Hollywood. He composed 100 film scores, became an American citizen in 1946, and died in Beverly Hills in 1968.

Music Played in Today's Program

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968): Violin Concerto No. 2 (The Prophets); Jascha Heifetz, violin; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Alfred Wallenstein, conductor; RCA BMG 7872

Synopsis

In 1996, American composer George T. Walker, Jr. became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. That was for his Lilacs, a setting for solo soprano and orchestra of Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

Walker died in the summer of 2018 at 96, leaving behind a substantial body of music ranging from solo works for piano and organ to chamber works and orchestral scores, including five works he titled Sinfonias.

His fifth and last sinfonia, Visions, was inspired by the 2015 hate crime shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and exists in two versions: one version includes elusive, enigmatic spoken texts and a video that includes a photo of the port of Charleston at its conclusion; the other version is purely instrumental.

Sadly, although completed in 2016, despite Walker’s stature and fame, he found no American orchestra able to schedule it during his lifetime. A studio recording of Sinfonia No. 5 was made under the composer’s supervision in 2018, but its public premiere by the Seattle Symphony occurred posthumously on today’s date in 2019.

Music Played in Today's Program

George Walker (1922-2018): Sinfonia No. 5 (Visions); Sinfonia Varsovia; Ian Hobson, conductor; Albany TROY-1707

Synopsis

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” If George Antheil were asked that question in 1927, he would have answered that it was easy. After the scandalous Paris premiere of his aggressively avant-garde Ballet Mécanique, scored for eight pianos and lots of percussion, including airplane propellers, Antheil received a cable offering financial backing for a one-night only performance of the new work at Carnegie Hall.

Antheil was broke at the time, so the offer was hard to refuse. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he also programmed his new jazz sinfonietta — and hired the all-black W.C. Handy jazz band to accompany him at the piano — and remember, this was 11 years before Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert famously presented a racially integrated ensemble on the same stage.

“The public paid scant attention,” Antheil later recalled. “They had come to see and hear the Ballet Mecanique. The new Jazz Sinfonietta which I composed specially for the occasion was played by a large Negro orchestra whose personnel contained a list of names later to become tremendously important in popular music … but the critics took almost no notice except to say that my Sinfonietta was reminiscent of Negro jazz and not as good.”

Music Played in Today's Program

George Antheil (1900-1959): A Jazz Symphony; Ivan Davis, piano; New Palaise Royale Ensemble; Maurice Peress, conductor; MusicMasters 67094