Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today's date in 1893, Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, a work subtitled From the New World. This was an afternoon concert, meant as a public dress rehearsal for the work's "official" premiere the following evening.

Among the Dec. 15th audience was Dvořák's eight-year old son, Otakar, who had a special interest in the success of his father's new symphony. In the preceding weeks, Otakar had accompanied his father to a New York café, where Dvořák met Anton Seidl to go over the new score. Young Otakar amused himself at a nearby toyshop, where a seven-foot long model of the ocean liner Majestic was on display, complete with its own miniature steam-chamber and working propellers. It cost a whopping $45—a HUGE amount of money in those days, and the answer from papa was always: NO!

Seeing that the boy's heart was set on having the toy, Anton Seidl suggested to Otakar that he wait until after the premiere and then ask his father again. Seidl told Otakar that if all went well at the premiere, Dvořák would be in a generous mood. The premiere was a great success, and, as Otakar recalled: "When Seidl offered to pay half the cost of the Majestic, Father could not say no. So that is how the three of us celebrated the success of the first performance of the New World Symphony."

Music Played in Today's Program

Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) Symphony No. 9 (From the New World) New York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec 73244

Synopsis

From its founding in 1986 the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet has both commissioned new works and arranged old ones for their ensemble of four virtuoso guitarists. On today’s date in 2001, the Quartet premiered a new commission, a suite of four pieces entitled Ghetto Strings, written by the Haitian-American composer Daniel Bernard Roumain.

Daniel Bernard Roumain – or DBR as he likes to be called – was born in Skokie, Illinois, but grew up in Southern Florida, surrounded by music from Latin communities – the Bahamas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic – as well as his own family’s Haitian music. He took up violin at age five, and says he absorbed a variety of classical and contemporary music. In junior high, he formed his own rock and hip-hop band and in high school played in a jazz orchestra which brought in guests like Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles. He later pursued formal musical studies with mentors William Bolcom and Michael Daugherty, earning both his masters and doctoral degrees.

The four movements of his Ghetto Strings evoke four places Roumain has called home at various points in his life: Harlem, Detroit, Liberty City in Miami, and Haiti.

Music Played in Today's Program

Daniel Bernard Roumain (b. 1970): Haiti, fr Ghetto Strings (Minneapolis Guitar Quartet) innova CD 858

Synopsis

On today's date in 1895, Gustav Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the first complete performance of his own Symphony No. 2.

Mahler's Second is often called the "Resurrection" symphony, as the work includes a choral setting of the Resurrection Ode of the 18th-century German poet Klopstock, but Mahler himself gave his symphony no such title. In a letter to his wife, Mahler confided that his Second Symphony "was so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself."

And like the world, music is often full of surprising transitions!

The American composer Paul Schoenfield quotes a dramatic passage of Mahler's Second in his concerto for piccolo trumpet and orchestra titled Vaudeville.

In live performances, the sudden juxtaposition of Mahler and the Brazilian tune Tico-Tico always gets a laugh—which is just what Schoenfield intended.

"I often suffer from depression," says Schoenfield, "and once, when I was feeling pretty low, a friend of mind suggested I try writing something happy and upbeat to see if that would help. Vaudeville was the result. I don't know if it helped me, but people say when they hear it, it makes them feel better. The music of other composers I respect has that effect on me, and I'm glad if "Vaudeville has that effect on others."

Music Played in Today's Program

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) London Symphony; Gilbert Kaplan, conductor. Conifer 51337

Paul Schoenfield (b. 1947) Vaudeville New World Symphony; John Nelson, conductor. Argo 440 212

Synopsis

La Valse -- one of the most popular orchestral works of Maurice Ravel -- was performed for the first time this day in 1920 by the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard. Ravel's score was subtitled a "choreographic poem for orchestra in the tempo of the Viennese waltz."

La Valse is a far more Impressionistic work than any of the waltzes by the Strauss Family. It is certainly darker. Ravel himself said, "I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal kind of Dervish's dance."

La Valse was written for the great ballet impresario Serge Diagalev, who apparently found it undanceable, and his failure to stage La Valse caused a serious rift in his friendship with Ravel.

The contemporary composer Judith Lang Zaimont is an unabashed Ravel enthusiast—"Ravel's music defines 'gorgeous,'" says Zaimoint, "it's beguiling to the ear, and sensuous. His textures are built in thin layers, like a Napoleon pastry, and his intricate surfaces—beautifully worked-out—shine and fascinate."

Judith Lang Zaimont should know. For many years she taught composition at the University of Minnesota, and her own solo piano, chamber and orchestra works are increasingly finding their way into concert halls and onto compact disc.

Music Played in Today's Program

Maurice Ravel (1875 -1937) La Valse Boston Symphony; Charles Munch, cond. RCA 6522

Judith Lang Zaimont (b. 1945) Symphony No. 1 Czech Radio Symphony; Leos Svarovsky, conductor. Arabesque 6742

Synopsis

On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet's Carmen broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*

Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met's manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further FREE telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976—after Bing had resigned—that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.

The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC's black and white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years—until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although Amahl is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.

*Currently the Metropolitan Opera offers a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from Lincoln Center in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's The Magic Flute on December 30, 2006.

**One surviving copy of the original kinescope did surface in a California archive, and was shown at broadcast museums on both coasts in 2001 to celebrate the work's 50th anniversary.

Music Played in Today's Program

Georges Bizet (1838-1875) Carmen Suite No. 1 Orchestre National de France; Seiji Ozawa, conductor. EMI 63898

Giancarlo Menotti (b. 1911) March, from Amahl and the Night Visitors New Zealand Symphony; Andrew Schenck, conductor. Koch 7005

Synopsis

Today's date marks the birthday anniversary of Morton Gould, a quintessentially American composer, conductor, and advocate for music, who was born in Richmond Hill, New York, on today's date in 1913.

A child prodigy, he published his first work of music at the tender age of six. His teenage years coincided with the Great Depression, and Gould played piano for New York movie theaters and vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as its staff pianist.

By the late 1930s, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for radio networks, and by the 1940s was writing scores for Hollywood films and Broadway shows. A decade or so later, he was writing music for TV. Gould became a favorite conductor for RCA recording sessions of both popular and classical music on LP.

All his life, Gould composed original, well-crafted works that gracefully incorporated American sounds ranging from spirituals to tap-dancing. One of these, for a singing fire department, he titled—with a sly wink at his colleague Aaron Copland—Hosedown.

Gould was a serious composer with a healthy sense of humor AND a keen sense of the business of music. He served for many decades as the president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers,) lobbying hard for the intellectual property rights of composers in the age of the Internet.

Gould died in 1996 at the newly-opened Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, where he was invited to serve as its first resident guest composer.

Music Played in Today's Program

Morton Gould (1913-1996) Spirituals for Strings London Philharmonic;Kenneth Klein, conductor. EMI 49462

Synopsis

These days, no one is surprised if a popular film generates a series of sequels or even prequels, but back in the 1830s the idea of a composer coming up with a sequel to a symphony must have seemed a little odd. But that odd idea did pop into the head of French composer Hector Berlioz.

In 1830, Berlioz had a huge hit with his Symphonie fantastique. That Fantastic Symphony told a story through music, based on the composer’s own real-life, unrequited love for a British Shakespearian actress. The story ends badly, with our hero trying to end it all with a dose of opium, which, while not killing him, does produce, well, “fantastic” nightmares in which he is condemned to death for killing his beloved who reappears at a grotesque witches’ sabbath.

That seems a hard act to follow, but two years later, Berlioz produced a musical sequel, entitled “Lelio, or the Return to Life,” which premiered in Paris on today’s date in 1832. In this, our hero awakes from his drug-induced nightmare, and, with a little help from Shakespeare and a kind of 10-step arts-based recovery program, rededicates his life to music.

Berlioz intended the original and the sequel to be performed together as a kind of double-feature. Alas, while audiences thrill to the lurid Symphonie fantastique, they tend to drift during the admirable, but rather boring rehab sequel, which is rarely performed.

Music Played in Today's Program

Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869) Fantasy on Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', from Lelio London Symphony; Pierre Boulez, conductor. Sony 64103

Synopsis

On this date in 1813, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was played for the first time in Vienna. The occasion was a benefit concert in honor of the Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who had died fighting Napoleon, with the concert's proceeds donated to their widows and orphans.

At its first rehearsal, some of the musicians found the part writing of the new work intimidating. A friend of Beethoven's who sat in on rehearsals later recalled: "the violin players refused to play a passage and rebuked [Beethoven] for writing difficulties that were incapable of performance. But Beethoven begged the gentlemen to take the parts home with them. If they were to practice it at home it would surely go.

The next day the passage went excellently, and the gentlemen themselves seemed to rejoice that they had given Beethoven such pleasure." The slow movement of Beethoven's Symphony so pleased the Viennese audience at its premiere that it had to be encored.

On today's date in 1980, a private tragedy also prompted music. On December 8th that year, ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment in New York City. American composer Aaron Jay Kernis was then a student at the Manhattan School of Music, living not far from where Lennon was slain. The death moved Kernis to reshape elements of Lennon's song "Imagine" into an altogether new work for cello and piano titled "Meditation (in memory of John Lennon)."

Music Played in Today's Program

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No. 7 Vienna Philharmonic; Carlos Kleiber, conductor. DG 447 400

Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960) Meditation (in memory of John Lennon) Eberli Ensemble Phoenix 142

Synopsis

On today's date in 1842, an orchestra of 63 players performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 at the first concert of the Philharmonic Society of New York. This 1842 performance of Beethoven's Fifth occurred 34 years after the work's premiere in Vienna in 1808.

One early and avid Philharmonic Society fan was George Templeton Strong, a young New York lawyer who recorded this appraisal of the symphony after another Philharmonic Society performance of Beethoven's Fifth in 1844:

"The first movement, with its abrupt opening, the complicated entanglement of harmonies that makes up the rest of it, is not very satisfactory or intelligible to me as a whole, though it abounds in exquisite little scraps of melody that come sparkling out like stars through a cloudy sky... but the second and fourth movements—the third ain't much—are enough to put Beethoven at the head of all instrumental composers if he'd never written another note."

In 1865, Strong became the President of the Philharmonic Society, and founded the Church Music Association, which presented sacred choral compositions by leading European composers. George Tempelton Strong's diaries are a fascinating record of life in New York City during the 19th century. Entries from Strong's diaries were quoted frequently as part of the Ken and Ric Burns' PBS television documentaries on the American Civil War and the history of New York City.

Music Played in Today's Program

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Symphony No. 5 Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor. DG Archiv 439 900

Synopsis

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of the American composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. Born in Concord, California on December 6th, 1920, Dave Brubeck would become one of the most famous jazz performers of our time—and one of the most successful at fusing elements of jazz and classical music.

Brubeck studied with Schoenberg and Milhaud, and in the late 1940's and '50's formed a jazz quartet incorporating Baroque-style counterpoint and unusual time signatures into a style that came to be known as "West Coast" or "cool" jazz, culminating in the 1960 release of a landmark jazz album for Columbia Records titled Time Out. This album produced two Hit Parade singles: Blue Rondo à la Turk and Take Five. Ironically, Brubeck had to fight to convince Columbia to release an album composed totally of original material with no familiar "standards" to help sales!

In addition to works for chamber-sized jazz combos, Brubeck has written a number of large-scale sacred works, among them a 1975 Christmas Choral Pageant titled La Fiesta de la Posada, or, The Festival of the Inn.

Originally written to celebrate the restoration of a Spanish mission in California, it wound up being premiered in Hawaii by the Honolulu Symphony. Since its premiere, La Fiesta de la Posada has been performed by both professional and amateur ensembles, ranging from symphony orchestras to mariachi bands. Its premiere recording was made by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Dale Warland Singers, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting.

Music Played in Today's Program

Dave Brubeck (1920 - 2012) Blue Rondo a la Turk The Dave Brubeck Quartet Columbia 40585

Dave Brubeck La Fiesta del Posada Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies, conductor. Columbia Legacy 64669