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Barber’s Vanessa: The Great American Opera That Wasn’t

To commemorate Samuel Barber’s centenary, the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts a performance from the first run of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa on Saturday, and it’s worth pointing out how momentous an occasion the 1958 premiere was. Just as people had always been on the lookout for the great American novel in the first half of the twentieth century, so were music fans waiting for an American opera to enter the classical music canon.

At first, it seemed that Vanessa (synopsis here) would fit the bill. Local critics were quick to praise it, emphasizing that the work was not just good, it was homegrown. Barber won his first of two Pulitzer Prizes on the strength of the work. But after word got back to the US that performances at the Salzburg Festival were unsuccessful and small audiences in the 1958-1959 season, Vanessa was out of the Met’s repertory. The company presented a revised version of the opera in 1965, but by then Vanessa had lost its luster.

I’ve been getting to know this opera over the last couple of days, and have particularly enjoyed the Act I aria “Must the Winter Come So Soon,” performed here by Frederica von Stade at a 1992 gala with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and James Conlon.

North Carolina Dance Theatre Gala Tonight

The North Carolina Dance Theatre just finished up its perennial run of Nutcracker performances, and it will be opening its new Patricia McBride & Jean-Pierre Bonnefoux Center for Dance on Tryon Street, just uptown from the Knight Theater, later this year.

The Dance Theater gala comes on the heels of the January 2 opening of Charlotte’s new Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (photos here and here), part of the Wells Fargo Cultural Campus. This two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street includes the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum uptown expansion, which is set to open in October. 

Cheesy Classical Music You Should Know: Barber’s Adagio for Strings

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings has been repeatedly popping into popular consciousness to signify tragic loss since its auspicious 1938 premiere on an NBC Symphony Orchestra broadcast with Arturo Toscanini (which you can hear courtesy of NPR.org).

Originally composed as part of Barber’s second string quartet, the Adagio for Strings was heard on the radio when FDR died. Barber arranged it in 1967 for choir as an Agnus Dei.

Adagio for Strings is part of the soundtracks for 1980s classics The Elephant Man and Platoon. On September 15, 2001, Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra closed London’s annual Proms concerts with the piece.

Barber’s centenary is this March (the composer died in 1981), so now is a perfect time to get to know (again) his most famous music, a work that has become an almost universal musical symbol for catharsis in the face of loss.

New York Phil’s New Year’s Eve, or How to Invigorate a US Orchestra

It was great to see the New York Philharmonic ring in the new year with its all-American program of Copland, Gershwin, and show tunes with Thomas Hampson. This is entertaining music, and certainly more a part of New York culture than the dusty old 19th-century European stuff the orchestra did last year. 

Alan Gilbert has made a strong commitment (at least relative to most) to American music this season, and that’s a good thing. It’s invigorated the orchestra and its audiences too.

Struggling orchestras such as the Charlotte Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra might do well to follow the Phil’s lead. Don’t assume that people want the usual classical-music standards all the time. And don’t apologize for presenting American music that’s new to audiences–believe in it, make it an important part of your programming. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Hear New York Phil’s First Contact! Concert Online

From now until January 11, you can stream the first concert in the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! series at the orchestra’s website, nyphil.org. There are also videos with one of the composers, Arthur Kampela, Alan Gilbert, who founded the series, and Magnus Lindberg, who conducted the December 17 show at Symphony Space on the Upper West Side.

WQXR.org, which also webcast the concert on their Q2 stream, has interviews with the composers and critical reaction from various bloggers on their site.

Don’t Stop the Christmas Music

Christmas is over, but there’s no reason to stop listening to music for the season. Here are some suggestions of things that haven’t yet become holiday classics, but which deserve hearing while you’re still in the mood.

Written in 1927, A Carol Symphony by British composer Victor Hely-Hutchinson is an honest-to-goodness four-movement symphony based on traditional holiday tunes. It’s entertaining as all get-out, and deserves to be played more often this time of year. Of course, Naxos has a recording of A Carol Symphony available.

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Though not strictly a Christmas piece, David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion reminds us that this is a time of year to remember the neediest. Lang’s 30-minute meditation on Hans Christian Andersen’s short story about a poor girl who dies alone in the cold on New Year’s Eve received its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2007.


Another contemporary American work, John Adams’s El Nino (available on CD from Nonesuch and on DVD from Arthaus Musik), uses sacred and secular texts in both English and Spanish to tell the story of the Nativity. 

And then there’s A Toolbox Christmas.

Charlotte Arts City?

Something’s going on in Charlotte. On Saturday, only a few months after the city’s orchestra was bailed out by former Bank of America head Hugh McColl and the C. D. Spangler Foundation, a new performance space, the Knight Theater, hosted an open house.

The 1,150-seat hall is part of the so-called Wells Fargo Cultural Campus, a two-block-long strip on South Tryon Street that includes new homes for the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture and the Mint Museum, as well the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, set to open in January.

Further uptown, the North Carolina Dance Theatre is building its own headquarters, complete with administrative offices, a costume shop, and, most importantly, six studios for rehearsals and teaching. There are also plans to open a black box theater within the 34,000-square-foot space, which sits beside the ten-year-old McColl Center for Visual Art.

This mini-boom shows that there’s definitely philanthropic interest in beautifying the Queen City, but it remains to be seen whether there will be a sustained commitment to the organizations that curate the exhibitions, play the music, and dance the dances in the new buildings. The Charlotte Symphony plays in a good-looking, relatively new concert hall built in the mid-1990s, but struggles financially and nearly folded over the summer.

It also remains to be seen whether the public will show sufficient interest to keep funders engaged. For most non-profit arts organizations, ticket sales aren’t a significant revenue source, but nobody–not big-money donors, not the government–wants to give money to groups that appear irrelevant to the community at large.