Tag: American Music

Move Over Michael Feinstein, George Crumb’s Working on the American Songbook

There’s an article in the Los Angeles Times this weekend about George Crumb’s seven-part American Songbook project. There will be performances this season in LA, in Washington, DC and New York City, and a version of Song Book IV staged by Peter Sellars and sung by Dawn Upshaw at the Ojai Festival.

Delia Casadei describes the folk songs Crumb chose to adapt:

They are, in other words, more than references to an archaic lost world: Some of the bloodiest episodes of the country’s history are etched into their very sinews. They are the spirituals of African slaves, the lullabies of American Indians, the congregational singing of the English settlers and songs of the Civil War. And they have been on the lips of the entire country since time immemorial. 

 Name that tune: there’s a sample on the Bridge Records website. And read Casadei’s article.

When Music Made Louisville

I went to a reception here in New York last night to publicize the release of the new documentary on the Louisville Symphony, Music Makes a City. I didn’t get much out of the event–it was a cheap night out for me and the mizz–except a couple of free beer. And some excellent hors d’oeuvres. They had these little hamburgers, which were really a little big to eat as finger food but were delicious, and some cheesy crackers that Vanessa really liked.

The documentary, which is showing here in New York City until the end of the week, looks promising, and should be a good way to get to know how this regional orchestra came to be a commissioning powerhouse in the second half of the 20th century, totally committed to performing and recording brand-new music.

Next week, the movie will play in Los Angeles. The LA Times has something on their Culture Monster blog.

Rochberg’s Big Break

The announcement that Jennifer Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto gave David Patrick Stearns a chance to look back on notable Philadelphia composers of the past and identify some, including Higdon, that are coming into their own.
George Rochberg was one of the older generation that Stearns discussed. Like Higdon, Rochberg taught at the Curtis Institute–he was also a student there, continuing a music career suspended when he went overseas to fight in World War II. 
But it was in 1958, after Rochberg left Curtis to work for the music publisher Presser, that a chance meeting on Chestnut Street with an old mentor set in motion a series of events that would bring him to national prominence. 
The composer remembers hearing someone call his name: “Roschbergh, Roschbergh.” It was George Szell. The Hungarian conductor taught Rochberg in New York at the Mannes School, shortly before he was drafted in 1942. Szell was an aloof teacher, and Rochberg was taken aback by the informality of the greeting. He was even more shocked when Szell called him a few weeks later to say, “Roschbergh, I am going to do your Second Symphony.” 

http://www.youtube.com/p/3569FADC2D403A76&hl=en_US&fs=1

And he did. The world premiere with the Cleveland Orchestra was a huge success. In February 1960, Szell reprised the work at Carnegie Hall; in 1961, the piece won a Naumberg award, leading to a performance and recording on Columbia with the New York Philharmonic. 
Although Rochberg thought the recording was poor, it, along with the high-profile performances of his Symphony No. 2 by Cleveland and Szell, solidified his position as a leading American composer. 

Barber Update: Violin Concerto

Barber’s 100th birthday is coming up in just over a week, making it the perfect time to hear what is maybe the composer’s second most famous piece.

Tomorrow at 2 PM, and again at 8 PM, Gil Shaham will play Barber’s Violin Concerto with David Robertson and the New York Philharmonic. Barber wrote the Violin Concerto in 1939, in the wake of Toscanini’s broadcast of the Adagio for Strings (his best known music by a long shot) with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and the violinist who it was commissioned for originally rejected the piece. It wasn’t premiered until 1941with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Arthur Spalding. (The New York Phil’s online program notes can tell you more.)

WQXR will broadcast the concert on Thursday, March 11.

If you want more Barber, look to the Baltimore Symphony in June, when they’ll present both his opera A Hand of Bridge and his Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

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.

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.

Gilbert Smartens Up the Phil

Recent New Yorker and New York articles have depicted Alan Gilbert as leading the New York Philharmonic away from old-world stuffiness and toward a more laid-back intellectualism.

For Alex Ross, Gilbert’s first season marks a great awakening after “two drowsy decades,” a return to programming that puts his orchestra’s “virtuosity in the service of ideas,” part of a tradition that dates back to Mitropoulos and includes Bernstein’s championing of new American music, Boulez’s Rug Concerts, and Zubin Mehta’s Horizons festivals.
Similarly, Justin Davidson describes a concert with Gilbert as “a little less drafty temple and more of a campus coffee house,” where audiences can “hear and think about music in an atmosphere of animated informality.”
It wasn’t quite that casual, but the September 30 concert certainly felt more friendly, rewarding, and entertaining than any show I’ve been to in a while.
Most conductors, in fact most classical-music “experts,” who talk about music rely on ten-dollar words that sound fancy but don’t really say much; like a sermon, or Chinese food, they leave you feeling overwhelmed yet unsustained. Gilbert, on the other hand, introduced Magnus Lindberg, whose EXPO opened the night, to the audience with a straight-talking ten-minute interview session. Using the orchestra to demonstrate, the two discussed the thinking behind EXPO, and Lindberg talked thoughtfully about his approach to writing music.
This talk primed people for the piece; the woman to my left noted that she “liked it … I thought I wouldn’t, but I did. More than I thought I would.”
It’s been a while since I’ve had any real interaction with other audience members at concerts, but Gilbert finds a way to get people talking. After Ives’s Symphony No. 2, another concertgoer commented on how different the piece was from her assumptions about Ives. The performance certainly made a case for this piece as part of the mainstream symphonic canon, and I ended up spending the entire intermission locked in an absorbing discussion. Usually, I don’t even wake up until the second half starts.
Both Ross and Davidson fear that Gilbert is too egg-headed for his own good, that he “lacks heat” or forgets that people “go to concerts to have fun.” I had plenty of fun on September 30 and am happy to give up some glamour (or whatever) for a night that stimulates. If you want spectacle, go to Cirque du Soleil; I’ll be at the coffee house, sitting cross legged on the floor with Alan Gilbert and the New York Phil.