The New York Times published an article about Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings in today’s Arts and Leisure section. As I mentioned in a previous post, NPR.org has a similar piece that includes a recording of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s broadcast in 1938.

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.

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.