Concert Notes

I first read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story El Aleph when I was a student at the University of Puerto Rico. The paradox of a point of light where one could see the totality of everything simultaneously was a moment of revelation to me. In El Aleph what seems empirically impossible is possible. In this…

Tonight’s concert features four works by distinguished American composers with long and sustained careers. Each has been recognized and been the recipient of numerous awards; two of the pieces on the program, by Shulamit Ran and Melinda Wagner, won the coveted Pulitzer Prize in the 1990s. The viola concerto by Richard Wernick was written in…

Melinda Wagner Born February 25, 1957, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion Composed in 1998 Premiered on May 30, 1998 in Purchase, New York New York at the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College by Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Mandarano with soloist Paul Lustig Dunkel, flute. Performance Time: Approximately 23…

Mahler spent a total of about a year and a half in New York, in the course of four extended sojourns between 1907 and 1911. He conducted at the Met and gave numerous concerts with the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall; he also visited a dozen American cities on tour. He conducted a wide…

The New York City to which Gustav Mahler arrived in 1907 was the third largest German-speaking city in the world. With its nearly 800,000 Germans, and over 140,000 inhabitants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, only Berlin and Vienna had more German speakers. Already in the 1870s, the largest German language newspaper in the world was the…

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington Born April 29, 1899, in Washington, D.C. Died May 24, 1974, in New York, NY By the time Duke Ellington was 75 years old, he was perhaps the most lauded composer of not only the 20th century, but possibly of any century. He had been presented with the Presidential Medal of…

During his three-year sojourn in the United States in the early 1890s—as director of a conservatory here in New York—the world-famous Czech composer Antonin Dvo˘rák observed that if composers in the United States were ever to break away from being trapped in the shadow of Europe’s musical culture and make an original lasting American contribution…