Richard Strauss Born June 11, 1864, in Munich, Germany Died September 8, 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany An den Baum Daphne (Epilogue from Daphne) Composed in 1943 Text by Joseph Gregor (1888-1960) Premiered on January 5, 1947 in Vienna, Austria by the Vienna State Opera Chorus with the Vienna Boys’ Choir conducted by Felix Prohaska. Performance Time: Approximately 16 minutes Daphne: Bukolische Tragödie in einem Aufzug (Bucolic Tragedy in One Act),…

The myth of Daphne has come down to us from a myriad of ancient Greek and Roman sources. The most well-known perhaps is the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In all its variants, however, three central issues animate the Daphne myth.  First, is beauty and its consequences. Daphne is so uncommonly beautiful and so mesmerizing that she becomes Apollo’s obsession and his object of pursuit. Of the Olympians, Apollo was himself…

It is a pleasure to welcome the audience to this concert of the American Symphony Orchestra at St. Bartholomew’s. St. Bartholomew’s has a rich and noble history as a venue for concerts, particularly concerts that utilize its spectacular and legendary Aeolian-Skinner organ. Although the present organ dates from 1918, it incorporates much of the previous organ by Hutchings and Odell. The organ has been meticulously maintained. Its current configuration dates…

Camille Saint-Saëns Born October 9, 1835, in Paris, France Died December 16, 1921, in Algiers, Algeria Symphony No. 3, Op. 78, 1886 Composed 1886 Premiered on May 19, 1886, in London, U.K., Conducted by Camille Saint-Saëns Performance Time: Approximately 36 minutes In 1878, Camille Saint-Saëns endured a double tragedy. On May 28, his young son André died when he fell from the window of the family apartment onto the courtyard…

This concert celebrates the role New York City has played, and continues to play as a center of national musical culture in the 20th century. At the same time, tonight’s concert marks the 60th anniversary of the American Symphony Orchestra.  The ASO was founded by Leopold Stokowski in the early sixties. Lincoln Center—the not altogether wise (in terms of the character of cities) dream of bringing the major performing arts…

Aaron Copland  Born November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York Died December 2, 1990, in North Tarrytown, New York Quiet City Composed 1939-1941 Orchestra version premiered on January 28, 1941 in New YORK, Conducted by Daniel Saidenberg Performance Time: Approximately 10 minutes “My career in the theatre has been a flop,” wrote Aaron Copland to his friend and fellow composer-critic Virgil Thomson in 1939. Copland meant live spoken theatre rather…

This first United States performance of Taneyev’s masterpiece At the Reading of a Psalm is not only part of the American Symphony Orchestra’s longstanding mission to revive neglected or unknown works of music that merit public performance and rediscovery, but it is taking place several weeks before the opening of the 2022 Bard Music Festival, which this year is dedicated to the life and career of Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of…

Sergei Taneyev Born November 25, 1856, in Vladimir, Russia Died June 19, 1915 in Zvenigorod, Russia At the Reading of a Psalm Composed in 1915 Premiered on March 11, 1915 in Saint Petersburg, Russia conducted by Serge Koussevitzky Performance Time: Approximately 70 minutes The cantata is not a genre often associated with Russian composers, who are perhaps most famous – at least in the West – for their operas, symphonies,…

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 first movement I composed dissimilar sections and gestures that only when the movement concludes they…

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 the late 1980s, a decade after he won the Pulitzer. Roberto Sierra’s work is a…

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 Instruments for this performance: timpani, percussion (glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, triangle, finger cymbal, castanets, vibraphone, chimes,…

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 range of operatic and symphonic repertoire that also included three of his own symphonies as…

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 city’s New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. It had a circulation of over 55,000 readers. A large segment…

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 Freedom, celebrated a birthday at the White House, received the Legion of Honor from France,…

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 to the world of music, they had to turn for inspiration to two sources for…