Sergei Taneyev, At the Reading of a Psalm
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…
The Cantata
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,…
Ficciones, Concerto for Electric Violin and Orchestra
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…
Contemporary Continuities
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…
American Masters
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 in New York
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…
New York and Gustav Mahler
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…
ALL-DUKE ELLINGTON PROGRAM
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,…
Duke Ellington
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…
Beyond Beethoven
Louis Spohr Born April 5, 1784, Brunswick, Germany Died October 22, 1859, Kassel, Germany Symphony No. 6, “Historical Symphony” Composed in 1839 Performance Time: Approximately 26 minutes After Beethoven’s death in 1827, European critics and audiences generally agreed that Louis (née Ludwig) Spohr was the greatest German composer. Until the rise of Mendelssohn, Spohr was considered Beethoven’s heir. Their opinion might have surprised Beethoven himself, who was sharply…
Celebrating Beethoven
Our habit of marking anniversaries in our culture of concert programming has to inspire some ambivalence. Mathematical symmetries in chronology are superstitions. If we want to exploit them to attract the attention of the audience, we ought to celebrate composers who need remembering, those whom we have forgotten but should not have, or those in the process of being forgotten unfairly. We certainly need no reminding about Beethoven. One can…
A Miraculous Family
There are probably enough members of tonight’s audience who will readily recognize—with a smile–the name P.D.Q. Bach—whose music does not appear on the program. P.D.Q.’s creator, the American composer Peter Schickele (whose aptitude for musical jokes was unparalleled) described him as “the last and unquestionably the least of the great Johann Sebastian Bach’s many children.” Schickele’s invention of a son whose dates were “(1807-1742)?” was a resounding success for decades,…
The Sons of Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (1785–1750) wrote more than a thousand musical works, and had twenty children. Four of his six sons became respected composers in their own right. Though they had the same father, the two eldest—Wilhelm Friedemann (1710–1784) and Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–1788) had a different mother, Maria Barbara (1684–1720), than the two younger sons—Johann Christoph Friedrich (1732–1795) and Johann Christian (1735–1782), who were born to Anna Magdalena (1701–1760). Indeed,…
The Kingdom
Edward Elgar Born June 2, 1857, Broadheath, United Kingdom Died February 23, 1934, Worcester, United Kingdom The Kingdom, Op. 51 Composed in 1906 Premiered on October 3, 1906 in Birmingham, England at Birmingham Music Festival conducted by Elgar with soloists Agnes Nicholls, Muriel Foster, John Coates and William Higley Performance Time: Approximately 95 minutes Due to the popularity of Elgar’s first major oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, the directors of…
Elgar’s The Kingdom
During the Bard Music Festival in 2007, which had Edward Elgar as its focus, the American Symphony Orchestra planned to present in the New York area the composer’s three great oratorios. The festival, at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College, closed with a performance of The Dream of Gerontius. The title role was brilliantly sung by Vinson Cole. The performance took on a special…
Martinů and Julietta
The career of Bohuslav Martinů mirrors the decisive and tragic character of the century in which he lived. Martinů was born in 1890 and came of age as a citizen of a multinational dynastic empire, only to find himself, in his twenties, a patriot of a newly minted national unit: Czechoslovakia. The triumphant nationalism of post-World War I Europe coexisted, however, with a profound sense of cultural discontinuity, a resistance…
Julietta, or Symphonic Music is a Sometime Thing
Born December 8, 1890, in Polička, Czechoslovakia Died August 28, 1959, in Liestal, Switzerland Composed in 1936–37 Premiered on March 16, 1938, in Prague, at the National Theatre, conducted by Václav Talich Performance Time: Approximately 3 hours including intermission Introductions and Possible Bright Futures On March 16, 1938, inside the hallowed walls of Prague’s National Theatre, Czechoslovak composer Bohuslav Martinů’s three-act lyric opera Julietta (Snář) [Juliette, or the Key of…
Composers, Teachers, and New York
This concert is exemplary of the original and ongoing mission of the ASO. The four composers on the program are all American, and they represent a thirty-year period, from Pearl Harbor to the Vietnam War, that witnessed unprecedented growth in the concert and classical music world of this country. These composers enjoyed enormous recognition and success in their lifetimes. With the passage of time, however, memories fade and tastes change….
Robert Mann, Fantasy for Orchestra
Born July 19, 1920, in Portland, Oregon Died January 1, 2018, in New York City Composed in 1957 Premiered on February 23, 1957 at Carnegie Hall, with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos Performance Time: Approximately 13 minutes A celebrated violinist who died last year at 97, Robert Mann was an outsize figure in the world of chamber music performance. He spent more than 50 years, from 1946…
Vivian Fine, Concertante for Piano and Orchestra
Vivian Fine’s multifaceted output as a composer included vocal, chamber, orchestral, and theater works. Fine was also a highly regarded pianist, and her Concertante reflects her deep attachment to the keyboard. The work is readily connected to neoclassicism—a term that suggests a strong interest in forms and styles of the baroque and classical periods. A number of significant twentieth-century musical figures were associated with neoclassicism, including Igor Stravinsky and Aaron…
