Jacob Druckman, Prism
Born June 26, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Died May 24, 1996, in New Haven, Connecticut Composed in 1979–80 Premiered on May 21, 1980 in Baltimore, with the Baltimore Symphony, conducted by Sergiu Comissiona Performance Time: Approximately 22 minutes Jacob Druckman’s Prism is perhaps best understood, at first, through the lens of a work Druckman admired: the Italian composer Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (1968), which Druckman called “a masterful example of the…
William Schuman, Symphony No. 3
Born August 4, 1910, in New York City Died February 15, 1992, in New York City Composed in 1941 Premiered on October 17, 1941, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky Performance Time: Approximately 31 minutes When William Schuman completed his Symphony No. 3 in 1941, he had an illustrious advocate: Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitzky, an active supporter of American music. It was Koussevitzky who led…
Whitman and Democracy
Among the most arguably difficult of literary enterprises is the art of translation. Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed about the matter; his complicated and controversial views on the processes of transferring the sensibilities evoked by one language to another have themselves inspired volumes of commentary. The challenge resides in an irresolvable paradox: if the translator aims for laser-like accuracy of meaning, the intangible qualities of linguistic usage that allow us to…
Othmar Schoeck, Trommelschläge
Born September 1, 1886, in Brunnen, Switzerland Died March 8, 1957, in Zürich, Switzerland Composed in 1915 Premiered on March 5, 1916 at Tonhalle, Zürich, with the Tonhalle-Orchester Performance Time: Approximately 5 minutes The horrors of the First World War intruded upon the Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck personally: the only manuscript copy of one of his songs was destroyed when a German U-boat torpedoed the Lusitania on May 7, 1915….
Kurt Weill, Four Walt Whitman Songs
Born March 2, 1900, in Dessau, Germany Died April 3, 1950, in New York City Composed in 1942–47 Premiered in 1947 for Concert Hall Records, with tenor William Horne and pianist Adam Garner Performance Time: Approximately 18 minutes Unlike some émigrés who fled Europe ahead of the Nazi menace, Kurt Weill never indulged in backward glances or nostalgia. Even before he became an American citizen on August 27, 1943, Weill…
Franz Schreker, Vom ewigen Leben (From Eternal Life)
Born March 23, 1878, in Monaco Died March 21, 1934, in Berlin, Germany Composed in 1923 Premiered in 1929 Performance Time: Approximately 20 minutes Franz Schreker was celebrated principally as a dramatic composer during his lifetime: his first success came in 1908 with a pantomime, Der Geburtstag der Infantin, based on The Birthday of the Infanta by Oscar Wilde. In 1910, Schreker completed his masterpiece, the opera Der ferne Klang,…
Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Sea Symphony
Born October 10, 1872, in Down Ampney, England Died August 26, 1958, in London Composed in 1903–09 Premiered on October 12, 1910 at the Leeds Festival, England Performance Time: Approximately 70 minutes In 1892, Bertrand Russell recommended Walt Whitman’s poetry to a fellow undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge: the aspiring young composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Whitman’s poetry was well known in Britain by that time. William Michael Rossetti, brother of…
Intolerance
It would be hard to imagine a work more pertinent to our times than Luigi Nono’s Intolleranza 1960. It is a work of musical theater that tells the story of an emigrant worker who encounters prejudice, injustice, incarceration, and violence. It assumes a political context in Europe of the threat of a return to fascism. Intolleranza 1960 suggests that none of us can afford to assume that we are immune to…
Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960
Born January 29, 1924, in Venice Died May 8, 1990, in Venice Composed in 1960–61 Premiered on April 13, 1961, at Teatro della Fenice in Venice with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bruno Maderna Performance Time: Approximately 75 minutes Fifteen years after the end of World War II, the wounds of Europe were far from being healed. Italy in particular had barely begun to come to terms with the…
The Courage of Friendship: The Composer as Jew in the Soviet Union
The historical thread running through this concert program is the presence and persecution of the Jews of Poland and Soviet Russia in the mid-twentieth century. The nearly total annihilation of the Jews that began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of Poland and proceeded with increased intensity after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had an unexpected and grim epilogue. In 1948 Stalin launched his post-war campaign against…
Mieczysław Weinberg, Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes
Born December 8, 1919, in Warsaw, Poland Died February 26, 1996, in Moscow, Russia Composed in 1949 Premiered on November 30, 1949, in Moscow by the All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Gauk Performance Time: Approximately 12 minutes During the last decade or so, a true Mieczysław Weinberg renaissance has begun in the concert halls of the world. Weinberg, who fled the Nazis from Poland to the Soviet Union…
Mieczysław Weinberg, Symphony No. 5
Born December 8, 1919, in Warsaw, Poland Died February 26, 1996, in Moscow, Russia Composed in 1962 Premiered on October 18, 1962, in Moscow by the Moscow Symphony, conducted by Kirill Kondrashin Performance Time: Approximately 42 minutes Weinberg’s Fifth Symphony may be seen as the composer’s response to Shostakovich’s Fourth, which was first performed publicly in 1961, 25 years after it was written. Weinberg had been familiar with the work…
Veniamin Fleishman, Rothschild’s Violin
Born July 20, 1913, in Bezhetsk, Russia Died September 14, 1941, in Krasnoye Selo, near Leningrad Composed by Fleishman in 1939–41, completed by Shostakovich in 1944 Premiered on June 20, 1960, in Moscow Performance Time: Approximately 40 minutes Shostakovich called Veniamin Fleishman his favorite student at the Leningrad Conservatory. At his teacher’s suggestion, Fleishman was working on a one-act opera based on Chekhov’s short story “Rothschild’s Violin” (he himself had…
Music, Autocracy, and Exile
What makes music so compelling as a means of human expression? Why were composers and audiences in the 20th century still drawn to the symphony and the concerto, musical forms that require neither words nor images and that occupy an extended duration of time? Why did composers seek to prove wrong Richard Wagner’s prediction that the traditions of instrumental music—music thinking pursued autonomously on its own terms—were incompatible with the…
Grażyna Bacewicz, Music for Strings, Trumpets, and Percussion
Born February 5, 1909 in Łódź, Poland Died January 17, 1969 in Warsaw, Poland Composed in 1958 Premiered in 1959 at the Warsaw Autumn Festival Performance Time: Approximately 19 minutes Upon hearing the words Music for Strings…and Percussion in the title of a composition, one immediately thinks of Bartók’s masterpiece from the year 1936, where the missing word in the title is completed by ‘celeste.’ Bartók’s music found a particularly…
Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 6, Fantaisies symphoniques
Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 6, Fantaisies symphoniques by Peter Laki Written for the concert Triumph of Art, which was performed on December 7, 2017 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Born December 8, 1890, in Polička, Czechoslovakia Died August 28, 1959, in Liestal, Switzerland Composed in 1951–53 Premiered on January 7, 1955 in Boston, Massachusetts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra Performance Time: Approximately 28 minutes Bohuslav Martinů said about his Fantaisies symphoniques,…
Grażyna Bacewicz, Violin Concerto No. 7
Born February 5, 1909 in Łódź, Poland Died January 17, 1969 in Warsaw, Poland Composed in 1965 Premiered on January 13, 1966 at the Grande Salle de Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels, with Augustín León Ara and the Belgian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Sternfeld Performance Time: Approximately 20 minutes Bacewicz was trained as a virtuoso violinist, which explains the large number of works for violin, and strings…
Alfred Schnittke, Symphony No. 5
Born November 24, 1934 in Engels, Russia (Soviet Union) Died August 3, 1998, in Hamburg, Germany Composed in 1988 Premiered on November 10, 1988 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly Performance Time: Approximately 37 minutes Almost twenty years after his death, it is becoming increasingly clear that Alfred Schnittke was one of the few composers for whom the traditional genres of symphony (with more than 200 years…
Music and Democracy
During the past century—the hundred years since America entered World War I—what has been (and still might be) the connection between the essentially European traditions of orchestral and symphonic music and the ideals, demands, and predicaments of American democracy? The historical precedents of form and expression that preoccupied the American composers on today’s program emerged from a political world quite different from the American experience. Classical and Romantic concert music…
Aaron Copland, Canticle of Freedom
Born November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn, New York Died December 2, 1990 in North Tarrytown, New York Composed in 1955 Premiered in 1955 at Kresge Auditorium, Cambridge, Massachusetts Performance Time: Approximately 13 minutes On May 26, 1953, Aaron Copland appeared before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) chaired the committee; the committee’s infamous chief counsel Roy Cohn was present. The anti-Communist crusader McCarthy called Copland to…
