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Samuel Barber, American Composer

March 12th, 2010 | 7:11 am est | Stephen Eddins

Barber 1 Although their styles were very different, early to mid-twentieth century composers George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein created the music that, for listeners both in the United States and around the world, came to be identified as an “American sound,” characterized by generous lyricism and emotional directness. Barber, who was born in 1910, and whose centenary was recognized on his birthday, March 9, stands out because he was the only one of the four not to prominently incorporate jazz or other popular American idioms into his style. He was the most introspective of the group, and while his music is often at its most effective when it reflects that quality, he had a broad expressive range, and his music could be whimsically humorous, passionate, or starkly powerful. He had a terrific gift for melody, and much of his music is notable for a sweeping lyricism and Romantic warmth. Even at its gentlest and most modest, Barber’s music has a quiet strength that is evidence of the high level of inspiration, clear vision, and sheer musical skill that mark him as one the 20th century American composers whose work is most likely to endure.

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Samuel Barber, 1910 – 1981

March 9th, 2010 | 12:41 pm est | Stephen Eddins

March 9 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of American composer Samuel Barber. Barber’s melodically generous and lyrical, romantic music has been in and out of favor with academicians and critics as musical fashions have changed, but it has never been out of fashion with the public. While he is especially remembered for his vocal music, he wrote and excelled in virtually every musical genre — orchestral, concerto, keyboard, chamber, opera, ballet, and choral. His best known work, Adagio for Strings, is one of the most beloved pieces of 20th century classical music. It has become associated with mourning so much that it has been described with accuracy by Barber’s biographer as our national funeral music. It has been played at funerals and memorials for heads of state, royalty, and public figures, most recently at the opening ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics, to honor the athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili who was killed before the games began. Classical Corner will feature a retrospective on the life and work of Barber later this month.

Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra — Barber: Adagio for Strings

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Binge Listening: André Previn and Ballet Reissues on EMI

March 2nd, 2010 | 8:12 am est | Blair Sanderson

When André Previn began his classical career in the late 1960s, he committed himself to conducting only works he loved, which on its face seemed a severely limiting choice. Fortunately for his many fans, Previn’s repertoire turned out to be quite large, and he established himself as one of the world’s leading conductors as director of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1968 to 1975. Starting in 1972, and continuing at two year intervals, Previn and the LSO released recordings of the complete ballets of Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky –The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty — which became extremely popular titles for EMI. The same service was rendered for Sergey Prokofiev’s great ballets, Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, in 1973 and 1983 respectively. As LPs and later as CDs, these recordings enjoyed multiple reissues, and their place in EMI’s catalog has ensured them longevity and seems secure.

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Posted in Classical, Ear Worms & Obsessions

Chopin at 200

February 19th, 2010 | 7:52 am est | Blair Sanderson

On March 1, Frédéric François Chopin turns 200, the official birth date the composer always claimed, despite a registry in Poland where his birth was recorded as February 22, 1810. At the distance of two centuries, we can see that Chopin became a composer and pianist of exquisite taste and originality, yet he was also a man of many parts, including some contradictions. Born to a Polish mother, Justyna Krzyzanowska, and a French emigré father, Mikolaj (Nicolas) Chopin, the young Fryderyk Franciszek expressed fervent patriotic emotions for the country of his birth, yet he rejected the parochial and claustrophobic milieu of Warsaw and made his name in Paris. There he gained a reputation as a demanding piano teacher who strictly taught his students to play music one way, while he was a somewhat more liberal performer, changing tempos, dynamics, and phrasing to suit his whims when he played, and often using rubato to shape his phrasing. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he neither idolized Ludwig van Beethoven nor admitted to feeling much of his influence, though he grudgingly permitted his students to play the “Moonlight” Sonata because the opening movement was at least quiet, controlled, and similar in mood to his own nocturnes. As a composer, Chopin had a devoted following and was extolled by no less a critic than Robert Schumann, though his greatness became more widely recognized after his death. Even so, he has been considered by some critics, including pianist Glenn Gould, to be a lightweight among the masters, almost a parlor composer who was overly fond of ornamentation and too shallow to attain true depths of expression. Far from a robust man, and sickly in his final years, due either to consumption (the 19th century term for tuberculosis), or what some now think may have been cystic fibrosis, Chopin nonetheless became something of a legend for his amorous involvements. Innuendos about his private life have flourished, due to affairs both real and imagined, perhaps sensationalized to compete with those of his friend and rival, Franz Liszt, whose extraordinary love-life made Chopin’s appear tame by comparison.

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Composers Now Festival

February 17th, 2010 | 12:40 pm est | Stephen Eddins

Composers Now, a new consortium of New York arts organizations, is sponsoring a weeklong festival highlighting the contributions composers make to the cultural fabric of society. During the week of February 22-28, the festival will present an intensive schedule of concerts and discussions at a wide range of venues, such as Symphony Space, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Manhattan School of Music, Merkin Concert Hall, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, the Jazz Gallery, Harlem Stage, and El Museo del Barrio. It’s being sponsored by an impressive consortium of organizations, including ASCAP, BMI, and Meet the Composer’s Metlife Creative Connections Program.

Tania León
Tania LeÃ³n The festival is the brainchild of New York-based composers Tania León and Laura Kaminsky. León draws an analogy with National Poetry Month. “We need to find a way to raise awareness and appreciation of this important community of creators. I would love to see composers as visible as poets.” She and Kaminsky enlisted grassroots support among New York arts organizations to sponsor events that would bring living composers and their work to the attention of broader audiences. Kaminsky, who serves as the group’s coordinator, calls the formation of Composers Now a demonstration of the goodwill and shared vision of the city’s music community. The plan is for the festival to become an annual event in New York, and Kaminsky envisions it expanding across the country, giving audiences in many communities exposure to living composers, not only in concert halls, but in schools, community centers, and retirement communities.

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Posted in Classical, Event Horizon, Future Classics

The Classical Grammy Winners

February 2nd, 2010 | 5:00 pm est | Stephen Eddins

There were no major surprises among the Grammy winners in the classical categories — big names and established artists tended to take the prizes, and pieces from the standard repertoire predominated. In the opera category, for instance, only 20th and 21st century pieces had been nominated, and the winner, Britten’s Billy Budd, was by a long shot the closest to the core repertoire. The Chamber Music category, too, was dominated by recordings of relatively obscure pieces, and the JanÃ¡cek and Martinu featured on the Emerson String Quartet’s winning Intimate Letters were actually among the more familiar works. David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion (2008) won in the Best Small Ensemble category, but its competition included only Baroque and Renaissance works from outside the standard repertoire, and the power of the performances by Paul Hillier, Ars Nova Copenhagen, and Theatre of Voices made it a release that would be hard to ignore. Guitarist Sharon Isbin’s Journey to the New World, which won in the Instrumental Soloist category, was an exception to the trend, because it does depart from the classics, with enough music by Joan Baez and Mark O’Connor that it could reasonably have been considered for the Crossover category.

The winners in multiple categories included Mahler: Symphony No. 8; Adagio from Symphony No. 10, led by Michael Tilson Thomas, which won for Best Engineered Album and Best Choral Performance; Ravel: Daphnis et ChloÃ©, led by James Levine, which won Best Classical Album and Best Orchestral Performance; and Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy and Peace, which won for Best Crossover Album and was produced by Steven Epstein, who was named Classical Producer of the Year.

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The Grawemeyer Award for Composition

January 29th, 2010 | 8:06 am est | Stephen Eddins

H. Charles Grawemeyer was a Louisville entrepreneur and industrialist who instituted annual awards in five fields, to be administered and granted by the University of Louisville: music, education, ideas improving world order, psychology, and religion. Music was the first of the awards to be developed. It was launched in 1984, and the Grawemeyer Award in Music has come to be recognized as the most prestigious composition award in the world. It is also the most lucrative. The amount of the first award, given in 1985, was $150,000, and was raised to $200,000 in 2000. The amount offered for the 2011 award (whose submission deadline has just passed) was decreased to $100,000, no doubt in response to the effect of the world economy on endowments such as Grawemeyer’s, but it remains by far the largest composition prize.

Lutoslawski 1985

Ligeti 1986
Ligeti2

Birtwistle 1987

Ung 1989
Ung

Grawemeyer was not a musician, but he was a music lover, and reasoned, “If we did something like this perhaps we could find another Mozart.” He worked with the music department at the University of Louisville to develop criteria for judging that would distinguish the award from others, such as the Pulitzer Prize, which were judged by academicians. The group establishing the award studied the procedures for the Nobel Prize, incorporating some of its principles, and came up with a system that involved three tiers of judging, including the faculty of the University of Louisville, an international committee of professional musicians, and a lay committee of knowledgeable music lovers. Pieces by living composers that had been given their premiere in the previous five years were eligible, and the composer had to be nominated by a professional musician or organization.

Tower 1990
Tower

Corigliano 1991

Penderecki 1992

Husa 1993
Husa

Award recipients have included both composers acknowledged to be among the greatest masters, and composers who are virtually unknown. Particularly in the earlier years, renowned composers like Witold Lutoslawski, GyÃ¶rgy Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, John Corigliano, Kryzstof Penderecki, Toru Takemitsu, and John Adams dominated the winnersâ€™ list, and more recently Tan Dun, Thomas AdÃ¨s, Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, and GyÃ¶rgy KurtÃ¡g have been honored. Recent winners tend to include composers respected by their colleagues, but less likely to be familiar to broad audiences, such as Unsuk Chin, George Tsontsakis, Brett Dean, and York HÃ¶ller.

Takemitsu 1994

Adams 1995
Adams

Tcherepnin 1996

Bainbridge 1997

The intent of the Grawemeyer to be an international award has been to some degree a success. While Americans certainly predominate, with seven U.S.-born composers among the 24 winners, 13 nationalities have been represented, including Australia, Cambodia, China, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, with multiple honorees from Great Britain, Poland, Hungary, and France. It should be noted, though, that winners from three of the other countries, Karel Husa of Czechoslovakia, Ivan Tcherepnin of France, and Tan Dun of China, established their careers in the U.S., so it can’t be denied that the U.S. has been disproportionately represented.

Tan Dun 1998
Tan_Dun

AdÃ¨s 2000
Ades

Boulez 2001
Boulez

Kernis 2002
Kernis

Three women have won the award: Joan Tower of the U.S., Kaija Saariaho of Finland, and Unsuk Chin of South Korea. Of the four Asian-born winners, all of whom, to varying degrees, have adopted or incorporated Western musical vocabularies, three have lived for most of their life in the West: Cambodian Chinary Ung and Korean Unsuk Chin in Germany, and Chinese Tan Dun in the US. Only Toru Takemitsu, born in Japan, developed his career primarily in his home country.

Saariaho 2003

Chin 2004
Chin

Tsontakis 2005

KurtÃ¡g 2006
Kurtag

In 2004 the Pulitzer Prize in music expanded its reach to include a wider array of music outside the academic tradition, with recent winners including jazz composer Ornette Coleman and post-minimalists David Lang and Steve Reich. Grawemeyer winners have tended to be composers with rigorous training in Western classical and modernist traditions, recognized as acceptable by the academic musical community, and even composers like John Adams and Tan Dun, who are indifferent to the world of academia, are represented by very fine but relatively conventional works. Four of the Grawemeyer winners, John Corigliano, Karel Husa, John Adams, and Aaron Jay Kernis, have also received the Pulitzer Prize.

Currier 2007
Currier

Lieberson 2008

Dean 2009
Dean

HÃ¶ller 2010

The Grawemeyer judges have favored works in large traditional forms, particularly concertos. Eleven winning compositions feature single or multiple soloists and orchestra, and seven purely orchestral works have been honored. Other winning compositions include three operas, two pieces of chamber music, and one work for piano. None of the winning compositions have included a significant electronic component, and only Tan Dun’s Marco Polo makes substantial use of non-Western instruments.