Composers Datebook

• Mahler and Schoenfield at the Vaudeville?

  SynopsisOn today’s date in 1895, Gustav Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the first complete performance of his own Symphony No. 2.Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 is often called the Resurrection Symphony, as the work includes a choral setting of the Resurrection Ode by 18th-century German poet Klopstock, but Mahler himself gave his symphony no such title. In a letter to his wife, Mahler confided that his Symphony No. 2 “was so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself.”And like the world, music is often full of surprising transitions!American composer Paul Schoenfield quoted a dramatic passage of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in his concerto for piccolo trumpet and orchestra, Vaudeville.In live performances, the sudden juxtaposition of Mahler and the Brazilian tune Tico-Tico always gets a laugh — which is just what Schoenfield intended.“I often suffer from depression, and once, when I was feeling pretty low, a friend of mind suggested I try writing something happy and upbeat to see if that would help. Vaudeville was the result. I don’t know if it helped me, but people say when they hear it, it makes them feel better. The music of other composers I respect has that effect on me, and I’m glad if Vaudeville has that effect on others,” Schoenfield said.Music Played in Today's ProgramGustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection); London Symphony; Gilbert Kaplan, conductor; Conifer 51337Paul Schoenfield (1947-2024): Vaudeville; New World Symphony; John Nelson, conductor; Argo 440 212

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• Ravel and Zaimont

  SynopsisLa Valse — one of the most popular orchestral works by Maurice Ravel — was performed for the first time this day in 1920 by the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard. Ravel’s score was subtitled a “choreographic poem for orchestra in the tempo of the Viennese waltz.”La Valse is a far more Impressionistic work than any of the waltzes by the Strauss Family. It is certainly darker. Ravel said, “I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal kind of Dervish’s dance.”La Valse was written for the great ballet impresario Serge Diagalev, who apparently found it undanceable, and his failure to stage La Valse caused a serious rift in his friendship with Ravel.Contemporary composer Judith Lang Zaimont is an unabashed Ravel enthusiast — ”Ravel’s music defines ‘gorgeous,’” she said. “It’s beguiling to the ear, and sensuous. His textures are built in thin layers, like a Napoleon pastry, and his intricate surfaces — beautifully worked-out — shine and fascinate.”Zaimont should know. For many years she taught composition at the University of Minnesota, and her own solo piano, chamber and orchestra works are increasingly finding their way into concert halls and onto compact disc.Music Played in Today's ProgramMaurice Ravel (1875-1937): La Valse; Boston Symphony; Charles Munch, conductor; RCA 6522Judith Lang Zaimont (b. 1945): Symphony No. 1; Czech Radio Symphony; Leos Svarovsky, conductor; Arabesque 6742

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• Bizet and Menotti on TV in the 1950s

  SynopsisOn this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet’s Carmen broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met’s manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further free telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976 — after Bing had resigned — that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC’s black-and-white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years — until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although Amahl is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.*Currently the Metropolitan Opera offers a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from Lincoln Center in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's The Magic Flute on December 30, 2006.**One surviving copy of the original kinescope did surface in a California archive, and was shown at broadcast museums on both coasts in 2001 to celebrate the work's 50th anniversary.Music Played in Today's ProgramGeorges Bizet (1838-1875): Carmen Suite No. 1; Orchestre National de France; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; EMI 63898Giancarlo Menotti (1911-2007): March from Amahl and the Night Visitors; New Zealand Symphony; Andrew Schenck, conductor; Koch 7005

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• Morton Gould

  SynopsisToday's date marks the birthday anniversary of Morton Gould, a quintessentially American composer, conductor and advocate for music, who was born in Richmond Hill, New York, on today’s date in 1913.A child prodigy, he published his first work of music at the tender age of six. His teenage years coincided with the Great Depression, and Gould played piano for New York movie theaters and vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as its staff pianist.By the late 1930s, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for radio networks, and by the 1940s was writing scores for Hollywood films and Broadway shows. A decade or so later, he was writing music for TV. Gould became a favorite conductor for RCA recording sessions of both popular and classical music on LP.All his life, Gould composed original, well-crafted works that gracefully incorporated American sounds ranging from spirituals to tap-dancing. One of these, for a singing fire department, he titled — with a sly wink at his colleague Aaron Copland — Hosedown.Gould was a serious composer with a healthy sense of humor and a keen sense of the business of music. He served for many decades as the president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), lobbying hard for the intellectual property rights of composers in the age of the Internet.Gould died in 1996 at the newly-opened Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, where he was invited to serve as its first resident guest composer.Music Played in Today's ProgramMorton Gould (1913-1996): Spirituals for Strings; London Philharmonic; Kenneth Klein, conductor; EMI 49462

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• A sequel by Berlioz

  SynopsisThese days, no one is surprised if a popular film generates a series of sequels or even prequels, but back in the 1830s the idea of a composer coming up with a sequel to a symphony must have seemed a little odd. But that odd idea did pop into the head of French composer Hector Berlioz.In 1830, Berlioz had a huge hit with his Symphonie Fantastique. That Fantastic Symphony told a story through music, based on the composer’s own real-life, unrequited love for a British Shakespearian actress. The story ends badly, with our hero trying to end it all with a dose of opium, which, while not killing him, does produce, well, “fantastic” nightmares in which he is condemned to death for killing his beloved who reappears at a grotesque witches’ sabbath.That seems a hard act to follow, but two years later, Berlioz produced a musical sequel: Lelio, or the Return to Life, which premiered in Paris on today’s date in 1832. In this, our hero awakes from his drug-induced nightmare, and, with a little help from Shakespeare and a kind of 10-step arts-based recovery program, rededicates his life to music.Berlioz intended the original and the sequel to be performed together as a kind of double-feature. Alas, while audiences thrill to the lurid Symphonie Fantastique, they tend to drift during the admirable, but rather boring rehab sequel, which is rarely performed.Music Played in Today's ProgramHector Berlioz (1803-1869): Fantasy on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ from Lelio London Symphony; Pierre Boulez, conductor; Sony 64103

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