Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today’s date in 2022, violinist Roger Zahab and the University of Pittsburgh Symphony premiered a Violin Concerto written some 50 years earlier by American composer Julia Perry. In his program notes, Zahab tells the story this way:

“One afternoon near the end of my undergraduate studies — around 1978–my violin teacher stepped out of his office and handed me a score by Julia Perry. She had sent … her Violin Concerto to him in the hope that he might know of someone who would play it, and he handed it to me. I called her phone number and spoke with her mother, who said that Julia was right next to her but unable to talk.”

Perry was unable to talk because she had suffered a debilitating stroke seven years earlier at 46, derailing her career as a composer. Cared for and nursed by her mother, Perry persisted in working on the concerto that would be her final work, as she died shortly after making contact with Zahab. For his part, the violinist made it his mission to create a full orchestral performance score of the concerto from Perry’s surviving sketches, a daunting project that took him decades to complete.

Music Played in Today's Program

Julia Perry (1924-1979): Violin Concerto; Curtis J. Stewart, violin; Experiential Orchestra; James Blachly, conductor; Bright Shiny Things 200

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2. Ives was then 76 and living in Connecticut. Heart disease and diabetes left him far too weak to attend the Carnegie Hall premiere. Nicholas Slonimsky recalls once asking the thin and pale Ives how he was feeling, to which Ives replied he felt so weak that he said, “I can’t even spit into the fireplace.”

Ives didn’t own a radio, so he visited his neighbors, the Ryders, to hear Bernstein conduct the Sunday afternoon broadcast performance of music he had composed some 50 years earlier.

“There’s not much to say about the Symphony. I express the musical feelings of the Connecticut country in the 1890s. It’s full of the tunes they sang and played then, and I thought it would be a sort of a joke to have some of these tunes in counterpoint with some Bach-like tunes,” he said at the time.

His neighbor, Mrs. Ryder, recalled how he reacted to the radio broadcast: “Mr. Ives sat in the front room and listened as quietly as could be, and I sat way back behind him, because I didn’t want him to think I was looking at him. After it was over, I’m sure he was very much moved. He stood up, walked over the fireplace, and spat! And then he walked out into the kitchen and said not a word.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Charles Ives (1874-1954): Symphony No. 2 New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 429 220

Synopsis

Many music lovers will confess they prefer to hear symphonies or operas in the comfort of their own home rather than live in person at a concert hall or theater.

On today’s date in 1911, famous French novelist, hypochondriac and notorious homebody Marcel Proust wrote to his friend, composer Reynaldo Hahn, that he had just listened to a live afternoon performance of the whole first act of Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger tucked up in bed and planned to hear Debussy’s still-new opera Pelléas and Mélisande later that same evening, once again snugly secure in his Parisian apartment.

Now, these days with radio, TV and multiple livestreaming devices, this would be no big deal — but in 1911 how could that be possible?

Well, for 60 francs a month — a small fortune in 1911 — wealthy Parisians could hear live performances of operas and plays relayed by a special phone line to a home receiver called the théâtrophone. First demonstrated in Paris in 1881, by 1890, the théâtrophone was commercialized and the service continued 1932.

Of course, even an enthusiastic subscriber like Proust had to admit the phone line sound quality was “très mal” (“really bad” in plain English) and hardly the same as being there in person.

Music Played in Today's Program

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Pelléas et Mélisande Symphonie Suite (arr. Marius Constant); Orchestre National de Lyon; Jun Märkl, conductor; Naxos 8.570993

Synopsis

In 1996, American composer John Harbison received an unusual commission — a ballet for dancers and symphonic winds. The commission came from a consortium of 14 wind ensembles, all members of the College Band Directors National Association.

Maybe the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta had something to do with it, but his imagination turned in that direction: he titled the resulting work Olympic Dances, and Atlanta also happened to be the venue for the work’s premiere performance on today’s date in 1997, with the Pilobus Dance Theatre and the University of North Texas Wind Symphony performing.

“When asked to do a piece for dancers and winds, it immediately suggested something ‘classical,’ not our musical 18th century, but an imaginative vision of ancient worlds … I thought of an imagined harmony between dance, sport and sound that we can imagine from serene oranges and blacks on Greek vases, the celebration of bodies in motion that we see in the matchless sculpture of ancient times, and perhaps most important to this piece, the celebration of the ideal tableau, the moment frozen in time, that is present still in the friezes that adorn the temples and in the architecture of the temples themselves,” he said.

Harbison’s ballet is an austere, rather than flashy score, reminiscent of Stravinsky’s austere, neo-classical scores like Agon and Apollo, which — like our modern Olympics — were also inspired by ancient Greek ideals.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Harbison (b. 1938): Olympic Dances; New England Conservatory Wind Ensemble; Dr. Frank Battisti, conductor; Albany 340

Synopsis

The British composer Ethel Smyth needed both talent and fierce determination to succeed in a professional musical career in her day. Born in 1858, she defied her father to study music in Leipzig. She became friends with Clara Schumann, Brahms and Dvořák. In 1903, her opera Der Wald was performed at the Metropolitan Opera. She also became a high-profile figure in the women’s suffrage movement, for which she was jailed briefly in 1912.

The premiere of her 64-minute vocal symphony, The Prison, took place at Usher Hall in Scotland on today’s date in 1931, when she was 73, and increasingly deaf. The text was by H.B. Brewster, who had been Smyth’s close friend and, perhaps, her lover, and is a dialogue between an innocent prisoner awaiting execution and his soul in search of spiritual peace.

In a New York Times interview, James Blachly, the conductor of the first recording of The Prison, suggests, “It’s a summary of her entire career. It’s a farewell. There’s a real sense of making peace with that, and also reconciling herself to the death of [Brewster,] her closest creative companion. It’s about love and life and loss and self-worth.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): The Prison; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone; Experimental Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor; Chandos 5279