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Red, White and Blue

Saturday, September 29, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, September 30, 2007, 2:00 p.m.

Program Notes

SOUVENIRS Op.28

Samuel Barber 1910-1981

Samuel Barber never abandoned his early tendency to musical Romanticism despite the ascendance during his career of atonality and Serialism. His talent as a composer expressed itself during his childhood and was nurtured with the best American education (Curtis Institute) and European sojourns. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini catapulted him to international recognition through his radio broadcast of the twin debuts of the orchestral arrangement of the Adagio movement from his String Quartet (Adagio for Strings) and the First Essay for Orchestra.

By the 1950s, Barber's music was being widely performed, and new commissions were flooding in. Perhaps because he was economically secure, he often took his time both accepting and completing commissions. Still, he found the time to compose music for his own pleasure and for his friends. He composed a suite of piano duets to play with his student and long-time friend Charles Turner, and was later asked in 1952 to orchestrate it for a ballet for the City Center Ballet (now the New York City Ballet). In the Preface to the published piano duet score, Barber wrote, "One might imagine a divertissement in a setting of the Palm Court of the Hotel Plaza in New York, the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos; "Souvenirs" – remembered with affection, not with irony or tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness."

Although Barber had completed the orchestration by the summer of 1952, the ballet performance had to be postponed. The suite alone was premiered by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony in November 1953. The ballet was finally produced in November 1955, with choreography by Todd Bolender, one of the principal dancers under George Balanchine.

The Suite includes the following dances with locations in the Plaza Hotel in parentheses:

Waltz (The Lobby):
Schottisch (Third Floor Hallway):
Pas de Deux (A Corner of the Ballroom):
Two-Step (Tea in the Palm Court):
Hesitation Tango (A Bedroom Affair):
Galop (The Next Afternoon):

RHAPSODY IN BLUE

George Gershwin 1898-1937

The musical idiom of jazz evolved in New Orleans in the early part of this century from ragtime and the blues. The origin of the term jazz is obscure, but it first appeared in print in 1913 in a San Francisco newspaper, in reference to enthusiasm at a baseball game. The application of the term to the specific kind of music occurred during World War I.

It was in Europe, however, where American dance bands were popular, that classical composers first incorporated the new idiom into their compositions: Claude Debussy in Golliwog's Cakewalk (1908); Igor Stravinsky in Ragtime (1918); and especially Darius Milhaud in the ballet La création du monde (1923).

George Gershwin was the first American composer to make jazz acceptable to the classical music audience. The son of poor Jewish immigrants in lower Manhattan, he was a natural-born pianist and left school at 16 to become a pianist with a Tin-Pan Alley firm, plugging their new songs. He soon commenced writing songs himself, eventually teaming up with his brother Ira as lyricist to become one of the most successful teams of song and musical comedy writers on Broadway. They created a string of immensely successful musicals from Lady be Good in December 1924 to Let ‘em Eat Cake in October 1933. The opening night of a George Gershwin musical comedy was a social and media event with Gershwin himself usually leading the orchestra.

Gershwin received the commission for an extended jazz composition from a conductor of popular music, Paul Whiteman, who promoted concerts of jazz music in New York's Aeolian Hall. Whiteman was the self-styled "King of Jazz" who attempted to make jazz more symphonic and more respectable. He tried to adapt it from dance music to concert music. Whiteman's commission followed an Aeolian Hall concert in the fall of 1923, at which Gershwin had played piano arrangements of a few of his songs.

Gershwin composed the Rhapsody in a mere three weeks early in 1924, in a two-piano version. It was immediately orchestrated for piano and jazz orchestra by Ferde Grofé, a popular composer, pianist and arranger, who served as Whiteman's factotum. Grofé practically lived in Gershwin's house, orchestrating the work page-by-page as they came from the composer's pen. He also rescored the Rhapsody two years later for full orchestra.

The premiere, on February 12 1924, was a smashing success. Although the critics – true to form – mostly panned it, the audience loved it. Virtually overnight, jazz became respectable. Gershwin himself played the piano part, becoming an instant celebrity. Significant credit for the success must go to Grofé's imaginative orchestration, which has ended up as his most enduring musical contribution, along with his Grand Canyon Suite.

It is useful to be aware that the rhapsody and fantasia of the classical tradition were the genres most related to jazz in that they embodied both freedom of form and improvisation or improvisatory writing. Gershwin's – and Grofé's – take on the form transfers the jazz idiom into a work Liszt would have been proud to have written.

The Rhapsody opens with probably the most famous clarinet riff in music history. It is answered by the horns with the principal counter-theme. Nearly three quarters of the way through the piece, the tempo slows and the Rhapsody's next "big theme" is introduced.

SYMPHONY NO. 9 IN E MINOR, Op.95
"FROM THE NEW WORLD"

Antonín Dvorák 1841-1904

Antonín Dvorák's sojourn in the United States from 1892 to 1895 came about through the efforts of Mrs. Jeanette B. Thurber. A dedicated and idealistic proponent of an American national musical style, she underwrote and administered the first American music conservatory, the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Because of Dvorák's popularity throughout Europe, he was Thurber's first choice for a director. He, in turn, was probably lured to the big city so far from home by both a large salary and convictions regarding musical nationalism that paralleled Mrs. Thurber's own.

Thirty years before his arrival in New York Dvorák had read Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha in a Czech translation and was eager to learn more about the Native American and African American music, which he believed should be the basis of the American style of composition. He also shared with Mrs. Thurber the conviction that the National Conservatory should admit Negro students.

While his knowledge of authentic Native American music is dubious – his exposure came through samples transcribed for him by American friends and through Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show – he became familiar with Negro spirituals through one of his students, as well as indirectly via the songs of Stephen Foster. He incorporated both of these styles into the Symphony No. 9, composed while he was in New York.

Just as Dvorák never quoted Bohemian folk music directly in his own nationalistic music, he did not use American themes in their entirety. Rather, he incorporated characteristic motives into his own unsurpassed gift for melody. Nevertheless, any listener with half an ear can discern fragments of "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" in the second theme of the first movement, as well as "Massa Dear" (also known as "Goin' Home") in the famous English horn solo in the second movement. We can deduce the importance of these musical motives from the fact that they appear as reminiscences in more than one movement, especially in the Finale. The symphony, however, is hardly an American pastiche; the second motive in the largo movement is a phrase of wrenching musical longing that many listeners interpret as the composer's nostalgia for his native Bohemia. Other melodies, such as the principal theme of the first movement, seem to have no particular origin beyond the composer's inspiration.

It is curious that Dvorák seemed to make no distinction between the folk music of American slaves and American Indians. While the second movement utilizes a spiritual theme, the composer claimed that it had also been inspired by Longfellow's epic, perhaps by Minnehaha's forest funeral. The third movement as well, in its rhythmic thumping, its use of the pentatonic scale and the orchestration dominated by winds and percussion is meant to portray an Indian ceremonial dance described in Longfellow's poem. Dvorák had also intended to compose an opera on Hiawatha, which never even approached completion. But his symphonic use of what he believed to be an authentic Native American musical idiom may have represented his initial ideas for the opera.

One of the most important features of the Symphony is its thematic coherence. Whatever the origin of the melodies, they all have a modular characteristic in that they can be mixed and matched in many different ways. In the finale Dvorák brings nearly all of the Symphony's themes together, sometimes as one long combined melody, sometimes in contrapuntal relationship to each other.