Composers Datebook

American composer Marga Richter was born on today’s date in 1926, in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. She began piano lessons by 4, started composing at 12 and had her first work performed when she was in high school in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where her family had moved so she could study at the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis. The family moved again in 1943, this time to New York, so Richter could attend the Juilliard School.

She would recall, “I really didn’t notice that there weren’t any women composers to model myself after until I got to Juilliard, and then I found I was the only one there."

She persisted as a composer, and a New York Times reviewer of a concert of her music in 1951 found it “restless, inventive, dissonant, clean; … her intentions seemed … well realized.” They added, “We will hear more from Miss Richter.”

That said, it took decades for her nearly 200 works, which range from operas and orchestra scores to chamber works for solo instrument, to earn increasing respect and performances here and abroad.

Richter died in 2020, at 93, in New Jersey.

Marga Richter (1926 – 2020): Fragments - Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra; Petr Vronský, conductor Navona 6050

On today’s date in 1950, Karel Ančerl was named the artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic, a position he would hold for the next 18 years.

Ančerl had first conducted the orchestra in 1930, when, upon graduation from the Prague Conservatory, he led that ensemble in one of his compositions. For a time, Ančerl debated whether to be a composer or a conductor. He opted for the latter, demonstrating a mastery of classical and contemporary scores with other orchestras in Czechoslovakia.

With all that in mind, it might not seem all that surprising that in 1950, he was eventually tapped to lead the Czech Philharmonic — but that would be ignoring the miracle that Ančerl was even alive in 1950.

In 1942, Ančerl and his family were imprisoned in the Nazis’ notorious Theresienstadt concentration camp, and, in 1944, they were transported to Auschwitz, where his wife and young son were killed. He alone survived.

In 1968, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops, Ančerl emigrated to Canada in protest and served as music director of the Toronto Symphony until his death in 1973.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890 - 1959) Symphony No. 5 - Czech Philharmonic; Karel Ancerl, cond. Supraphon SU-3694-2

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1991, Dennis Russell Davies conducted the American Composers’ Orchestra in the premiere performance of a new orchestral work, Black Light.

Its composer was Daniel Asia, a Seattle native who has emerged as one of the most productive contemporary composers of orchestral works. Asia has written several symphonies to date and a number of concertos and shorter orchestral works.

The final page of the score for Asia’s Black Light is inscribed, “October 15, 1990 — In Memoriam Leonard Bernstein.” Bernstein had died the previous day, as Asia was just finishing his new score, and a year later, almost to the day, Asia’s Black Light was premiered in New York.

Bernstein was a composer that Asia openly acknowledges as a big influence in his work. But it would be wrong to suggest that Black Light was conceived as an elegy for Bernstein. Asia has been associated with the University of Arizona in Tucson and says the closing section of Black Light is “suggestive of the fierceness of the appearance of the sun, particularly in the Southwest, in all its glory at that first instant of daybreak.”

Daniel Asia (b. 1953) Black Light - New Zealand Symphony; James Sedares, cond. Koch 7372

Angel Fire is a village in the New Mexico Rockies that hosts an annual chamber music festival.  To celebrate their 25th anniversary, Music from Angel Fire commissioned the American composer Joan Tower to write them a new work, which she titled Angels – a virtuosic String Quartet, her fourth, which received its premiere performance by the Miami String Quartet on today’s date in 2008.

“Having written three prior quartets and gotten to travel extensively around the world of quartets,” wrote Tower, “I have come to love the way [they] are so deeply creative and passionate about the music they play. They are really like four ‘composers’ at work.”

The title given the new piece is a nod to Angel Fire, New Mexico, of course, but Tower made it clear she had some other special angels in mind: six people who helped her younger brother George survive a major stroke. These were her sister, a former student named Erin, a doctor , a nurse, and a pair of real estate agents.

All six appear on the score’s front page beneath her dedication, “to the ‘Angels’ who took care of my brother.”

Joan Tower (b. 1938) Angels (String Quartet No. 4) Miami String Quartet Naxos 8.559795

At 6:05 p.m. on today’s date in 2007, the Interstate 35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, plunging dozens of cars and trucks into the Mississippi River. Thirteen people died. Investigators said a design flaw was to blame, and the event served as a wake-up call about America’s crumbling infrastructure.

It also inspired a new piece of music.

In 2007 Minnesota composer Linda Tutas Haugen had been commissioned to write a piece for solo instrument and organ for performance at the next American Guild of Organists’ national convention. Haugen had been looking at various hymn tunes for inspiration when the I-35 bridge collapsed.

As she recalled, “I had family members who’d been over the bridge a day before. Many were feeling, ‘It could have been me.’ I reread texts of the hymns I had been considering, and there was one that talks about ‘God of hill and plain, o’er which our traffic runs’ and ‘wherever God your people go, protect them by your guarding hand.’ That inspired my writing.”

Haugen scored her new piece for trumpet and organ and titled it “Invocation and Remembrance.” “For me,” said Haugen, “it’s a prayer, an invocation for protection, and also a remembrance of what happened.”

Linda Tutas Haugen Invocation and Remembrance Martin Hodel, trumpet; Kraig Windschitl, organ Augsburg Fortress Music CD (with ISBN: 9780800679118)

• 1779 - Baltimore lawyer Francis Scott Key, who in 1814 wrote the words of "The Star-Spangled Banner," setting his text to the tune of a popular British drinking song of the day, "To Anacreon in Heaven," written by John Stafford Smith; The text and the tune became the official national anthem by and Act of Congress in 1931;




• 1858 - Austrian composer Hans Rott, in Vienna;




• 1913 - American composer Jerome Moross, in Brooklyn;




• 1930 - British pop song and musical composer Lionel Bart, of "Oliver!" fame, in London;

• 1973 - Gian-Francesco Maliperio, Italian composer and first editor of collected works of Monteverdi and Vivaldi, age 91, in Treviso;

• 1740 - Thomas Arne: masque, “Alfred” (containing “Rule, Brittania”), in Clivedon (Gregorian date: August 12);




• 1921 - Hindemith: String Quartet No. 3, Op. 16, by the Amar Quartet (which included the composer on viola) in Donaueschingen, Germany;




• 1968 - Webern: "Rondo" for string quartet, written in 1906, at the Congregation of the Arts at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire;




• 1993 - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Concerto for Horn and String Orchestra, at the Bravo! Music Festival in Vail, Colo., by soloist David Jolley with the Rochester Philharmonic, Lawrence Leighton Smith conducting;

• 1892 - John Philip Sousa , age 37, quits the U.S. Marine Corps Band to form his own 100-piece marching band;




• 1893 - In Spillville Iowa, Antonin Dvorák finishes his String Quintet in Eb, Op. 97 ("The American") during his summer vacation at the Czech settlement.

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  On Linda Tutas Haugen
  
  

Today we note the birthday of a remarkable composer, conductor and virtuoso violinist: Eugéne Ysaÿe, born in Liége, Belgium, on today’s date in 1858. After studies with two famous violin composers of his day, Henyrk Wieniawski of Poland and his Belgian compatriot, Henri Vieuxtemps, Ysaÿe soon was touring Europe and Russia as a star performer himself.

In 1886, when the 28-year old Ysaÿe married, the great Belgian composer Cesar Franck presented the young couple with a Violin Sonata as a wedding present. That same year, Ysaÿe founded a famous string quartet, and in 1893 it was the Ysaÿe Quartet that gave the premiere performance of Claude Debussy’s String Quartet, a work its composer dedicated to the ensemble in admiration.

In 1918, Ysaye made his American debut as a conductor with the Cincinnati Symphony, and made such a great impression there that he remained as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony from 1918 to 1922.

As a composer, Ysaye wrote eight concertos and a famous set of six solo sonatas for the violin. He died at the age of 72, in 1931, and in 1937, Queen Elizabeth of Belgium inaugurated the annual Eugene Ysaÿe International Prize for promising young violinists.

Cesar Franck (1822 - 1890) Violin Sonata in A Itzhak Perlman, violin; Martha Argerich, piano EMI 56815

Eugène Ysaÿe (1858 - 1931) Chant d'hiver Aaron Rosand, violin; Radio Luxembourg Orchestra; Louis de Froment, cond. Vox Box 5102

On today’s date in 1876, America was celebrating its Centennial, and the place to be was in Philadelphia, where a Centennial Exhibition was in progress.  This was the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States. It drew 9 million visitors — this at a time when the entire population of the U.S. was 46 million.

The Exhibition had opened in May with a concert attended by President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. After “Hail to the Chief,” the orchestra premiered a specially commissioned “Centennial March” by the famous German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was paid $5000 for the commission, an astronomically high fee in those days. Wagner did not bother to attend the Philadelphia premiere, and privately told friends back: “Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me.”

The following month, the French composer Jacques Offenbach arrived to conduct his music at a specially constructed open-air pavilion. “They asked my permission to call it ‘Offenbach Gardens,’” the composer later wrote. “How could I refuse?” The concertmaster of Offenbach’s orchestra, by the way, was a 21-year old violinist from Washington, D.C. by the name of John Philip Sousa.

Richard Wagner (1813 - 1883) American Centennial March Philip Jones Ensemble; Elgar Howarth, conductor. London 414 149

In the 18th century, just like today, tourists gravitate toward the Vatican in Rome to view the famous Sistine Chapel and its ceiling by Michelangelo. But during Holy Week in the 18th century, there was an added attraction: performances by the Sistine Chapel Choir of a hauntingly beautiful piece of music, the a cappella setting of the Latin Miserere by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri.

The Vatican jealously guarded Allegri’s work as its exclusive property. Rumor had it—under threat of excommunication—that the choir was forbidden to let the score be taken out of the Chapel, copied, or even seen by any outsider.

On today’s date in 1770, Wolfgang Mozart, age 14, was visiting Rome with his father. The Mozarts attended an evening service at the Vatican and heard Allegri’s Miserere. That same night—after just one hearing—young Wolfgang transcribed the piece from memory, and the Mozarts returned three days later to check Wolfgang’s transcription against a repeat performance of Allegri’s music. The elder Mozart thought that letting people know about this feat might be “good PR” for young Wolfgang.

In any case, the Mozarts were NOT excommunicated, and Roman society WAS suitably impressed when they learned of the teenager’s remarkable musical talent.

Gregorio Allegri (1582 - 1652) Miserere The Tallis Scholars Gimell 454 990

On today’s date in 1887, Florence Beatrice Smith was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She would grow up to be the first African-American woman to win widespread recognition as a symphonic composer. All that happened under her married name: Florence Price.

Price studied at the New England Conservatory, with the noted American composers Frederick Converse and George Whitefield Chadwick, but settled in Chicago. In 1933, the Chicago Symphony premiered her First Symphony. In 1940, her Third Symphony premiered in Detroit, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in Detroit that week, was so impressed by a rehearsal of Price’s symphony that she altered her schedule to stay for that evening’s performance, and even wrote about it in her newspaper column, “My Day.”

And speaking of Eleanor Roosevelt, on today’s date in 1939, which fell on Easter Sunday that year, the First Lady and then Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes arranged for the famous African-American contralto, Marion Anderson, to perform a free, open-air recital at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. 75,000 people attended. Marion Anderson admired Florence Price’s work, and sang some of Florence Price’s songs, including Songs to the Dark Virgin, a setting of a text by Langston Hughes.

Florence Price (1887 – 1953) Symphony No. 3 The Women's Philharmonic; Apo Hsu, conductor. Koch 7518

In Toronto on today’s date in 2017 violinist James Ehnes gave the world premiere performance of a new violin concerto by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis. The work was written specially for Ehnes and was a joint commission from orchestras in Toronto, Seattle, Dallas, and Melbourne.

Shortly after the Toronto premiere, Ehnes performed the new concerto in Seattle with the Seattle Symphony and conductor Ludovic Morlot. A live recording of that Seattle performance was released on compact disc and was awarded not one, but TWO Grammy Awards in 2019: it was chosen as “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” and snagged the highly-competitive “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” prize.

The three movements of Kernis Violin Concerto demand incredible virtuosity from the soloist, and Ehnes was up to the challenge. “James Ehnes is a truly spectacular musician and collaborator,” said Kernis. “James took everything I threw at him with good humor and generosity, and made the knuckle-busting passages and everything else I gave him sound absolutely dazzling.”

As part of the commissioning agreement, Ehnes was granted exclusive performing rights of the new concerto for five years – so audiences will have to wait until March 2021 to hear if other violinist choose to tackle the demanding new Kernis Concerto!

Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960) Violin Concerto James Ehnes, violin; Seattle Symphony; Ludovic Morlot, conductor. Onyx CD 4189