Composers Datebook

On this day* in 1888, the orchestral suite “Scheherazade,” the most famous work of the Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was first performed in St. Petersburg. The suite evokes episodes from “The Arabian Nights.” Though Rimsky-Korsakov was Russian, and most often concentrated on operas based on RUSSIAN history and fable, it’s ironic that his most popular work was inspired by folklore and fables from the Middle East.

Until recently, Western knowledge of the Middle Eastern music was mostly limited to such second-hand accounts. But today, we’re discovering first-hand both the traditional music of the Middle East and new works by contemporary composers from that part of the world.

One of these is Iranian-born American composer Reza Vali, who was born in Ghazvin, Iran in 1952 and began his musical studies at the Teheran Conservatory. In 1972, he moved to Vienna and studied at the Academy of Music, and then came to America to study at University of Pittsburgh.

Despite his training in Western technique, Vali has returned to the instruments and traditions of Persian music for inspiration. “Music is like the ocean,” he once said in an interview. “It moves between cultures. It doesn’t have boundaries. But that doesn’t mean that you have to lose your identity … you can have a pluralistic approach by also keeping your identity.”

*Julian calendar date: October 22

On today’s date in 1873, a new piece by the German composer Johannes Brahms received its first performance by the Vienna Philharmonic. The piece was titled “Variations on a Theme by Haydn,” and was a big success at its premiere. Brahms must have heaved a great sigh of relief.

For the previous 18 years, Brahms had struggled to complete his First Symphony, unconvinced that he had “the right stuff” to pull it off. In the summer of 1873, he wrote his “Haydn Variations” as a kind of personal test to see how audiences would react—and to bolster his own confidence. Lucky for us, it worked: Brahms returned to work on his First Symphony and went on to write four symphonies in all!

On today’s date in 1990, the Fourth Symphony of American composer Lou Harrison received its premiere by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Much of Harrison’s music has been influenced by non-Western traditions, especially the Javanese gamelan music, and his Symphony No. 4 is no exception.

Harrison was 73 when this symphony premiered, and he dubbed it his “Last Symphony” —apparently agreeing with Brahms that four was enough when it came to symphonies. When asked what would happen should he decide to write still another, Harrison quipped, “I’ll call it the ‘VERY Last Symphony.”

On today’s date in 1948, Maestro Efrem Kurtz led the first subscription concert of the newly reorganized Houston Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was founded in 1913, but after struggling through the “minor” disruptions of two World Wars and the Great Depression, the symphony’s 1948 season marked its rebirth as a major player among American orchestras. Since then, the Houston Symphony’s roster of conductors has included some of the greatest: Leopold Stokowski, Sir John Barbirolli, André Previn, to name just a few.

For its 1948 debut concert, the new Houston Symphony commissioned and premiered a new work by Aaron Copland—a concert suite adapted from his latest film score.

Copland had gone to Hollywood early in 1948 to write the music for the cinematic version of John Steinbeck’s novella, “The Red Pony,” and spent ten weeks writing about an hour’s worth of music for the new film, which was scheduled for release in 1949—so that meant his 1948 concert suite from “The Red Pony” debuted even before the movie.

The Houston Post’s review called Copland’s suite “clean, joyous, ingenious and irresistibly spirited,” and correctly predicted “Mr. Copland’s ‘Red Pony’ has grand little gaits, and will stand playing again—here and in a lot of other places.”

It’s Halloween -- that time of year when chains rattle, doors creak, skeletons dance, and when even concert music can get a bit spooky.

For example, in 1987, the American composer Libby Larsen composed an orchestral suite titled “What the Monster Saw,” inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein.” Says Larsen, “[It’s] is a musical exploration of the second part of the novel, where the monster confronts Frankenstein, his creator.” In 1990, Larsen’s confronted the same monster at greater length, in a full-length opera titled “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,” again based on Shelley’s classic tale.

Speaking of monster music, connoisseurs of horror films consider “The Bride of Frankenstein,” released by Universal Studios in 1935, to be one of the classics. It featured Boris Karloff as the monster, Elsa Lancaster as his bride, and a moody film score by Franz Waxman.

Waxman originally composed his Frankenstein music on a pipe organ. His score was then orchestrated by one Clifford Vaughan, who translated many of the organ’s spookiest effects into eerie and effective symphonic colors. So successfully, in fact, that their creation refused to die: chunks of their film score were transplanted into dozens of subsequent Universal Studios thrillers and movie serials.

Dr. Frankenstein would have been proud!

It was on today’s date in 1944 that Martha Graham and her dance company first performed the ballet "Appalachian Spring" by Aaron Copland. The premiere took place at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C, as part of the 80th birthday celebrations for music patron Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had commissioned Copland’s score for $500 – not a bad commission back then!

Copland used an old Shaker hymn called "Simple Gifts" as a principle theme for his ballet. The austere but simple elegance of Shaker art reminded him, he said, of Graham’s style of dancing, and tied in with her vague suggestions that the ballet would be about early American pioneers. Copland left the title up to Graham.

Arriving in Washington for the rehearsals, Copland wrote: “The first thing I said to Martha when I saw her was, ‘What have you called the ballet?’ She replied, ‘Appalachian Spring.’ ‘What a pretty title. Where did you get it?’ I asked, and Martha said, ‘Well, actually it’s from a poem by Hart Crane.’ I asked, ‘Does the poem have anything to do with your ballet?’ ‘No,’ said Martha. ‘I just liked the title.’”

Understandably, Copland said he was always amused when people said, "Oh Mr. Copland, I can just see the Appalachian Mountains when I hear your music!"

On today’s date in 1787, Mozart’s opera “Don Giovanni” had its premiere performance in Prague, with Mozart himself conducting. Mozart had arrived in Prague early in October that year, but as singers and instrumentalists alike needed more time than originally planned to prepare his difficult new score, the premiere occurred later than planned.

The October 29th premiere was a triumph, and a Prague newspaper reported that Mozart was received with threefold cheers when he entered and left the theater. At the request of Joseph II, the Austrian emperor, “Don Giovanni” was staged in Vienna the following year. The emperor was pleased: “That opera is divine,” he told Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, but, surprisingly, the Viennese audiences didn’t seem to like it.

Da Ponte quotes the Emperor as suggesting “Don Giovanni” was just too complicated for their taste: “Such music is not meat for the teeth of my Viennese,” he said. In his Memoirs, da Ponte writes: “I reported this remark to Mozart, who replied quietly: ‘Well, give them time to chew on it, then.’”

”He was not mistaken,” continued da Ponte. “At each performance of Don Giovanni the applause increased, and little by little, even Vienna of the dull teeth came to savor it.”

In 2016, the Minneapolis-based jazz composer and pianist Jeremy Walker collaborated with Consortium Carissimi, a Twin Cities early music vocal ensemble in the creation of some brand-new music in the style of the ensemble’s namesake, the 17th-century Italian composer Giacomo Carissimi.

One of the pieces Walker composed was a duet for tenor and mezzo-soprano. The mezzo for the premiere performance was Clara Osowski, a singer with a special passion for art songs, past and present.

Now since Osowski was as impressed with Walker’s music as he with her voice, after that concert they decided to embark on a project to infuse the modern jazz harmonies of, say, Bill Evans, into the Romantic art song genre of Schubert and Brahms.

They chose texts by Whitman, Longfellow, and Minnesota lyricist Greg Foley, for a song cycle Walker titled “Haunted Blue.” “The ‘blue’ in the title refers to the overall mood of the music,” Walker explained. “But it also refers to the type of harmonies I’m using. The ‘haunted’ part is like when you’re half asleep and half awake at night, and dreams combine with reality.”

A studio recording and even some music videos were made, and on today’s date in 2018, “Haunted Blue” received its premiere pubic performance at a CD release concert in Minneapolis.

Traditionally, the harmonica is the instrument of the loner: the cowboy by the campfire, the hobo riding the rails, the bluesman pouring out his soul at midnight.

The Harmonica seems a little out of place in a concert hall — especially when played by someone wearing a tuxedo. But every so often a virtuoso player comes along who commissions a new concert work for the instrument. In the mid-1950s the American harmonica virtuoso John Sebastian asked the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos for just such a work.

On today’s date in 1959, Sebastian premiered Villa-Lobos’ Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra in Jerusalem. This work is now regarded as one of the finest concertos ever written for the instrument, but when the British harmonica virtuoso Tommy Reilly wanted to record it some 20 years after its 1959 premiere, he said had a very hard time tracking down the score. Even Villa-Lobos’ own publisher didn’t seem aware of its existence!

Truth be told, Villa-Lobos was both a very prolific and not always very organized composer, so his poor publisher may be forgiven for his ignorance of the work. Even Villa-Lobos couldn’t remember all the pieces he had written, and once said: “I am like a father of a family too numerous who doesn’t always recognize his own infants.”

On this day in 1919, Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony in the premiere performance of his new Cello Concerto, with Felix Salmond as soloist.

What should have been a happy occasion turned out to be a frustrating one — there simply wasn’t enough time to rehearse properly, and the premiere was a near-fiasco. Puzzled, the less-than-full house in Queen’s Hall gave Elgar a polite ovation but left shaking their heads.

Mrs. Elgar blamed the conductor, Albert Coates, who hogged all the orchestra’s rehearsal time working over the two pieces HE was to conduct on the same program as Elgar’s new Concerto, for which Coates would hand off the baton to Elgar. In her diary for October 26th she writes, “Poor Felix Salmond in a state of suspense and nerves — wretched hurried rehearsal — an insult to Elgar from that brutal, selfish, ill-mannered bounder, Coates.”

After the botched premiere of the new Concerto, critic Ernest Newman reported: “Never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable a public exhibition of itself.”

Despite this rough beginning, Elgar’s Cello Concerto has gone on to become one of the composer’s best-loved works worldwide, and has proven to be a favorite with the great cellists of our time, including the late British cellist, Jacqueline du Pré.

Imagine that YOU are playing for high stakes on a TV quiz show and here’s your question:

“Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 had its world premiere performance in what city:

a) Moscow

b) St. Petersburg

c) Budapest

d) Boston?”

Is that your final answer? If you chose d) Boston, you would have been a winner!

Tchaikovsky finished his First Piano Concerto in the early months of 1875, and the work received its very first performance on October 25th that year at the Music Hall in Boston. The orchestra was a freelance group, mostly members of the Harvard Musical Association — the Boston Symphony wouldn’t be founded until six years later. The conductor of the Tchaikovsky premiere was one B.J. Lang -- hardly a name most classical music lovers would recognize today -- but the soloist was world-class: the famous German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow.

In his day, Bülow was one of the great champions of new music, and Tchaikovsky dedicated his new Piano Concerto to Bulow after his one-time teacher, Nicolai Rubinstein, a famous Russian concert pianist and conductor in his own right, had said the piece was unplayable. Von Bülow proved him wrong, and was able to telegraph Tchaikovsky from Boston that his new concerto had been a big success.