Composers Datebook

Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto was first performed in Barcelona, Spain, on today’s date in 1936, at the opening concert of the International Society for Contemporary Music Festival. Berg had died the previous winter, and the premiere was supposed to be conducted by his close friend and fellow composer, Anton Webern, but he withdrew at the last minute, and so Hermann Scherchen conducted the first performance, with the violinist who had commissioned the work, Louis Krasner, as soloist.

Krasner was born in Ukraine but raised in America and served for a time as the concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos. He later taught at Syracuse University and the New England Conservatory of Music.

In the spring of 1976, he was cleaning out his attic, and discovered he still had private acetate discs he had made of the second performance of the Berg Violin Concerto, a May 1, 1936 radio broadcast of the new work by the BBC Symphony, with Krasner again as the soloist. This time the conductor was Webern. The 40-year old discs were transcribed to tape, and eventually were released on CD, allowing posterity a chance to listen in as music history was being made.

Alban Berg (1885-1935): Violin Concerto; Louis Krasner, violin; BBC Symphony; Anton Webern, conductor; Testament/Continuum 1004

The month of April in the year 1800 was an especially busy one for Ludwig van Beethoven. On the second of April at his first big orchestral concert in Vienna, Beethoven premiered his Symphony No. 1, a new piano concerto, and his chamber septet. Composing, writing out the parts, and rehearsing all that music was no small task.

On today’s date that same month, Beethoven appeared in Vienna once again, this time as piano accompanist for the popular Bohemian horn virtuoso, Johann Wenzel Stich, who went by the more marketable Italian “stage name” of Giovanni Punto.

The pre-concert announcements for the Punto recital promised that Beethoven would contribute a new work for the occasion — but, apparently still recovering from his own big concert, Beethoven didn’t get around to writing the promised Horn Sonata for Punto until the day before the recital.

Beethoven and Punto took the new Sonata with them for a concert in Budapest the following month. The press in Hungary had heard of Punto, but not Beethoven, whose name they didn’t even get right: “Who is this Beethover (sic)?” one press notice read, noting, “The history of German music is not acquainted with such a name. Punto, of course, is very well known…”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Horn Sonata; Hermann Baumann, horn; Leonard Hokanson, piano; Philips 416 816

Early in April in the year 1845, 15-year old American pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. On the program was Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, and Chopin happened to be in the audience and congratulated the young American on his performance.

What exactly Chopin said depends on whom you asked. Gottschalk’s first biographer claims it was, “Very good, my child, let me shake your hand,” while his sister insists it was, “I predict you will become the king of pianists!”

In 1845, Parisian society was curious about anything American after experiencing other exotic exports from the New World, including P.T. Barnum’s circus and George Catlin’s paintings of Native American life. Anything American was definitely “hip.”

Four years later, on today’s date in 1849, Gottschalk returned to the Salle Pleyel, this time performing some of his own compositions, including Bamboula, a work named after the a deep-voiced Afro-Caribbean drum. The Parisian audiences had never heard anything like it and gave him a standing ovation. He was born in New Orleans and was exposed from childhood to Cuban and Haitian music and went on to write original works which anticipate both the rhythms and colors of American jazz.

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849): Piano Concerto No. 1; Krystian Zimerman, piano; Polish Festival Orchestra; DG 459 684

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869): Bamboula; Alan Feinberg, piano; Argo 444 457

For the 1958-59 season of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, the orchestra’s newly-appointed music director, was eager to program as much new American music as he dared. As luck would have it, early in 1958, 35-year old American composer Ned Rorem had just returned from Europe with a new symphonic score.

“I wrote most of my Symphony No. 3 in France. It’s a big piece but not a commission — I was still writing for the love of it in those days… So I showed it to Lenny and he said ‘Okay, I’ll do it, but I wish you would re-orchestrate the slow movement entirely for strings.’ I replied ‘Sure,’ but didn’t, because Bernstein was always saying things like that and then would forget all about it,” he said.

The premiere of Rorem’s Symphony No. 3 — as written — occurred at Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1959, but for its composer, the thrill was tempered by some harsher realities.

He recalled, “I came late to the first rehearsal because in those days I was living off unemployment insurance … and I had to go down and stand in line to pick up my check. I guess they managed without me because Lenny conducted four wonderful performances.”

Ned Rorem (1923-2022): Symphony No. 3; Utah Symphony; Maurice Abravanel, conductor; Vox Box 5092

Over the centuries, a wide range of composers have created musical settings of the Latin mass, but one of the more unusual and distinctive settings received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1973 at a concert at Finch College in New York City devoted entirely to the music of American composer Vivian Fine.

At that time, Fine was teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, and her Missa Brevis, or Short Mass, was inspired by some of her colleagues there. Cellist George Finckel had organized cello quartet at the college, and for one semester as a sabbatical replacement, mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, a noted new music advocate, taught at Bennington. She crafted her Missa Brevis from the taped voice of DeGaetani, multi-tracked into four channels as a kind of one-woman chorus, accompanied by Finckel’s quartet of cellos, whose combined low registers sound rather organ-like.

The blend of taped and live musicians created an effect both ancient and modern. In addition to the familiar Kyrie and Sanctus movements of the traditional mass, Fine interpolated sacred texts of her own choosing, making this Missa Brevis her own, intensely personal private spiritual testament.

Vivian Fine (1913-2000): Missa Brevis; JanDeGaetani, mezzo-soprano; Eric Barlett, David Finckel, Michael Finckel, Maurice Neuman, cello; CRI 692

On today’s date in 1789, Mozart was in Dresden, performing his new piano concerto at the Royal Saxon Court. Mozart was pretty good at documenting his own compositions, and we know from a catalog of his works that he finished this concerto in late February the previous year.

Unfortunately for posterity, he was less dutiful in copying out all of the solo piano part, which he no doubt just kept in his head. The surviving manuscript score contains just a shorthand version of the solo piano part, with the music for the left-hand hardly there at all.

Modern performers have to rely on their own wit and imagination to fill in the blanks, and, who knows: maybe he played it differently each time, improvising around his own sketchy outline as the mood took him?

In any case, Mozart must have been proud of this concerto. He played it again at the festivities surrounding the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Frankfurt in October of 1790. Ever since, this concerto has been known as the Coronation Concerto.

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation); Jenö Jandó, piano; Concentus Hungaricus; Mátyás Antál, conductor; Naxos 8.550209

Over the centuries, many composers have set verses from the Bible’s Book of Psalms to music, often in response to times of turmoil and trouble.

One unusual Psalm setting had its premiere performance on today’s date in 2013 at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Seven Psalms was scored for a jazz quartet of bass, drums, saxophone and piano accompanying a solo vocalist and 15-member choir, and was created by Minneapolis composer Jeremy Walker, who confesses the music was motivated by his own personal struggle.

Walker’s burgeoning career as a jazz saxophonist was sidetracked by an illness which stymied doctors for 12 years until finally diagnosed as Lyme Disease. Unable to continue as a saxophonist, he turned to the piano and composition, and found himself drawn to the Book of Psalms, where he heard echoes of African-American spirituals and the blues.

“The book is just dripping with human hope and suffering all intertwined so it seemed like blues material to me,” he said. “It occurred to me to blend the jazz vernacular harmonic universe with the psalms. And right away the call and response between solo voice, or between the band and the choir, were sounds I could hear,” he said.

Jeremey Walker (b. 1972): “Psalm 130” from Seven Psalms; Jason Harms, vocalist; 7 Psalms Chamber Choir; Jeremy Walker Quartet; CD Baby/iTunes/Amazon release

On today’s date in 1892, the Adamowski Quartet gave a concert in Boston that included two movements from a string quartet by 32-year old composer Charles Martin Loeffler.

For the past 10 years, Loeffler had been the associate concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and just the previous year they had premiered his first orchestral piece.

Loeffler told people he was born in the Alsace region of France in 1861, which would account for his French manners and the French titles he gave some of his pieces. In fact, he was born in Berlin, but he never forgave the Prussians for the political persecution and imprisonment of his father, and left Berlin for Paris as soon as he could.

In 1881, at 20, Loeffler came to the United States, where, as he put it, he found Americans “quick to reward genuine musical merit and to reward it far more generously than Europe.” In 1887, he became an American citizen, and in short order established himself as one of our leading composers.

After his death in 1935, Loeffler’s music fell into neglect for many decades, but his elegant and well-crafted music is attracting renewed interest — and recordings — today.

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935): String Quartet; DaVinci Quartet; Naxos 8.559077

On today’s date in 1930, Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first staged presentation in America of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet The Rite of Spring at Philadelphia’s 4000-seat Opera House — and it was a hot ticket.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted “a milling mob fought and scrambled for entrance to the Opera House … there was a traffic tie-up of taxis and trolleys for blocks beyond, while dignified ladies were seen to pop out of automobiles like rabbits out of hutches, and scurry for blocks on foot, to avoid being late.” This was for what the newspaper described as, “the startling spectacle of bare-legged girls and men whirling madly and stamping upon the stage to an orgiastic fury of sound.”

For its American premiere, the original costuming from the work’s Paris premiere was retained, but the choreography was now by Léonide Massine, not Vaslav Nijinsky, and Martha Graham and her Corps de Ballet were the dancers, not Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.

Stokowski, a passionate promoter of Stravinsky’s score, had given its American concert premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1922 and, in 1940, it was Stokie and the Philadelphians who could accompany Walt Disney’s dinosaurs in his animated Fantasia version of the famous Stravinsky score.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Rite of Spring; Philadelphia Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, conductor; Disneyland WDX101

On today’s date in 1959, the Duke University Band under Paul Bryan gave the premiere performance of a new work they had commissioned: the Symphony No. 3 for concert band by American composer Vittorio Giannini.

With the growth of concert bands in the 1950s, and success of high-profile performing ensembles like Frederick Fennell’s Eastman Wind Ensemble, composers like Giannini started getting commissions to write new works for these ensembles. In all, Giannini wrote five pieces for concert band, with his Symphony No. 3 the biggest and best known of the lot.

Paul Bryan and Duke University were certainly pleased with the new work. Its resounding success encouraged other band directors to commission new concert works for wind band — and, in one fell swoop, the Duke Band achieved national recognition for its initiative.

As for Giannini, in his later years he taught a younger generation of composers, first in New York City at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, then in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute, and finally at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he served as that institution’s first president. Giannini students included a number of successful composers, including David Amram, John Corigliano, Nicolas Flagello, Adolphus Hailstork and Alfred Reed.

Vittorio Giannini (1903-1966): Symphony No. 3; University of Houston Wind Ensemble; Tom Bennett, conductor; Naxos 8.570130