Composers Datebook

An unusual piano concerto by American composer Lou Harrison had its premiere performance in New York on this day in 1985. Famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, for whom it was written, was the soloist.

Now, Harrison’s music was often marked by its eclectic blending of East and West, and on occasion, Harrison employed non-Western or unusual instruments in his scores, including his own home-made Javanese-style gamelan constructed from old brake drums and clay flowerpots. But that wasn’t what made his Piano Concerto so singular.

“I’ve always wanted to write a piano concerto which utilizes two or three pianos on stage, each tuned differently,” Harrison said. “And Keith was willing to try that. But in the end, I decided to use one piano in a tuning I really enjoy.”

In Harrison’s concerto, the piano is not tuned to the “equal temperament” system in use in Western music since Bach’s day. The black keys are tuned to the medieval system of mathematically exact intervals of fourths and fifths, while the white keys reproduce the “just intonation” system common in the Renaissance and Baroque.

And so the familiar instrument has an unfamiliar ring, but one that Keith Jarret loved: “At times in the piece, whole chords sound like bells,” he said.

Lou Harrison (1917-2003): Piano Concerto; Keith Jarrett, piano; New Japan Philharmonic; Naoto Otomo, conductor; New World 366

From the first millennium of the Common Era to the present day, the Mass have been chanted and sung to music both simple and complex. Most Mass settings are in the original Latin, since that liturgical language, after so many centuries, has the advantage of being very familiar and eminently suitable for singing.

On today’s date in 2010, the Kansas City Chorale gave the premiere of a new Mass for Double Choir by American composer René Clausen.

Now, Clausen is an established and well-regarded composer of choral works, but even so writing a Mass can be a daunting task, and Clausen’s was his first such attempt.

“Let’s say it was a new challenge to set a text which has historically been set probably more than any other,” Clausen said. “I tend to be rather text-content driven, nearly always attempting to express the meaning and mood of the words. In the longer movements of the Mass, especially the Credo, it was challenging to express all the text, yet keep the music structurally integrated and proportioned.”

Clausen’s Mass for Double Choir was well-received at its American premiere, and subsequently recorded by the Kansas City Chorale for the British Chandos label. That recording won three Grammy Awards in 2013, including one for Best Choral Performance.

Rene Clausen (b. 1953): Mass for Double Choir; Kansas City Chorale; Charles Bruffy, conductor; Chandos 5105

On this day in 1904, in Cologne, Germany, Gustav Mahler conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 5. It was not a success. Applause was light, with loud hissing from some in the audience. Even Mahler’s wife, Alma, complained so much about the orchestration that Mahler kept tinkering with the score until the last year of his life.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 has become a popular showpiece for virtuoso orchestras and its slow movement, marked Adagietto — supposedly Mahler’s musical love to Alma — has become one of Mahler’s best-loved pieces.

The American composer Jerome Moross also had a symphony premiered on today’s date. The year was 1943, Moross was 30, and Thomas Beecham conducted its premiere performance with the Seattle Symphony. Unlike Mahler, Moross wrote only one symphony, and the American hobo tune inspired the slow movement of his The Midnight Special.

Jerome Moross is best known his work in Hollywood. His 1958 score for The Big Country was nominated for an Academy Award. Moross also wrote the music for Wagon Train, a popular TV Western. As Moross once said, “a composer must reflect his landscape and mine is the landscape of America. I don't do it consciously, it is simply the only way I can write.”

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 5; Chicago Symphony; Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG 427 254

Jerome Moross (1913-1983): Symphony No. 1; London Symphony; JoAnn Falletta, conductor; Koch 7188

On this date in 1831, the 21-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a concert in Munich consisting entirely of his own works — a concert that included the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1, with its composer as the soloist.

Mendelssohn was in high spirits and wrote these lines to family:

“It is a glorious feeling to waken in the morning and to know that you are going to write the score of a grand allegro with all sorts of instruments … while bright weather promises a cheering, long walk in the afternoon. On the evening of the October 17 at half-past six, think of me, for then I will dash off with thirty violins and two sets of wind instruments [for] my new concerto in G minor. Every morning I have to write, correct and score till one o’clock, when I go to Scheidel’s coffee house in Kaufinger Gasse, where I know each face by heart and find the same people every day in the same position: two playing chess, three looking on, five reading the newspapers, six eating their dinner — with me making up the seventh.”

Unfortunately for posterity, Mendelssohn never said if he recognized any of that coffeehouse crowd sitting in the audience for the performance of his new concerto!

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): Piano Concerto No. 1; Cyprien Katsaris, piano; Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; Kurt Masur, conductor; Teldec 8.43681

Today’s date in 1956 marks the birthday of Cuban composer Eduardo Martin, a name that might not be all that familiar to you — unless you play guitar, that is. Martin has written music for orchestra and films but is best known and admired for works he’s written for his own instrument, the guitar — music infused with the flair and dance rhythms of his native Havana.

One of his popular pieces is Hasta Alicia Baila, roughly translated Even Alicia Dances, referencing the great Cuban ballerina Alicia Alonso, suggesting that even she couldn’t resist dancing to its beat.

“Guitar is my greatest passion,” said Martin in an interview for Cuban radio. “But I have other passions: my country and my family.”

“In my work, it is easy to notice the attachment to my roots. Even when I travel and see something that I like, I say, ‘Of course, it looks just like home.’ I confess I am an eternal lover of Havana. I find it wonderful and irreplaceable … And so I reflect in my work some of the impressions that this place has left in me … What I feel when I wake up in my city, when I walk in it, the mix of colors and the sounds that flood through it.”

Eduardo Martin (b. 1956): Hasta Alicia Baila; Clea Galhano, recorder; Rene Izquierdo, guitar; ‘Latin Reverie’ CD 89577 75162

On today’s date in 1905, Claude Debussy’s orchestral suite La Mer or The Sea was performed for the first time in Paris. Today this music is regarded as an impressionistic masterpiece, but early audiences — especially those in America — found it rough sailing.

“We clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck,” wrote a 1907 Boston critic, and suggested that instead of The Sea Debussy should have titled his piece Sea-Sickness.

“The Sea is persistently ugly,” wrote The New York Times that same year. “Debussy fails to give any impression of the sea … There is more of a barnyard cackle in it than anything else.”

And in 1909, this on La Mer from The Chicago Tribune: “It is safe to say that few understood what they heard and few heard anything they understood … There are no themes … There is nothing in the way of even a brief motif that can be grasped securely enough by the ear and brain to serve as a guiding line through the tonal maze. There is no end of queer and unusual effects, no end of harmonic complications and progressions that sound so hideously ugly.”

Ah, the perils of “modern music” in the early 20th century!

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): La Mer; New Philharmonia; Pierre Boulez, conductor; Sony 68327

To most music lovers, the name Jean-Baptise Lully calls to mind pompous and courtly music for Louis XIV, the French “Sun King” who was his great patron. The Italian-born Lully is credited with “creating” French opera in the 17th century — and some of these works, usually based on subjects from classical mythology and poetry, are occasionally revived and recorded today.

But that was only one side of Lully’s personality, the “stuffy and serious” side, because Lully was also something of a clown — literally.

For over seven years, he worked with the great French comedian and playwright Moliere to create joint stage works. In addition to composing the music, Lully acted, sang and danced in these satirical and slapstick affairs. The most famous of the Lully-Moliere collaborations debuted on today’s date in 1670, when, to cheer up King Louis after an embarrassing incident involving a bogus ambassador from Turkey, Lully and Moliere concocted a ballet spoof they called Le Turc Ridicule, preceded by Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a musical play about a wealthy upstart from the middle class.

Lully played the role of the Grand Mufti, and Moliere the middle-class upstart with upper-class aspirations. Think of Abbot and Costello or Laurel and Hardy in powdered wigs, and you get the idea.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687): Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme; Comedy-Ballet Le Concert des Nations; Jordi Savall, conductor; Alia Vox 9807

Today’s date in 1979 marked the passing, at 93, of a remarkable composer and performer named Rebecca Clarke. Born in Harrow, England, in 1886, she became one of the first female professional orchestral viola players in the United Kingdom, and in 1916 moved to the United States.

At a New York recital in 1918, she premiered one of her own compositions under the male pseudonym of Anthony Trent. While “Trent’s” work was praised, the same reviewers largely ignored or dismissed her other works on the same recital, which she programmed under her name.

Late in Clarke’s life, with the renewal of interest in works by neglected women composers, she enjoyed a major revival of interest in her works, with her Viola Sonata, written in 1919, singled out as a significant achievement. Even so, she wryly remarked to an interviewer that even then “I got one or two press clippings saying that it was impossible, that I couldn’t have written [the Viola Sonata] myself. And the funniest review of all was that I didn’t exist, and there wasn’t any such person as a Rebecca Clarke, that it was a female pseudonym for Ernest Bloch.”

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979): Vivace from Viola Sonata; Philip Dukes, viola; Sophia Rahman, piano; Naxos 8.557934

Today’s date marks the original Columbus Day, honoring the Italian explorer who for decades was described as the man who “discovered America.” In recent years Native American leaders have pointed out that indigenous peoples had been living on the continent for thousands of years, and Columbus didn’t “discover” anything — in fact, he didn’t even know where he was, which is why he called the people he found here “Indians.” Some historians now think that Viking explorers from Scandinavia arrived in America long before Columbus — and others suggest the Chinese arrived before those Europeans.

Even so, it’s Columbus who has a national holiday (now always observed on the closest Monday in October), and concert music written to celebrate it. For example, there’s a Columbus Suite by Victor Herbert, originally commissioned for the 1893 Chicago World Fair to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Columbus voyage, but not actually premiered until 1903.

A much more recent “Columbus-inspired” work, and much more elegiac in tone, is by the Native American composer James DeMars. Premonitions of Christopher Columbus is scored for Native American flute, African drum, and chamber orchestra. In this work, DeMars blends sounds of the various ethnic traditions that would come to make up modern America.

Victor Herbert (1859-1924) Columbus Suite Slovak Radio Symphony; Keith Brion, cond. Naxos 8.559027

James DeMars (b. 1952) Premonitions of Christopher Columbus Tos Ensemble with R. Carlos Nakai, Native American flute Canyon 7014

On today’s date in 1928, Danish composer Carl Nielsen conducted the first public performance of his new Clarinet Concerto in Copenhagen.

“The clarinet can, at one and the same time seem utterly hysterical, gentle as balsam, or as screechy as a streetcar on badly greased rails,” Nielsen said. He set himself the task of covering that whole range of the instrument’s conflicting emotions and colors. He wrote it for a Danish clarinetist he admired, Aage Oxenvad, who played both the public premiere on today’s date and a private reading a few weeks earlier.

After the private performance Oxenvad is supposed to have muttered: “Nielsen must be able to play the clarinet himself — otherwise he would hardly have been able to find all the instrument’s worst notes.” The concerto’s wild mood swings puzzled audiences in 1928, but today it’s regarded as one of Nielsen’s most original works.

In October of 1996, another clarinet concerto received its premiere when American composer John Adams conducted the first performance of his work Gnarly Buttons with soloist Michael Collins. This concerto contains a bittersweet tribute to Adams’ father, a clarinetist who fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease. In Adams’ concerto, the swing tunes slide into dementia, but the concerto ends with a kind of benediction.

Carl Nielsen (1865-1931): Clarinet Concerto; Kjell-Inge Stevennson, clarinet; Danish Radio Symphony; Herbert Blomstedt, conductor; EMI 69758

John Adams (b. 1947): Gnarly Buttons; Michael Collins, clarinet; London Sinfonietta; John Adams, conductor; Nonesuch 79453