Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 2002, a high-profile musical event occurred at Philadelphia’s new Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. The city was hosting the 57th National Conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League, and the Philadelphia Orchestra was celebrating its 100th anniversary with eight new commissions, all to be premiered in the Orchestra’s new Verizon Hall.

On June 12th, the new piece was a Concerto for Orchestra by 39-year-old composer Jennifer Higdon. Her concerto opened the Philadelphia Orchestra’s program, followed by Richard Strauss’ tone-poem Ein Heldenleben. Both pieces were performed before an audience of orchestral professionals from around the country — not to mention Higdon’s proud mother.

Higdon, understandably a little nervous, quipped to a newspaper reporter, “You’ll know my mother because she’ll be the one crying before the piece starts.” She needn’t have worried. Her Concerto for Orchestra was greeted with cheers from both its audience and performers — the latter in typically irreverent fashion, dubbed the new piece Ein Higdonleben.

Higdon, the only woman among the eight composers commissioned for the orchestra’s centennial project, calls herself a “late bloomer” as a composer. She taught herself the flute at 15 and didn’t pursue formal music training until college. She was almost finished with her bachelor’s degree requirements at Bowling Green State University when she started composing her own music.

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962): Concerto for Orchestra; Atlanta Symphony; Robert Spano, conductor; Telarc 80620

On today’s date in 1931, Russian-born American composer Nicolas Slonimsky was in Paris, conducting the second of two concerts of modern music from the Americas bankrolled by retired insurance executive and famous composer Charles Ives.

This second concert showcased Latin American composers like Pedro Sanjuan, Carlos Chavez and Alejandro Caturla, as well as works by the Franco-American composers Carlos Salzedo and Edgard Varese. North America was represented by Wallingford Riegger’s Three Canons for flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon.

Normally, chamber music for just four players doesn’t require the services of a conductor, but in this case Slonimsky did beat time for the Parisian wind players hired for the gig. As he put it, “Some instrumental parts were written in 5/8 and others in 2/8. I started beating time in 5/8, whereupon the binary musicians began to gesticulate at me to show their discomfort. What was I to do? OK, I said, I will conduct 5/8 with my right hand and 2/8 with my left. I was so delighted with my newly found ambidextrous technique that I applied it in other pieces as well, notably in the second movement of Ives’ Three Places in New England, played on the first of the two Parisian concerts. Someone quipped that my conducting was evangelical, for my right hand knew not what my left hand was doing.”

Wallingford Riegger (1885-1961): Three Canons; Samuel Baron, flute; Ronald Roseman, oboe; Charles Neidich, clarinet; Donald MacCourt, bassoon; Bridge 9068

On today’s date in 1939, the King and Queen of England were in New York City. Despite the perilous situation back home in Europe, their royal majesties George and Elizabeth Windsor crossed the Atlantic to attend the 1939 World’s Fair, and sample exotic native delights such as a hot dog picnic with President Franklin Roosevelt.

That same evening at Carnegie Hall, another visiting Brit, conductor Adrian Boult, led the New York Philharmonic in premiere performances of three brand-new works by leading British composers of the day, including the world premiere of the Seventh Symphony of Arnold Bax, a work commissioned by the British Council and dedicated to the American people. Also premiered that night was a virtuoso Piano Concerto by Arthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ set of variations for strings and harp on the old English carol, “Dives and Lazarus.”

The music critic for The New Yorker, covering the premieres, wrote, “The symphony wandered, as Bax symphonies seem to do, yet wandered into many characteristic eloquences. The variations were soundly charming, and the piano concerto was a roaring triumph.”

There seems to be no documentation on the quality of the hot dogs served to their royal majesties, but we’re willing to bet they, too, were top-notch.

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975): Piano Concerto; Philip Fowke, piano; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; David Atherton, conductor; Unicorn 2029

Arnold Bax (1883-1953): Symphony No. 7; London Philharmonic; Raymond Leppard, conductor; Lyrita 232

Contemporary composers may bemoan that their newly-composed opera or concerto might languish unperformed for years. “Haydn was lucky,” they whine, “His stuff got played right away!”

Well, it’s true that Haydn did have his own orchestra at Prince Esterhazy’s estate and got his music played while the ink was still wet. But even Haydn had to wait for a premiere on occasion — in two instances, for a very, very long time.

Consider the last opera Haydn wrote, L’anima del Filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice — or, in English, The Soul of the Philosopher, or Orpheus and Euridice. This was supposed to premiere in 1791 in London. But a spat between the Prince of Wales and his pop, King George III, meant the performance was off. The opera was eventually premiered 160 years later — on today’s date in 1951, at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, with a cast including Maria Callas and Boris Christoff, led by the German conductor Erich Kleiber.

And the public premiere of a Cello Concerto, a work some think Haydn wrote at Esterhazy in the 1760s, took place in the 1960s. Haydn’s score was presumed lost until 1961, when it was discovered at the Prague National Museum and finally played by cellist Milos Sádlo and the Czech Radio Symphony, led by Sir Charles Mackerras, on May 19, 1962.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): L’Anima del Filosofo (Orfeo ed Euridice); Cecilia Bartoli, mezzo-soprano; Academy of Ancient Music; Christopher Hogwood, conductor; Decca 452668

Cello Concerto No. 1; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; Iona Brown, conductor; EMI 65701

For some composers, what made them popular in their own day is not always what makes them popular today. Take, for example, Italian Baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni, who was born in Venice on today’s date in 1671.

Albinoni was the son of a wealthy paper merchant, so he was sufficiently well-off, not to have to land a job with the church or some noble patron. He was most famous as an opera composer and travelled outside Italy to lead productions. Unfortunately, his opera scores were never published and so were lost to posterity. He did, however, publish several collections of instrumental works, and it is on these that his fame rests today.

By a quirk of fate, nowadays Albinoni’s best known work, his famous Adagio in g minor, was not one those works published in the 18th century. Rather, it was a 20th century recreation by musicologist Remo Giazotto based on a rather skimpy surviving sketch. No matter that there are scads of other Albinoni Adagios equally ravishing and straight from his own quill pen. In 1996 the Erato label even issued an album consisting of nothing but 22 original and legitimate Albinoni Adagios and slow movements — plus the famous Adagio that was cooked up by Remo Giazotto tossed in for good measure!

Tomaso Albinoni (1671-1751): Adagio, from Concerto No. 12; I Solisti Veneti; Claudio Scimone, conductor; Erato 0630-15681-2

Claudette Sorel was a pianist, educator and passionate advocate for equal rights for women in music, especially composers and performers. In 1996, she founded the Sorel Organization to expand opportunities and stretch the boundaries for promising emerging female musicians through a variety of collaborations and scholarships, and to acknowledge notable masters in the field.

On today’s date in 2022, for example, Cuban-born American composer Tania J. León was awarded the Organization’s Sorel Legacy Medallion for her life and work in music.

While still in her 20s, León became a founding member and the first musical director of the Dance Theater of Harlem, establishing its music department, school, and orchestra. She has composed a number of both large scale and chamber works that have been performed here and abroad. In February 2020, the New York Philharmonic premiered her orchestral piece Stride and in 2021 that work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

León said, “Stride was inspired by women’s rights pioneer Susan B. Anthony. She kept pushing and pushing and moving forward, walking with firm steps until she got [it] done. That is what Stride means. Something that is moving forward.”

Tania León (b. 1943): Batá; Louisville Orchestra; Lawrence Leighton Smith, conductor; Soundmark CD 48027

On today’s date in 1931, Russian-born American conductor and composer Nicolas Slonimsky was in Paris conducting the first of two concerts of ultra-modern music from the New World. These were presented under the auspices of the Pan American Association of Composers, and funded by an anonymous philanthropist Slonimsky later identified as retired insurance executive and fellow composer Charles Ives.

Slonimsky had approached Ives early in 1931 with the idea of presenting a series of new music concerts in New York. When that proved too costly, they suggested mounting the same concerts in Paris.

“In 1931, the dollar was still almighty among world currencies,” Slonimsky recalled. “Ives gave me a letter of credit to the Paris branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in the amount of $1500, an enormous sum of money in French francs at the time. The prestigious Orchestra Straram was engaged for my first Paris concert. I had a brilliant audience: composers, journalists, painters, Italian futurists. There was applause, but also puzzled responses.”

One French music critic even titled his review “The Discovery of America,” writing, “We have, (without joking), just discovered America, thanks to a Christopher Columbus called Slonimsky.” As for Ives, he was very pleased with the success of the concerts, and for a time jokingly addressed Slonimsky as either “Columbus et Vespuccius.”

Henry Cowell (1897-1965): Synchrony; Polish National Radio Orchestra; William Strickland, cond.) Citadel 88122

Merriam-Webster’s defines a gazebo as “a freestanding roofed structure usually open on the sides.”

To most Americans, however, “gazebo” conjures up warm, summer days spent out-of-doors: If you imagine yourself inside a gazebo, you’re probably enjoying a cool beverage while gazing out at the greenery — or, if you fancy yourself outside one, you’re probably seated in a lawn chair, gazing at a group of gazebo-sheltered band musicians playing a pops concert for your entertainment.

In the early 1970s, American composer John Corigliano wrote a series of whimsical four-hand piano dances he dedicated to certain of his pianist friends, and then later arranged these pieces for concert band, titling the resulting suite Gazebo Dances.

“The title was suggested by the pavilions often seen on village greens in towns throughout the countryside, where public band concerts are given in the summer,” Corigliano explained. “The delights of that sort of entertainment are portrayed in this set of dances, which begins with a Rossini-like overture, followed by a rather peg-legged waltz, a long-lined adagio, and a bouncy tarantella.”

The concert band version of Corigliano’s Gazebo Dances was first performed in Indiana on today’s date in 1973, by the University of Evansville Wind Ensemble, with Robert Bailey conducting.

John Corigliano (b. 1938): Gazebo Dances; University of Texas Wind Ensemble; Jerry Junkin, conductor; Naxos 8.559601

In the summer of 1853 Johannes Brahms had just turned twenty and was touring as the piano accompanist of the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. On today’s date, they arrived in Gottingen, where they were hosted by Arnold Wehner, the Music Director of that city’s University.

Wehner kept a guest book for visitors, and over time accumulated signatures from the most famous composers of his day, including Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Liszt. Now, in 1853, Brahms was not yet as famous as he would later become, but as a thank-you to his host, he filled a page of Wehner’s album with a short, original composition for piano.

Fast forward over 150 years to 2011, when Herr Wehner’s guest book fetched over $158,000 at an auction house in New York City, and this previously unknown piano score by Brahms attracted attention for many reasons.

First, few early Brahms manuscripts have survived. Brahms was notorious for burning his drafts and sketches, and second, the melody Brahms jotted down in 1853 showed up again in the second movement of his Horn Trio, published 12 years later.

Finally, there’s a still-unresolved controversy about who had rediscovered the long-lost score: the auction house had the manuscript authenticated in 2011, but in 2012 British conductor Christopher Hogwood claimed he had stumbled across it while doing other research.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Albumblatt (1853); Sophie-Mayuko Vetter, piano; Hännsler 98048

In the late 19th Century, there were two rival musical camps: one favored “absolute music” like the symphonies, concertos, and chamber music of Brahms; the other the “music of the future,” namely the operas of Wagner and the tone poems of Liszt, works that told dramatic stories in music.

Now, Dvořák’s mentor was Brahms, and Dvořák was famous for his symphonies, concertos and chamber music. But on today’s date in 1896, at a concert of the Prague Conservatory Orchestra, three tone poems by Dvořák premiered: The Water Goblin, The Noonday Witch, and The Golden Spinning Wheel, all three based on Czech folk legends — and rather lurid, even gruesome ones at that.

Not surprisingly, the “absolute music” camp was shocked. Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick lamented: “It is strange that Dvořák now indulges in ugly, unnatural, and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is. In The Water Goblin we are treated to a fiend who cuts off his own child’s head!”

But another Czech composer, Leos Janacek, heard something quite different: “In all the orchestral tone poems that I have known, the ‘direct speech’ of the instruments, if I might describe it thus, has never sounded with such certainty, clarity and truthfulness within the wave of melodies, as it does in The Water Goblin.”

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): The Water Goblin; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Nikolaus Harnoncourt, conductor; Teldec 25254