Synopsis

In 1953, the Louisville Orchestra was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $500,000 to commission, premiere and record 20th-century music to be issued on its own label, Louisville First Edition Records. By 1997, it had released nearly 150 discs, containing more than 450 compositions by living composers.

On today’s date in 1980, one of the Louisville commissions premiered and recorded by the orchestra was Tournaments by the then-41-year-old American composer John Corigliano.

“As the title implies,” Corigliano writes, “Tournaments is a ‘contest piece,’ a sort of mini-Concerto for Orchestra in which first-desk players and entire sections vie with each other in displaying their virtuosity.”

The Louisville Orchestra received many awards for its ambitious commissioning project, while Corigliano went on to win Grammys and an Oscar, not to mention the Grawemeyer and Pulitzer prizes.

Corigliano also is proud of his teaching positions at the Juilliard School and Lehman College in New York.

“I think it’s good for a composer to teach,” he says, “because you always have new students, and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.”

Music Played in Today's Program

John Corigliano (b. 1938) Tournaments Overture; Louisville Orchestra; Sidney Harth, cond. Louisville First Edition LOU-771