Thursday October 1, 2009

Colorado Symphony Orchestra
Larry Rachleff, conductor; Jeffrey Kahane, piano
Samuel Barber: Overture to The School for Scandal, Opus 5
George Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F (5/8-10/09)
Also, Charley talks with Jennie Dorris, artistic director and den-mother of Telling Stories.
Benjamin Britten: "Andante sostenuto" (1st movement) from String Quartet No.1 in D major, Op.25
Telling Stories String Quartet (Chris Jusell, Chris Short, violins; Megan Tipton, viola; Dave Short, cello)
KVOD Performance Studio 9/29/09 MS 8:41


Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Overture to The School for Scandal, Opus 5

Barber was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia when he won the Joseph H. Bearns prize of $1200. This enabled him to travel to Italy during the summer of 1931. There he wrote the Overture to The School for Scandal, after the satirical play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). The next year he submitted the work as his graduation thesis from Curtis.
The first performance took place at Robin Hood Dell on August 30, 1933. Alexander Smallens conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra. By then Barber was in Italy again, having won a second Bearns prize for this very Overture.
Barber noted in the score that the music was only ``suggested'' by the Sheridan play, so the intrigues of Lady Sneerwell and Joseph Surface and the virtues of Maria are only indirectly depicted. As Nicolas Slonimsky puts it, ``from the onset the music reflects the theme of sly merriment, the shining metallic sonorities of trumpets, triangle and cymbals accentuating the brightness of the scene. As the festive metallic sound subsides, a pastoral theme is sounded by the oboe. But a school for scandal must have its wily elements as its farce. The tonality is dislocated and twisted, suggesting intrigue; the gaiety is resumed with an invigorating rhythmic bounce.''
The score calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, bells, celeste, harp and strings.

George Gershwin (1898-1937): Concerto in F major for Piano and Orchestra
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro agitato

After the success of Rhapsody in Blue, Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Society, commissioned Gershwin to write a full-length piano concerto in 1925. ``This showed great confidence on his part,'' said Gershwin, ``as I had never written anything for symphony before.'' Rhapsody had been orchestrated by Ferde Grofé.
With contract in hand, and a promise of $500 for the Concerto, Gershwin left for London, armed with ``four or five books on musical structure to find out what the concerto form really was!'' Returning to New York in late June, he set to work in earnest. ``It took me three months to compose this Concerto, and one month to orchestrate it,'' he said. By November 10, 1925, it was finished.
Eager to hear his new work, Gershwin hired 50 musicians and arranged for a run-through at the Globe Theatre. ``I enjoyed it,'' he admitted, ``not as one of my fair and mischievous friends said, as the mad King Ludwig enjoyed Wagner, being the sole audience in the theatre, for Mr. Damrosch was there, and about a dozen others who wished to hear it.''
Gershwin was the pianist at the first performance on a stormy Thursday afternoon, December 3, 1925, in Carnegie Hall. Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony in a program that also included Glazunov's Fifth Symphony, Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis Overture and Henri Rabaud's Suite Anglaise.
Audiences loved the Concerto; the critics were mixed. The most perceptive was Samuel Chotzinoff, who wrote in the World: ``He alone actually expresses us. He is the present, with all its audacity, impertinence, its feverish delight in its motions, its lapses into rhythmic exotic melancholy. He writes without the smallest hint of self-consciousness....And here is where his genius comes in, for George Gershwin is an instinctive artist who has a talent for the right manipulation of the crude material he starts out with that a lifelong study of counterpoint and fugue never can give to one who is not born with it.''
Gershwin himself provided an analysis of the Concerto: ``The first movement employs the Charleston rhythm. It is quick and pulsating, representing the young, enthusiastic spirit of American life....The second movement has a poetic, nocturnal tone. It utilizes the atmosphere of what has come to be referred to as the American blues....The final movement reverts to the style of the first. It is an orgy of rhythm starting violently and keeping to the same pace throughout.''
The score calls for solo piano, piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, bells, xylophone, triangle and strings.