Composers Datebook

Synopsis

In 1974, St. Petersburg was still called Leningrad and still part of what we now call the former Soviet Union. Back then, the most famous living Soviet composer was Dmitri Shostakovich, whose health was rapidly failing from the cancer that would claim his life the following year.

On today’s date in 1974, Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15, his final, was given its premiere performance by the Taneyev Quartet. The work was supposed to have been premiered by the Beethoven Quartet, but its cellist died unexpectedly, and, mindful of his own mortality, Shostakovich was reluctant to postpone the scheduled premiere. After all, he might not be around by the time the Beethoven Quartet found a replacement cellist.

When his String Quartet No. 1 had premiered in 1938, Shostakovich had described that work as “joyful, merry, lyrical” and “springlike.” His String Quartet No. 15, on the other hand, is obviously a “winter work,” written by someone who knows he might never see another spring.

If Shostakovich’s fifteen symphonies represent the public side of a Soviet composer, his fifteen string quartets might be described as chronicling his private inner world of hopes, fears and dreams.

Music Played in Today's Program

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): String Quartet No. 15; Emerson String Quartet; DG 463 284

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation began daily radio transmissions from London, at first offering just news and weather — the latter read twice, in case anyone wanted to take notes. The following month, on Dec. 23, 1922, the BBC broadcast its first orchestral concert.

Over time, the BBC became affectionately nicknamed “the Beeb,” or, less affectionately “Auntie,” due to the upper-middle class, slightly patronizing tone of its music announcers in the 1940s and ‘50s.

That said, Auntie has proven to be hip in one aspect: The BBC has been a major commissioner of and advocate for new music by a wide range of composers — and not just British ones. In 2007, for example, the BBC Symphony premiered the Doctor Atomic Symphony, by American composer John Adams, live on-air at a BBC Proms Concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

And it’s not just famous, big-name composers who get an airing on the Beeb either. Each year, BBC Radio 3 hosts a competition for teenage composers. Winners participate in a mentored program and have one of their orchestral works developed, rehearsed and performed at the BBC Proms.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Adams (b. 1947): Violin Concerto; Tamsin Waley-Cohen, violin; BBC Symphony; Andrew Litton, conductor; Signum 468

Synopsis

While for Puerto Ricans, the bomba and the plena are more familiar representatives of their proud dance tradition, the musical form known as danza holds a special place in their hearts.

Danza originated in southern Puerto Rico in the early 19th century, originally similar to the waltz, but over time it absorbed Afro-Cuban influences. Manuel Gregorio Tavárez, a 19th-century Puerto Rican composer raised the danza to a cultivated art form, and accordingly he was dubbed “the Chopin of America.”

Puerto Rican composer Dan Román paid tribute to Tavárez and other earlier danza masters in a piece for cello and piano called Retrospectos, or Retrospectives. This work premiered on today’s date in 2007 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, played by the Montserrat Duo, which had commissioned the piece.

“Each movement of my piece uses a different aspect of the danza. Each movement also explores a particular composer from among the most significant authors of the genre. However, the source material is always treated as series of analytical objects that become manipulated to nearly the point of abstraction,” Román said.

Music Played in Today's Program

Dan Román (b. 1974): Retrospectos; Beth Ringel, cello; Alex Maynegre, piano; Innova 904

Synopsis

These days at symphony concerts, when a new piece of music is about to be played, it’s not uncommon to overhear someone mutter, “Why do they have to program this new stuff, when there’s so much Brahms and Tchaikovsky we’d rather hear?”

Well, on today’s date in 1881, the 40th season of the New York Philharmonic Society’s concerts opened with a pair of new works: first the New York premiere of the Tragic Overture, by Johannes Brahms, and after that, the world premiere of Piano Concerto No. 2 by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky with soloist Madeleine Schiller.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say the following morning: “The return of Madame Schiller to the stage is a welcome event, ... the only regret being that her efforts had not been devoted to a more interesting work, for, apart from the novelty, it cannot be said that the Tchaikovsky concerto possessed any great merit. There are older works, of which one never tires and which, interpreted by Madame Schiller ... would always be welcomed.”

Ah, some things never change!

Music Played in Today's Program

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Tragic Overture; Chicago Symphony; Daniel Barenboim, conductor; Erato 95192

Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Piano Concerto No. 2; Barry Douglas, piano; Philharmonia Orchestra; Leonard Slatkin, conductor; RCA/BMG 61633

Synopsis

In his autobiographical sketch, A Mingled Chime, British conductor Thomas Beecham offered this assessment of British composer Ethel Smyth: “Ethel Smyth is without question the most remarkable of her sex that I have been privileged to know,” and added that he admired her “fiery energy and unrelenting fixity of purpose.”

Born in 1858, she became a composer against her family’s wishes, and it took dogged determination to get her large-scale choral and operatic works performed in an era when most in the music business did not take female composers seriously. That was before they met Smyth, who convinced legendary conductors like Arthur Nikisch, Bruno Walter and Beecham, who realized her music had merit.

Her opera The Wreckers had its premiere performance in Leipzig on today’s date in 1906 and was championed in England by Beecham, who thought it her masterpiece. It remains, wrote Beecham in 1944, the year of her death, “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality written in the past 40 years.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ethyl Smyth (1858-1944): The Wreckers; Soloists and BBC Philharmonic; Odaline de la Martinez, conductor; Conifer 51250