Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1789, Mozart was in Dresden, performing his new piano concerto at the Royal Saxon Court. Mozart was pretty good at documenting his own compositions, and we know from a catalog of his works that he finished this concerto in late February the previous year.

Unfortunately for posterity, he was less dutiful in copying out all of the solo piano part, which he no doubt just kept in his head. The surviving manuscript score contains just a shorthand version of the solo piano part, with the music for the left-hand hardly there at all.

Modern performers have to rely on their own wit and imagination to fill in the blanks, and, who knows: maybe he played it differently each time, improvising around his own sketchy outline as the mood took him?

In any case, Mozart must have been proud of this concerto. He played it again at the festivities surrounding the coronation of Emperor Leopold II in Frankfurt in October of 1790. Ever since, this concerto has been known as the Coronation Concerto.

Music Played in Today's Program

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 26 (Coronation); Jenö Jandó, piano; Concentus Hungaricus; Mátyás Antál, conductor; Naxos 8.550209

Synopsis

Over the centuries, many composers have set verses from the Bible’s Book of Psalms to music, often in response to times of turmoil and trouble.

One unusual Psalm setting had its premiere performance on today’s date in 2013 at Bethel University in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Seven Psalms was scored for a jazz quartet of bass, drums, saxophone and piano accompanying a solo vocalist and 15-member choir, and was created by Minneapolis composer Jeremy Walker, who confesses the music was motivated by his own personal struggle.

Walker’s burgeoning career as a jazz saxophonist was sidetracked by an illness which stymied doctors for 12 years until finally diagnosed as Lyme Disease. Unable to continue as a saxophonist, he turned to the piano and composition, and found himself drawn to the Book of Psalms, where he heard echoes of African-American spirituals and the blues.

“The book is just dripping with human hope and suffering all intertwined so it seemed like blues material to me,” he said. “It occurred to me to blend the jazz vernacular harmonic universe with the psalms. And right away the call and response between solo voice, or between the band and the choir, were sounds I could hear,” he said.

Music Played in Today's Program

Jeremey Walker (b. 1972): “Psalm 130” from Seven Psalms; Jason Harms, vocalist; 7 Psalms Chamber Choir; Jeremy Walker Quartet; CD Baby/iTunes/Amazon release

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1892, the Adamowski Quartet gave a concert in Boston that included two movements from a string quartet by 32-year old composer Charles Martin Loeffler.

For the past 10 years, Loeffler had been the associate concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and just the previous year they had premiered his first orchestral piece.

Loeffler told people he was born in the Alsace region of France in 1861, which would account for his French manners and the French titles he gave some of his pieces. In fact, he was born in Berlin, but he never forgave the Prussians for the political persecution and imprisonment of his father, and left Berlin for Paris as soon as he could.

In 1881, at 20, Loeffler came to the United States, where, as he put it, he found Americans “quick to reward genuine musical merit and to reward it far more generously than Europe.” In 1887, he became an American citizen, and in short order established himself as one of our leading composers.

After his death in 1935, Loeffler’s music fell into neglect for many decades, but his elegant and well-crafted music is attracting renewed interest — and recordings — today.

Music Played in Today's Program

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935): String Quartet; DaVinci Quartet; Naxos 8.559077

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1930, Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first staged presentation in America of Igor Stravinsky’s revolutionary ballet The Rite of Spring at Philadelphia’s 4000-seat Opera House — and it was a hot ticket.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted “a milling mob fought and scrambled for entrance to the Opera House … there was a traffic tie-up of taxis and trolleys for blocks beyond, while dignified ladies were seen to pop out of automobiles like rabbits out of hutches, and scurry for blocks on foot, to avoid being late.” This was for what the newspaper described as, “the startling spectacle of bare-legged girls and men whirling madly and stamping upon the stage to an orgiastic fury of sound.”

For its American premiere, the original costuming from the work’s Paris premiere was retained, but the choreography was now by Léonide Massine, not Vaslav Nijinsky, and Martha Graham and her Corps de Ballet were the dancers, not Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe.

Stokowski, a passionate promoter of Stravinsky’s score, had given its American concert premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1922 and, in 1940, it was Stokie and the Philadelphians who could accompany Walt Disney’s dinosaurs in his animated Fantasia version of the famous Stravinsky score.

Music Played in Today's Program

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Rite of Spring; Philadelphia Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, conductor; Disneyland WDX101

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1959, the Duke University Band under Paul Bryan gave the premiere performance of a new work they had commissioned: the Symphony No. 3 for concert band by American composer Vittorio Giannini.

With the growth of concert bands in the 1950s, and success of high-profile performing ensembles like Frederick Fennell’s Eastman Wind Ensemble, composers like Giannini started getting commissions to write new works for these ensembles. In all, Giannini wrote five pieces for concert band, with his Symphony No. 3 the biggest and best known of the lot.

Paul Bryan and Duke University were certainly pleased with the new work. Its resounding success encouraged other band directors to commission new concert works for wind band — and, in one fell swoop, the Duke Band achieved national recognition for its initiative.

As for Giannini, in his later years he taught a younger generation of composers, first in New York City at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, then in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute, and finally at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he served as that institution’s first president. Giannini students included a number of successful composers, including David Amram, John Corigliano, Nicolas Flagello, Adolphus Hailstork and Alfred Reed.

Music Played in Today's Program

Vittorio Giannini (1903-1966): Symphony No. 3; University of Houston Wind Ensemble; Tom Bennett, conductor; Naxos 8.570130