Composers Datebook

Synopsis

Late in 2013, the musical world was gearing up to celebrate the 70th birthday of British composer John Tavener, but sadly he died, so his 70th birthday, which fell on today’s date in 2014, became a memorial tribute instead.

Tavener had suffered from ill health throughout his life: a stroke in his thirties, heart surgery and the removal of a tumor in his forties, and two subsequent heart attacks.

In his early twenties, he became famous in 1968 with his avant-garde cantata, The Whale, based loosely on the Old Testament story of Jonah. That work caught the attention of one of The Beatles, and a recording of it was released on The Beatles’ own Apple label.

Tavener converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977, and his music became increasingly spiritual. Millions who watched TV coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, were deeply moved by his “Song for Athene,” which was performed to telling effect as Diana’s casket left Westminster Abbey. He was knighted in 2000, becoming Sir John Tavener.

In 2003, his Ikon of Eros, commissioned for the Centennial of the Minnesota Orchestra, and premiered at St. Paul’s Cathedral — the one in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is, not the one in London — and Tavener came to Minnesota for the event.

Music Played in Today's Program

John Tavener (1944-2013): Ikon of Eros; Jorja Fleezanis, violin; Minnesota Chorale; Minnesota Orchestra; Paul Goodwin, conductor; Reference Recording 102

Synopsis

On today’s date in 2019 a new documentary film, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah examining her powerful works and her career as a Black American artist.

Appropriately enough, the musical score for that documentary was crafted by another talented Black American woman, namely Kathryn Bostic, an accomplished composer of film, TV, theatrical, and concert hall scores.

Bostic is a recipient of many fellowships and awards including several from the Sundance Festival. She served the Vice President of the Alliance for Women Film Composers, is a member of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2016 she became the first female African American score composer in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“My parents loved music and my mother was a classical pianist and teacher. Listening to the wide range of music while growing up brought me to a phenomenal treasure trove of black composers including William Grant Still, Ulysses Kay, George Walker, Margaret Bonds, Duke Ellington, Quincy Jones, Isaac Hayes … I mean I could go on and on. They are all such extraordinary innovators of rich textures and amazing emotional depth. Definitely big influences for me,” Bostic said.

Music Played in Today's Program

Kathryn Bostic: Main Title, from Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am; Lakeshore Records 35495 (original soundtrack album)

Synopsis

In 1933, Aaron Copland introduced Roy Harris to Serge Koussevitzky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony in those days. Now, Koussevitzky was one of the great patrons of American music and was always looking for new American music and new American composers. Roy Harris had been described to him as an “American Mussorgsky,” which probably intrigued the Russian-born conductor.

When Koussevitzky learned that Harris had been born in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, no less — well, perhaps he hoped the 41-year old Harris might produce music equally all-American in origin. “Write me a big symphony from the West,” asked Koussevitzky, and Harris responded with a three-movement orchestral work: Symphony, 1933, which had its premiere performance on today’s date in 1934 with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky’s direction.

Koussevitzky loved it. “I think that nobody has captured in music the essence of American life — its vitality, its greatness, its strength — so well as Roy Harris,” enthused the famous conductor, who recorded the piece at Carnegie Hall in New York just one week after its premiere.

And it was Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony that would subsequently premiere Harris’s Symphonies No. 2, 3, 5 and 6.

Music Played in Today's Program

Roy Harris (1898-1979): Symphony No. 1 (1933); Louisville Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor; Albany 012

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1909, Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra had its premiere in Dresden. The libretto, a free adaptation of the grim, ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, was by the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

In ancient Greek tragedies, violence occurred off-stage, and for his libretto, Hofmannsthal honored that tradition. But the music of Strauss evoking the tragedy’s violence unleashed a huge orchestra with a ferocity that stunned early listeners.

After its American premiere, one New York critic wrote of “a total delineation of shrieks and groans, of tortures physical in the clear definition and audible in their gross realism … Snarling of stopped trumpets, barking of trombones, moaning of bassoons and squealing of violins.”

Even Strauss later admitted Elektra “penetrated to the uttermost limits of … the receptivity of human ears,” and what he called his “green horror” opera might cause him to be type-cast as a purveyor of creepy-crawly music. And so, Strauss prudently suggested to Hofmansthal “Next time, we’ll write a Mozart opera.”

Almost two years later to the day, on January 26, 1911, their “Mozart” opera, Der Rosenkavalier, or the The Rose Bearer premiered. It’s set in 18th century Vienna, and for this opera Strauss included anachronistic, but eminently hummable waltz tunes.

Music Played in Today's Program

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Elektra; Alessandra Marc, soprano; Vienna Philharmonic; Giuseppe Sinopoli, conductor; DG 453 429

Richard Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier; Waltz Suite Philadelphia Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy, conductor; Sony 60989

Synopsis

On this day in 1946, Igor Stravinsky conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of his Symphony in Three Movements, a work inspired in part by World War II newsreels.

“Each episode in the symphony is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of the war. But the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes — that is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say,” Stravinsky wrote.

What Stravinsky did say was that images of goose-stepping soldiers influenced its first movement, and its third movement was inspired in part by newsreels of the victorious march of the Allies into Germany. The themes of middle movement, however, had nothing to do with the war, but consisted of bits and pieces Stravinsky salvaged from his unused and unfinished score for the 1943 movie The Song of Bernadette. The producers decided instead to go with a score by Alfred Newman, a more experienced film composer.

To Stravinsky’s embarrassment, Newman’s score for The Song of Bernadette won an Oscar for the Best Film Score of 1943.

But Igor needn’t have felt too chagrined — his music may have failed in Hollywood, but it triumphed at Carnegie Hall.

Music Played in Today's Program

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Symphony in Three Movements; Berlin Philharmonic; Pierre Boulez, conductor; DG 457 616

Alfred Newman (1901-1970): Song of Bernadette; National Philharmonic; Charles Gerhardt, conductor; RCA 184