{ program notes
Arturo Toscanini and his fiery interpretations of the great symphonic and operatic literature. In 1933, the 23-year-old composer used his status as nephew of the celebrated operatic contralto Louise Homer, one of Toscanini’ s favorite singers, to pay a visit to the maestro at his summer retreat on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. To Barber’ s delight, they struck up an immediate friendship, and the old conductor expressed interest in performing a work by Barber despite the fact that he generally shunned contemporary music. But Barber was by no means a typical contemporary composer. Only recently graduated from Philadelphia’ s Curtis Institute, he was a precocious artist who had already found his own creative voice: lyrical, deeply expressive and rooted in the harmonic language of the late 19 th century— a voice even the conservative Toscanini could love.
It took Barber several years to produce two works he thought worthy of the conductor’ s attention. Finally, early in 1938, Barber sent Toscanini his newly completed First Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for string orchestra he had fashioned from the slow movement of his String Quartet of 1936.
Toscanini’ s selection of both pieces for his evening radio broadcast with the NBC Symphony on November 5, 1938, was the ultimate promotional coup for Barber. By the next morning, Samuel Barber was a household name among American music lovers.
Barber had truly embodied his uncle’ s advice, especially in the Adagio, which remains his most beloved and frequently performed composition. Using the simplest of musical means, it is a work whose sincerity and depth of feeling shoot directly to the heart. Called our“ national funeral music,” it has eloquently expressed Americans’ grief at the ceremonies for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 and John F. Kennedy in 1963. In 1986, it moved a new generation in the Academy Award-winning film Platoon, mourning the young lives taken by the Vietnam War.
Instrumentation: String orchestra.
Beautiful Passing: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
Steven Mackey
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, February 14, 1956; now living in Princeton, New Jersey
Though today Steven Mackey sits in the heart of the musical establishment as a professor of music at Princeton University( once the academic bastion of the most severe forms of 12-tone serialism), his path there was exceedingly unusual. He did not grow up playing the piano or the violin but, instead, the Baroque lute and the electric guitar. He still performs regularly on the guitar and has written a number of pieces for that instrument. Rock bands rather than youth orchestras provided his formative performing experiences. At the University of California-Davis, he originally planned to major in physics, but greater exposure to classical music shifted him to composition. A PhD from Brandeis University followed, then an appointment to the Princeton faculty. In 1991, he was given the first distinguished teaching award from Princeton.
Mackey is also one of America’ s most honored composers: he has won two of the prestigious Friedheim awards from the Kennedy Center, as well as a host of other prizes including a Grammy Award in 2012. Commissions come to him regularly from great orchestras like Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and from ensembles and soloists such as the Kronos Quartet, soprano Dawn Upshaw and violinist Leila Josefowicz.
Mackey likes shaking up an audience and pushing listeners to relate to the music in ways that are new to them. Thus, in a 1998 Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performance, his Eating Greens featured an unforgettable interruption when a pizza deliveryman appeared on stage to hand over an order to one of the musicians! Audience members, of course, burst out laughing, but Mackey’ s real motive was to trick them into paying closer attention to the music once it resumed.
Beautiful Passing is a far more serious and moving work than was Eating
Greens; in fact, it relates to his mother’ s death, and its title incorporates the last words she said to him. Jointly commissioned by the BBC and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, it had its world premiere by violinist Leila Josefewicz and the BBC Symphony in Manchester, England on October 24, 2008.
Steven Mackey has provided the following guide to the Concerto:
“ Beautiful Passing is in two halves separated by a violin cadenza. The first half deals with the interaction between the sharply contrasting materials of the violin and the orchestra. The orchestra develops something of a group mentality, a mass hysteria that is both scary and funny. It isn’ t so much malevolent as it is mechanical and oblivious to the nuance of the violin. That insensitivity is threatening but, like a bull in a china shop, also somewhat funny to observe with enough distance. Gradually, a few members of the orchestra hear the voice of reason and become supportive of the violin. After a cadenza that impresses the orchestra with fluttering delicacy, the violin introduces its own version of brutality— crushing triple stops— which command, for the first time, a consensus between the orchestra and soloist. In this second part, they retain their individuality but conspire toward common goals, unlike in the first part.
“ The governing metaphor of the work has to do with the violin gaining control of its own destiny, competing with, commanding, and ultimately letting go of the orchestra. This metaphor arises from my experience, during the composition of the piece, watching my mother gain control of her destiny to the point of predicting the day she would let go, predicting the day of her death. Her last words to me were,‘ Please tell everyone I had a beautiful passing.’”
Instrumentation: Three flutes including piccolos, two oboes including English horn, two clarinets including E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons including contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, two trombones, tuba, percussion, timpani, harp, piano, strings.
28 Overture | bsomusic. org