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A NEW ERA OF EXCELLENCE |
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SPRING CONCERT 2008 |
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A Springtime Celebration Bugler's Holiday Anderson Blue Tango Anderson . PROGRAM NOTES
Although he wrote a Piano Concerto in C and a Broadway musical Goldilocks, Leroy Anderson (1908 - 1975) is best known for his light classical works. This centenary year of Anderson's birth is an opportune time to recognize the special genius of this skillful composer of small masterpieces. Some critics of the American musical scene considered Anderson's works to be "novelties" or "tunes"; others have been kinder and referred to Anderson's small creations with the more apt "miniatures." Anderson has been grouped along with George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Charles Ives as a true American music original. Regardless of critical judgment, his distinctive, descriptive miniatures continue to delight audiences today as they did at their introductions. Leroy Anderson was a man of New England born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1908, to Swedish immigrants, both of whom had musical talents. At age eleven, he began studies at the New England Conservatory of Music, and following graduation from secondary school, he entered the music program at Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude. He then pursued a master's study program in orchestration and composition with eminent composers Georges Enescu and Walter Piston. It was as an orchestrator that Anderson made his name when in 1935 he moved to New York City following a five-year stint as the music director of the Harvard University band. Here, as an orchestrator and arranger, he caught the attention of Arthur Fiedler, conductor of the Boston Pops. Fittingly, his first arrangement in 1936 for Fiedler was a setting of Harvard school melodies, Harvard Fantasy. Anderson composed his first original piece for the Boston Pops - Jazz Pizzicato - in 1938, and followed the next year with Jazz Legato, both of which were immediately successful. During World War II, Anderson served as an intelligence officer in the U. S. Army, rising to the rank of captain. He maintained his composing and conducting activities, premiering two notable pieces with the Boston Pops, The Syncopated Clock and Promenade. After the war, he continued his association with the Boston Pops, and he and his family moved permanently to Woodbury, Connecticut. It was during this period 1946 - 1953 that he composed some of his best-loved works - Blue Tango, The Typewriter, Serenata, Belle of the Ball, Bugler’s Holiday, Forgotten Dreams, The Waltzing Cat, Plink, Plank, Plunk!, and Sleigh Ride among them. Anderson's own recording of Blue Tango made number one on the hit parade in 1952, selling over one million copies and served as a milestone for a purely instrumental recording. The Boston Pops honored Anderson with a nation-wide televised concert in 1972. Anderson conducted one piece on the concert, and later confided to his wife that the event was "the most important evening of my life." The composer continued with his writing and conducting up to the time of his death from cancer in 1975. Bugler's Holiday, The Waltzing Cat, and Blue Tango are among the most popular of Anderson's orchestral miniatures. Bugler's Holiday is just as the title implies, a feast for the brass and a rousing sonic pleasure for the audience. The Waltzing Cat sounds like a cat, but only enough so we can hear the joke--not so much as to ruin the enjoyment of the piece as music. Blue Tango is unusual among Anderson's output: a simple, lovely tune with no gimmick. It uses the traditional Argentine tango rhythm but without the melodramatic flash of authentic tangos. Born Giuseppe Guttoveggio in New York City, Paul Creston (1906 - 1985) was the son of an immigrant Sicilian house painter and an Italian mother. Like fellow composers Peter Mennin and Walter Piston, Creston decided to "Americanize" his name; he expanded his nickname "Cress" (given to him by fellow students following his character Crespino in a school play) to Creston and adopted the name Paul on a whim - he liked the sound of it. His early struggles, eventual success, fame, decline, and restoration are truly the stuff of an Horatio Alger tale.
Largely "self-learned," Creston pursued a musical career despite childhood poverty and lack of significant formal training. Severe family financial problems forced young Creston to quit school at fifteen, but this difficulty did not dampen his thirst for knowledge. Inspired by the example of Thomas Edison, Creston trained himself to get by on a minimum of four hours sleep a day; he put in a regular work day, then practiced the piano until 11 p.m., and finished his "day" studying music, literature, foreign languages, philosophy, even cryptography, the occult, and homeopathic medicine. His regimen of independent study stayed with him throughout his life and informed his own philosophies on life and the role of music in it. In essence he developed a unique and personal view of all aspects of music - harmony, form, notation and, most notably, rhythm. Creston's first major success came with the Symphony No. 1 in 1941, for which he won the New York Critic’s Circle Award. This award signified the beginning of a two decade period of tremendous creative output and world-wide recognition. He was, along with George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, and Roy Harris, the most frequently programmed American composer here and abroad. Unlike many American composers, he had no compunctions about working in radio and television, earning several awards for his scores, including an Emmy citation for the music to the television documentary In the American Grain (1964). Interest in Creston's music declined sharply in the 1960s. He and other composers of the American Neo-Romantic school lost favor to the new experimental avant garde composers of the day. Though embittered with the trend that music was apparently taking, Creston continued to compose and premiere works up to his death from cancer in 1985. Creston was a notable teacher and writer with John Corigliano and Charles Roland Berry among his students and Principles of Rhythm, numerous articles analyzing four centuries of rhythmic practice and Rational Metric Notations among his publications. Rhythm is one of the elements of music in which Creston specialized, and his sophisticated use of rhythm is clearly heard in his Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra. The work was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1944 with Victor Abato as soloist. For a video performance (Alto Saxophone and Piano arrangement) of the first movement of Paul Creston's Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra CLICK HERE. As a composer Robert Schumann (1810 - 1856) was first and foremost a master of small, intimate salon works. Until his marriage to Clara Wieck, the majority of his compositions consisted of short piano pieces and songs, two types of music he wielded so closely to one another as to be inseparable. It was she who encouraged him to expand his talents into areas he had been reluctant to entertain.
The year of the Schumann's marriage was a year of song for Robert - in his music as well as in his outlook on life. For the melancholy Robert, 1840 and the years immediately following were the happiest he was to experience before the dark shadows of depression took over his life. During the year 1840, he wrote about 150 songs. Among the outpouring of song he completed under Clara's inspiration were Liederkreis (Song Cycle), Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman's Love and Life) and his masterpiece of song Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love) which tells the tragic Romantic story of the flowering of love, its failure, and the poet's loss of joy and his longing for death. Clara saw greater possibilities for Robert's genius, however. She pressed him to widen his scope, to launch out in other, more ambitious genres — above all, the orchestra. Thus in January–February 1841 he composed the Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major, which was immediately performed under the composer Felix Mendelssohn at Leipzig; an Overture, Scherzo, and Finale (April–May); a Phantasie for piano and orchestra (May), which was expanded into the famous Piano Concerto in A Minor by the addition of two more movements in 1845; another symphony, in D minor (June–September); and sketches for an uncompleted third symphony, in C minor. Schumann later revised the symphony in D minor and published it as his Symphony No. 4 in D minor. His inspiration unspent, Schumann in 1842, while Clara was away on a concert tour (she was a much sought-after piano virtuoso), tried his hand at chamber music, producing three string quartets and three works with piano, of which the Piano Quintet in E-flat major is most often performed for the vitality and warmth of its Romantic ideas. In 1843, he turned his talents to choral music, working on a secular oratorio and on a setting of Goethe's Faust. Then, the year 1844 saw him lapse back into recurring fits of melancholia and depression after disappointments as a teacher and as a conductor. Schumann never again enjoyed another extended period of creativity as those first years of marriage to his beloved Clara. He continued to produce major works but at an erratic pace until his confinement, at his own request, to a mental institution in 1854. Of his four numbered symphonies, the Symphony No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 38, 'Spring' is Schumann's first completed orchestral score. Sketched out in late January 1841, the work was orchestrated in a fevered passion in February and premiered in March. According to Schumann the subtitle 'Spring' was inspired by his song Liebesfruehling (spring of love); Clara, on the other hand, wrote in her diary that the subtitle was inspired by the vernal poetry of Adolph Boettger. Whatever the case, the symphony is one of the brightest, most optimistic works from Schumann's catalog of large-scale works. As one writer so appropriately stated, "the whole work exhales the fresh, crisp, now exhilarating, and again balmy, breath of springtime." The first movement opens with an extended introduction in which the theme is intoned by the trumpets and horns. This theme is developed throughout the movement until the coda where a new, quieter, secondary theme is presented as a point of contrast. The second movement is a gentle, beautiful creation of the Romantic spirit, a contemplation of his soul, as Schumann suggested, when he was in the presence of his beloved Clara. A scherzo, the third movement, is composed quite broadly and offers two trios to offset the vibrancy of the rest of the section. The finale is one of the most buoyant, cheerful in all symphonic literature. It opens with an apparent independent theme which later comes to dominate the development of the movement and its coda.
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