THE BLUE ROOM (VIOLIN CONCERTO) – Reena Esmail
BORN: 1983, Chicago, IL
PREMIERE: This piece was commissioned by Robert Bolyard, conductor. It was premiered on April 14th, 2007 at Battell Chapel, Yale University with violin soloist Alexander Woods.
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpetss, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion, harp and strings
PROGAM NOTES: Two years before I wrote The Blue Room, I had sketched out two themes that I wanted to turn into a violin concerto. It was only years later, when I was asked by conductor Robert Bolyard to write a piece for his graduation recital from Yale in 2007, that the piece actually began to take shape.
The Blue Room is in two movements. The first movement contains the two themes from the initial sketch, essentially recreating a previous vision of the piece, and the second movement was my response to that vision. The title was taken from a poem called White Key, by the Poet Laureate of California, Carol Muske (the text of which I later set for choir). The line reads, “…like the light on the bed / In the blue room where I last held you.” The poem is such a poignant expression of love and loss and has resonated with me for years, since the day I first heard it. – program notes by Reena Esmail
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CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA, OP. 14 – Samuel Barber
BORN: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania
DIED: January 23, 1981, in New York City
COMPOSED: Summer 1939 through July 1940; revised in November 1948
WORLD PREMIERE: February 7, 1941, in Philadelphia, by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, conductor, Albert Spalding, solois. The revised version was introduced January 7, 1949 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky, conductor, Ruth Posselt, soloist,
INSTRUMENTATION: two flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, and strings, in addition to the solo violin.
PROGRAM NOTES: When the Curtis Institute of Music opened its doors to students on October 1, 1924, Samuel Barber was second in line. It was a violinist who managed to pass through the portal before him: Max Aronoff, a future member of the Curtis String Quartet, the ensemble for which Barber would compose (a dozen years later) his String Quartet with its famous slow movement, often heard in its string orchestra setting as his Adagio for Strings. Barber’s musical gifts had been apparent from an early age, and he was fortunate to have been born into a family that was attuned to recognize them. Although his parents were not professional musicians, his aunt, the contraltoLouise Homer, was a mainstay at The Metropolitan Opera, and her husband, Sidney Homer, was well known as a composer of light Lieder of the parlor-song sort.
At Curtis Barber studied piano (with Isabelle Vengerova), composition (with Rosario Scalero), and voice (with the baritone Emilio de Gogorza, who was a colleague of Barber’s aunt at The Met). While still a student there he produced several works that have entered the repertoire, including DoverBeach for baritone and string quartet (which he sang in its first commercial recording) and the orchestral Overture to The School for Scandal and Music for a Scene from Shelley. Thanks to a Rome Prize, he spent 1935–37 at the American Academy in that city completing, among other pieces, his Symphony in One Movement; it quickly received high-profile performances in Rome, Cleveland, and New York, as well as in the opening concert of the 1937 Salzburg Festival. The following year his reputation was cemented when Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony broadcast his Essay No. 1 and the Adagio for Strings; the latter would become one of the most recognized compositions of the century. Barber was famous, and he was not yet 30 years old.
In 1939 he returned to Curtis, this time as composition professor, and he maintained that position until 1942, when he traded his affiliation there for one with the U.S. Army Air Forces. During this period Barber composed his Violin Concerto, which also grew out of a Curtis connection. Samuel Fels, of Fels Naptha soap fame, served on the school’s board of directors, and in early 1939 he offered Barber a $1,000 commission to write a violin concerto for Iso Briselli, a Curtis violin student he was interested in assisting. Barber accepted. He got to work on the piece that summer while staying in SilsMaria, Switzerland. He moved on to Paris, where he hoped to complete the finale, but with the outbreak of war in August, Barber returned home to continue working on his concerto in America.
The finale was in part problematic because the violinist for whom the concerto was commissioned (and his violin coach) expressed displeasure with it. After provisional read throughs, including by the respected violinist Oscar Shumsky, Barber showed his concerto to the eminent Albert Spalding, who was reputedly on the lookout for an American piece to add to his concerto repertoire. Spalding signed on instantly, and it was he who introduced the work, with Eugene Ormandy conducting The Philadelphia Orchestra, following its extended gestation. — program notes by The New York Philharmonic
Aubree Oliverson, Violin
Praised for her evocative lyricism and joyful, genuine approach, young American violinist Aubree Oliverson is proving to be one of the most compelling artists of her generation, distinguishing herself with clear, honest, and colorful interpretations. Her performances have been described by the Miami New Times as “powerful… brimming with confidence and joy” and “masterful” by the San Diego Story. Aubree won the ‘2021 Special Prize of Merit’ for violin at the prestigious Verbier Festival Academy in Switzerland, a National YoungArts Foundation award, was honored as a United States Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and was selected for the Dorothy DeLay Fellowship and concerto performance at the Aspen Music Festival. She made her solo debut with the Utah Symphony at age eleven, her Carnegie Hall Weill Hall recital debut at age twelve as winner of the American Protégé International Strings Competition, and has been featured on NPR’s hit radio show From The Top several times.
Aubree graduated from the Colburn Music Academy in Los Angeles in 2016 and is a former student of Debbie Moench, Eugene Watanabe, Danielle Belen, and Boris Kuschnir at the Musik und Kunst Privatuniversität der Stadt Wien. She currently studies with Robert Lipsett, the Jascha Heifetz Distinguished Violin Chair at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles. Ms. Oliverson plays on a 1743 Sanctus Seraphin violin thanks to the generous loan of Dr. James Stewart.
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OVERTURE TO CANDID – Leonard Bernstein
BORN: August 25, 1918. Lawrence, Massachusetts
DIED: October 14, 1990. New York City
COMPOSED: 1956
INSTRUMENTATION: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings
PROGRAM NOTES: The troubles and adventures of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide are nearly as varied and pitiable as those of Voltaire’s optimistic hero. Lillian Hellman may have suggested collaborating on Candide to Bernstein as early as 1950, a time when the composer was much involved in music theater projects. Trouble in Tahiti premiered in 1951 and Wonderful Town opened in 1953. (This was also the period when West Side Story was gestating.) In 1954 Hellman switched her attention – also diverted by a subpoena from the House Un- American Activities Committee – to The Lark, her adaptation of a play by Jean Anouilh. Bernstein wrote incidental music for it, and the following year The Lark opened on Broadway, where it ran for 229 performances.
Thoroughly enthused about Candide, Bernstein persuaded Hellman to adapt it as a neo-Classical operetta, rather than the play with incidental music that she had envisioned. After a few out-of-town performances, the new work opened in New York City December 1, 1956. It closed less than three months later, after 73 performances. For a contemporary opera, that would have been a phenomenal run – for a Broadway show, it was a flop, for which Hellman’s book received most of the blame.
Bernstein quickly moved on to other things, such as West Side Story and the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic. Candide had a few different performances in the 1950s and ’60s, and a new complete production in 1971 (with some new music by Bernstein), which opened in San Francisco and reached Los Angeles and Washington DC, but not New York. In 1973, however, it got a complete makeover, with Bernstein’s permission but not his participation.
Harold Prince directed a cut-down and rearranged one-act version, with new orchestrations and a new book, for which Hugh Wheeler won a Tony Award. This version was then expanded back into two acts, with much of the cut music restored (although also reordered) in orchestrations by John Mauceri. It was premiered by New York City Opera in 1982. Mauceri then began yet another version for Scottish Opera, this time with Bernstein’s help. They restored much of the original order, with new work on the book (and connecting narrations) by John Wells (Wheeler having died). This was first performed in 1988, and provided the basis for the 1989 concert version that Bernstein conducted and recorded as his final thoughts on the work.
Whatever the travails of Candide as a whole, its overture has become a hugely popular concert classic. Though it does touch on some of the show’s great tunes, the dashing overture is also a shapely sonata form with points of canonic imitation and a sparkling Rossini crescendo to close. — program notes by John Henken
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SYMPHONIC DANCES FROM WEST SIDE STORY – Leonard Bernstein
COMPOSED: The musical West Side Story was composed principally from autumn 1955 through summer 1957, and Bernstein assembled portions of the score into the Symphonic Dances in early 1961, overseeing the orchestration for this version as it was carried out by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. The Symphonic Dances are dedicated “To Sid Ramin, in friendship”
WORLD PREMIERE: The musical was premiered on August 19, 1957, at the National Theatre in Washington, DC; the Symphonic Dances were first performed on February 13, 1961, with Lukas Foss conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, in a pension fund gala concert titled “A Valentine for Leonard Bernstein”.
INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes and piccolo, 2 oboes and English horn, 2 clarinets plus E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons and contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bongos, suspended cymbal, cymbals, tenor drum, snare drum, bass drum, four pitched drums, xylophone, trap set, three cowbells, timbales, conga drum, police whistle, vibraphone, chime, woodblock, triangle, glockenspiel, tom-tom, guiro, maracas, finger cymbals, tambourine, harp, piano, celesta, and strings
THE BACKSTORY: Throughout his career, Leonard Bernstein struggled to balance the competing demands of his multifarious gifts as a composer, conductor, pianist, media personality, and all-round celebrity. Time for composition was potentially the most endangered in the mix that packed his date-book, and he had to take special care to see that it didn’t get entirely crowded out by his day-to-day obligations as a performer. That he left as large an oeuvre as he did is a testament to his astonishing musical fluency and to his embrace of a wide variety of American styles.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Bernstein was schooled at Harvard (where he graduated in 1939) and, following advanced work at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, returned to his home state. There he worked at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and was taken under the wing of Serge Koussevitzky, musical director of the Boston Symphony. In 1943, he moved to New York, the city with which he would become most famously associated. While working as assistant conductor to Arthur Rodzinski, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein stepped in at short notice—on November 14, 1943—to substitute for an ailing conductor (Bruno Walter) at a Philharmonic concert and, as they say, the rest is history. In 1958, he began a decade-long tenure as that orchestra’s music director.
By that time, he was already making a mark as the first conductor to truly harness the power of the rapidly developing medium of television. A generation of music lovers received some of their earliest indoctrination through his Young People’s Concerts at the New York Philharmonic, a series of fifty-three broadcasts that began in his first season with the New York Philharmonic. (He continued to oversee the series until he handed it off in 1972 to Michael Tilson Thomas, then the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic and principal guest conductor of the Boston Symphony.) But Bernstein had already established a presence on television several years before he inaugurated the Young People’s Concerts. In November 1954, he presented his first special on Omnibus, a Sunday-night show that ran from 1952 through 1961, originally on the CBS network, then on ABC and finally NBC. Sponsored by the Ford Foundation and hosted by Alistair Cooke, it exemplified the medium’s highest aspirations, purveying insightful programming on topics in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Bernstein presented seven Omnibus installments on a variety of musical topics. His first, using Beethoven’s sketches for his Fifth Symphony to explore the composer’s decision-making process, became a classic. Bernstein included its script in his 1959 essay collection The Joy of Music, along with those of his other Omnibus topics, which included American musical theater, the innovations of Stravinsky, and the brilliance of Bach.
THE MUSIC : As early as 1949, Bernstein and his friends Jerome Robbins (the choreographer) and Arthur Laurents (the librettist) batted around the idea of creating a musical retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set amid the tensions of rival social groups in modern New York City. The project took a long time to find its eventual form. An early version tentatively titled East Side Story, involving the doomed love affair between a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy on New York’s Lower East Side, was altered to reflect the more up-to-date social issue of gang conflict. Much of the composition was carried out more-or-less concurrently with Bernstein’s work on his opera Candide, with music flowing in both directions between the two scores.
As the production of West Side Story moved into the home stretch it was beset with several crises. Cheryl Crawford, the producer, got cold feet about what she termed “a show full of hatefulness and ugliness,” but her partner Roger Stevens jumped in to ensure that the project would continue; and the young Stephen Sondheim, who had been brought on as lyricist, snagged the interest of his friend Harold Prince to be involved as a producer. To everyone’s amazement, Robbins announced at the eleventh hour that he would rather spend his time directing than choreographing the show, thereby jeopardizing Prince’s participation; in the end, Robbins was persuaded to stay on as choreographer and was granted an unusually long rehearsal period as an inducement.
On August 19, 1957, West Side Story opened in a try-out run in Washington, DC, with a host of government luminaries in attendance. (During the intermission, Bernstein ran into Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in tears.) It proved a very firm hit when it reached Broadway, running for 772 performances, just short of two years. After that it embarked on a national tour and eventually made its way back to New York in 1960 for another 253 performances, after which it was released as a feature film in 1961. “The radioactive fallout from West Side Story must still be descending on Broadway this morning,” wrote Walter Kerr, critic of the Herald Tribune, in the wake of the opening in New York, and one might argue that his assumption remains true six decades later. West Side Story stands as an essential, influential chapter in the history of American theater, and its engrossing tale of young love against a background of spectacularly choreographed gang warfare has found a place at the core of Americans’ common culture.
In the opening weeks of 1961, Bernstein revisited his score for West Side Story and extracted nine sections to assemble into what he called the Symphonic Dances. The impetus was a gala fundraising concert for the New York Philharmonic’s pension fund, to be held the evening before Valentine’s Day. The event was styled as an overt love-fest, celebrating not only his involvement with the orchestra up to that time but also the fact that he had agreed that month to a new contract that would ensure his presence for another seven years. In the interest of efficiency, Bernstein’s colleagues Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, who had just completed the orchestration of West Side Story for its film version, suggested appropriate sections of the score to Bernstein, who placed them not in the order in which they occur in the musical but instead in a new, uninterrupted sequence derived from a strictly musical rationale. Two of the most popular favorites of the musical’s songs are found in the pages of the Symphonic Dances: “Somewhere” and “Maria” (in the Cha-Cha section), though not the also-beloved “America,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “I Feel Pretty,” or “Tonight.”
The late Jack Gottlieb, who for many years served as Bernstein’s amanuensis, provided this summary of the sections of the Symphonic Dances and how they relate to the action in the well-known musical:
Prologue: The growing rivalry between two teenage gangs, the Jets and Sharks.
“Somewhere”: In a visionary dance sequence, the two gangs are united in friendship.
Scherzo: In the same dream, they break through the city walls, and suddenly find themselves in a world of space, air and sun.
Mambo: Reality again; competitive dance between the gangs.
Cha-Cha: The star-crossed lovers see each other for the first time and dance together.
Meeting Scene: Music accompanies their first spoken words.
“Cool” Fugue: An elaborate dance sequence in which the Jets practice controlling their hostility.
Rumble: Climactic gang battle during which the two gang leaders are killed.
Finale: Love music developing into a processional, which recalls, in tragic reality, the vision of “Somewhere.”
– program notes by James M. Keller