PROGRAM NOTES

Lyric for Strings

George Walker(1678 - 1741)

A string of firsts dominated George Walker’s long life and career. He was the first African American graduate of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music with a dual diploma in both piano and composition. In 1945, he was the first African American to debut with a solo recital at Manhattan’s Town Hall and the first to perform with the Philadelphia Orchestra as the soloist for Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. In 1950, he became the first African American artist to sign with a major artist management company, and he spent the next several years playing a string of high-profile concerts in nearly every European capital. In 1956, Walker became the first African American to graduate with a doctoral degree from the Eastman School of Music. In 1961, he was hired by Smith College where he became the first tenured African American faculty member in any department. And finally, in 1996, Walker was the first African American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in recognition of his composition Lilacs for voice and orchestra. At his death in August 2018, Walker was one of the most decorated and revered composers in American history.

Lyric for Strings was composed when Walker was only 24 years old, but it has remained one of his most enduring compositions. The sound, structure, and instrumentation of the piece are all clearly inspired by the famous Adagio for Strings composed by Walker’s Curtis Institute classmate Samuel Barber in 1936. Walker first conceived the music that became Lyric as a middle movement for his first string quartet and originally titled it “Lament” in dedication to his grandmother who died the year prior. The piece fluidly and dramatically alternates between lush harmonies and stark solo passages which showcase the range of sounds possible in the string orchestra. In an interview not long before his death, Walker commented: “I never played a string instrument, but somehow strings have always fascinated me.” In Lyric, we hear the beginning of this life-long fascination.

Cello Sonata in E minor, RV 40

Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741)

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was an influential composer during the baroque era. He was also a priest and a virtuosic violin player. Vivaldi was well recognized for writing church music, operas, concertos and chamber music. Vivaldi’s cello sonata in E minor is one out of 6 sonatas that survived out of the many 300 which were composed.

Vivaldi did not feel the need to actually publish any of his cello sonatas since the instrument did .not yet have enough players during the 17th and 18th century. These sonatas were published in Paris by C. N. Le Clerc in 1740. This is the first volume in a set of Vivaldi’s complete cello sonatas. Each sonata has four movements, following slow, fast, slow, fast. These works by Vivaldi represent the best cello works of the baroque era. These sonatas have been popular and frequently played among cellists since 1916.

Zigeunerweisen, (Gypsy Airs), C minor, Opus #20 Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908)

Sarasate was born in the small, northern Spanish city of Pamplona, famed for its running-of-the-bulls, featured in Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises. Père Sarasate was a military musician, and recognized Pablo’s prodigious talent when the child was five. Giving recitals by eight, Pablo was sent to Madrid for formal studies, before the Paris conservatoire, where he won their first prize aged 17. Over his career he was celebrated for brilliant technique, with many great pieces of the violin repertoire composed for him, including Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnol, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and concerti by Wieniawski and Saint-Saëns (as well as the latter’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso).

Sarasate composed some showpieces for his own performances, including the Carmen Fantasy on Bizet’s themes and this Zigeunerweisen (or ‘Gypsy Airs’). Gypsy was not then considered the pejorative term for the stateless European Roma people that it is now. Its first main section is in C minor, and is at turns heroic, then mournful. In a kind of fantasy form, it has sections of declamation by the solo violin, and its mournful themes are loosely based on Roma melodies. The final section (in the brighter key of A minor), is in a virtuosic 2/4 Allegro molto vivace czardas, with technical fireworks of double-stops fast runs.

Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin (1898 - 1937)

Rhapsody in Blue occupies a special place in American music: it introduced jazz to classical concert audiences, and simultaneously made an instant star of its composer. From its instantly recognizable opening whine in the clarinet through its brilliant finale, Rhapsody in Blue epitomizes the Gershwin sound and instantly transformed the 25-year-old songwriter from Tin Pan Alley into a composer of “serious” music.

The story of how Rhapsody in Blue came about is as captivating as the music itself. On January 4, 1924, Ira Gershwin showed George a news report in the New York Tribune about a concert put together by jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman that would endeavor to trace the history of jazz (Whiteman gave this concert a rather grandiose title, “An Experiment in Modern Music.”) The report concluded with a brief announcement: “George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto.” This was certainly news to Gershwin, who was then in rehearsals for a Broadway show, Sweet Little Devil. Gershwin contacted Whiteman to refute the Tribune article, but Whiteman eventually talked Gershwin into taking the job. Whiteman also sweetened the deal by offering to have Ferde Grofé orchestrate Gershwin’s music for orchestra. Gershwin completed Rhapsody in Blue in three weeks.

Gershwin’s phenomenal talent as a pianist wowed the audience as much as the novelty of jazz stylings in a “classical” piece of music. The original opening clarinet solo, written by Gershwin, got its trademark jazzy glissando from Whiteman’s clarinetist Ross Gorman. This opening unleashes a floodgate of colorful ideas, which blend seamlessly into one another. The pulsing syncopated rhythms and showy music later give way to a warm, expansive melody Sergei Rachmaninoff could have written.

Suite from Appalachian Spring

Aaron Copland (1898 - 1937)

Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring began as a ballet commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation. The eponymous foundation was a collaboration with the Library of Congress, and their intention was to promote the composition and performance of modern chamber music. Elizabeth Coolidge stated, “My plea for modern music is not that we should like it, nor necessarily that we should even understand it, but that we should exhibit it as a significant human document.” If you were to list all of the influential 20th century composers you could think of, you would find that most of those on your list have works commissioned by the E.S.P. Foundation.

Appalachian Spring afforded two titans of the mid-century American fine arts scene a chance to collaborate – Copland, and the ground-breaking modern dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham. Copland and Graham had developed a friendship a decade earlier, but this was the first opportunity for them to fuse their collective genius. Martha Graham choreographed the ballet, as well as danced the lead role in the work’s premiere on October 30, 1944. Since this was a chamber music series, the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress was quite small; thus, the original music for the ballet was not for full orchestra, but a complement of merely thirteen instruments. The orchestral version was arranged by Copland soon after the ballet’s premiere and first performed in 1945 by the New York Philharmonic.

The ballet used the working title of Ballet for Martha (this still remains as the ballet’s subtitle) during most of its composition, but soon before the premiere Martha Graham settled on Appalachian Spring, a phrase she had found in a poem by American author, Hart Crane. Copland and Graham fully admitted that the title had no relationship to the story that the ballet told, and the phrase from the poem referred not to the season, but to a water source. Copland wrote this synopsis of the ballet’s story:

A pioneer celebration in spring around a newly built farmhouse in the Pennsylvania hills in the early part of the last [19th] century. The bride-to-be and the young farmer-husband enact the emotions, joyful and apprehensive, which their new domestic partnership invites. An older neighbor suggests now and then the rocky confidence of experience. A revivalist [preacher] and his followers remind the new householders of the strange and terrible aspects of human fate. At the end the couple are left quiet and strong in their new house.

Appalachian Spring is Copland’s third ballet from his Americana period, the others being Billy the Kid and Rodeo. It contains his trademark American style, and its most famous section, the variations on the Shaker folk tune “Simple Gifts.” Copland conceded this inclusion was less than historically accurate, as there had never been a Shaker settlement in Pennsylvania.