John Corigliano's name has become particularly well-known in recent years since he won an Academy Award in 2000 for his score for The Red Violin. This is only one of his best-known compositions in a creative career that has been eclectic in the best sense of the word. He was commissioned to compose The Ghosts of Versailles by the Metropolitan Opera of New York (premiered in December 1991), their first commission since 1967. His Symphony No. 1, "Of Rage and Remembrance," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered in 1989, is remarkable for its technical brilliance and emotional intensity. The Symphony No. 3, "Circus Maximus" for wind ensemble, was given its first performances in Austin and Carnegie Hall by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble.
Corigliano writes regarding the "Gazebo Dances": "Gazebo Dances" was originally written as a set of four-hand piano pieces dedicated to certain of my pianist friends. I later arranged the suite for orchestra and for concert band, and it is from the latter version that the title is drawn. The title comes from the gazebo-like band stands found in town squares across rural America where town bands played their concerts on summer evenings. The sense of summer joy and exuberance form the inspiration for this suite. The Overture, a modern, Rossini-like movement, is followed by a peg-legged Waltz in which the um-pah-pah sometimes lacks a pah. Then comes a long-lined Adagio and a final, spirited Tarantella, which alternates movements of great pseudo-seriousness with bouncing spirit.
Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky
b. 7 May 1840 in Vyatka province, Russia; d. 6 November 1893 in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 23; first public performance 25 October 1875 in Boston (conducted by Hans von Bülow), age 35.
On Christmas Eve 1874 at the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky met with Nikolai Rubinstein--director of the Conservatory, mentor, and personal friend--and Nikolai Hubert, another friend and professor of music theory. Tchaikovsky, professor of composition, had completed his Piano Concerto No. 1 on 21 December, and Rubinstein and Hubert were the first "outsiders" to hear it.
We really have no idea how this performance went, but it couldn't have been very good, since Tchaikovsky wasn't a professional pianist. However it went, Rubinstein (with Hubert dutifully following Rubinstein's lead) sat in icy silence at the end of the first movement. At the very end, Rubinstein finally began to speak and let loose with a torrent of abuse about the piece. He declared the solo part "impossible to play, that the passages were hackneyed, clumsy, and so awkward that there was no way even to correct them, that as a composition it was bad, vulgar" (translation from Alexander Poznansky's biography). Perhaps two or three pages were salvageable. Tchaikovsky, insulted and deeply hurt, left without another word.
Later that same evening, Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky had another conversation about the concerto. Rubinstein considered it simply impossible to play, but if Tchaikovsky would make revisions to it, he would consider performing it. Pyotr Ilych defiantly answered, "I will not change a single note and will publish it exactly as it is now!"
The only account of this event is Tchaikovsky's own, written three years later in a letter to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. While we must take care not to assume that this document is scientifically accurate, we need not question the emotional wound that Tchaikovsky sustained. Whether the composer, still unsure of himself at age 34, was correct in how he received Nikolai Rubinstein's tirade, it appears that he took it as a personal rejection as well as the artistic equivalent of a whipping.
We chuckle today at Nikolai Rubinstein's high and mighty pronouncement about the concerto. The premiere in Boston was a big success, and succeeding performances led by Bülow on a tour of the U.S. established the work's reputation firmly in this country. The first Russian performance was in early November in St. Petersburg with pianist Gustav Kross. The composer wrote that Kross reduced the work to "atrocious cacophony." But three weeks later, on 21 November, Sergei Taneyev, nineteen years old and a recently graduated composition student of Tchaikovsky, had brilliant success with it in Moscow. The irony is that the conductor was Nikolai Rubinstein, who in time became a noted interpreter of the concerto.
The First Piano Concerto is so well known that most people, including many professional musicians, have no idea that Tchaikovsky composed three piano concertos. The extensive introduction to the first movement has a wide-arching melody that was known for some time in the United States as a popular song. The first movement as a whole, a substantial sonata form, conforms to the Classical model, taking up more than half of the playing time of the entire work. The second movement, in its outer portions a slow movement, in its center is a lightning-paced scherzo. The last movement is spirited, but it features a second tune whose eloquence forms an appropriate counterweight to the concerto's opening.
Lukas Foss
b. 15 August 1922 in Berlin, Germany.
Salomon Rossi Suite; composed 1975, age 53.
Lukas Foss's education began in Berlin. He emigrated with his family first to Paris in 1933, then to the United States in 1937, where, at the age of 15, he continued musical studies at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He has been a citizen of the United States since 1942. His career as a composer has been combined with a noted career as a conductor and pianist, all the while supporting new music in its broadest sense.
Salomon Rossi was a composer and rabbi in Mantua. His exact dates are unknown; he lived from about 1570 to about 1630, calling himself "L'Ebreo" (the Hebrew). His family believed that their ancestors were taken to Rome as prisoners under the emperors Titus and Vespasian. Hired in 1587 as a musician at the court of Duke Vincenze I of Mantua, his standing there was such that he was allowed to appear in public without the yellow badge that Mantuan Jews were required to wear. He was crucial in introducing polyphonic music to the synagogues around Mantua.
The "Salomon Rossi Suite" takes as its model Igor Stravinsky's "Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD Annum," in which Stravinsky took three madrigals by Gesualdo and "recomposed" them without changing any of the pitch content. Foss here takes a similar approach with six of Rossi's pieces, using a special instrumentation for each movement.
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
b. 3 February 1809 in Hamburg, Germany; d. 4 November 1847 in Leipzig, Germany.
Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 "Italian"; first performance 13 May 1833 in London, age 24.
The "Italian" Symphony is one of the most popular of Mendelssohn's compositions that he did not release for publication during his lifetime. Just as the "Scottish" Symphony began stirring in its composer's brain during a visit to Scotland in 1829, there was an extended tour of Italy by the end of which a symphony was taking shape. This "grand tour" marking Felix's arrival in adulthood was primarily spent in Italy, which was the twenty-one-year-old's place of residence from October 1830 to July of the following summer. More than half of his time was spent in Rome. In March he was at work on the "Scottish" Symphony when spring arrived in Rome. Mendelssohn was overwhelmed and had drafts for three movements of the "Italian" before departing Rome.
Mendelssohn's major compositions had long gestation periods, and Felix was not highly communicative about his compositional process. Just about all we know is that in the spring of 1833, during one of Mendelssohn's numerous visits to England, he brought his "Italian" Symphony to some kind of finished form and conducted its first performance in London. It was well received, but, as related by biographer R. Larry Todd, Mendelssohn wanted to work on it some more. He left the manuscript with the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles, who at that time was living and working in London and who frequently played host to Mendelssohn.
Upon returning to Germany, Mendelssohn began by writing out a new score of the last three movements from memory. Apparently it was the first movement that the composer intended to revise, but Todd tells us that Mendelssohn gave it up--there is no indication why--and put the whole thing away. That was the last that we know of Mendelssohn working on it. As for the score left in London with Moscheles, it served on three additional occasions for performances conducted by Moscheles and Cipriani Potter in 1834, 1837, and 1838.
The "Italian" Symphony is constantly delightful; its artistic reach never exceeds its grasp. Scholars have debated whether Mendelssohn used folk melodies in the second and fourth movements, but no originals have ever been identified. The folk element is strongest in the breathtaking fourth movement, with two melodies sounding borrowed: the first in the woodwinds in thirds, the second introduced later in the strings and featuring scalar motion. There has been additional discussion about whether this movement is a saltarello or tarantella, but it is nearly impossible to make any meaningful distinction between the dance types.
