Composers Datebook American Public Media

Synopsis
In 1895, H.G. Wells published The Time Machine, a sci-fi classic that fired the imagination of Victorian readers. How fantastic it would be to be able to experience past, present, and future at will!Well, on today’s date in 2019, Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir invited the audience at that year’s Point Music Festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, to experience past, present and future all at once via the premiere of an orchestral work she titled Aiōn, after the ancient Greek god of time.The title is a metaphor, as Thorvaldsdottir put it, “connected to a number of broader ideas: How we relate to our lives, to the ecosystem, and to our place in the broader scheme of things, and how at any given moment we are connected both to the past and to the future, not just of our own lives but across — and beyond — generations.”At the 2019 premiere, dancers from the Iceland Dance Company moved in and around the players of the Gothenburg Symphony, creating striking visuals to accompany music one reviewer described as “weirdly unearthly, or awesome with oceanic majesty,” and another suggested that “[Aiōn] has the same archaic brutality as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977): Aiōn; Iceland Symphony Orchestra; Eva Ollikainen, conductor; innova 810 (original release) and Sono Luminus 92268

Synopsis
In 1805, a 56-year-old Italian man of letters immigrated to America.

Now, there wasn’t much call for Italian men of letters in America in those days, so over the next twenty years, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, he was, by turns, a grocer, distiller, seller of patent medicines and owner of a dry goods shop. Eventually he was offered an honorary — that is to say unsalaried — position as Professor of Italian at Columbia University.

In 1825, a troupe of Italian opera singers visited New York, and our Italian professor friend attended their performances. He introduced himself to the head of the troupe, famous singer Manuel García, who was astonished to learn the elderly Italian gentleman was none other than Lorenzo da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart’s operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni.

And so it came about, that on today’s date in 1826, the American premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was given in New York City, with García in the title role, in the presence of the man who had penned the opera’s libretto almost forty years earlier, a 77-year-old American citizen named Lorenzo da Ponte.

Music Played in Today's Program
Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) arr. Triebensee: Don Giovanni Suite; Amadeus Ensemble; Julius Rudel, conductor; MusicMasters 67118

Synopsis
The Cincinnati May Festival one of America’s oldest music festivals, with roots going back to the 1840s, and a formal launch dating from the 1870s. Over the course of its history, the Festival has performed great choral works of both European and American composers and commissioned and premiered many new works.

On today’s date in 1998, for example, James Conlon conducted the premiere performance of PraiseMaker, a new work for chorus and orchestra setting texts by poet and screenwriter Susan Kougell to music by American composer Alvin Singleton.

The title was inspired by the “praise singers” of Africa, who serve as the oral historians and celebrants of their community’s history and traditions. Susan Kougell’s text is a celebration of memory, expressed in simple, almost minimalist poetry.

“Her poetry is so straightforward; you don’t have to work to figure it out,” said Singleton. For his part, Singleton scored PraiseMaker for chorus and orchestra, with a percussion section that includes temple bells, tubular bells and vibraphone.

Reviewing a recording of PraiseMaker made by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, one critic wrote, “The score surprises you with its range of mood and even, in places, with its tenderness.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Alvin Singleton (b. 1940): PraiseMaker; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus; Robert Spano; Telarc 32630

Synopsis
Popular as the imaginary purple dinosaur Barney was with American kids in the 1990s, he got some competition from another dinosaur: a T. Rex named Sue. Sue was the nearly complete fossilized skeleton of a female T. Rex discovered in South Dakota, named after paleontologist Susan Hendrickson, the woman who found her.

Sue — the dinosaur, that is — ended up as a major display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

As part of the festivities surrounding the opening of the exhibit, on today’s date in 2000, the Chicago Chamber Musicians premiered Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto, a work by American composer Bruce Adolphe that told Sue’s story. It was designed for children, in the style of Peter and the Wolf, or, in this case, “Sue eats Peter, the wolf, and anything else she can catch.”

Adolphe was a good choice for the project for, in addition to being a composer, author, educator and performer, he admits to being a big kid at heart, eager to share his enthusiasm for music with audiences of all ages.

Music Played in Today's Program
Bruce Adolphe (b. 1955): Tyrannosaurus Sue: A Cretaceous Concerto; Chicago Chamber Musicians; Pollyrhythm Productions 30001

Synopsis
On today’s date in 1846, a Grand Festival Concert took place at New York’s Castle Garden, a popular spot for 19th century Manhattanites to enjoy fireworks, balloon rides, ice cream, and band concerts.

The band on this occasion consisted of some 400 instrumentalists and singers, including members of the four-year-old New York Philharmonic. They gave, for the first time in America, a complete performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, the Choral Symphony.

In attendance was a 26-year-old lawyer named George Templeton Strong, whose diary recorded his impressions:

“A splendid failure, I’m sorry to say,” he wrote. “The first movement was utterly barren … the minuet was well enough, quite brilliant in parts [and] the only point I found worth remembering in the whole piece … then came an andante (very tedious) ... then the fourth movement with its chorus, which was a bore …”

“[But] after all,” Strong concluded, “‘tisn’t fair to judge, hearing it under so many disadvantages.”

Fourteen years later, after a more advantageous Philharmonic performance in 1860, Strong changed his mind about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, and wrote, “Strange I should have missed its real character and overlooked so many great points when I heard it last. It is an immense, wonderful work.”

Music Played in Today's Program
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 9 (Choral); Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG 471 491

Synopsis
It’s ironic that Romantic composer Camille Saint-Saëns was more appreciated in England and the United States than in his native France.

And so, it’s perhaps not surprising that his Symphony No. 3 (Organ), premiered not in Paris, but at St. James’ Church in London on today’s date in 1886, with the composer conducting as well as performing as the organ soloist.

In addition to being a famous composer and brilliant pianist, Saint-Saëns was also an accomplished organist. In 1857, he became an organist at the famous Church of the Madeleine in Paris, and held that post for 20 years. Romantic composer Franz Liszt once hailed Saint-Saëns as the finest organist in the world. And so, again not surprisingly, Saint-Saëns dedicated the published score of the Organ Symphony to Liszt, who had died in Germany shortly after the London premiere.

What we do find surprising is that, for quite a few modern American audiences, this great and noble symphonic work calls to mind a clever little sheep-herding piglet named Babe, since one of the uplifting themes from the Organ Symphony was used, to great effect, in a popular 1995 film about talking barnyard animals.

Music Played in Today's Program
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Symphony No. 3 (Organ); Peter Hurford, organ; Montreal Symphony Orchestra; Charles Dutoit, conductor; London/Decca 410201