12/13/2023 0 Comments Broken halo barber![]() ![]() Louis Symphony Orchestra, from 1991, is a symbol of this paucity.) So it’s especially disappointing that a new recording of the work by Keith Jarrett (on ECM) is so irremediably problematic. (In a way, Browning’s re-recording of the piece with Leonard Slatkin and the St. But the vibrancy of a work’s place in the repertory is reflected by the number of recordings it receives, and “name” soloists have not rushed to take the Concerto’s measure. This remains the benchmark interpretation. The Concerto’s discography began auspiciously, when Browning, two years after the première, set it down with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. ![]() Then think back to the man himself, as Apollonian a creature who ever stopped chatter on entering a room … yet with on occasion the cutting manners that only those born rich can get away with (or think they can).” For me, the Piano Concerto reflects this contrast all too perfectly. But Barber’s colleague Ned Rorem, in a perceptive article from 1982, challenged much of this as “conventional wisdom,” commenting on the “unpredictable” and “neurotic” qualities, as well as the essential refinement, of both the music and the man: “Is elegance indeed the term for the person, and is his product inevitably suave? Listen again to the First Symphony, frantic and-if you will-ill-bred throughout its nineteen minutes. Was the fifty-something composer worried about being old-fashioned? Or did he, under extreme pressure, reveal too much of himself? Barber’s music is, for many listeners, a watchword for elegance and precision. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the piece: it’s a little too nakedly emotional, too “performative,” a work that, unlike the Violin and Cello Concertos, needs an extraordinary interpretation to be truly convincing. The piece is in three movements, each of which seems to inhabit a different world: a fevered Tchaikovskian sonata, a dolefully elegant Canzone (an orchestration and expansion of a brief piece for flute and piano that Barber had written for a young lover), and a blunt but exciting finale in five-eight time, written under extreme deadline pressure, that is perhaps too obviously influenced by Gershwin and Prokofiev. Written for the opening festivities of Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall and premièred there by the soloist John Browning, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, its composition was especially protracted due to the death of Barber’s sister, with whom he was close. The Piano Concerto (1960-62), however, is still something of an exotic bird. Lisa Batiashvili, the prominent Georgian violinist, recently called it “the American violin concerto”-a piece that sums up a nation’s sensibility, the way Sibelius and Tchaikovsky and Elgar did in their violin concertos.īarber’s more astringent Cello Concerto (1945) is not quite as popular as the lushly melodic Violin Concerto, but it has become firmly ensconced in the canon, and has been recorded by such contemporary virtuosos as Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Isserlis, and Wendy Warner. ![]() This was partially because of the “CD boom,” but also because of an easy acceptance of the work’s obvious lyrical genius. ![]() But, by the mid-nineties, famous fiddlers were piling on, most notably Gil Shaham, Itzhak Perlman, and Joshua Bell. Before Barber’s death, in 1981, only one major soloist-Isaac Stern, with Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic-had recorded it. Certain orchestral works that were once thought to be automatic repertory-the First and Second Essays for Orchestra, and “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” a lambent scena for soprano and chamber orchestra that was famously recorded by Eleanor Steber and Leontyne Price-now have a lower profile. The Adagio for Strings has become the world’s official song of mourning “Summer Music” is the foundation of the American wind-quintet repertory the Piano Sonata ranks with those of Berg and Prokofiev as a twentieth-century classic and his songs, equal in stature to the best of Ives, are still performed. For Samuel Barber, America’s finest exponent of late Romanticism, the situation has evolved into something like invisible ubiquity. It is often said that it takes time for a composer’s music to be assessed after his demise, for its place in the repertory to be sorted out. ![]()
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