PROGRAM NOTES
November, 2009
An American Celebration

American Festival Overture (1939)
William Schuman
Born 4 August 1910 in New York
Died there 16 February 1992

            America’s most distinguished twentieth-century symphonist, William Schuman, was an unlikely candidate for that august designation. As a boy, Schuman had instruction in violin, but his youthful interest was in popular music and jazz. He appeared headed toward a career as a popular song writer, collaborating extensively with Frank Loesser (who went on to fame with such Broadway classics as The Most Happy Fella and Guys and Dolls).

            Schuman’s world changed at age nineteen when he heard the New York Philharmonic perform Schumann, Wagner, and Kodály. The next day, Schuman withdrew from NYU, quit his part-time job, and registered for  courses in harmony and counterpoint at Malkin Conservatory. He advanced rapidly, supporting himself through jazz band arrangements and work in his father’s printing business. In 1935 he earned a degree from Columbia, then studied privately with Roy Harris, then among America’s most prominent composers. 
            Schuman’s big break came in 1938, when Aaron Copland drew Schuman’s music to the attention of Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony and a great champion of new music. Koussevitzky became an enthusiastic advocate, conducting a performance of Schuman’s Second Symphony in 1939 and leading premières of four other Schuman compositions between 1939 and 1943.
            One of them was American Festival Overture, written as part of the BSO’s special concerts of American music. For the premiere on 6 October, 1939, Schuman wrote introductory comments. They are suffused with the nostalgia of an era long vanished in American culture.

The first three notes of this piece will be recognized by some listeners as the “call to play” of boyhood days. In New York City it is yelled on the syllables “Wee-Awk-Eee” to get the gang together for a game or festive occasion of some sort. This call very naturally suggested itself for a piece of music being composed for a very festive occasion. From this it should not be inferred that the Overture is program music. In fact, the idea for the music came to mind before the origin of the theme was recalled. The development of this bit of “folk material,” then, is along purely musical lines.

One does not have to have grown up in New York in the 1920s to respond to the spirit and energy of Schuman’s lively music. At once sassy, jazzy, and a tad edgy, it grabs you from the opening gesture and keeps a tight grip. 
            After the razzle-dazzle opening section, a slower, more lyrical passage ensues. Schuman then introduces a crisp fugue in the strings, based freely on the overture’s opening motive and theme. Woodwinds are the first to rejoin the fray, developing the material in layers of sound. A brass fanfare ushers in an extended passage for unison strings. Schuman reintroduces each section of the orchestra, building American Festival to an exciting close.
            Schuman served as president of the Juillliard School from 1945 to 1962, when he left to become the first president of the new Lincoln Center. His legacy – including bringing Juilliard, NYC Ballet, and NYC Opera to Lincoln Center as well as establishing the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center – remains legendary.
            The score calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, snare drum, cymbals, bass drum, and strings.

Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra
Benjamin Lees
Born 8 January 1924 in Harbin, China
A biography of Benjamin Lees appears earlier in this program.

            Modern oboe does not have a great deal of concerted literature. During the Baroque and Classical eras, oboe flourished as a solo instrument, but received far less attention from 19th- and 20th-century composers. Richard Strauss and the Englishmen Ralph Vaughan Williams and Eugene Goossens all wrote oboe concertos, but the list is brief. Consequently, Benjamin Lees’s 1963 Oboe Concerto is a significant contribution to the repertoire. The Richardson Symphony is particularly pleased to feature this work on tonight’s program, not only because the composer is present, but also because our own Maestro Brusilow played a seminal role in commissioning it.
            The friendship between Benjamin Lees and Anshel Brusilow extends back nearly half a century. They first met when Brusilow was Associate Concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra and the legendary George Szell had programmed one of Lees’s compositions. “Anshel and I hit it off very well,” Lees recalls.
            They stayed in touch after Brusilow became concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. At the time, Lees lived fairly close, in Hyattsville, Maryland. Brusilow arranged for the composer to meet Eugene Ormandy, who also liked Lees’s music and soon programmed one of his orchestral pieces in Philadelphia. “It was a great performance – not only because of Ormandy,” says Lees. “I loved the way Anshel could handle a section.”
            By this time, Brusilow had expanded his activities to conducting. His Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra comprised the cream of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s players. Early in 1963, he called Lees and asked, “Do you know who John de Lancie is?” Lees certainly did know. A virtuoso oboist, De Lancie had been stationed in Garmisch-Partenkirchen right after World War II ended. He sought out Richard Strauss and persuaded the German composer to write an oboe concerto. The piece remains a staple of the repertoire and is one of Strauss’s finest late works.   
            Brusilow suggested that Lees compose a concerto for de Lancie to play with the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra. Brusilow conducted the premiere at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music on 12 December, 1964.
            Lees remembers that performance – 44 years ago – as if it were yesterday. “At the last note, the audience went crazy. They just wouldn’t stop applauding. Anshel and John [de Lancie] took five, six curtain calls, and still they clapped. Anshel signaled the audience to be quiet and said, ‘Well, obviously you liked the piece. You want us to play it again?’ A chorus of ‘Yes!’ came from the audience – and they did!
            “Looking at the concerto today, and listening, I believe it is a good, solid work that represents what I was trying to do in the mid-1960s,” continues Lees.  “I didn’t want to write the 12-tone music that the rest of the establishment was composing. To me, that technique is like a puzzle that you solve, then it’s solved, period. It didn’t move me at all.”
            Instead, Lees pursued a musical language that is distinctly his. “People tell me, they’ll always recognize a piece of mine,” he says. His style is characterized by rhythmic intricacy. He avoids consecutive meters and regular pulses, preferring near constant metric change and asymmetrical, uneven rhythms. “Nicky Slonimsky [the musicologist, conductor, and composer Nicholas Slonimsky] once told me I had an erratic systolic/diastolic condition!” chuckles Lees. “It’s the only way I know to compose; I couldn’t write music any other way.”
            Soloist Kelli Short is a new fan. “I love this piece!” she says. “It’s quite different from other concertos I’ve played. He uses a lot of intervals within his melodies, as opposed to scale patterns, and his use of chromaticism is quite striking. But the big difference is the way he uses meter, and the complex rhythms that result. You’re counting like crazy – even during the rests!” She acknowledges that the solo part is extremely challenging, but says that Lees has written very well for oboe. “It lies well. The technical passages are difficult, but they’re comfortable.”
            The Lees concerto is cast in a straightforward three movements, arranged fast-slow-fast. Although there is no formal cadenza, the slow movement is quite rhapsodic, and functions as a quasi-cadenza, giving free rein to the soloist to explore long lines and a beautiful tone. “I find it very melodic,” says Ms. Short, “in spite of the fact that here, Lees defines his motives with rhythm rather than pitch. This movement demands almost perfect control of high register intervals, while asking the soloist to come in softly on low pitches.
            “The finale has a more détaché [detached] style, with lots of mixed meter and Lees’s characteristic chromaticism. At the very end, there’s a terrific, almost Gypsy-like feeling; ‘Bohemian’ is the word that comes to mind. This is a great piece!”
            The score calls for flute, piccolo, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, timpani, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, triangle, woodblocks, tambourine, solo oboe, and strings.

Concerto in C for Piano and Orchestra
Leroy Anderson
Born 29 June 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Died 18 May 1975 in Woodbury, Connecticut

            Yes, that Leroy Anderson. The same fellow who composed that holiday staple, Sleigh Ride, as well as such beloved pops perennials as The Typewriter, Fiddle-Faddle, Blue Tango, A Trumpeter’s Lullaby, and Bugler’s Holiday.
            In addition to his activities as a successful arranger and conductor, Anderson was a serious and capable composer. Miniatures were his specialty: three- and four-minute gems that could vie with the pop charts in their melodic appeal and rhythmic pizzazz. The Piano Concerto, which dates from 1953, was his only large-scale work. Eugene List and the Chicago Summer Symphony introduced it at Chicago’s Grant Park on 18 July, 1953, and performed it the following summer in Cleveland. Chicago audiences did not hear the concerto again until 1994, when this evening’s soloist, Jeffrey Biegel, reintroduced it.
            Anderson was dissatisfied with the concerto and withdrew it shortly after that second  performance, concerned that it did not have suitable gravitas. He was responding in part to critical reaction, which raised its eyebrows at the concerto’s unmistakable references to Rachmaninoff, Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, and some Hollywood composers of the golden age, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Miklos Rosza.  He always intended to revise the concerto, but never returned to it.
            Fourteen years after Anderson’s death, his widow released the Piano Concerto. In the two decades since then, the work has gained some advocates, including pianist Jeffrey Biegel, who has recorded it on the Naxos label, with Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
            While Anderson’s concerto is certainly not going to supplant the Tchaikovsky or Grieg piano concertos, it is a pleasant and tuneful work that is a refreshing change in the concert hall. We hear evidence of Anderson’s academic training in the fugal passage that dominates the development section in his opening movement. The Andante combines slow movement and scherzo, with a pitter-patter section that hints at the Anderson we love from pieces like Fiddle-Faddle and Chicken Reel.
            The finale is clearly indebted to Aaron Copland’s Rodeo in its opening, but Anderson soon reverts to what he does best: deliver catchy melodies, brilliantly orchestrated. The solo cadenza, placed near the end of this Allegro vivo, has some Lisztian fireworks that lead logically to a bright and happy close. Mr. Biegel notes that Anderson’s cadenza is reminiscent of the first movement in Edvard Grieg’s concerto.
            Anderson’s concerto is scored for two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombone, tuba, timpani, snare drum, maracas, claves, cow bell, solo piano, and strings.

Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin
Born 26 September, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York
Died 11 July, 1937 in Beverly Hills, California

            If tomorrow's newspaper were to announce a concert of American music, at which a committee of judges would decide what American music is, they would face a very lengthy evening, and the event would face skepticism, if not outright ridicule.  Such a newspaper article actually ran in January 1924 in the New York Tribune, announcing that Irving Berlin, Victor Herbert, and George Gershwin would introduce new compositions on the program.  The paper reported:

George Gershwin is at work on a jazz concerto, Irving Berlin is writing a syncopated tone poem, and Victor Herbert is working on an American Suite.

            It was news to Gershwin.  He had planned a collaboration with jazz band leader Paul Whiteman, whom he had met in 1922, but the details had not yet been determined. 

            Gershwin was 25, ambitious, talented, and unschooled.  Recognizing the commercial and professional potential of the American music event, he and Whiteman decided to make the new piece happen.  They agreed on a free-form composition for Whiteman's band featuring solo piano.  Gershwin sketched the score in a two-piano version that initially bore the title `American Rhapsody;' by the time of the premiere on 12 February, 1924, it had acquired its present title.  In a matter of weeks the piece was drafted.  Only a few pre-existing ideas found their way into the Rhapsody, but one was seminal:  the fabulous clarinet glissando that soars upward at the start, setting the whole sultry tone of the work, was already in Gershwin's sketchbooks.
            “It was the clarinetist’s personal way with the open, which Gershwin liked and demanded be done that way,” says Mr. Biegel. “The only reference to the trill followed by the scale leading to a high B-flat came a few years prior in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. Prokofiev himself played that concerto in New York in 1921. We know that Gershwin was an avid concert-goer in New York at that time. One has to wonder whether he heard Prokofiev’s performance.”
            Whiteman suggested that Ferde Grofé (1892-1972) orchestrate the Rhapsody.  Today, Grofé's reputation rests primarily on his splendid and colorful Grand Canyon Suite (1931).  In 1924, he was highly respected as a band composer and arranger, and he had already worked closely with Whiteman.  Gershwin had no background in orchestration (although Victor Herbert agreed to teach him shortly after this Rhapsody was completed).  Grofé's accomplishment was masterly, and contributed greatly to Rhapsody in Blue's success.  It also contributed to the confusion as to which is the ‘correct’ version.
            Multiple versions of the piece exist, in part because Gershwin was a gifted improviser who altered the work several times in order to suit a specific occasion – and because he wanted to accommodate his publishers in order to maximize the commercial potential of the piece.  Grofé worked from Gershwin’s two piano, four-hands ‘short score.’ At least two solo piano editions exist, plus the jazz band and concert orchestra arrangements. The situation is complicated by the fact that Gershwin’s editors made “corrections” and interpretive adjustments to the Rhapsody while preparing it for publication. Some of these changes were cuts, in one case of a whopping 80+ measures of music.
            Jeffrey Biegel plays those missing measures, which occur in the solo cadenza passages. He consulted Gershwin’s original 1924 manuscript at the Library of Congress with Gershwin scholar Alicia Zizzo. “She brought the new annotated Rhapsody to me for proofreading in 1997,” says Biegel. “This new solo version, published by Warner Brothers, includes the missing measures as well as original notations for dynamics, restoration of certain notes throughout the score, and phrase indications.” Thus the Rhapsody we hear this evening, beloved and familiar though it is, may startle you in a couple of places. Pay special attention during those piano solos, which bring us as close as we can get to the composer himself at the piano.
            Rhapsody in Blue has had an extraordinary impact on the history of American music and culture.  Although some critics objected to Gershwin's lack of traditional formal discipline, the audience loved the piece.  Everyone -- even the most disdainful critics -- acknowledged the freshness of the musical ideas.  Rhapsody in Blue positioned Gershwin as the great hope of American music. 
           
Gershwin later told his first biographer, Isaac Goldberg:

I heard it as a musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.

That description helps to explain the capriciousness and vivid snapshots in Gershwin's music.  The Rhapsody consists of two large sections that are peppered with improvisatory solo piano cadenzas.  Major rhythmic ideas dominate the first half, with extensive, non-traditional development.  The slow E-major section that contains the Rhapsody's most famous melody is the emotional heart of the work, but gives way to a showy and virtuosic close. 
            The traditional assessment of Rhapsody in Blue pegs it as popular music plunked squarely into the traditional concert hall, thereby imparting an unaccustomed aura of legitimacy to an American composer.  For the entire balance of his tragically short life, Gershwin craved acceptance from the world of art music.  Those who object to the meandering structure of this piece overlook that a Rhapsody is, by definition, a free fantasy, often of epic character.  On that level Gershwin succeeds brilliantly.  His incomparable piano writing retains its spontaneity and panache 70 years after he improvised so much of it on opening night. 
            Ferde Grofé's original score was for Whiteman's jazz band.  Two years later he did another scoring for full orchestra, calling for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, drums, solo piano, three saxophones, banjo, and strings. 

© 2008 Laurie Shulman