Samuel Barber Dover Beach Professional Bond That

This results in unusually coherent performances of a movement from Ives Trio for violin, clarinet, and piano (there would have been room to include the whole thing, but Ehnes might have felt it would disturb the interwar focus), and Elliott Carters early Elegy.

His music is notable for its warmly Romantic lyricism, memorable melodies, and essentially conservative harmonic style, all of which put him at odds with the prevailing modernist aesthetic of his time.

Barber was a member of the first class at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Samuel Barber Dover Beach Professional Bond That

In 1928, the 17-year-old Gian Carlo Menotti came to study at Curtis, and the two formed a personal and professional bond that would last most of Barbers life.

As a student, Barber wrote several works that have entered the repertoire, including the song Dover Beach and Overture to the School for Scandal for orchestra.

A fine singer and pianist, as well as composer, much of his work throughout his career featured the voice.

After his graduation from Curtis, Barber wrote a string quartet, the second movement of which became his most famous work, Adagio for Strings.

Toscanini performed the Adagio with the NBC Symphony in 1938, and Barbers career was effectively launched.

His 1939 Violin Concerto further established his international reputation.

During the Second World War, Barber served in the Army Air Corps, where his duties included writing a symphony, his second.

Some of the most prestigious musicians in the world performed his music and became champions of his work, including Leontyne Price, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Eleanor Steber, Martina Arroyo, Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Toscanini, Eugene Ormandy, Bruno Walter, George Szell, and Serge Koussevitzky.

Barber received his first Pulitzer Prize for Vanessa, which had been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera, had its premiere in 1958, and was hailed as the first great American grand opera.

His 1962 Piano Concerto won the composer his second Pulitzer Prize.

The Metropolitan Opera commissioned Barber to write an opera to inaugurate its new opera house in Lincoln Center in 1966.

Antony and Cleopatra, based on Shakespeare with a libretto by Franco Zeffirelli, proved to be a failure due at least as much to flaws in the production as to the music.

Barber was so devastated by the intensity of the animosity toward his work that he never regained his confidence.

He was temperamentally disposed to melancholy, which turned into clinical depression, and although he continued to compose sporadically, he produced few further works of substance.

His Adagio for Strings has achieved iconic status as a profound and universally understood expression of grief, and remains a testament to Barbers ability to write music of the highest artistic standards that can also touch the heart.

Is there a Canadian perspective on American chamber music Maybe not, but this is an exceptionally well-chosen program, with Samuel Barbers String Quartet in B major, Op.

Adagio for strings, wrapping up a group of worthwile but less commonly performed pieces.

Especially interesting is the opener, Coplands Violin Sonata of 1942-1943, one of the few works that combined his modernist idiom of the 1920s and 1930s with his more popular style.

This piece, with its Stravinskian lines, suits Ehnes dry precision to a T.

Leonard Bernsteins Piano Trio of 1937, written when he was a 19-year-old student at Harvard and certainly drawing on either Copland or the composers who inspired him, makes an ideal foil to the Copland work.

The program is novel as well in terms of its forces, with a central violinist accompanied by varying forces drawn from a group of chamber players who know each other and have already played together.

Samuel Barber Dover Beach Pdf Download