Faculty Recital Series
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Jaclyn Hartenberger Ballet (later American Ballet Theatre) and Program Notes choreographer George Balanchine. After Faculty Recital Series completing the score the composer arrived Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) in New York early in the following year to assist in supervising rehearsals, where- Monday Concerto in E-flat Major, Dumbarton upon he was immediately commissioned to Oaks (1937) write this very different – intimate, but no November 13 2017 less witty – score for Mr. and Mrs. Robert 8:00 p.m. “My Concerto in E-flat . was begun almost Woods Bliss to celebrate their 30th wedding immediately upon my return to Europe af- anniversary. ter Jeux de cartes, in the spring of 1937. I had moved from Paris to Annemasse in the Robert Woods Bliss held various diplomatic Haute Savoie to be near my daughter Mika positions, including being ambassador to conductor Jaclyn Hartenberger [Ludmila] who, mortally ill with tubercu- Sweden and to Argentina. His wife, Mil- losis, was confined to a sanatorium there. dred, was a knowledgeable art collector, soprano Amy Petrongelli Annemasse is near Geneva, and [conduc- most notably of pre-Columbian sculpture, tor] Ernest Ansermet was therefore a neigh- and their treasures were housed in their bor and also a helpful friend at this, perhaps early 19th-century mansion, Dumbarton the most difficult time of my life. [Ludmila Oaks, in the Georgetown section of Wash- ington, DC. The house, its contents, and the PROGRAM died in 1938.] I played Bach regularly dur- ing the composition of the Concerto, and gardens were left by the Blisses in 1940 to was greatly attracted to the Brandenburg Harvard University. In 1944, Dumbarton Oaks hosted the conference that would lay Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Concerto in E-flat Major, Concertos. Whether or not the first theme of my [first] movement is a conscious borrow- the groundwork for the United Nations; to- Dumbarton Oaks (1937) ing from the third Brandenburg, however, I day, the mansion is a research center for the I. Tempo giusto do not know.” – Igor Stravinsky study of Byzantine and pre-Columbian art. II. Allegretto Stravinsky was to have conducted the pre- III. Con moto Stravinsky’s close association with the Unit- ed States began in 1936, when he wrote Jeux miere of the Concerto, but his own bout of tu- de cartes (Card Game) for the new American berculosis kept him from traveling from Paris. Samuel Barber (1910 -1981) Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Op. 24 (1947) Amy Petrongelli, Soprano Aaron Copland (1900 -1990) Appalachian Spring Suite (Ballet for Martha) (1943-1944) RAMSEY CONCERT HALL 4 Performance UGA November 2017 January 2018 5 Jaclyn Hartenberger It was thus under his friend Nadia Bou- before the death of his father. (It would later my mother, my good father, oh, remember langer that the premiere took place at appear as the preface to his posthumously them kindly in their time of trouble; and in Dumbarton Oaks on May 8, 1938. published novel A Death in the Family.) Bar- the hour of their taking away.” with subtly ber’s choice of text seems to have been deeply agitated music. The music of the introduc- The three movements are played without personal – both his father and his aunt were tion reappears once more for the final sec- pause. The first is a bubbly affair, mostly in gravely ill as he was composing it, and both tion – the sleepy child is put to bed, but the 16th notes, with the solo winds (all the in- died within a few months. text ends with the uneasy “but will not ever strumentalists are in essence soloists) bound- tell me who I am” before a hushed ending. ing and bouncing everywhichwhere. The The poem’s nostalgia, wistfulness, and opening theme of Bach’s Third Brandenburg underlying sadness resonated strongly – Program Note by J. Michael Allsen is concealed – in plain sight, so to speak – in as Barber later recalled: “Agee’s poem was the viola part of the opening measure but be- vivid and moved me deeply, and my musical Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Library of Congress (with Graham herself comes more obvious as the movement pro- response that summer of 1947 was immedi- as the Bride, Erick Hawkins as the Hus- gresses. Eight measures of quiet chords join ate and intense. I think I must have com- Appalachian Spring Suite (Ballet bandman, and Merce Cunningham as the the first movement to the second, a lyrical posed Knoxville within a few days. .You Revivalist). In the spring of 1945, he ar- ) (1943-1944) Allegretto “of an intense purity of line where see, it expresses a child’s feelings of loneli- for Martha ranged a suite from the ballet for full or- the different instrumental strands . stand ness, wonder and lack of identity in that Some of Copland’s most populist “Ameri- chestra, which won the Pulitzer Prize for out with startling three-dimensional clarity marginal world between twilight and sleep.” music that year. in their atmosphere of enveloping silence,” can” music was produced during the De- pression and war years, including the in the words of Stravinsky biographer Eric The style of Agee’s writing in Knoxville: The Suite is cast in eight uninterrupted sec- Walter White. The Italian composer Alfredo Summer of 1915 was deliberately spontane- overtly patriotic morale boosters Lin- coln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common tions. It opens with a slowly blooming in- Casella was convinced that Stravinsky had ous. In the program note to the premiere, troduction, after which, unison strings burst been inspired in this movement by a phrase he described his process: “I was greatly in- Man. Appalachian Spring capped a trilogy of dance interpretations of the American into in an elated Allegro. The scenes that fol- from the first act of Verdi’s Falstaff. Stravin- terested in improvisatory writing, as against low move from a warm, gentle duet for the sky’s response was, presumably, a shrug of carefully composed, multiple-draft writing: frontier spirit, beginning with Billy the Kid (1938) and continuing with Rodeo (1942). pioneering couple, through fleetly fiddling the shoulders. This movement is joined to its i.e., with a kind of parallel to improvisation dances for a revivalist preacher and his fol- successor by slow, quiet chords, leading into in jazz, to a certain kind of ‘genuine’ lyric This was music that created the concert and theater equivalent of the poignant “high lowers, to an animated dance of anticipation the finale, launched by the marching horns, which I thought should be purely impro- for the bride. A transitional interlude recalls cellos, and basses as prelude to some zesty vised.” The free-flowing style Barber adopt- lonesome” bluegrass sound emerging at the same time, music of open chords and spare the opening, before the Suite’s climax, a set counterpoint for the entire ensemble, with a ed in setting this text, which he described as of variations on the Shaker hymn “Simple smart fugato climax. “lyric rhapsody,” fits it perfectly. textures that often drew on traditional sources. Appalachian Spring was commis- Gifts,” which supports scenes of rustic do- Program Note by Herbert Glass Barber’s version is laid out in several inter- sioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for mesticity in the choreography. In the Coda, connected sections, tied together with a re- Martha Graham. Copland began work on the married couple is left alone in their new curring refrain. After a brief introduction, Graham’s then-untitled scenario in Holly- home, with tender music that bookends and Samuel Barber (1910-1981) the soprano enters above a softly rocking wood in June, 1943, and compled the ballet fulfills the opening expectations. Knoxville: Summer of 1915, background, painting a dreamy and gentle a year later in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Graham told Copland that she wanted the portrait of a warm southern night. Barber Op. 24 (1947) dance to be “a legend of American living, does a bit of musical word painting, as in “After Martha gave me this bare outline, I like a bone structure, the inner frame that the mechanical music that introduces Agee’s knew certain crucial things – that it had to Barber composed Knoxville: Summer of 1915 holds together a people,” and the ballet and description of a passing streetcar. At “Now do with the pioneer American spirit, with in 1947 for soprano Eleanor Steber. She sang its music were immediately understood as is the night one blue dew” the style changes youth and spring, with optimism and hope,” the premiere with the Boston Symphony Or- reflections of a national identity, of hope, again, to luminous quiet background to the Copland later wrote. chestra, directed by Serge Koussevitsky, on and fulfillment in a difficult time. “The soprano. An echo of the introduction leads Spring that is being celebrated is not just April 9, 1948. into the next panel, a calm picture of the Graham took the eventual title from a poem by Hart Crane, though not the narrative of an any Spring, but the Spring of America; and In 1947, when conductor Serge Koussevitsky family, lying quietly on quilts “on the rough Appalachian housewarming for pioneer and the celebrants are not just half a dozen in- asked Barber for a work for soprano and or- wet grass of the back yard.” Barber gradu- his bride. Copland originally scored the bal- dividuals, but ourselves in different phas- chestra, Barber turned to a James Agee prose ally interjects a note of darkness as the text let for an ensemble of thirteen instruments, es,” John Martin wrote in his New York poem, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, written in hints of the “sorrow of being on this earth.” since the premiere was in the small Eliza- Times review.