559288 Bk Wuorinen US
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
559214 bk Rochberg US 29/7/07 19:16 Page 8 AMERICAN CLASSICS Also available in this series: GEORGE ROCHBERG 8.559115 8.559129 Symphony No. 1 Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra 8.559182 Christopher Lyndon-Gee 8.559214 8 559214 bk Rochberg US 29/7/07 19:16 Page 2 George Rochberg (1918-2005) had its première in Florence in 2006. Lyndon-Gee is now working on a further work for SingerPur, Lieder des Symphony No. 1 (1948-49, rev. 1977 and 2003) Morgensterns. In 2004 he co-ordinated eight composers (including himself) to set the work of the American poet laureate William Meredith in honour of Meredith’s 85th birthday, for a “Songbook” recital that toured worldwide in George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on sounds to create their own context”. This unchaining of more than 22 performances. A 25th Anniversary Presteigne Festival Commission, Over Litton, after a poem of 5th July, 1918, and died after a long illness on 30th sound from tonal harmonic functions led to “the Edward Storey, had its première in 2007. May, 2005. An accomplished pianist who worked his overthrow of a long-dominant temporal structure”; a Lyndon-Gee studied under Arthur Hutchings and Rudolf Schwartz in Great Britain, Franco Ferrara and way through college playing in jazz bands in New York world in which conglomerates of pure sound are able to Goffredo Petrassi in Italy, and Igor Markevitch at Monte Carlo. Hearing him conduct a student concert in Rome, City, he began formal studies of composition in 1939 at interact in ways that are not necessarily hidebound by Leonard Bernstein invited him to Tanglewood, where he met Bruno Maderna, becoming the latter’s assistant in the Mannes School of Music, under Hans Weisse, structural considerations. Milan. Erich Leinsdorf and Maurice Abravanel were also influential on his work. He enjoyed a busy early career as George Szell and Leopold Mannes. He was seriously “Subjective man,” writes Rochberg, “views pianist, specialising in contemporary repertoire; over 200 new works were written for him, by composers such as wounded during wartime service in Europe, existence as change; himself and his history at the center Oliver Knussen, Jonathan Lloyd, Nicola LeFanu, David Bedford, Mauro Cardi, Ada Gentile, Silvano Bussotti and subsequently resuming his studies at the Curtis Institute of a process of becoming. Subjective man cannot many more. Since 2005, he has conducted regularly at the prestigious Warsaw Autumn Festival; at the 2007 Jubilee of Music in Philadelphia in 1945 with Rosario Scalero. transcend time; he is trapped in it. However, when man Fiftieth Anniversary Festival, he will conduct four world premières by young Polish composers; in late 2006 he led From 1951 he was Director of Publications for the seizes on the present moment of existence as the only the closing concert of the eight-day Festival entirely devoted to the works of leading Polish composer Pawel music publishing house Theodore Presser, in 1960 ‘real’ time, he spatializes his existence; that is, he fills Szymanski. As Music Director of the Adelphi Symphony based on Long Island, New York, he has gathered an becoming Chairman of the Music Department at the his present with objects that take on … a state of orchestra of predominantly Russian and Ukrainian expatriate musicians, in programmes featuring music of Peteris University of Pennsylvania. In 1979 he was designated permanence.” Thus did the composer allow broader Vasks, Louis Andriessen, Alfred Schnittke, Joanne Metcalf, Sidney Boquiren, Arvo Pärt and rare American Annenberg Professor of the Humanities, retiring from means of expression to be added to his vocabulary, performances of works such as Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 ‘Babi Yar’, Messiaen’s Trois Petites Liturgies, the University in 1983. constantly enlarging it, making possible what he later Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, as well as many new works. He serves also as Chair of the Music Rochberg’s music has been honoured since his came to call an “all-at-once world”. Department at New York’s Adelphi University. His hectic freelance career includes regular visits to orchestras in earliest substantial compositions, his Night Music By 1959 Rochberg was lionized as America’s first Germany, Poland, Italy, England, The Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, Russia and several other receiving the George Gershwin Memorial Award in and greatest master of composition in a serial language. countries. 1953. Since then, the Naumberg Recording Award, His 1955-56 Second Symphony, taken up and Guggenheim Fellowships, Honorary Doctorates, a enthusiastically premiered by George Szell, seemed to Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and lay out a path for him as one of the leaders of the Fulbright Scholarship in 1950-51 (the year in which he American avant-garde. And yet, not even three years met and befriended Luigi Dallapiccola), the ASCAP after its première, he was rethinking his language, Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and countless already dissatisfied with the limitations of expressivity other honours have accumulated in ever greater of the strict twelve-tone environment. Having mastered profusion. In 1996 his manuscripts and papers were the idiom, he was far ahead of his time in seeking to go acquired for the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation beyond it. in Basel, Switzerland. The oft-repeated assertion that it was predominantly The key that will open George Rochberg’s music to personal tragedy that led Rochberg to abandon the willing, the curious, but especially to the “innocent” dodecaphony and embrace tonality, is not entirely borne ear lies not in the conventional wisdom that declares him out by the facts. His evolution towards a multiplicity of the first “post-modernist” for his openness to a complex simultaneous languages was already well in train from mix of musical languages, but rather in seeking to enter his earliest compositions. Rochberg speaks of his use of the composer’s singular vision of the nature of time. twelve-tone techniques as engendering a “hard” As long ago as 1963, Rochberg, in The New Image Romanticism (kin, perhaps, to the works of Alban Berg) of Music, wrote that the successive revolutions of - one has only to look at the slow movement of the twelve-tone composition and of the post-war avant- Second Symphony, Rochberg’s “serial” work par garde had brought about a liberation that “permits excellence, to see that the tone row yields music that 8.559214 27 8.559214 559214 bk Rochberg US 29/7/07 19:16 Page 6 Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra alternates between melting, elegiac beauty and Symphony No. 1 desperate explosions of anguish; ebullient self- The Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken) was founded in 1937. confidence and profound tragedy. “This is the craziest music I have ever seen!”, was the Today it is one of the most important cultural institutions in the Saarland region. Enjoying close links with George Rochberg’s relationship with the past is thus response of George Rochberg’s teacher, Leopold neighbouring countries, the orchestra exchanges concerts with the Orchestre National de Lorraine in Metz (France) not one of nostalgia: it is one of intimate, living Mannes, when the young composer showed him a piano and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg. The orchestra thus plays a key rôle in the cultural integration of familiarity. Indeed, he has said, in Reflections on the reduction score of the Capriccio movement of the First the Saarland-Lorraine-Luxembourg region, to which it makes a vital contribution. It is also regularly heard Renewal of Music, “History will not help us; but the Symphony. “Why are you making these seconds?”, throughout Europe thanks to its involvement in the Deutsch-Französische Konzerte (Franco-German Concerts), a past, which is ever-present, can.” asked an equally mystified Rosario Scalero, in response radio series that the Saarländischer Rundfunk, the regional broadcasting corporation, has organized for over fifty One recalls, too, William Faulkner’s dictum : “the to the first movement of the work, when Rochberg years. Apart from its numerous concerts in Saarbrücken, the orchestra also performs in Germany’s most famous past – it is not even past!” visited Scalero at his home in Piedmont, Italy, in 1951. concert halls, and is a regular guest on stages around the world. It has already performed to great acclaim in Rochberg is never about regret, borrowing or And indeed, the work’s harmonic language reaches far Australia, the Soviet Union, the United States, Italy, China, Lisbon, and Japan, and, most recently, in Spain. The quotation (even if only quotation “in kind”). The beyond the “classical” training Rochberg had received orchestra is thus one of the most important cultural flagships of the Saarland, and contributes significantly to the Universal Mind, which is there to be embraced by a from the scrupulous Scalero, though it would still be image of German public service broadcasting as a whole. Since its foundation, the RSO has made a large number of composer humble enough to deny ego and the flawed five or six years before he adopted the twelve-tone recordings, both for broadcasting purposes and for release on CD, with a notable complete edition of Anton search for “originality” at all costs, transcends Time and idiom so fearlessly and virtuosically explored in the Bruckner’s symphonies, conducted by the orchestra’s first guest conductor, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and Space. Denying individualism, seeing the creative artist Second Symphony. honoured with a Cannes Classical Award in 2002. The orchestra’s recording of George Rochberg’s Symphony No. 5 as a representative of the endless procession of the Living in New York in 1941-42 with his new wife, (8.559115) had a Grammy nomination in 2004.