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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
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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. Christoph Poppen is principal conductor from 2006, succeeding human condition, the purveyor of our collective Gene Rosenfeld, making ends meet by playing at jazz Günther Herbig, Michael Stern, Marcello Viotti and Myung-Whun Chung, and Hans Zender, principal conductor memory, allows the composer to gather the entirety of bars and clubs while studying with Hans Weisse, between 1972 and 1984. In September 2007 the orchestra merges with the Radio Orchestra Kaiserslautern to experience into a single, integrated language. Leopold Mannes and George Szell at the Mannes become the German Radio Philhamonic (Deutsche Radio Philharmonie). “Making the world a better place is not a project for School of Music, Rochberg’s student life and idyllic the artist. His project is to express the fire in the mind, to early years of marriage were interrupted by call-up into make, as Robert Browning said, beautiful things that the United States Army in November 1942. There Christopher Lyndon-Gee “have lain burningly on the Divine Hand.” followed three testing years serving as a Captain with At the heart of Rochberg’s music are an acceptance Allied forces in Europe. At the Battle of the Bulge, Christopher Lyndon-Gee was nominated for Grammys in 1998 for Best Orchestral Performance for the ground- of the past as an integral ingredient of a rich present; an Rochberg was severely wounded, spending close to a breaking complete works of Igor Markevitch (Marco Polo), in 2003 for the world première recording of George understanding that an art which insists on “originality” year in recovery and rehabilitation; he walked with a Rochberg’s Symphony No. 5 on Naxos American Classics, and again in 2007 for Hans Werner Henze’s Violin in its every utterance can have no context and no hope slight limp for the rest of his life. As the war ended, he Concertos Nos. 1 & 3, with Peter Sheppard Skærved. In 2001-2002 recordings for Naxos of Arcana and other works of communication. His music liberates the was able to take up his studies again at the Curtis by Varèse, with the Polish National Radio Orchestra received acclaimed notices worldwide, while The contemporary musician fearlessly to draw upon, and Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he honed his Gramophone, Fanfare, Classics Today and Penguin Guide to Compact Discs have all recognised his work, the last develop in his own voice, the inheritance of his artistic skills in counterpoint under the great Rosario Scalero, with numerous Rosettes and a Key Recordings listing. Australian critics’ organizations named him Artist of the forbears without being derivative, in the knowledge that who had been a member of Brahms’s circle in Vienna Year and Best Opera Conductor, the latter for his conducting of the world première of Larry Sitsky’s The Golem at there is a language, that the many-hued palette of the sixty years earlier. Sydney Opera House. Also a widely performed composer, Lyndon-Gee was awarded a prestigious composition great masters has not been darkened forever by the The more than one-hour-long First Symphony, prize by the Onassis Foundation, Athens, in 2001. He has won the Adolf Spivakovsky Prize, the Sounds Australian cultural pathologies of the twentieth century. written in 1948-49, was the first large-scale work of the Award (three times), and two MacDowell Fellowships. He is currently working on major orchestral works including “The hope of contemporary music”, writes composer’s career; unlike the anguished Second, written The Auschwitz Poems, Socrates’ Death (intended for performance at Canterbury Cathedral, in his native England), Rochberg, “lies in learning how to reconcile all manner in the mid-fifties as a delayed response to the awfulness and a second commission for the German conductor Eckart Schloifer, … und unter den Blättern saß Er, weinend. of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes; the past with Rochberg saw at first hand in the war years, the First is During 2003 his setting of an ancient Greek Ode under the title The Temple of Athena Pronaea had its première in the present, tonality with atonality. That is why, in my a young composer’s exultant exploration of his New York. In the same week, On the Theory of Cosmic Strings received its première by Peter Sheppard Skærved at most recent music, I have tried to utilize these in maturing technique and powers of invention. Flexing his the Odense Festival, Denmark, and has since been performed over fifty times. Frammento del Dante, a setting of combinations which reassert the primal values of muscles in the range of the orchestral palette for the first lines from the Paradiso, was commissioned by the Echo Klassiek Preis-winning German ensemble SingerPur, and music.” time, delineating his expressive boundaries and
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challenges, establishing a powerfully individual ability as a conductor. his wide interval-stretching of expressive line; Variations (one thinks of Rubbra, or of certain passages personal language, still essentially “tonal” but ever more “I remember how hard and concentratedly we Stravinsky for his outward gestural angularity, of Walton); and many more. Rochberg’s gifts of sharply pressing the harmonic limits of that language, worked that evening. Somehow we played through the Schoenberg for his inward, expressionistic gestures. invention as a young man were so fertile that he had a the First Symphony is a 31-year-old composer’s entire work without any serious mishaps … the full- Never far from my thoughts were Beethoven’s Eroica hard time containing his pieces within bounds. And so it exuberant and assertive laying-down of the gauntlet to blown, big-boned character and size of the symphony’s and Ninth, [and] Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.” remained during the entire richly productive life of this the music establishment. musical ideas came through.” None of this is audible in a surface way. The greatest of American symphonists. Following the bitter experiences of the war years, If the Curtis orchestra reading was exhilarating, the musical voice is pure Rochberg; the “influences” In 1977 Rochberg revisited the First, rewriting and “some of us born in America between 1900 and 1920 hard-won, partial Philadelphia Orchestra performance thoroughly and completely internalised. This music’s enriching the orchestration of the work from top to felt another, opposite world stirring, a barely coherent, under Ormandy eight years later was a bitter-sweet chief characteristics are that it is impassioned while bottom. Then, in 2002-03, with the present performance inner world of longings and yearnings to say something experience for the young composer. In the interim being hard-edged; at the same time discursive yet and recording in the offing, the score was again serious in one of the art forms; to leave our own stamp Rochberg “foolishly acceded to the bad counsel of my rigorous and economical; by turns ferocious and elegiac comprehensively revised. It was at this point that the on the time; even to leave behind, if we could, a touch of friends and colleagues to shorten the work.” In yet always utterly unsentimental. The composer later Variations movement, the second slow movement, was beauty, in sound, in paint, in words; and, if not beauty removing the first of the symmetrically paired slow came to call the tensions inherent in this expressive style renotated with a quadrupling of note-values into triple per se, something that mysteriously leaves its healing movements — which would later be played several “hard romanticism”. alla breve time that highlights its links with Renaissance mark and residual trace on the human soul. These urges, times as a free-standing piece under the title Night Most impressive are, first of all the deeply contrapuntal techniques. old as the universe itself, were couched in idiosyncratic Music — and the Capriccio (often performed during the satisfying, symmetrical form of the work, which comes Americanese.” fifties in a two-piano version; but orchestrally for the full-circle with the recapitulation of ideas of the opening Christopher Lyndon-Gee Feeling his powers returning after the exhaustion of first time ever in the present performance), a formally sixty-five minutes later, in the final, headlong rush of the war, the young composer’s project for his first large- unsatisfying shell of an impressively conceived work the closing pages of the Finale. But, most of all, his scale work was nothing if not ambitious: remained. Further changes, however, were too much; ability to create thematic ideas of sharp individuality: The First Symphony is dedicated “To my Mother, in “In 1948, three years after the war ended … I was when Ormandy saw fit to suggest a rewrite of the ending the magical, suspended, timeless lament for solo ’cello Memoriam”. already full of a large and ambitious plan with which to of the Finale, so that it would not “tear off” so abruptly that lies at the heart of the Night Music; the cheery Quotations are taken from George Rochberg’s scale the orchestral heights, still vague where specific — precisely the musical gesture the composer wished grotesquerie of the “peg-leg Pete” second theme group unpublished autobiography, Five Lines and Four ideas were concerned, but nonetheless, laid out in my — he said “enough”, and refused. The seeds of the of the Finale (he termed it thus himself); the Ariel-like Spaces: Reflections on My Music and the Performers mind as two great pillars for outer movements and two famous breakdown in their relationship were sown : “In untouchability and constant changes of direction in the, Who Played It, © 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 George inside slow movements of differing structure and a sharply biting, arch tone of voice, [Ormandy] shot out, yes, capricious Capriccio; the grand, melancholic Rochberg; publication anticipated in 2008. Used by character enclosing a big scherzo of constant, capricious “Far be it from me, a mere conductor, to tell a composer dignity of the surprisingly “English”-sounding permission of Mrs Gene Rochberg. changes that I decided to call Capriccio.” how he should write his music.” The Symphony was complete by March 1949 and, The work has stood the test of time, and of neglect. thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the legendary It is music of powerful individuality and enormous self- Al Boss of Philadelphia, copying of the orchestral confidence; a First Symphony of a young composer who materials for the more than two thousand measures of was a natural composer for the orchestra, and a born the piece finished by the end of that year. An evening symphonist. As to its language, “idiosyncratic rehearsal session of the student orchestra of the Curtis Americanese” or not, Rochberg defied the academic Institute was devoted to a reading of the work, thanks to dichotomy identified by Adorno, drawing on both of the an invitation from the orchestra’s conductor, Alexander European giants of the earlier twentieth century for his Hilsberg. But Hilsberg got cold feet; whether from jumping-off points : genuine lack of time, or an inability to connect with “I drew on … the largest palette possible as I Rochberg’s musical language, he handed off the sketched and wrote: Stravinsky for his rhythmic esprit conducting to the young composer himself at a week or and metric assymetry, Schoenberg for the ache of his two’s notice — and Rochberg, by his own admission, atonal harmony; Stravinsky for his high saturation with neither then nor at any time later, professed any kind of a kind of perverse dissonantal atonality, Schoenberg for
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challenges, establishing a powerfully individual ability as a conductor. his wide interval-stretching of expressive line; Variations (one thinks of Rubbra, or of certain passages personal language, still essentially “tonal” but ever more “I remember how hard and concentratedly we Stravinsky for his outward gestural angularity, of Walton); and many more. Rochberg’s gifts of sharply pressing the harmonic limits of that language, worked that evening. Somehow we played through the Schoenberg for his inward, expressionistic gestures. invention as a young man were so fertile that he had a the First Symphony is a 31-year-old composer’s entire work without any serious mishaps … the full- Never far from my thoughts were Beethoven’s Eroica hard time containing his pieces within bounds. And so it exuberant and assertive laying-down of the gauntlet to blown, big-boned character and size of the symphony’s and Ninth, [and] Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.” remained during the entire richly productive life of this the music establishment. musical ideas came through.” None of this is audible in a surface way. The greatest of American symphonists. Following the bitter experiences of the war years, If the Curtis orchestra reading was exhilarating, the musical voice is pure Rochberg; the “influences” In 1977 Rochberg revisited the First, rewriting and “some of us born in America between 1900 and 1920 hard-won, partial Philadelphia Orchestra performance thoroughly and completely internalised. This music’s enriching the orchestration of the work from top to felt another, opposite world stirring, a barely coherent, under Ormandy eight years later was a bitter-sweet chief characteristics are that it is impassioned while bottom. Then, in 2002-03, with the present performance inner world of longings and yearnings to say something experience for the young composer. In the interim being hard-edged; at the same time discursive yet and recording in the offing, the score was again serious in one of the art forms; to leave our own stamp Rochberg “foolishly acceded to the bad counsel of my rigorous and economical; by turns ferocious and elegiac comprehensively revised. It was at this point that the on the time; even to leave behind, if we could, a touch of friends and colleagues to shorten the work.” In yet always utterly unsentimental. The composer later Variations movement, the second slow movement, was beauty, in sound, in paint, in words; and, if not beauty removing the first of the symmetrically paired slow came to call the tensions inherent in this expressive style renotated with a quadrupling of note-values into triple per se, something that mysteriously leaves its healing movements — which would later be played several “hard romanticism”. alla breve time that highlights its links with Renaissance mark and residual trace on the human soul. These urges, times as a free-standing piece under the title Night Most impressive are, first of all the deeply contrapuntal techniques. old as the universe itself, were couched in idiosyncratic Music — and the Capriccio (often performed during the satisfying, symmetrical form of the work, which comes Americanese.” fifties in a two-piano version; but orchestrally for the full-circle with the recapitulation of ideas of the opening Christopher Lyndon-Gee Feeling his powers returning after the exhaustion of first time ever in the present performance), a formally sixty-five minutes later, in the final, headlong rush of the war, the young composer’s project for his first large- unsatisfying shell of an impressively conceived work the closing pages of the Finale. But, most of all, his scale work was nothing if not ambitious: remained. Further changes, however, were too much; ability to create thematic ideas of sharp individuality: The First Symphony is dedicated “To my Mother, in “In 1948, three years after the war ended … I was when Ormandy saw fit to suggest a rewrite of the ending the magical, suspended, timeless lament for solo ’cello Memoriam”. already full of a large and ambitious plan with which to of the Finale, so that it would not “tear off” so abruptly that lies at the heart of the Night Music; the cheery Quotations are taken from George Rochberg’s scale the orchestral heights, still vague where specific — precisely the musical gesture the composer wished grotesquerie of the “peg-leg Pete” second theme group unpublished autobiography, Five Lines and Four ideas were concerned, but nonetheless, laid out in my — he said “enough”, and refused. The seeds of the of the Finale (he termed it thus himself); the Ariel-like Spaces: Reflections on My Music and the Performers mind as two great pillars for outer movements and two famous breakdown in their relationship were sown : “In untouchability and constant changes of direction in the, Who Played It, © 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 George inside slow movements of differing structure and a sharply biting, arch tone of voice, [Ormandy] shot out, yes, capricious Capriccio; the grand, melancholic Rochberg; publication anticipated in 2008. Used by character enclosing a big scherzo of constant, capricious “Far be it from me, a mere conductor, to tell a composer dignity of the surprisingly “English”-sounding permission of Mrs Gene Rochberg. changes that I decided to call Capriccio.” how he should write his music.” The Symphony was complete by March 1949 and, The work has stood the test of time, and of neglect. thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the legendary It is music of powerful individuality and enormous self- Al Boss of Philadelphia, copying of the orchestral confidence; a First Symphony of a young composer who materials for the more than two thousand measures of was a natural composer for the orchestra, and a born the piece finished by the end of that year. An evening symphonist. As to its language, “idiosyncratic rehearsal session of the student orchestra of the Curtis Americanese” or not, Rochberg defied the academic Institute was devoted to a reading of the work, thanks to dichotomy identified by Adorno, drawing on both of the an invitation from the orchestra’s conductor, Alexander European giants of the earlier twentieth century for his Hilsberg. But Hilsberg got cold feet; whether from jumping-off points : genuine lack of time, or an inability to connect with “I drew on … the largest palette possible as I Rochberg’s musical language, he handed off the sketched and wrote: Stravinsky for his rhythmic esprit conducting to the young composer himself at a week or and metric assymetry, Schoenberg for the ache of his two’s notice — and Rochberg, by his own admission, atonal harmony; Stravinsky for his high saturation with neither then nor at any time later, professed any kind of a kind of perverse dissonantal atonality, Schoenberg for
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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. Christoph Poppen is principal conductor from 2006, succeeding human condition, the purveyor of our collective Gene Rosenfeld, making ends meet by playing at jazz Günther Herbig, Michael Stern, Marcello Viotti and Myung-Whun Chung, and Hans Zender, principal conductor memory, allows the composer to gather the entirety of bars and clubs while studying with Hans Weisse, between 1972 and 1984. In September 2007 the orchestra merges with the Radio Orchestra Kaiserslautern to experience into a single, integrated language. Leopold Mannes and George Szell at the Mannes become the German Radio Philhamonic (Deutsche Radio Philharmonie). “Making the world a better place is not a project for School of Music, Rochberg’s student life and idyllic the artist. His project is to express the fire in the mind, to early years of marriage were interrupted by call-up into make, as Robert Browning said, beautiful things that the United States Army in November 1942. There Christopher Lyndon-Gee “have lain burningly on the Divine Hand.” followed three testing years serving as a Captain with At the heart of Rochberg’s music are an acceptance Allied forces in Europe. At the Battle of the Bulge, Christopher Lyndon-Gee was nominated for Grammys in 1998 for Best Orchestral Performance for the ground- of the past as an integral ingredient of a rich present; an Rochberg was severely wounded, spending close to a breaking complete works of Igor Markevitch (Marco Polo), in 2003 for the world première recording of George understanding that an art which insists on “originality” year in recovery and rehabilitation; he walked with a Rochberg’s Symphony No. 5 on Naxos American Classics, and again in 2007 for Hans Werner Henze’s Violin in its every utterance can have no context and no hope slight limp for the rest of his life. As the war ended, he Concertos Nos. 1 & 3, with Peter Sheppard Skærved. In 2001-2002 recordings for Naxos of Arcana and other works of communication. His music liberates the was able to take up his studies again at the Curtis by Varèse, with the Polish National Radio Orchestra received acclaimed notices worldwide, while The contemporary musician fearlessly to draw upon, and Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he honed his Gramophone, Fanfare, Classics Today and Penguin Guide to Compact Discs have all recognised his work, the last develop in his own voice, the inheritance of his artistic skills in counterpoint under the great Rosario Scalero, with numerous Rosettes and a Key Recordings listing. Australian critics’ organizations named him Artist of the forbears without being derivative, in the knowledge that who had been a member of Brahms’s circle in Vienna Year and Best Opera Conductor, the latter for his conducting of the world première of Larry Sitsky’s The Golem at there is a language, that the many-hued palette of the sixty years earlier. Sydney Opera House. Also a widely performed composer, Lyndon-Gee was awarded a prestigious composition great masters has not been darkened forever by the The more than one-hour-long First Symphony, prize by the Onassis Foundation, Athens, in 2001. He has won the Adolf Spivakovsky Prize, the Sounds Australian cultural pathologies of the twentieth century. written in 1948-49, was the first large-scale work of the Award (three times), and two MacDowell Fellowships. He is currently working on major orchestral works including “The hope of contemporary music”, writes composer’s career; unlike the anguished Second, written The Auschwitz Poems, Socrates’ Death (intended for performance at Canterbury Cathedral, in his native England), Rochberg, “lies in learning how to reconcile all manner in the mid-fifties as a delayed response to the awfulness and a second commission for the German conductor Eckart Schloifer, … und unter den Blättern saß Er, weinend. of opposites, contradictions, paradoxes; the past with Rochberg saw at first hand in the war years, the First is During 2003 his setting of an ancient Greek Ode under the title The Temple of Athena Pronaea had its première in the present, tonality with atonality. That is why, in my a young composer’s exultant exploration of his New York. In the same week, On the Theory of Cosmic Strings received its première by Peter Sheppard Skærved at most recent music, I have tried to utilize these in maturing technique and powers of invention. Flexing his the Odense Festival, Denmark, and has since been performed over fifty times. Frammento del Dante, a setting of combinations which reassert the primal values of muscles in the range of the orchestral palette for the first lines from the Paradiso, was commissioned by the Echo Klassiek Preis-winning German ensemble SingerPur, and music.” time, delineating his expressive boundaries and
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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
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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 CMYK NAXOS Playing George Time: 64:15 ROCHBERG (1918-2005) broadcasting and copying of this compact disc prohibited. translations reserved. Unauthorised public performance, All rights in this sound recording, artwork, texts and Made in Canada 8.559214
& Symphony No. 1 AMERICAN CLASSICS
2007 Naxos Rights International Ltd. (1948-49, rev. 1977 and 2003) Although the first, fourth and fifth movements were performed in cut 1 I. Allegro molto, ma un poco pesante: form in March 1958, Rochberg’s Symphony No. 1, the first large-scale Exultant !! 11:09 ROCHBERG: 2 II. Night Music: Poco adagio; work of his career, is here heard complete for the first time. Unlike the like a slow March 13:31 anguished Second (Naxos 8.559182), 3 III. Capriccio: Fast and Impetuous; written in the mid-fifties as a delayed like a curtain-raiser 13:31 response to the awfulness Rochberg 4 saw at first hand in the war years, the IV. Variations: Molto adagio; First is a young composer’s exultant very slow and stately 17:32 exploration of his maturing technique 5 and powers of invention. Rochberg’s V. Finale: Adagio; parlando e Symphony No. 1 rubato – Allegro gioioso 8:32 teacher, Leopold Mannes, called the Symphony No. 1 Capriccio movement, heard orchestrally Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra for the first time ever in the present performance, “the craziest music I have Christopher Lyndon-Gee ever seen!” More than fifty years on, WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDING this powerfully individual work has stood the test of time, and of neglect. It A co-production with Saarländischer Rundfunk is a First Symphony of a young Recorded at the Großes Sendesaal, composer who was a natural composer Funkhaus Halberg, Saarbrücken, Germany, for the orchestra, and a born ROCHBERG: from 6th to 9th January, 2004. symphonist. DDD Producer: Dr. Markus Braendle • Engineer: Ralf Schnellbach WORLD PREMIERE Booklet notes: Christopher Lyndon-Gee RECORDING With special thanks to Dr Sabine Tomek, Musik-Chefin of
Saarländischer Rundfunk; and to Jeremy Gill and Greg www.naxos.com 8.559214 8.559214 Wilder for copying of the score and orchestral materials. Publisher: Theodore Presser Company Cover painting of George Rochberg © Helen Mirkil (by kind permission) NAXOS