AMERICAN CLASSICS BERNSTEIN: Arias and Barcarolles BARBER: Overture to ‘The School for Scandal’ DIAMOND: Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel Jane Bunnell, Mezzo-soprano • Dale Duesing, Baritone Seattle Symphony • Gerard Schwarz Leonard Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Arias and Barcarolles Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Overture to ‘The School for Scandal’ BERNSTEIN David Diamond (1915-2005): Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel (1918-1990) Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber and David Diamond with Bernstein until he could employ it with suitable irony. Arias and Barcarolles (orch. Bright Sheng) 31:38 represent the mainstream of American concert music Bernstein scored this cycle of songs about love and during the middle decades of the twentieth century. marriage for two voices and piano (four-hands). The 1 Prelude (Text: Leonard Bernstein)1:29 Somewhat more adventurous than such latter-day composer hoped to orchestrate the accompaniment but 2 Love Duet (Text: Leonard Bernstein)4:17 Romantics as Howard Hanson, more loyal to received was prevented from doing so by his conducting schedule tradition than were Ives, Cowell, John Cage and other and declining health. That task was therefore undertaken 3 Little Smary (Text: Jennie Bernstein (1898-1992))2:28 experimentally inclined composers, Bernstein, Barber and by the Chinese émigré composer Bright Sheng, under 4 The Love of My Life (Text: Leonard Bernstein)4:11 Diamond adopted certain modernist innovations in Bernstein’s supervision. The resulting version of Arias harmony, rhythm and instrumentation, but the music of and Barcarolles, with the accompaniment transcribed for 5 Greeting (Text: Leonard Bernstein)3:11 each of these composers remained rooted in clearly strings and percussion, was first performed in 1989, under 6 At My Wedding (Text: Yankev-Yitskhok Segal defined tonal centers and a fundamentally lyrical impulse. the direction of Gerard Schwarz. Leonard Bernstein was born in Boston in 1918. He The songs of Arias and Barcarolles reflect the eclectic (1896-1954), transl. Michael Barrett)5:30 became one of the most versatile musicians of his day style of Bernstein’s composing. The angular rhythms that 7 Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight and a true polymath in a larger sense. A renowned begin the Prelude recall the famous opening sequence of (Text: Leonard Bernstein)7:16conductor, he led many of the world’s major orchestras. West Side Story. By contrast, the second movement’s As a pianist, he could perform classical works and jazz. Love Duet presents the composer’s lyrical vein. Little 8 Nachspiel 3:17 With his famous Young People’s Concerts, he established Smary, The Love of My Life and At My Wedding attest to himself as an engaging television personality, but he was Bernstein’s familiarity with the work of Bartók, equally capable of delivering the prestigious Charles Eliot Shostakovich and other twentieth-century composers. Samuel Norton lectures at Harvard University, his alma mater. Greeting, written in 1955 upon the birth of the composer’s Bernstein’s activities as a composer also were diverse; son Alexander, partakes of the open, diatonic style BARBER encompassing operas, symphonies and choral works, as cultivated as a distinctly American idiom by Aaron (1910-1981) well as film scores and Broadway musicals. Copland. Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight begins with 9 Completed in 1988, Arias and Barcarolles was a zany march, then progresses through a jazzy section Overture to ‘The School for Scandal’ 8:08 Bernstein’s last major work before his death in 1990. But (complete with scat-singing of some off-color lyrics) to a although the piece took its definitive shape during the final duet recalling the best music of another Broadway David years of the composer’s life, its genesis spans a much master, Stephen Sondheim. The concluding Nachspiel, longer time. One of its constituent movements dates from with its wordless vocalise, brings to mind the Adagietto of DIAMOND 1955, and others may have been conceived well before Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, a work with which Bernstein, as (1915-2005) assuming their final forms, since Bernstein often jotted a conductor, was closely associated. down verses or melodies that might grow into songs. Samuel Barber was born in 1910 in West Chester, 0 Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel 7:16 Moreover, the work’s title originated in 1960, when Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. He began writing Bernstein performed at the White House for an audience music at age seven and worked as a church organist from that included President Dwight Eisenhower. “I liked that the time he was twelve. Four years later he became a last piece you played,” Ike reportedly told the composer at member of the charter class of the Curtis Institute of the time; “it had a tune. I like music with a tune, not all of Music, in Philadelphia. At Curtis, Barber composed his them arias and barcarolles and things.” That expression first polished pieces and began to gain the attention of of the 34th President’s musical dislikes evidently stayed some of the leading musicians of his day. During the years that followed, he produced a respected body of David Diamond was born in 1915, in Rochester, New Jane Bunnell music, earning numerous honors, including, on two York. He studied violin and composition during his youth occasions, the Pulitzer Prize. Works such as his Violin and remembered having written about a hundred pieces Mezzo-soprano Jane Bunnell has enjoyed an illustrious international career for Concerto and the cantata Knoxville: Summer of 1915 of music by the time he graduated from high school. almost 30 years. She is known especially for her long association with the remain frequently performed, while his poignant Adagio Following a year at the Eastman School and studies with Metropolitan Opera, where she has sung thirty roles in more than 350 performances, for Strings has achieved a degree of general familiarity Roger Sessions in New York, Diamond went to Paris, beginning with her critically acclaimed début as Annio in La clemenza di Tito and rare among twentieth-century compositions. He died in where he worked with Nadia Boulanger. Returning to the continuing with leading roles in Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, Madama Butterfly, 1981. United States, he secured commissions and and Otto Schenk’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. She played Hermia in the Although Barber cautiously ventured some modern performances of his works by major American orchestras Metropolitan Opera première of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and sang in compositional procedures, his most characteristic music under the direction of such conductors as Koussevitzky, the Met premières of Prokofiev’s War and Peace and Wolf-Ferrari’s Sly. She has evinces an allegiance to fairly traditional harmonies, an Mitropoulos and the young Leonard Bernstein. In 1973 appeared in new Met productions of Otello, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne unabashed lyricism, strong emotional expression and an Diamond joined the faculty of The Juilliard School, where Schatten, Les Troyens, Faust and Roméo et Juliette, and has also recorded with the approach to compositional form, orchestration and he taught composition for the next quarter-century. He Met for Sony/BMG and Deutsche Grammophon and toured with the company to musical rhetoric rooted in nineteenth-century practice. All died in 2005. Europe and Japan. She has appeared widely in major opera houses, nationally and this implies an essentially Romantic outlook that was Diamond cast many of his works in venerable forms – internationally, and collaborated with conductors of distinction. She served on the integral to the composer’s temperament. Barber found the symphonies, string quartets and concertos figure faculty of New York University for nine years and in 2006 joined the voice faculty at inspiration for three of his most successful early pieces in prominently in his output – and he steadfastly resisted the DePaul University School of Music. the work of English writers, Matthew Arnold, Percy trappings and processes of the post-World War II avant- Shelley and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose comedy of garde. The composer stated his musical outlook manners The School for Scandal prompted Barber’s succinctly, declaring: “I am part of the classical tradition.” concert overture of the same title. Written in the summer In addition to studying with Boulanger, Diamond had Dale Duesing of 1931, this work proved the greatest of Barber’s youthful valuable contact in Paris with such composers as successes. Stravinsky, Milhaud and Ravel. The latter’s fastidious The American baritone Dale Duesing has had an international career spanning five Barber did not write the overture for a particular musical craftsmanship became a model for Diamond. decades. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he studied piano as a child, and performance of The School for Scandal, nor does the Shortly after Ravel’s death in 1937 Diamond wrote an enrolled at Lawrence University, majoring in piano performance. He switched his music contain any programmatic references to the play; Elegy for the French composer, scoring it for brass, study, however, to vocal performance and won the Metropolitan Opera Competition. that is, there are no correspondences between the percussion and harps. (The composer subsequently Duesing has performed at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, Lyric Opera overture’s themes or episodes and the characters or plot created an alternate version for strings and percussion.) of Chicago, La Scala, Vienna State Opera, Paris Opera, and Covent Garden, among of Sheridan’s comedy. Rather, the music mirrors the The work’s main theme, an arching subject of great others, and appeared in recitals and in concerts in leading musical centres. In 1993 play’s witty and fast-paced tone within the traditional form nobility, appears at the outset of the single-movement he received a GRAMMY® Award for his recording of Samuel Barber’s The Lovers of a concert overture.