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The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director HERBERT BARRETT, Manager

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The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director HERBERT BARRETT, Manager BROOKLYN ACADEMY OF MUSIC The Little Orchestra Society THOMAS SCHERMAN, Music Director HERBERT BARRETT, Manager ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION SERIEs-SEASON 1969-1970 Second Concert-Sunday, November 16, 1969, at 2:30p.m. THOMAS SCHERMAN, Conductor GRANT JOHANNESEN, Soloist DOUGLAS MOORE (1893-1969) Farm Journal* a. Up early b. Sunday Clothes c. Lamplight d. Harvest Song Played in memory of the composer WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756-1 791) Symphony in B flat No. 33 K 319 DARIUS MILHAUD (1892- ) Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra Grant Johannesen, soloist Intermission DARIUS MILHAUD L'Homme et son desir First Violin: Peter Dimitriades Second Violin: James Nassy Viola: Lotte Bamberger Cello: George Koutzen Bass: Angelo La Penna Flute: Andrew Lolya Piccolo: Martin Orenstein Oboe: Duane Voth English Horn: Harriet Orenstein Clarinet: Wallace Shapiro Bass Clarinet: Harold Freeman Bassoon: Sanford Sharoff French Horn: Brooks Tillotson First Trumpet: Murray Karpilovsky Second Trumpet: Richard San Filippo Harp: Cynthia Otis Percussion: Ronald Gould, Wallace Deyerle WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART Concerto in C minor for piano and orchestra K 491 Grant Johannesen, soloist *Commissioned by The Little Orchestra Society-World premiere January 19, 1948 Baldwin Piano Mr. Johannesen plays the Steinway NOTES ON THE PROGRAM by BERNARD JACOBSON Douglas Moore Farm Journal ( 1893-1969) The opening work on tonight's program is offered by way of a homage. Douglas Moore, who died earlier this year at the age of 75, wrote Farm Journal in 1947 for Thomas Scherman and his then newly formed Little Orchestra Society, who gave it its premiere in January, 1948. He was the first of many composers to respond to commissions from Mr. Scherman's pioneering organization. The link between the two men goes back further than that, to 1935, when Mr. Scherman, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, took a modern music course under Moore, who was at the time an associate professor in the Music Department and shortly afterwards became its head. Mr. Scherman described Moore in a recent article as an "optimistic conservative." Speaking of his gradually developing respect for Moore, he explained : "When I first became acquainted with him, I was a young ambitious musician-full of ideas which I felt sure would shatter the world, or at the very least, 57th Street. I was incapable at the age of 19 to appreciate the true meaning of 'conservative,' and in the brashness of youth, I equated it with 'reactionary.' It was not until I had the opportunity to work as a student under him, and later the rare privilege to get to know him and his music more intimately, that I became aware that a true conservative artist must have just as much or more courage and deep conviction than a 'forger of new paths'." Moore's own training was by no means exclusively conservative, nor was it in the least insular. After taking B.A. and B.Mus. degrees at Yale and serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy in World War I, he went to Paris to continue his studies under Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum, and under Nadia Boulanger, with whom he studied organ. How­ ever, it was as an almost archetypically American composer that he was later to make his name. The Americanism is evident in his choice of themes for several highly successful operas- they included The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Carry Nation. But his gift for expressing himself directly and strongly in American terms is equally demonstrated by his orchestral music, from the early Pageant of P. T. Barnum down to the charming and typical Farm Journal. As Thomas Scherman has acknowledged, Farm Journal "helped to launch the series by tacitly revealing to the musical public Moore's own judgment of the Society's musical worth." With gratitude, and In Memoriam, that compliment is hereby reciprocated. Mozart Symphony N o. 33 in B flat major, K. 319 (1756-1791) Allegro assai Andante moderato Minuet and Trio Finale: Allegro assai Mozart's 33rd Symphony looks both ways. It is modest in scoring-apart from the usual strings, only oboes, bassoons, and horns in pairs are required-and no less so in formal dimensions. As originally composed, in Salzburg during July, 1779, it consisted (like No. 31, the "Paris" Symphony, and like the original version of No. 34 in C major) of only three movements: the minuet was added three years later for a performance in Vienna. Stylistically, there are some backward-looking characteristics- the very begin- rung, for instance, with no fewer than eleven alternations of loud and soft in the space of 35 measures, evokes traditions both of the Parisian orchestral world and of the mid-18th­ century Mannheim style. Yet the "Haffner," first of the six great works that concluded Mozart's symphonic production, was only three years away. And it was not purely for a whim that when Mozart needed K. 319 again for that 1782 performance, though he left the original scoring intact, he took the step of adding a minuet. For this work is no longer the close cousin of the three-movement Italian opera overture that many of Mozart's earlier symphonies are. For all its unassuming scale, it already foreshadows the individuality of the late, great Mozart. The new accent becomes unmistakable if we compare it with the "Paris" Symphony. That D major work is admittedly more ambitious, in formal plan as well as in orchestral layout. Yet there is an intimacy and graciousness about K. 319 that makes it far more rewarding and more Mozartean listening than its comparatively super­ ficial predecessor. It is not surprising that Beethoven, as musicologist Alfred Einstein pointed out, thought highly enough of the work to use its first and last movements as a sort of springboard for the corresponding movements of his Eighth Symphony; and it may not be fanciful to find, in the jaunty little march near the end of Beethoven's First Sym­ phony, an equally clear reminiscence of the one in Mozart's finale. The most striking formal feature of the first movement and finale of K. 319 had a still more profound influence on Beethoven: the development sections of both movements are founded on new material, instead of taking their themes exclusively from the exposition. The "new" theme in the first movement is in fact one of the oldest and most familiar in music: it is the four-note figure most familiar from its use as cornerstone of the "Jupiter" Symphony's celebrated finale, but it was part of the common stock of composers long before Mozart's time, and he himself had used it earlier in the Credo of the F major Mass, K. 192. Another unusual, though not unique, feature of the first movement is that Mozart dispenses with the traditional exposition repeat. The first movements of the "Paris" and of K. 334 likewise omit the repeat mark-altogether, one might think, a circumstance that ought to interest the many performers who disregard repeat marks in Mozart's later works on the pretext that "he only put them in out of habit." The new intimacy already mentioned comes to fullest expression, as we might expect, in the Andante moderato second movement, whose subsidiary theme is, it appears, a quotation from an opera by Giovanni Paisiello (17 40-1816) . But even the minuet is a movement full of subtle and personal touches-listen, for instance, to the first bass figure (played by bassoons, cellos, and basses, with violas in thirds above), and then observe how Mozart turns it upside down when the theme returns in the second section. Such, indeed, are the fingerprints of full maturity. Milhaud Piano Concerto No.1 (b. 1892) Tres vif Mouvement de Barcarolle Final: Anime For sheer size and diversity, Darius Milhaud's output is more astonishing than that of any other living composer. A list embracing a dozen operas, more than a dozen ballets, incidental music for over forty plays, two dozen film scores, three dozen choral works, a dozen symphonies for large or small forces, more than twenty miscellaneous orchestral works, concertos for a dozen different instruments, eighteen string quartets (two of them, Nos. 14 and 15, also playable together as an octet), a wide variety of sonatas and smaller chamber and instrumental pieces, and over 200 songs-all this suggests a kind of 20th­ century Telemann, especially since, like his urbane forerunner of the German baroque, Milhaud has somehow found time to do a good deal of conducting too. The two men share, moreover, a tendency toward light-heartedness that is, in Milhaud's case, most noticeable in the instrumental and orchestral works, and an insatiable interest in novel media. The Piano Concerto No. 1 (first of five essays in the form-composed in 1933, and dedicated to the French pianist Marguerite Long) is standard enough in orchestral layout-the scoring is for two flutes, two oboes, E fiat clarinet, B flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, three trumpets, two trombones, tuba, harp, timpani, percussion, and strings-but the music is full of the busy exuberance that links even the most diverse examples of Milhaud's oeuvre. Still, below the bustling surface activity, a conplementary vein of lyricism is never far distant. This more tranquil mood is repre­ sented, in the first movement of the Concerto, by a second theme introduced in sustained form by violins and muted trumpet while the solo piano plays it in a figured version. Its influence permeates much of the movement's middle section, and it is at least as strong a d~terminant of the character of the piece as the more extrovert triplets and 16th-notes of the opening quick march.
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