Samuel Barber (1910-1981) Complete Published
Piano Music
Samuel Barber was
born on 9th March, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania His father was a
physician and his mother a sister of the famous American contralto, Louise
Homer. From the age of six his musical gifts were apparent, and when he was
thirteen he was accepted as one of the first students to attend the newly
established Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. There he studied
composition with Rosario Scalero, piano with Isabelle Vengerova and singing
with Emilio de Gogorza. Although he had written his first compositions when he
was seven. He only undertook serious composition at the age of eighteen.
Recognition of his gifts as a composer came quickly. In 1933 the Philadelphia
Orchestra played his Overture to The School
for Scandai and in 1935 the New York Philharmonic presented his Music for a Scene from Shelley. Both early
compositions won considerable acclaim. Between 1935 and 1937 Barber was awarded
the American Prix de Rome and the Pulitzer Prize and achieved overnight fame on
5th November 1938, when Arturo Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra
in the Essay for Orchestra No. 1 and
Adagio for String. The Adagio became one of the most popular
American works of serious music, and through some lurid aberration of
circumstance, also became a favourite work for American state funerals and as
background for death scenes in movies. During World War II, Barber served in
the Army Air Corps and composed his Second
Symphony on commission from the Air Force. He wrote three operas, Vanessa, awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize
and A Hand of Bridge with
libretti by his friend Gian Carlo Menotti and Antony
and Cleopatra with a libretto based on Shakespeare by Franco
Zeffirelli, two ballets, Medea and
Souvenirs, three Essays for orchestra, two symphonies,
concertos for violin, piano and cello, many vocal works, chamber music and
works for piano, as well as choral compositions. His music has been called
romantic, yet his technical idiom is decidedly modern. His melodies are broadly
songful; his harmonies are opulent; his orchestration is resplendent with
colour. In the words of David Ewen, "As
Barber’s talent ripened, he added poetic feeling to his lyricism. And, towards
the end of his life there was a growing intensity and strength of idiom in his
writing. But his lyricism always remained on a high plane of eloquence; and the
emotional factor never was sacrificed." He died on 23rd January
1981 in New York after ill health that had involved hospitalization on various
occasions and a stroke.
In his obituary for
the New York Times, Donald Henahan wrote: "Throughout
his career, Samuel Barber was hounded by success. Probably no other American
composer enjoyed such early, persistent and such long lasting acclaim. One
reason for the acceptance won by Mr. Barber's music apart from it, undeniable
craft and thorough professionalism - was its deep-seated conservatism, which
audiences could find congenial even at first hearing. Although he often dealt
in pungent dissonance, and complex rhythms, like most of his twentieth-century
contemporaries there was a lyrical quality even to his strictly instrumental
pieces that from the first established him as a neo-Romantic…"
Barber's solo
instrumental compositions include works for piano, two pianos, carillon and
organ. Of these, twenty-nine works have yet to be published. The remaining
eleven works comprise one suite for carillon, one set of variations for organ,
and nine compositions for piano. All nine solo piano works are recorded on this
disc. Of the unpublished compositions, with the exception of one work, After the Concert (c. 1973), all were
composed before 1932. Of the published piano compositions, the earliest are his
Three Sketches (1923-24) He
published the three short pieces himself in 1924 and distributed the scores to
friends and family. Various copies eventually ended up in a number of prominent
American music libraries, and since 1969 have appeared in print in a variety of
editions (Schaum Publications, Alfred Publishing Company, and in the magazine
Keyboard Classics). The first piece in the set is called Love Song. This 24-bar-long, nostalgic
waltz, written in April 1924, is dedicated to Barber's mother. The second piece
is entitled, To My Steinway. Only
15-bars long, this sweet waltz-like adagio was
written in June 1923 and is dedicated To
Number 220601, his prized childhood instrument. The last piece in
the group, Minuet, was composed
in April1923, and is based on Beethoven's Minuet
No 2, WoO 10. He
dedicated this piece to his beloved younger sister, Sara, for whom he composed
some of his earliest songs.
Chronologically,
the next work is the Interlude No.1,
composed in 1931. Although it is an early work, and a product of Barber's years
at the Curtis Institute, it was only published by Schirmer in 1993. This
rhapsodic work owes much to the brooding romanticism of Brahms and Reger, but
is clearly written in atonal language that is without a doubt of the twentieth
century. Barber revels in the full range of the keyboard, demanding wide
stretches in both hands from the pianist. The work is dedicated to Jeanne
Behrend, American pianist and fellow student at the Curtis Institute.
The composer gave
the first performance of this work at the Twenty-Fifth Students' Concert of the
Curtis Institute of Music on 12th May 1932. That same evening he also gave the
first performance of his chamber piece, Dover
Beach, Opus 3, for baritone and string quartet to words by Matthew
Arnold.
Although Vladimir
Horowitz is always credited with having given the first performance of the four
Excursions Opus 20, in reality he
only gave the première of three of the pieces. Barber composed them largely at
the behest of Jeanne Behrend, who as early as 1938 pressed the composer to
write a "longish piece" for
piano. The work was begun in June, 1942 and completed in September 1944. In May
1944 Behrend performed the first in the set on WQXR Radio in New York. By July
1944, Barber had provided Excursion I,
III and IV for Vladimir Horowitz, who played them on 4th January 1945 at a
concert at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. He performed them again on 28th
March 1945 at Carnegie Hall in New York. It was left to Jeanne Behrend to
become the first pianist to play the complete set, on 22nd December 1948 at New
York Times Hall. In his explanatory note to the 1945 G. Schirmer published
score, Barber wrote "These are
Excursion, in small classical forms into regional American idiom. Their
regional characteristics, as well us their sources in folk material and their scorin,
reminiscent of local instruments, are easily recognized." The
first in the set is in the form of a boogie-woogie. The second is harmonically,
melodically and rhythmically in "blues" style The third piece is a
set of variations reminiscent of Latin American popular music. According to
James Sifferman, Excursion IV
suggests "the limited vocabulary of the
mouth organ or harmonica" reminding us of American barn-dances
and indigenous fiddle playing.
One of the great
landmarks of American piano music is Barber's monumental Sonata for Piano, Opus 26. This was
commissioned in the autumn of 1947 by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers in
honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the League of Composers. Although
Barber found it relatively easy to begin composing the work, it took him nearly
two years to complete it. The holograph score at the Library of Congress shows
the completion date of June 1949. Its première in New York on 23rd January 1950
by Vladimir Horowitz turned the musical world on its ears. Horowitz, who was
undoubtedly intrigued by its ferocious technical demands, quickly became
Barber's most vocal supporter, claiming the sonata was "the first truly great native work in the
form." The technically demanding work for a while frightened
many professional pianists away, but no serious musician could ignore the work
for long and it soon became the most played American piano composition and a
required work at piano competitions throughout the world. Despite Horowitz's
close association with the sonata, the work was actually not written with him
in mind. In an interview on WQXR with Robert Sherman, Barber declared that he
had no particular pianists in mind when he began writing the work: "I just started to write a sonata." Regardless,
the support and numerous performances by Horowitz only strengthened the work's
impact and eventual place in the musical hall of fame. In the New York Times Olin Downes wrote "We consider it the first sonata really to come
of age by an American composer of this period it has intense feeling as well as
constructive power and intellectual maturity. It is stated naturally and
convincingly in the language of modern music." The sonata is in
four movements. The first of these begins with a steel-fingered chromaticism,
through which flickers a poignant, lyrical theme. It is answered by a brusque
fragment built up from dissonant intervals. At the movement's conclusion the
left hand ends in an angry grumble, while the right evaporates in a mist of
feathery, upward strokes. The second movement is a sort of super scherzo that might be described as
happy, were it not so hysterical. In the words of the musicologist Charles
Briefer, "The germinal element is akin
to feathery stroke, that ended the first movement, though here they are
inverted into a downward loop. The same "feather" form themselves
into helpless bird cries at the outset of the third movement while a theme
tries to assert itself in the left hand. A treble melody appears which seems
related to the lyric theme that opened the first movement. Suddenly there is a
distinct shift in mood and character. The pervading chromaticism is gone, leaving behind a quiet, almost Hindemithian
aura of neo-classicism to fade away to nothing. The fourth and final movement,
a fugue…is by far the most dazzling and concise of the four movements with it,
immense energy and barely a pause for breath, it hurtles to it, violent and
cataclysmic end." When Francis Poulenc heard Barber's Sonata in 1950, he remarked "The Sonata pleases me without reserve. It is a
remarkable work from both the musical and instrumental point of view. In turn,
tragical, joyous and songful, it end, up with a fantastically difficult to play
fugue. Bursting with energy, this finale knocks you out in (something less
than) five minutes!"
The Souvenirs, Opus 28, were originally
composed for piano four-hands in 1951 Barber then arranged the score for piano
solo and orchestrated it as a ballet in 1952 In 1952, Arthur Gold and Robert
Fizdale made an arrangement of the work for two pianos as well. When the
four-hand score was published by G. Schirmer in 1954, Barber provided the
following introduction: "In 1952
I was writing some duets for one piano to
play with a friend, and Lincoln Kirstein suggested I orchestrate them for a
ballet. Commissioned by the Ballet Society, the suite consists of a waltz,
schottische, pas de deux, two step, hesitation tango, and gallop. One might
imagine a divertissement in a selling of the Palm Court of the Hotel Plaza in
New York, the year about 1914, epoch of the first tangos; Souvenir, remembered
with affection, not in irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused
tenderness." Although the critics initially received the work
as "airy, gracious, inventive, and
lighthearted" and "a
facile trifle," when the ballet version received its first
performance at the New York City Ballet on 15th November 1955, Francis
Herridge, reviewing it for the New York Post, understood Barber's satirical
intentions: "Souvenirs is a thoroughly
engaging potpourri of Mack Sennett bathing girls, thin-mustached Lotharios and
bloodthirsty vampire… A series of brief sketches includes a spoof on the Irene
Castle dance style" a hotel hallway farce, three wall-flowers at a dance,
a bedroom seduction, and an afternoon on the beach."
Barber's Nocturne, Opus 33, was composed in 1959
and is subtitled Homage to John Field. Although
it was the Irish pianist and composer John Field who created the form of the
nocturne, it was Chopin who realised its fullest possibilities as a medium of
expressing some of the most sensitive and poetic thoughts. Barber's
neo-romantic harmonies, along with exquisite filigree passages, make this
dreamy and highly pianistic work one of the composer's most ethereal creations.
It was first performed in 1959 in San Diego, California by John Browning
The Ballade, Opus 46, commissioned in August
1974 by the Van Cliburn Foundation for its fifth Van Cliburn International
Quadrennial Piano Competition, was completed by Barber in 1977. After a long
time away from the piano, he returned to it with great difficulty, taking eight
or nine months to complete the commission at a time in his life when he felt
sombre and out of place. His beloved Capricorn (his home in Mount Kisco, New
York) was sold and he had moved to a spacious apartment in New York City,
overlooking Central Park. He felt restless and depressed, and the Ballade reflects his mental state. The
opening chordal material surges restlessly, while the middle section explodes
in virtuosity. The work closes after recapitulating the opening section and
mysteriously concludes, pianissimo. Deceptively
simple and compact, it is a work of deeply moving musical expression.
Daniel Pollack
Daniel Pollack was
born in Los Angeles on 23rd January, 1935, and began his studies at the age of
four Two years later, he was accepted into the "prodigy" class of the
legendary Ethel Leginska, herself a pupil of Theodore Leschetizky. At the age
of nine he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic performing Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1 in E minor. He subsequently
studied with Jacob Gimpel followed by Lillian Steuber he was accepted until, at
the age of seventeen as a full scholarship student in the class of the
legendary Mme Rosina Lhevinne at the Juilliard School in New York. After
receiving his Masters Degree from Juilliard, Pollack received a Fulbright
Scholarship for graduate studies at the Vienna Academie fur Musik in the class
of Professor Bruno Seidelhofer. Other teachers have included Wilhem Kempff,
Guido Agosti, and Ilona Kabos. At the age of 23, Pollack, already a veteran of
numerous prizes and competitions, garnered international recognition when he
became a prize-winner in the First International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition
in Moscow. In fact, his performance or Samuel Barber's Sonata became the sensation or that 1958
competition and a subsequent recording on the Melodiya label became a highly
collectable souvenir. Pollack has performed not only in the United States, but
in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. He has appeared as a soloist with
almost all of the world's greatest orchestras, and in most or the greatest
concert halls. Among his unique honours, he has performed on demand on
International Competition juries and has served on the visiting faculties or
The Juilliard School and Yale University's School or Music. He is currently
professor or piano at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.