Contemporary Classics June 12, 2018 Summer

Summer has come to Savannah so this broadcast of Contemporary Classics is dedicated to Summer.

Josef Suk’s A Summer's Tale Op. 29 is a tone poem for large orchestra was composed between 1907 and 1909 and is in five movements. The work received its premiere in 1909, and was initially coolly received – several critics charged it with being impressionistic.  It has been described as Scrianbinesque and some have found in it a foreshadowing of Shostakovich's orchestration.

John Cage’s The Seasons was composed for Merce Cunningham’s Dance Group and first performed in 1947.  The work has a strict mathematical construction and uses his” gamut’s” of sounds approach with predefined sonorities (single notes, chords, aggregates). The ballet is in one act divided into nine sections: Prelude I, Winter; Prelude II, Spring; Prelude III, Summer; Prelude IV, Fall; Finale (Prelude I).  Here we will be listening to “Summer”

Anton Webern wrote Im Sommerwind in 1904, the year before he started his studies with Arnold Schoenberg.  It is a very the lush, very tonal tone poem, which was never performed during his lifetime. Webern died in 1945; the score was discovered in 1961 among belongings that had passed to his daughter. The next year, it was premiered at the First International Webern Festival by Eugene Ormandy and The Philadelphia Orchestra.

Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a lush, richly textured work and is set to excerpts from "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", a 1938 prose poem by James Agee that later became a preamble to his posthumously published, Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Death in the Family (1957).   Barber paints an idyllic, nostalgic picture of Agee's native Knoxville, Tennessee. The preamble is a simple, dreamlike depiction of an evening in the American South, narrated by a male child who seems, at times, to transform into an adult since it is an adult’s reflection on his childhood fueled by a moving nostalgia. The work was commissioned by soprano Eleanor Steber, who premiered it in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky.  Although written for a soprano, it is also sung by a tenor in some versions.  

Zoltan Kodály's Summer Evening  was his first significant orchestral work composed in 1906 but heavily revised in 1929 at the suggestion of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted it the following year with the New York Philharmonic. This is the version heard here.   It's an idyll for chamber orchestra -- no percussion or brass, except for the horns that are blended into the woodwind section. Despite its evocative title, the piece carries no particular program. Kodály noted simply that "it was conceived on summer evenings, amid harvested cornfields, by the ripples of the Adriatic." Not the loose rhapsody the title implies, this music is firmly hung on an elaborated sonata form.   At the very beginning, the English horn sings out the work's most important theme: long, soft, expressive, and flowing. This is taken up by the strings, then presented in several variant forms, interlacing brief woodwind solos with more forceful statements by the string section. After this mini development comes a new motif, a soft, short, fluid two-bar phrase offered by oboe, then flute, and soon strings bringing it to a crescendo. Kodály now brings on the rest of his thematic material more quickly: first, a melody in the violins containing a couple of very Hungarian-sounding twisting triplets, and then a sharply marked figure in the oboe, immediately repeated by full orchestra, that ends with a quick upward flourish. Kodály next subjects all these themes to a full development so intense that it hardly seems nocturnal anymore. The mood eventually relaxes for a loose recapitulation of the four themes, unwinding into a soft, atmospheric conclusion.