Composers Datebook

Synopsis

At Westminster Abbey on today’s date in 1998 a haunting new setting of the Latin mass written by British composer Roxanna Panufnik received its premiere performance.

Panufnik was born in London in 1968, and if her family name sounds familiar, it’s because her father was Andrzej Panufnik, one of the greatest Polish composers of the 20th century.

Her interest in music began early: “I was three years old … when I said ‘Mummy, I want a violin with a stick to make it sing!’ I started violin, piano and flute. But I only wanted to make up my own music. When I was 12, [the composer] Oliver Knussen, visiting my parents, told me I should write down my improvisations. It all went from there.”

And in response to questions about having a famous composer as her father, she said: “My father had enormous integrity, always teaching me to be myself … Early in my career I was very sensitive to being compared to him and a few stray remarks about nepotism dented my confidence. However, I plodded on and now I’m thrilled to be regularly programmed alongside him and I’m so proud of where and who I came from.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Roxanna Panufnik (b. 1968): ‘Westminster Mass’; Westminster Cathedral Choir; James O’Donnell, conductor; Teldec 28069

Synopsis

These days composer John J. Becker is almost totally forgotten, but back in the 1930s his name was linked with Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger as one of the American Five composers of what was dubbed “ultra-modern” music.

From 1928 to 1935, Becker taught at the College of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and briefly assembled a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra to give Midwest premieres of works by Ives and other ultra-modernists. From 1935 to 1941, Becker was the Minnesota State director of the Federal Music Project, one of President Roosevelt’s initiatives to provide work for American musicians during the Depression years.

On today's date in 1937, at the old St. Paul Auditorium, Becker conducted the Federal Music Project's Twin Cities Orchestra in a program that included the premiere performance of his own Symphony No. 3, subtitled Symphonia Brevis.

This ultra-modern symphony was met with an ultra-conservative review in The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, whose critic wrote: “It consists of spasmodic little excursions … percussive barrages… ideas that seem to run out before the score comes to a close, with the consequent suggestion of that spurious vitality exhibited by decapitated fowls.”

Decades later, three years before his death in 1961, Becker, along with a few other surviving members of the American Five, was invited to take a bow from the stage of Carnegie Hall at one of Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic concerts which featured his Sinfonia Brevis.

Music Played in Today's Program

John J. Becker (1886-1961): Sinfonia Brevis; Symphony No. 3; Louisville Orchestra; Jorge Mester, conductor; Albany TROY-027

Synopsis

On today’s date in 2013, a new work by 90-year old German-born American composer and teacher named Ursula Mamlok received its premiere performance in Switzerland. Five Fantasy Pieces for oboe and strings was given its premiere by great Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and colleagues.

Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923 and began composing as a child. Her family was Jewish, and once the Nazis placed school music programs off limits to Jews, her family began holding musicales in their home, with Ursula writing the music.

After the Crystal Night pogrom in 1938, her family left Germany, and, via Ecuador, young Ursula came to America after being offered a full scholarship to study at the Mannes School of Music in New York. She became an American citizen and began teaching most notably the Manhattan School of Music.

The bulk of Mamlok’s music is for small chamber ensembles, and only once she tried to create a purely electronic piece. In a 1996 interview, she confessed, “Unfortunately I have no connection to it … I put it together in the studio at Columbia in New York, but it took too long. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d rather use the pencil.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Ursula Mamlok (1923-2016): Five Fantasy Pieces (2012/13); Heinz Holliger, oboe; Hanna Weinmeister, violin; Jurg Dahler, viola; Daniel Heaflinger, cello; Bridge 9457

Synopsis

In Costa Mesa, California, on today’s date in 2014, the Pacific Chorale premiered a new choral opera. And what exactly is a choral opera you ask? Good question — and one that puzzled Jake Heggie as well, since he was the composer commissioned for that occasion.

He and his librettist Gene Sheer at first scratched their heads. As Heggie put it, “Operas require action, characters, conflicts, journeys, transformation movement. Choirs stand still and make beautiful sound.”

They came up with a unique solution involving one character, Nora, a silent, on-stage actress, whose inner thoughts are sung by half of the choir. The other half expresses the sounds and surroundings of the outside world she chooses to hear on a day in her life on which everything seems to go wrong — starting with a returned, unopened, handwritten letter she had sent, pouring out her heart, to her jerk of a boyfriend. Even her apartment furniture gets in a word or two about her unhappy state. And where does she turn for comfort? Why, to the radio of course — hence the title of the new choral opera: The Radio Hour.

Spoiler alert: the opera ends on a hopeful note for poor Nora.

Music Played in Today's Program

Jake Heggie (b. 1961): The Radio Hour; John Alexander Singers; Pacific Symphony members; John Alexander, conductor; Delos 3484

Synopsis

Today, a tip of the hat to the persistence of Elisa Hall, who lived in Boston from 1853 to 1924.

Hall was a Francophile and championed the best and the latest in French music. Sadly, she suffered from a hearing ailment, which would eventually result in complete deafness. At the advice of her doctor, who thought it might stimulate her ears, she took up the saxophone — and with typical enthusiasm soon began commissioning the leading French composers of the day for new pieces for her instrument.

In all, she commissioned 22 works, the most famous being by Claude Debussy. He at first refused Hall’s persistent offers of a commission, pleading the saxophone was “a reed animal with whose habits he was poorly acquainted.”

Debussy was paid in advance, but it was years before delivered a short rhapsody in a vaguely Moorish style. In May of 1919, one year after his death, the orchestration of the piece was completed by his friend, Jean Roger-Ducasse, and premiered in Paris.

Hall apparently never performed it herself. Maybe she was exasperated by the long delay or perhaps, by 1919, her own hearing had deteriorated to the point where she no longer could.

Music Played in Today's Program

Claude Debussy (1862-1918): Rhapsody for Saxophone and Orchestra; Kenneth Radnofsky, alto saxophone; New York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, conductor; Teldec 13133