APPALACHIAN SPRING

Originally composed for oboe and string orchestra, and here presented in a new chamber arrangement by Ensemble 360’s oboist, Adrian Wilson, Samuel Barber’s Canzonetta for Oboe and Strings was meant to be the slow movement of an oboe concerto commissioned by the New York Philharmonic. However, soon after starting work on the piece (in 1978) Barber was diagnosed with cancer. The other two movements of the concerto were never completed, and this was to be the composer’s final work (Barber died in 1981). The piece was orchestrated posthumously by Barber’s longtime friend and former student, Charles Turner, and was premiered on December 17th, 1981, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta. Principle oboist of the New York Philharmonic (and a former classmate of Barber’s at the Curtis Institute of Music), Harold Gomberg played the solo part. 

In many ways, the Canzonetta is typical of Barber’s style, with a tendency towards vocal lyricism and neo-romantic tonality. In this regard, Historian and Barber specialist Barbara Heyman calls the Canzonetta an “appropriate elegy to the conclusion of Barber’s career.” The work, like others in Barber’s oeuvre, combines elements of post-Straussian chromaticism with what we might think of as a typically American lyrical simplicity. A simple, meandering melodic line is at times presented in a strictly diatonic context, and at others with a highly chromatic harmonisation. Throughout, the oboe’s melody floats above the string texture, seemingly weightless with Barber showing the instrument at its best. Indeed, Turner quotes Barber (in the preface to the 1993 edition of the work for oboe and piano) as having said, “I like to give my best themes to the oboe”. 

Dr. Benjamin Tassie

In September 1944, Richard Strauss wrote to his friend Karl Böhm, telling him that he had been working on an Adagio for string instruments, which would probably become an Allegro since he couldn’t ‘remain very long at a Brucknerian snail’s pace’. Early in 1945, Strauss gave the new piece a name – Metamorphosen – and completed a version for seven string instruments, a score that was only discovered in 1990. Whether Strauss ever intended this for performance is questionable, but it serves as a fascinating comparison with the final version for 23 solo strings that was completed on 12 April 1945, just two weeks after the septet score. Metamorphosen was first performed on 25 January 1946, by the Collegium Musicum Zurich under Paul Sacher who had commissioned it. According to Michael Kennedy, Strauss conducted two of the rehearsals and he was in the audience for the premiere. Metamorophosen is an overwhelmingly powerful lament for Strauss’s native city of Munich – which had been all but destroyed by more than 70 bombing raids – especially its Opera House. The introductory chords and the falling theme heard near the opening are the most important components of a work marked by the most fluid and complex counterpuntal development. On the last page of the score, Strauss has written ‘In Memoriam!’ and the falling theme appears over a quotation in the bass from the Funeral March of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Thus ends one of the most moving and profound of all Strauss’s works.

Nigel Simone 2014

It’s an amusing accident of history that Barber’s Adagio, one of the totems of American music, was composed in Austria (where Barber was spending the summer and autumn with Gian-Carlo Menotti) and first performed on 14 December 1936 at a concert in Rome (as the slow movement of the String Quartet Op.11). Barber was delighted with this movement, describing it to his friend Orlando Cole as ‘a knockout!’ While finishing the whole quartet, he arranged the Adagio as an independent movement for string orchestra and this was first performed in 1938 in a broadcast concert in New York given by the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Barber’s fellow composer Aaron Copland spoke about the piece in 1982 for a BBC radio programme, praising ‘the sense of continuity, the steadiness of the flow, the satisfaction of the arch … from beginning to end. It’s gratifying, satisfying, and it makes you believe in the sincerity which he obviously put into it.’

Nigel Simeone 2014

It was the patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge who commissioned Aaron Copland to compose a new ballet for Martha Graham’s dance company in 1943, for performance in the Coolidge Auditorium (named after her) at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. Copland was delighted with the idea, particularly after Graham sent him the first version of her scenario concerning a young married couple in rural Pennsylvania. The ballet went through various titles during the composition process, and Copland’s manuscript was simply headed ‘Ballet for Martha’, but Graham settled on ‘Appalachian Spring’ just before the premiere, taking the title from a poem by Hart Crane. One of the attractions for Copland was the challenge of writing for an ensemble of 12 instruments (the largest group that could fit into the very small pit in the Coolidge Auditorium), and the result was described in a review of the first performance by the ballet critic John Martin as ‘a score of fresh and singing beauty. It is, on its surface, a piece of early Americana, but in reality, it is a celebration of the human spirit.’ Copland himself was typically self-effacing, admitting that ‘people seemed to like it, so I guess it was all right.’ In 1945 he made a very successful arrangement for large orchestra, but the sound of the original has a beauty and intimacy all its own. Copland decided quite early on to use the Shaker tune ‘Simple Gifts’ (written in 1848), and this melody is woven through much of the score, notably in the set of variations. But while the score perfectly matches the ‘local’ elements of the story, it also transcends them to become a piece of universal appeal: Copland’s great achievement in Appalachian Spring is to have created a quiet and heartfelt vision of hope in troubled times.

Nigel Simeone 2024