WOSU Public Media - Classical

First things first. Here is the Ohio State University Men’s Glee Club in the sublime Prisoner’s Chorus from Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio, from a concert performance of the complete opera given at Mershon Auditorium on March 10, 2010, and broadcast live over WOSU:

Marhsall Haddock conducted the performance. The Men’s Glee Club is prepared and conducted by Robert Ward

O welche Lust! In freir Luft, dem Atem leicht zu heben!

O what joy, to breathe with ease in the open air!

For me, the singing of the Men’s Glee Club in some of the most moving pages in all opera was worth the price of admission. Okay, I was working the show and got in for free, but you know what I mean. Fidelio is a musical and emotional gut punch anyway, but the days preceding this performance were not for the feint of heart. The performance was heavily promoted around the participation of a world class tenor who was busy in Australia and Italy in the weeks leading up to March 10. No problem. The guy is in demand and his presence on campus would be worth waiting for. And in every breath, uttered by me and others, it was “Fidelio at Ohio State with Joe Blow”.  Comes two days before the performance when the word is out that Joe Blow ain’t coming.  So the opera has to go on without Blow, or more to the point without a tenor to sing Florestan which is a role very few tenors have the cojones to sing well (literally-its a killer). I grew up hearing Jon Vickers do the role, so my standards are impossibly high, and Jon Vickers in his 80s is living a happy retirement in Bermuda. But bing-o, tenor Michael Hendrick is en route to save the show. He gets off a plane at 9 pm on March 8 while the first dress rehearsal is going on, comes in to Mershon auditorium  with his coat on and luggage in hand, gets on stage and sings…and sings…WOW!

Mind you, the guy barely had time to take off his coat. Thank you,

Michael Hendrick

Michael Hendrick!

Okay, so now we have a terrific new tenor in place, the OSU Symphony and Glee Clubs sound wonderful, conductor Marshall Haddock is in command and its all good. Isn’t it? Well, second dress rehearsal Tuesday night March 9 goes okay.

And then. And then.  AND THEN my phone rings at 4 pm,  four hours before show time letting me know that our beloved soprano who is to

Jennifer Whitehead with daughter, Olivia

sing the title role, a distinguished OSU alumna with a great voice and a sweetheart to boot is ill and has CANCELLED. So on four hours notice we have no Fidelio. And the opera is called Fidelio in case you forgot. Luckily, Jennifer Whitehead is pursuing doctoral study at OSU, she’s a gifted, lovely experienced soprano and she is ready to go on. Is she a Fidelio?  She is a gifted, lovely  and experienced soprano and she is ready to go on.  (Talk about “first things first”.  She is reported to have said, “I gotta go buy a dress”. Which she did and looked glorious).  So Jennifer Whitehead, who to my knowledge has had no rehearsal with orchestra, who has never sung this role before, who had a few hours notice, comes out in the snappy new dress, score in hand and the girl delivers.  Here’s the Act I quartet, Mir ist so wunderbar (and it bloody well was)

Helen Allen (Marzelline) Jennifer Whitehead (Fidelio)  C.Andrew Blosser (Jaquino) and Calvin Griffin (Rocco)

nnifer Whitehead with Olivia

Some very gifted singers here. I’m told Calvin Girfin is an undergrad. Write his name down. Andy Blosser is a jewel and I’m in love with Helen Allen’s voice. Jenifer Whitehead saved the show and brought honor to herself and Beethoven. OSU should have at least paid for the dress.

At the end,  it was a great evening for the School of Music at The Ohio State University. It was a joy for us to be involved and to have a live broadcast for OSU listeners. Don’t believe me about the joy part?  Here’s the finale, with our soloists and the OSU Women’s and Men’s Glee Clubs, Richard Schnipke and Robert Ward, conductors, all led by the man who

Marshall Haddock-who made it happen

made it happen, Marshall Haddock:

Jennifer sings like a dream and gets a new dress and thanks to our broadcast locally and over the web, the world knows about the fine School of Music at the Ohio State University. Bravo School of Music, Bravo Beethoven and Bravo WOSU!

–Christopher Purdy

Pianist John O'Conor

Pianist John O’Conor has a ready laugh and a lilt in his voice that has nothing to do with his Irish accent.  He loves what he does.  A recently re-released recording combines his love of music, playing the piano, and the melodies he grew up hearing in his native Ireland.  Melodies like The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee, The Last Rose of Summer, and Danny Boy, are near and dear to John O’Conor.  In these arrangements, which he recorded with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, these classic Irish tunes take on a sophisticated air, while retaining their original charm.

Mr. O’Conor invested several years of his life into recording the piano sonatas of Beethoven.  His love of Beethoven came through special studies with renowned German pianist Wilhelm Kempff at his villa in Positano, Italy.  His studies with Kempff would eventually lead to the student becoming the teacher as O’Conor now conducts masterclasses in that same villa.

In a recent Columbus recital (thanks to Chamber Music Columbus), the audience was treated to selections by pianist John Field, an Irish-born composer about whom many of us know little.  O’Conor says Field is someone we owe a great deal when it comes to the development of the piano repertoire as we know it today.

While John O’Conor still makes his home in Ireland, he finds himself spending more and more time in the mountains of  Virginia.  University of Virginia?  Virginia Tech?  No…at what is now Shenandoah University in the sleepy little town of Winchester.

What advice does he offer for that next generation?

I leave you with a look at Wilhelm Kempff’s villa in Positano, Italy. — Boyce Lancaster

Last week I discovered a new comic strip called “Who’s Minding the Score?”   So far there are three Toons  on the site, including one for yesterday.   

If you enjoy satire and can relate to orchestras and the business involved in running them, you might want to take a peek. There will be a new weekly installment,  “more or less” each Sunday. — Beverley Ervine

Do you think classical music is irrelevant to the world’s “greater concerns”?  On this blog, I’m probably preaching to the choir.  But read on anyway, and once you’ve reached the end of this post, I dare you to tell me that classical music has no purpose in our troubled world.

Let’s remember, for a moment, what the world was like during World War II.  Europe was a no-go, having almost entirely succumbed to the Nazi juggernaut.  Russia was bleeding to the tune of millions of lives.  North Africa was crawling with Panzers.  Japan wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.  Strewn conveniently across various tectonic plates between Europe and Asia, the U.S. wasn’t immune to the aftershocks of the Anschluss.  U-boats stalked the East Coast, California became a No Man’s Land for Japanese Americans, and the folks at Pearl Harbor would never forget what came their way.  And, in the end, too many would never again set eyes on our amber waves of grain.

But while World War II sealed the fates of many Americans, it also brought their nation together.  Yankees young and old recruited themselves for the war effort however they could.  Some enlisted, others kept the home fires burning.  Rosie became a Riveter, and schoolkids balled up and gave away the little foil wrappers from their chewing gum sticks - all in the name of supporting the war against evil.

Does anyone know how much those tiny balls of aluminum helped the Allied Forces?  I like to think they helped a lot.  In fact, I like to think that the landing at Normandy couldn’t have happened had children everywhere not happily chewed a lot of Doublemint.  After all, gum-chewing is something kids do exceptionally well, and it is something that makes most kids happy, and being happy is what kids’ young lives should be about, even more so with a monster like Hitler hiding beneath their collective bed.

In other words, in time of war, one does what one can with one’s available resources.  Schoolkids can chew gum and donate gum wrappers for ammo.  Others older and with more education and skills can do other things.  But no one can do everything, and even the smallest, most apparently insignificant task can help others get through a horrible time, as World War II must have been for, well, pretty much everyone, everywhere.

This is the spirit behind Alexander McCall Smith’s delightful novel La’s Orchestra Saves the World (Pantheon Books, 2008).  I’ve long been a fan of McCall Smith’s work, his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and 44 Scotland Street series in particular being so beautifully penned and populated with such gracious characters.  But somehow La’s Orchestra eluded me.  Until now.  It’s a delightful read and, in that ineffable life-imitates-art-imitates-life matrix, has real-life resonances with today’s war-torn Middle East.

There were many things La (short for Lavender) Stone, the title character of McCall Smith’s book, couldn’t do from her location in rural England to help Britain’s efforts against the Axis Powers.  So, like those gum-chewing students, she did what she could.  She planted a vegetable garden, she tended a farmer-neighbor’s hens, and, an amateur flute-player, she started an orchestra.  One by one, village eccentrics and airmen from a nearby Royal Air Force base joined up.  The orchestra didn’t sound very good, but it served everyone’s needs: it enabled the musicians and their audience to come together for a few moments of peace, a few moments of - dare I say it? - harmony at a time when darkness had again covered the earth.

I won’t reveal too much here about the book’s plot and (enigmatic) conclusion, because I’d like to leave them for your own discovery.  Suffice it to say that La and her cohort of English villagers are people I think you’d enjoy meeting, and, as is often the case in McCall Smith’s novels, even the villains (or those we think might be villains) aren’t really so bad after all. 

Sadly, history does seem doomed to repeat itself and may well be doing so this very moment.  What would a World War III look like if not the global mess we’ve got now?  Perish the thought.  And what can most of us do about it?  Time to dust off that violin, call a few friends, and start sawing away.

One young woman in Iraq recently did that - and more.  Last summer, 18-year-old Zuhal Sultan, of Baghdad, though now living in Scotland, created the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq. Sultan, a pianist and graduate of Baghdad’s Music and Ballet School, found the orchestra’s music director, Paul MacAlindin, and players by posting “help wanted” announcements online.  She recruited instructors at prestigious music schools and major orchestras around the world to teach the orchestra’s young musicians online.  And she drummed up cash for the orchestra - including $50,000 from Iraq’s deputy prime minister - by sending out funding requests on Twitter.  Sultan says she developed her online savvy when Iraq’s increasingly unstable security situation forced her to stay indoors and to turn to social networking media to stay in touch with the world.  Read more about Sultan and the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq in The Sunday Times of London.  And view the BBC’s report about the orchestra here:

So what can the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq do about policy in and toward the Middle East?  Precious little, I would think.  But what it can do is help keep life from becoming all about war.  Zuhal’s orchestra and La’s orchestra remind us that war cannot destroy humanity unless we let it.  And that means these orchestras truly have saved the world. 

- Jennifer Hambrick

Happy 100th birthday to composer Samuel Barber (d.1981).  We’ve

Samuel Barber

been discussing some of his vocal music on this blog in honor of the occasion. The world knows the composer of the Adagio for Strings, used in film and television, not to mention the funerals of FDR, JFK, Einstein and Princess Grace. There’s a lovely setting of the Agnus Dei for which Barber adapted the Adagio. You’ll find it at the end of this post.

But wait! The most beloved song-cycle of the last sixty years is Barber’s  Hermit Songs. These are adaptations of medieval-monastic Irish poetry by Sean O’Faolain.  Hermit Songs was commissioned by the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Fund in 1953.  Leontyne Price gave the first performance of these ten exquisite songs at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1953. Samuel Barber was at the piano.  This is The Heavenly Banquet,  from that world premiere performance

I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.  I would like to

Leontyne Price

be watching heaven’s family/Drinking it through all eternity

Leontyne Price, that great artist, that magnificent voice, was Samuel Barber’s muse.  Do you have a better idea? It’s long been customary for a woman to sing Hermit Songs, but I don’t know why a terrific artist like Sanford Sylvan should be excluded. The accompanist is David Breitman

The Crucifixion, number five of the Hermit Songs is from a 12th century

Sanford Sylvan

text called The Speckled Book

At the cry of the first bird/They began to crucify thee, o Swan!/Never shall lament cease because of that/It was like the parting of day from night

Leontyne Price and Samuel Barber

Sanford Sylvan and David Breitman

The final Song, The Desire for Hermitage is as beautiful and as moving as The Crucifixion brief and dramatic.

Ah! to be all alone in a little cell with nobody near me; beloved that pilgrimage before the last pilgrimage to Death…Alone I came into the world/Alone I shall go from it

Leontyne Price and Samuel Barber:

Sanford Sylvan and David Breitman

Miss Price made two recordings of the Hermit Songs. The world premiere performance sampled here in on an RCA Red Seal CD: Leontyne Price Sings Samuel Barber. Sanford Sylvan and David Bretiman included the Barber songs an a CD called Beloved That Pilgrimage from Nonesuch, along with music by Copland and Chanler.

And now for something completely different, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, adapted from the music that gave him fame:

Samuel Barber died in New York on January 23, 1981. Do yourself a favor and remember him on his 100th birthday by listening to his music. Enjoy.

–Christopher Purdy

J. S. Bach’s birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks, but sometimes his worthy sons get overlooked.  Today (March 8th) is the birthday of Carl Philipp Emanuel, the next to last son of Johann Sebastian, born in 1714.  The first music of C.P.E. that I really became aware of years ago was his masterful Magnificat of 1749, a choral setting of the Song of Mary, the Latin text which begins, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” and whose version stands comparison with his more famous father’s setting.  In fact, it was  only after I got a recording of the senior Bach’s version of the Magnificat that I first heard and came to appreciate the one by Carl Philipp Emanuel, which was the other work on the CD.  What a delightful surprise it was.

C.P.E. Bach was one of the founders of the Classical style that succeeded the Baroque era in music and was admired by Mozart, among others, who said of him, “He is the father, we are the children.”  And it is said that early on Franz Joseph Haydn learned much from a study of his works.   C.P.E. Bach got a law degree at the age of 24 after studying at the Universities of Leipzig and Frankfurt but abandoned that profession to pursue a career in music like his father.  He served in the court of Frederick II of Prussia and eventually succeeded Georg Philip Telemann as Kapellmeister at Hamburg where he died in 1788.  His reputation waned during the 19th century but has picked up again since the 1960’s when more recordings of his compositions became available.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote solo keyboard pieces, chamber music, concertos, symphonies, and choral works.  The beautiful Magnificat, influenced by his father and written a year before his passing in 1750, is an outstanding example of his art.  Here is the opening portion I found on Youtube; it may pique your interest to hear more.

–John Rittmeyer

It’s more than a little strange to be introducing a musician whom the classical music world has in one sense known for more than three decades.  But hear American violinist Dylana Jenson’s story - one of a prodigious musical talent virtually silenced at the flowering of what augured to be a brilliant concert career, and now, with the release of a new recording of violin concertos by Shostakovich and Barber with the London Symphony Orchestra, again on the rise - and you’ll understand the reason for this little introduction.  Jenson joined me in a phone interview recently from her home in Grand Rapids, MI, years after an unfathomable episode left her without an instrument to play - left her, as Jenson says, artistically voiceless.  Here is Jenson’s story in (mostly) her own words, and in her own voice. 

Jenson, 49, was a child prodigy.  Her mother had come to America from Costa Rica and fell in love with classical music when she heard the Beethoven symphonies on some some old 78s.  Jenson’s mother was poor and never had the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument, but did everything she could to take part in music:

Jenson’s mother insisted that Jenson and her siblings have a chance to learn how to play instruments.  In the early 1960s, the noted Japanese music educator Dr. Shinichi Suzuki was making his first tour of the U.S. and showing parents and teachers alike his innovative approach to teaching music to very young children.  For Jenson’s mother, the Suzuki method was the answer to a prayer:

For four years, Jenson learned to play the violin alongside her mother. When Jenson was seven, her parents took her to study with noted violinist Manuel Compinsky.  Just this year Jenson found a cassette tape her parents made of her first lesson with the chamber music master:

Jenson thrived on Compinsky’s perfectionism; like a sponge, her muscle memory absorbed his pearls of wisdom.  Her mother was firm in her desire for her daughter to learn correct technique through actual violin performance repertory - concertos, solo pieces - rather than through etudes of little artistic depth.  So Compinsky guided Jenson through the violin repertory, refining her technique one passage, one phrase, one piece at a time.

But when Jenson told Compinsky she wanted to learn the Mendelssohn concerto, a work that calls for mastery of the ricochet technique, her teacher hesitated and her mother stepped in with just the right magic:

By age 13 Jenson was performing in public.  When Jenson was 15, she moved with her family to Bloomington, Indiana, where she met the legendary Indiana University violin pedagogue Josef Gingold.  The young Jenson and Gingold were more like colleagues than student and teacher:

In 1978, when she was 17, Jenson won the silver medal in the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  That win, and the prospects of what would no doubt be a dazzling concert career, convinced the owner of a 1743 Guarneri del Gesù violin to loan the violin to Jenson.  A Montagnana violin had seen Jenson successfully through the Tchaikovsky competition.  But the del Gesù, Jenson says, felt like an extension of herself:

Jenson’s calendar began filling up with engagements to solo with major orchestras.  She signed a contract to make a series of recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra.  As one of precious few women musicians on the concert circuit in the early 1980s, the barely-adult-aged Jenson was building a life for herself.

So when Jenson and conductor David Lockington decided to marry, Jenson sent the violin’s owner a wedding invitation.  She could never have predicted his response:

Two weeks after the fateful phone call, Jenson handed over the violin to its owner.  The instrument landed back in the vault.

At the time, Jenson thought the withdrawal of the del Gesù would be only a minor obstacle to her career.  She was wrong.  For a couple of years she borrowed violins from players in the orchestras with which she performed as soloist.  But these instruments lacked the presence and quality of sound a concert violin needs in order to project over an orchestra.  Music critics started to notice the problem, writing reviews of Jenson’s performances of concertos “without violin.”  Jenson asked everyone she knew for help finding a concert-caliber violin, but no one came through. 

Her management and recording company became increasingly frustrated with her inability to proceed with scheduled performances and recordings.  Lacking an instrument suitable to her work, Jenson eventually was forced to leave the major concert stage, performing occasionally only on borrowed violins and with smaller orchestras.

With each failed attempt to find a world-class instrument, Jenson grieved more and more the loss of the del Gesù.  At one point, even hearing the sound of a violin was enough to leave her in tears:

But Jenson’s luck started to change in 1996, when she met luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz.  When Jenson told Yo-Yo Ma of her quest for a concert instrument, the world-renowned cellist referred her to Zygmuntowicz.  She commissioned a violin from him, for which Zygmuntowicz made a copy of a del Gesù.  After some retooling, this instrument became the instrument Jenson played in a 2005 Carnegie Hall performance with her husband’s orchestra, the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra.  Jenson was also given a second Zygmuntowicz, a copy of a Stradivarius (”Strad”) violin.  She says her twin violins couldn’t be more different:

The reworked Zygmuntowicz violin is also the instrument on which Jenson made her 2009 recording of the Barber Violin Concerto and the first Shostakovich Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra, her husband conducting.  That project was the result of what could without much exaggeration be called the stuff of every musician’s dreams:

Hampton gave Jenson carte blanche to select the repertory for her recording with the London Symphony Orchestra.  Jenson chose the Shostakovich concerto because in it she hears her own struggles: 

 Hear the ponderous bleakness in her sound near the work’s beginning:

. .  and the frenetic determination as the cadenza moves into the finale:

Jenson selected the lush and lyrical Barber Violin Concerto a “nice juxtaposition” with the heavier Shotakovich.  At the Barber concerto’s opening, she veritably sings above the London Symphony Orchestra’s rich bed of support:

With not one but two top-flight instruments in her collection, a recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, and engagements for concerto performances with regional American orchestras of note, Jenson’s career has all the appearances of a comeback.  But she emphatically rejects this notion.  Years of grieving over the loss of the del Gesù instrument she says felt like a part of her have convinced Jenson that hope can be dangerous:

And her life experience has taken her on a journey that, in the final analysis, is a spiritual one, a journey full of questions to which there may be no answers:

But at the very least, Jenson is silenced no longer. 

- Jennifer Hambrick

As I prepare for my time on the air each morning, I do a lot of exploring for new and interesting information about the music we play on WOSU FM.  Today I discovered a site which might be fun for you to explore with kids or grandkids, or even by yourself!

Classicsforkids.com has games and other musically-related activities, a feature composer of the month, (Chopin is March’s composer, since we celebrated his 200th birth anniversary March 1st), places to hear instruments of the orchestra, even a section  with helpful classroom materials.   No need to be a teacher to utilize this site, there is a parents section, so you can use it at home, too.  For other music sites geared to youngsters, I suggest you visit marthabeesmusic.com where you’ll find a great list.

In an age that finds us struggling to provide the same musical opportunities in school for our children that we had growing up, it’s good to know that there are sites like this which help us share our love of music with future generations. –Boyce Lancaster

Lemony Snicket is at it again, this time with a classical music mystery…The Composer is Dead.  I shan’t go into a huge explanation.  Suffice it to say that it appears to be engaging for young and old alike.

I will tell you that, in this tale, everyone has a motive, everyone has an alibi, and nearly everyone is an instrument.  To find out more about Lemony Snicket, check out this recent interview.

Here’s a musical sneak preview.  Happy Sleuthing! –Boyce Lancaster

Composer Samuel Barber (d. 1981) would have had his 100th

Samuel Barber

birthday on March 9, 2010. In celebration of this fine American composer, we have been looking at-listening to-some of his vocal music. Barber worked well in all genres: Chamber music, Symphonic music, piano and violin concerti, art song (magnificent) and opera. His two major operas were written for the Metropolitan: Vanessa in 1958, and, for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, Antony and Cleopatra in 1966.

The failure of Antony and Cleopatra with the critics and the

Metropolitan Opera House in 1966

glittering opening night audience (Imelda Marcos, for goodness sake!) crowding into Wallace Harrison’s new Met on September 16, 1966, ruined Samuel Barber’s life. He lived another fifteen years, but the disappointment crushed him, his productivity fell off, he ended his long term relationship with Gian- Carlo Menotti, and he battled depression and alcoholism.  I will never understand why this opera was a failure.  I can only guess that the political and storied audience, which had turned out understandably to see the new Met, would have been thrilled with Leontyne Price in Aida or Tebaldi in La boheme, rather than something new.

Met General Manger Rudolph Bing was himself doubtful about the choice of  Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra as a subject for this new opera:  “Not one of the stronger plays” (!) he wrote. The production was staged to gaudy excess by Franco Zeffirelli, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s play into a libretto. The opera’s huge sets broke the stage turntable in the new theater during the rehearsals-the weight of the pyramids and the sphinxes literally crushed the new stage, and in all this chazerei, Barber’s luscious music got lost (Leontyne Price was trapped inside a pyramid and her displeasure is evident in a TV film made during rehearsals).

No complaints about the casting.  Leontyne Price, Barber’s long time

Leontyne Price as Cleopatra

muse and America’s reigning soprano,  sang Cleopatra. She was joined by the young Justino Diaz as Antony, and the cast included some wonderful names among American singers: Rosalind Elias-Barber’s magnificent Erika in Vanessa, Jess Thomas,  Ezio Flagello and Andrea Velis. Thomas Schippers, a long time Barber/Menotti protege and a favorite in New York conducted. The ink was still wet on some of Barber’s pages on opening night, and the premiere, which was broadcast internationally sounded chaotic and under rehearsed .  Stage managers yelling “Go!” and “Move it!” and presumably worse can be clearly heard.

Curtain up. We’re at the Met on September 16, 1966 for the world

Conductor Thomas Schippers (1930-1977)

premiere of Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra:

From Alexandria, this is the news; Antony fishes, drinks and wastes/The lamps of night in revel;

Antony salutes Cleopatra, even if he must leave her for battle:

Antony and Cleopatra: Leontyne Price and Justino Diaz

I pray you seek no color for your going/But bid farewell and go

And Cleopatra wallows in her passion for Antony:

O Charmian, where think you he is now? Stands he, or sits he? Or does he walk?  Or is he on his horse?  O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!

The duet “Take o take these lips away” is not in the original score.  Barber added this when he revised the opera in 1978 for performances at the Juilliard School. The text is not from Antony and Cleopatra but I think this scene is one of the highlights of the score. The excerpt following is from one of the opera’s few revivals (phooey!),  at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, with Catherine Malfitano and Richard Cowan:

The opera ends with Antony’s death and Cleopatra’s suicide, with the asp “my baby at my breast”

Methinks I hear Antony call; I see him rouse himself to praise my noble act. Husband I come! Now to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air, my other elements I give to baser life

The opening night performance was well applauded as the

Metropolitan Opera

Metropolitan’s beloved commentator Milton Cross told us:

Bu the critics shruggged:

Mr. Barber’s score for Antony and Cleopatra-like that of his Vanessa- is strongly based on the Romantic period.  One might label lit “Egyptological modern”, with a slight American accent; some of the harmonies splay out in open position, typical of the American sound.  But his tonal structure is overlaid with the gauze of harps and flutes; the orchestra shimmers with trills and tremolos that make the music pleasant listening, if not always dynamically so.

-Harold Rogers, The Christian Science Monitor

I’d give a lot to hear Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra in the theater. The opera has been revived in recent years, twice  at Carnegie Hall, at the Spoleto Festival, in Chicago and earlier this year in Philadelphia, a city closely associated with Samuel Barber. It lasted seven performances at the Met in 1966 and was never heard there again. Their loss. I think it’s a perfectly beautiful opera.

–Christopher Purdy