Barber: Piano Concerto / Die Natali / Medea's Meditation

Description

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)Piano Concerto • Die Natali • Medea’s Meditation and Dance of VengeanceCommando MarchAlthough the Second Symphony (Naxos 8.559024) was the major musical undertaking of Samuel Barber’s war service, he preceded it with the Commando March in E flat major, composed in February 1943, and first performed by the Army Air Force Technical Training Command Band on 23rd May that year. Recorded by the Edwin Franko Goldman Band, it was broadcast around the world under the auspices of the Office of War Information. Scored for enlarged concert band, the march is in three sections, with an introduction and coda. Barber soon orchestrated it, and this version was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Serge Koussevitzky on 29th October 1943. The ballet Medea has a complex history. To a commission from Martha Graham, for the Second Annual Festival of Contemporary Music, Barber began work to a scenario entitled Cave of the Heart. The first version, completed in April and scored, like Copland’s Appalachian Spring, for thirteen instruments, was first performed at Columbia University on 10th May 1946, under the title Serpent Heart. The original title was reinstated for the New York première on 27th February 1947, by which time Barber had reworked the score into a seven-movement suite for full orchestra, preferring the title Medea, after the principal character. In 1955, he telescoped the suite into one continuous movement, Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, first performed by the New York Philharmonic and Dimitri Mitropoulos on 2nd February 1956. The suite has been recorded on Naxos 8.559088, and its fourth, fifth and seventh movements are reworked into the present piece. The opening, xylophone echoing against static strings, creates a tangible atmosphere, enhanced by questioning woodwind and brass, while a haunting violin motif will be a crucial source of the work’s evolution. Strings introduce a more expressive tone, and a brief climax is reached on the opening woodwind idea. The music now takes on an angular, Bartókian rhythmic motion, and a lonely cor anglais sounds out over piano and harp chords and ricocheting side drum. This quickly becomes more animated, and a further, more sustained climax on the opening idea leads to a syncopated motion on piano, over which wind and strings engage in animated dialogue. The orchestration grows fuller and more aggressive, culminating in a plangent outpouring for strings and brass, developed from the violin motif, before the rhythmic activity re-emerges, driving to a hectic and decisive conclusion. Commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and dedicated to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, Die Natali was begun in July 1960 and completed that November. The première, by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony, took place on 23rd December. As its title suggests, the piece draws on Christmas carols for