A prodigious composer and pianist, Samuel Barber enrolled in the founding class at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 14. The school’s patron, Mary Curtis Bok, promoted the career of the star student even after his graduation, and she enticed him back to teach from 1939 to 1942. In 1943, Bok helped Barber and his partner Gian Carlo Menotti (also a Curtis alumnus and a prolific opera composer) purchase an estate they dubbed “Capricorn” in Mount Kisco, New York, about 40 miles north of Manhattan. Menotti later described it as “not a particularly beautiful house; in fact, it was a rather strange house. But it was perfect for what we wanted. It had two studies, separated by a huge room where we ate and received guests. … I remember wonderful evenings with Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Jerome Robbins, Tallulah Bankhead.  I can’t begin to recall all the famous people who were part of those years.”

Barber spent much of World War II at Capricorn, despite his military service. He secured an assignment in the U.S. Army Air Force to compose a flight-inspired symphony, and worked from home on his Symphony No. 2 during the fall and winter of 1943. The success of the symphony’s premiere in March 1944 helped Barber land another cushy post, working under Daniel Saidenberg in the Office of War Information’s Music Department in New York. Saidenberg was an excellent cellist and conductor with his own ensemble; Barber had that group in mind when he wrote a concerto grosso for flute, oboe, trumpet and strings. He completed the piece on September 8, 1944, and the Saidenberg Little Symphony premiered it a month later at Town Hall in New York.

The Capricorn Concerto is an anomaly in Barber’s catalog. There are traces of his signature lushness and beauty, but also much dry and spiky music. One clear point of reference is Bach, with the instrumentation echoing the “Brandenburg” Concerto No. 2. Barber also addresses the neoclassical path laid out by Stravinsky; the Capricorn Concerto bears a resemblance to another modern concerto grosso named after a house, Stravinsky’s 1938 “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto. The opening movement alternates from an Allegro ma non troppo tempo, churning with shifting accents and angular themes, to a more contemplative Andante con moto, beginning with a fugue led by the soloists. The central Allegretto movement bounces with fragmented solo lines over pizzicato strings, reaches a serene and muted interlude, and nonchalantly resumes its pecking pulse for the conclusion. The Allegro con brio finale opens with a bright trumpet fanfare; the music detours into driving permutations, buzzing chromatics and a lyrical island of repose, always returning to the regal trumpet theme.

Click here to purchase a recording of this work through iTunes (Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra)

 

Benjamin Britten left England in 1939, evading the specter of war, some troubling romantic attachments, and an uncertain musical future. He passed through Canada, visited briefly with Aaron Copland, and then spent three years around New York, first on Long Island and later in Brooklyn Heights, in a house he shared with the poet W. H. Auden. Britten’s traveling companion was the tenor Peter Pears, and in those years their relationship blossomed into a lifelong romance and one of the most fruitful musical exchanges of the century.

Shortly before embarking, Britten began a song cycle using texts by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Rimbaud’s ecstatic prose poems compiled as Les Illuminations, written mostly in London in 1873, captured the bright spirit of travel, inspiration and love—he spent much of that journey with his own gifted flame, the poet Paul Verlaine.

Britten wrote Les Illuminations for the Boyd Neel String Orchestra, the group that gave him a major career boost in 1937 with a last-minute commission to write Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for the Salzburg Festival. He dedicated the new score to Sophie Wyss, the soprano who gave the premiere performance in January 1940. Pears added Les Illuminations to his repertoire the following year, and it remains the territory of both sopranos and tenors.

Les Illuminations is full of bright triads and shimmering textures, sounds that fill the opening Fanfare. The single line of text—“I alone hold the key to this wild parade”—reappears twice in the piece with different shadings, highlighting the nuanced emotions in this musical travelogue. Two songs reveal special significance, with their cryptic dedications to Britten’s romantic past and present. Antique, celebrating the “Gracious child of Pan,” is dedicated “to K.H.W.S.” (Wulff Scherchen), who was 14 when he met Britten and 18 when they began an affair. The song calls for players to strum their strings like a guitar, reinforcing the intimate, serenading quality of the music. Being Beauteous, a deliciously sensual portrait,bears a dedication “to P.N.L.P.” (Peter Pears). Britten’s bountiful talent and gift for exalting the human voice had buoyed him since his Suffolk upbringing, but it was not until his wartime, love-filled sojourn in America that he found the simple, direct and deeply moving core of his musical voice.