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TR591
Nikolai Lopatnikoff
Festival Overture, op. 40
Robert Helps
Concerto No. 2 for Piano & Orchestra
Alan Feinberg, piano
Virgil Thomson
Filling Station (complete ballet)
Robert Kurka
Symphony No. 2, op. 24
Albany Symphony Orchestra
David Alan Miller, conductor
NIKOLAI LOPATNIKOFF
Festival Overture, op. 40
A self-declared adversary of what he termed “the danger of academicism and dogmatism in the musical arts,” Nikolai Lvovich Lopatnikoff came to the United States in 1939 by way of England, Germany, Finland, Russia and Estonia, where he was born in 1903. He taught at Connecticut's Hartt College of Music and Westchester Conservatory in upstate New York before settling at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, where he died in 1976.
His compositions—including four symphonies, various orchestral pieces, the opera Danton and the ballet Melting Pot—were known for their melodic strength and aggressive, “racy” drive. That Lopatnikoff counted the melodist Borodin and the rhythmically demonic Hindemith among his early influences is no surprise.
His Festival Overture, commissioned by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, was dedicated to “the automobile industry of America”— apt enough for a man who had done so much traveling in his life. It was premiered in Detroit, Michigan, by the Detroit Symphony under Paul Paray, on 12 October (Columbus Day—hence the title) 1960.
An unpretentious powerhouse of a piece, it is nonetheless more darkly dynamic than conventional curtainraisers. Dominated by brass and percussion statements, the storm it unleashes pauses halfway through to let the woodwinds and strings offer a lyrical—but still dark-edged—meditation. It pauses once again for fleeting glockenspiel, flute and piano runs. Then the onslaught resumes and rushes unstoppably to the end.
ROBERT HELPS
Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra
“In a country as big as ours,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Harbison, referring to his friend and one-time piano teacher, the late Robert Helps, “there are many hidden first-class artists.”
How fiercely the sensitive-natured Helps worked to come out of hiding and fight for recognition as a first-class composer in a cutthroat music industry is moot. That he was universally recognized as a first-class keyboard artist is not. He was a virtuosic interpreter of modernist music, especially of the complex works of his composition teachers Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt.
Born in 1928 in Passaic, New Jersey, Robert Helps graduated from Manhattan's Juilliard School and did postgraduate work at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley. He also taught piano at Berkeley, as he subsequently did at such institutions as the San Francisco Conservatory, the New England Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music.
He recorded and toured widely and won a number of awards and honors for his own works. But in many ways the bearded and long-haired Helps remained apart from the mainstream. At times charmingly gregarious, at times withdrawn, he endured several nervous breakdowns—the last around 1979, after which he moved to Tampa; there, until his death from cancer in 2001, he taught at the University of South Florida.
Though most of his music, like the various Hommages, showcased the piano, he also wrote two symphonies, assorted small-ensemble and solo pieces and Gossamer Noons, for voice and orchestra. His works often challenge casual listeners, for in his deeply self-expressive compositions—mysterious, abstract, intentionally unresolved—Helps, like his mentor Babbitt, favored a musical language addressing the chosen few, not the broad masses.
His Piano Concerto No. 2, written during a two-month stay in 1973 at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, was dedicated to and commissioned by (with a Ford Foundation grant) the pianist Richard Goode, who premiered it on 8 March 1979 in Oakland, California, with the Oakland Symphony under David Gilbert.
A one-movement, three-section work, it starts with the insistent pounding of a single chime, penetrated by repeated wind motifs over a dissonant cushion of strings. The piano takes up the turbulence and leads it, through a screeching climax, into the heart of the piece, its ethereal cadenza section, whose extended piano solo is briefly intruded on by the other players.
This inward- or perhaps upward-focused contemplation gives way to a “somewhat waltz-like, gentle, flowing, not loud, not dramatic concluding statement.” The orchestra provides the melody, the piano a series of “flutterings”—the composer's original program note goes on—“often alarmingly difficult . . . especially as these horrors must sound easy and pleasantly impressionistic. Aaron Copland said to me (with a smile) after hearing the piece, `A piano concerto that ends softly! Unheard of!'”
VIRGIL THOMSON
Filling Station
(complete ballet)
An imposing figure in American classical music—not just as a composer but as a self-described “sassy and classy” music critic as well—Virgil Garnett Thomson was born in 1896 in Kansas City, Missouri. A World War One veteran and Harvard graduate, he spent seven years in Paris, studying with Boulanger, fraternizing with Satie and Les Six and befriending Gertrude Stein.
Back in the States, his collaboration with theatrician John Houseman led to the enormously successful 1934 staging of Four Saints in Three Acts, Thomson's surrealistic opera with libretto by Stein, who also wrote the text for his next operatic success, The Mother of Us All, about Susan B. Anthony. His score for the 1949 documentary film The Louisiana Story earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and his highly polished music in sundry other genres, from symphonic to sacred to solo instrumental, further solidified a celebrity that endured to his death in New York City in 1989.
Just as Four Saints was a landmark opera, his Filling Station was a groundbreaking ballet—the first to showcase an American choreographer (Lew Christensen), an American dance company (American Ballet Caravan, precursor to the New York City Ballet), an American designer (the infamous painter Paul Cadmus) and a down-to-earth American setting (a gas station)—all bound up with Thomson's mock-grandiose and pop-inspired music.
The story line, by Caravan founder Lincoln Kirstein, offered a comic-book-style send-up of events one evening at the eponymous locale. The ballet opens—like Thomson's operas, with a theatrical drumroll—to reveal Mac, the gas-station mechanic, reading, killing time (“Introduction,” “Mac's Dance,” tracks 3 and 4). A beleaguered motorist arrives, needing directions (“Motorist and Mac,” track 5). To a variation of “For He's a Jolly Good Fellow,” Mac's truckdriver pals, Roy and Ray, appear, followed by a state trooper who browbeats them for speeding (“Truckdrivers' Dance,” “Scene,” tracks 6 and 7).
The hapless motorist comes back, with shrewish wife and cranky daughter in tow (“Dance of Family Life,” track 8), after which a well-heeled and deeply intoxicated young couple shows up; intent on dancing, they draw the others into their carousing (“Tango,” “Waltz,” “The Big Apple,” tracks 9-11). But the merriment turns to menace when a gun-packing gangster tries to rob them, then to tragedy when, in the ensuing melee, he fires and the rich girl falls to the ground. The trooper returns and subdues the thief, and the others grimly bear aloft the girl's inert body. But at the last moment she revives—the bullet had missed her; she only fainted—and waves ta-ta as off she is carried into the wings; Mac, alone again, goes back to reading (“Hold-up,” “Chase,” “Finale,” tracks 12-14).
Filling Station premiered on 6 January 1938 at the Avery Memorial Theater in Hartford, Connecticut—with a pianist playing a keyboard reduction of the music, due to budgetary constraints. Even so, it triumphed. The first performance with the full score took place six weeks later, at the ballet's Manhattan premiere, Edgar Schenckman conducting. An orchestral suite that Thomson made for concert purposes premiered 14 December 1941 under Artur Rodzinski and the New York Philharmonic. (The version on this disk features the entire ballet music, uncut.)
Kirstein had approached Aaron Copland in 1937 about composing an American-themed score for Caravan, but Copland had been hesitant. Any hesitation apparently vanished in the wake of Filling Station's success—Copland's Billy the Kid was on the boards in October 1938. The impact of that revolutionary cowboy ballet may have overshadowed that of Thomson's whimsical work. But Copland referred to Thomson as “the father of American music.” If he felt a certain debt was due, Filling Station may help explain why.
—Ray Bono
ROBERT KURKA
Symphony No. 2, op. 24
His reputation resting chiefly on the posthumously produced opera, The Good Soldier Schweik, Robert Kurka remains largely unstudied. Geoffrey S. Lapin of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, an ardent admirer of Kurka's music, provides the following note on the three-movement Second Symphony, extending his gratitude to May (Mrs. Robert) Kurka for her time and her sharing of the composer's personal files.
“There is a degree of freshness and impetuosity that defines Kurka as an imitator of nobody. It must stand as the insufficient summation of a talent that was only beginning to find itself when Kurka died in the fall of 1957.” Thus read the Saturday Review's critique of the 1959 Carnegie Hall premiere of Robert Kurka's Second Symphony.
Kurka's promising career ended abruptly when he died of leukemia at the age of 35. Born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1921, he received his music degrees from Columbia University.
Although described as principally self-taught, he did study composition briefly with Darius Milhaud and Otto Luening. His own teaching credentials included faculty positions at the City College of New York, Queens College and Dartmouth. He also played violin in the faculty string quartets at those institutions.
Awards he received included the George Gershwin Memorial Award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. The 1952 National Institute of Arts and Letters grant was presented “To Robert Kurka, whose unusual musical skill and imagination in handling materials of music inspire confidence in his future as a composer.” Nelson A. Rockefeller was presenter of the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1957, saying, “To Robert Kurka, a composer at the threshold of a career of real distinction.” Tragically, that composer passed away nine months later.
His compositions included ten works for orchestra, five works for soloist with orchestra, five string quartets, five violin sonatas, other chamber works, piano and choral pieces—and two symphonies.
Symphony No. 2 was written on a commission Kurka received in 1952 from the Paderewski Fund for the Encouragement of American Composers. It premiered on 9 July 1958 with the San Diego Symphony under the direction of John Barnett. The San Diego Evening Tribune reported, “It swells with the teeming rush of the metropolis. Kurka's symphony is mindful of the best traditions of 19th-century music.”
Performances by the Cleveland Orchestra and the Boston Symphony soon followed, both conducted by Robert Shaw. The Boston Symphony performed it at home and at Carnegie Hall in 1959. The Boston Herald reported it as being “A work of immense vitality and color…combines American optimism and bustle with Slavic rhetoric.” Of the Carnegie Hall premiere the New Yorker said, “A composition of great individuality…has a sureness of draftsmanship that is not often encountered in contemporary American symphonies.” Musical America commented, “It is a shame that it had to wait so long for a performance, for it is worthy of not one but repeated hearings…extremely fresh and appealing.”
I first performed the Second Symphony with the Indianapolis Symphony in 1972. On first hearing, it sounded a bit like Americanized Prokofiev, with a touch of the quirkiness of Kurt Weill. The work was a hit with audiences and musicians alike. With the release of this disk, I hope the rest of the world will be able to share my enthusiasm.
—Geoffrey S. Lapin
DAVID ALAN MILLER
One of the leading American conductors of his generation, David Alan Miller has worked with most of America's major orchestras, developing especially close relationships with the Minnesota Orchestra and the Chicago and Detroit symphonies. He has also conducted the orchestras of Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Houston and Indianapolis, as well as the New World Symphony and the New York City Ballet.
A creative and compelling orchestra builder, Mr. Miller has been music director for the Albany Symphony Orchestra since 1992. Through exploration of unusual repertoire, educational programming, community outreach and recording initiatives, he has reaffirmed the ASO's standing as one of the nation's leading proponents of American music and one of its most innovative orchestras.
Internationally, Mr. Miller has conducted throughout Europe and in Asia and Australia. In addition to his many recordings for Albany Records, he has recorded for the Deutsche Grammophon, Harmonia Mundi, Argo and London/Decca labels.
THE ALBANY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
The Albany Symphony Orchestra has for more than thirty years held a unique position in the orchestra world as champion of the American symphonic repertoire. Founded in 1931 by the composer-conductor John Carabella, it has also been led by music directors Rudolf Thomas, Ole Windingstad, Edgar Curtis, Julius Hegyi and Geoffrey Simon. In addition to its regular programming, the orchestra hosts a month-long American Music Festival and has a new-music ensemble, the Dogs of Desire. With 15 consecutive ASCAP awards for adventuresome programming, it received the prestigious 2001 ASCAP Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming, as well as the first ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming in 1999. Its discography is extensive; its recordings appear on the Albany, New World, CRI, Argo and London/Decca labels.
More information about the Albany Symphony Orchestra can be found on its website: www.albanysymphony.com.
ALAN FEINBERG
A native New Yorker, Juilliard alumnus and three-time Grammy Award-nominee, Alan Feinberg stands at the forefront of American piano music, exemplified by his much-lauded four-disk Argo series, Discover America, and his live renditions of compositions by such composers as Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, Percy Grainger and Jelly Roll Morton. He has in addition premiered well over 200 works, including the 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning Duplicates by Mel Powell and pieces by John Adams, Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen.
The familiar classics by European masters—notably Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Ravel—also figure in his repertoire; with his concert appearances and recitals hailed worldwide, he has performed with such leading orchestras as the London Philharmonia, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony and the New York Philharmonic and at the Edinburgh, Geneva, Berlin and Budapest music festivals. A visiting professor at Manhattan's Juilliard School, Mr. Feinberg has recorded for such labels as New World Records, Catalyst, Decca/Argo, Bridge Records, EMI/Angel and Nonesuch.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Joseph Fennimore, John Harbison, May Kurka, Geoffrey S. Lapin
This recording is made possible in part by the generous support of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, BMI Foundation: Carols Surinach Fund, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Paul Underwood, and Vanguard, the volunteer organization of the Albany Symphony Orchestra.
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