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MUSIC FOR ALL TIME
American Music for Flute and Orchestra
David Diamond, Flute Concerto
Antal Dorati, Night Music
Bernard Rogers, Soliloquy
Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic Orchestra
Charles Anthony Johnson, conducting
Two years ago, conductor Charles Anthony Johnson approached me with the idea of producing a recording of flute concertos together. We decided to concentrate on American music, exploring new territory by locating works that had never been recorded or were currently unavailable on CD. Our decision to record these particular four was based on their unique American character, defined by their compelling individualism. They are products of this century, but their composers chose to use more traditional styles, utilizing familiar rhythmic patterns and tuneful melodies. It was a sad discovery for us that these exceptional pieces were not only unavailable on recordings, but had also seen little performance exposure. As I began studying and practicing, I realized that this was a great injustice to the composers themselves as well as a loss to musical audiences. The four works on this CD represent some of the finest flute literature from this country, and will prove to be "Music for all Time."
Friend and colleague, flutist, Jean-Pierre Rampal and New Haven Philharmonic's conductor Murry Sidlin were participating in a symposium in New Haven with composer David Diamond when Rampal complained about the lack of modern concertos for the flute. Asking Diamond why he had never composed a flute concerto, he responded, "Nobody ever asked me." Sidlin responded, "Well, now you have been." This precipitated a commission and subsequent premiere of Diamond's Flute Concerto on February 18th, 1986. Rampal performed the piece with the Seattle Symphony one more time in 1987.
Born in 1915, David Diamond is one of America's most honored composers. A highly prolific composer, he has written extensively in all traditional forms. His many awards include the Rockefeller, the Fulbright and three Guggenheim Fellowships for study abroad, including work with the eminent composition teacher, Nadia Boulanger in Paris. He has also received the Prix de Rome, the Panderewski Prize, New York Critics Circle Award, National Medal of the Arts, the Edward MacDowell Gold Medal and the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for lifetime achievement.
A Rochester, New York, native, his immigrant parents were unable to afford formal training for the obviously gifted child, who upon hearing the violin played for the first time by a neighbor, invented his own 4-line hand-drawn staff to compose for the instrument based on its four plucked strings. Shortly after that, the busy young man who spent more time composing music and poetry than studying, was enrolled in the Eastman School of Music Preparatory Department, studying with Bernard Rogers. He continued work in composition and violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music and was particularly noted for his great talent by George Gershwin, a judge in a young composers' competition. Work in Paris with Nadia Boulanger exposed him to a circle which included Albert Roussel, Igor Stravinsky and Charles Munch, influencing his developing creative attitudes with a new perspective.
A romantic twentieth century classicist, Diamond is a brilliant orchestrator, who infuses his clearly structured music with intensely individualistic lyricism. He has a large and varied output, the core of which includes symphonies, quartets, and songs. The flute concerto is in the traditional concerto form with three movements and an extended cadenza in the first movement. It makes use of a large orchestra, which adds variety and excitement to the flute solo.
Hungarian-born conductor and composer, Antal Dorati (1906-1988), writes in a style he describes as "recognizably contemporary but not unafraid of melody." A student of Bartok and Kodaly at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Dorati also studied philosophy at the Vienna University. He made his conducting debut of the Budapest Royal Opera at the age of 18. Settling in the U.S. in 1940, he became a citizen in 1945 and was distinguished as an "orchestra doctor" and one of the best known conductors of his time. He championed the works of a then unknown Bartok and later turned to the classics, recording the complete works of Haydn in definitive gold recordings.
Written in 1970, at a time when Dorati was completing a tenure with the Stockholm Philharmonic and returning to the U.S. to begin work with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C., Night Music for Flute and Orchestra is a five-movement programmatic piece, rich in orchestral color and nostalgia, with ad libitum cadenza passages for the flute and orchestra. Dorati speaks about his work:
"It was first performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal and the Orchestre National under my direction in 1972. It is a flute concerto in disguise, emphasizing the virtuoso qualities of the instrument to the hilt, not for the sake of display, but in the course of musical expression. The five movements are a series of 'nocturnes' referring to natural episodes from sunset to dawn. The titles given to each movement should provide enough for the listener to follow the course of the music.
Recitation: Antiphon of Twilight. The solo instrument and the orchestra respond to each other's song while the light fades.
Arioso: Lullaby; In the Serbian Mood. The simple song of a mother cradling her baby is interrupted by the cadences of the flute - as if her thoughts would wander and she would muse about the future of the infant, with love, care and some anxiety.
Capriccio: Midnight. The shadows are the longest. Twigs are cracking in the silence of the plains. The hour of ghouls and spooks.
Scherzo: Insects Around the Flame. The insects' death-dance into the candle light. The little creature is flirting with the flame, dances its best for it, then hurries into its embrace and dies. Already the next one dances the same dance, attracted by the magnet - the flame.
Postlude: Notte alta - Dawn. The Italian phrase, 'high night' has a flavor which cannot be translated. It is not deep night, it is high night. The restlessness of it harbors the vibrating excitement of the coming day. The first to feel the coming dawn are the birds - the cadenza of the flute imitating birdcalls, highly stylized (not naturalistic, as Messiaen's birdcalls are) - transfigured into absolute music. Then by and by the entire world of nature awakens and greets the birth of a new day.
It is a simple fantasy on something we may all observe at any time, designed for unburdened listening."
At the age of fifteen, New Yorker Bernard Rogers, (1893-1968), began evening classes in architecture at Columbia University and subsequently received permission to fulfill one of his passions, to copy the great masters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is no wonder that throughout his musical life, his compositions were greatly influenced by the esoteric subjects he loved to study. Composing for him was likened "to the procedure of a painter." He studied composition with Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Upon returning to the U.S., he became a member and later head of the famous Eastman School of Music composition department for 36 years, where one of his pupils was composer David Diamond.
While a student in Cleveland, the 29-year-old Rogers wrote his Soliloquy No. 1 for Flute and String Orchestra. It was, as he describes, "an attempt to write music of a serious character which could be performed by young musicians." It is just this simplicity and intimacy that has drawn musicians to this work to make it one of Roger's best-known and most widely performed pieces. Opening with a solo statement in a cadenza-like style, the work threads through broad, singing lines of voluptuous and luxurious textures, evoking an expressive quality reminiscent of program music.
When asked to describe his place in the twentieth-century American music scene, composer Ernst Krenek, (1900-1991) replied "whenever they thought I had comfortably settled down in some stylistic district, I was not at the expected place the next time, and the business of classifying had to start all over again." One of the most prolific composers of his generation, Krenek was a consummate craftsman in full command of any of the compositional styles that he chose to adopt. He was considered by some critics to be a great genius of his time, and by others to be simply an unscrupulous opportunist because his music embraced nearly every musical trend of the twentieth century, including romantic tonality, atonality, neo-classicism, serialism, aleotoricism, and electronics.
Krenek was born in Vienna, and lived in Austria during the Nazi occupation. A viciously retouched photo of him was included in the Nazis' Degenerate Music exhibition and later his music was banned altogether. He fled to the U.S. in 1938, becoming an American citizen in 1945. However, his modernistic idiom upset American music lovers, and a concert-goer was overheard saying, "Conditions must be terrible in Europe." It is ironic, therefore, that after the war Krenek should find his music highly acclaimed in Europe and greatly misunderstood in the U.S. "It is quite possible," he describes, "that the unusual variety of my output has baffled observers accustomed to more homogenous phenomena. It is my impression that this confusion has surrounded my work with an unusual obscurity, almost anonymity."
Although he received many flattering notices in Europe, by the early 1950's he was in such desperate financial straits that he appealed to publishers to accept anonymous "semi-classical items in the popular vein" simply for money. However, it was also during this time that he composed a great number of concertante works at the request of soloists, including most notably his violin concerto. Published in 1954 for flute and piano and later arranged for a string orchestra accompaniment, the Suite, op. 147 is a simple, neo-classic work in four movements with some atonal sections. It was premiered by Paul Horn, flutist, and Paul Katz, pianist, at the Pasadena Art Museum in California on February 9,1958.
Hailed by the Atlanta Constitution and Journal as "a recitalist of great poise and technical security, dazzling precision and virtuosic flair", ALISON YOUNG is active as a soloist, orchestral musician, and teacher. She began her formal music education at the age of fifteen, graduating Magna Cum Laude and receiving the Fine Arts Award for outstanding artistic achievement from the Interlochen Arts Academy. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a Master of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music and also holds a degree from the University of Southern California.
Currently Principal Flute of the Houston Ballet Orchestra, she has performed and recorded as Principal Flute of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Grand Opera, and the Memphis and Toledo Symphonies. She has also appeared as guest Principal Flute with the Boston Symphony in Boston and in New York's Carnegie Hall under the direction of Seiji Ozawa, and with the Houston Symphony under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach. In the summers, Ms. Young has performed as Principal Flute of the Colorado Music Festival where she was featured in a solo recital with Uruguayan guitarist Eduardo Fernandez. She also played Principal Flute with the Des Moines Metro Opera, being particularly noted in Opera News for her interpretation of the flute and soprano cadenza in Lucia di Lammermoor. She has participated in the Grand Teton Music Festival and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, playing Principal Flute under the direction of Leonard Bernstein.
Ms. Young has appeared as soloist with the Atlanta Symphony, the Dallas Chamber Orchestra, the Toledo Symphony, the Colorado Philharmonic, and the Houston Civic Symphony. She was praised by the Santa Barbara Independent in a performance of the Nielson Flute Concerto with the Music Academy of the West Orchestra as playing the concerto "with complete technical mastery and exquisite musicianship." As the winner of the Mu Phi Epsilon International Competition in 1989, she toured the U.S. for two years, performing solo recitals in major universities. She appeared as soloist at the National Flute Association Conventions in Los Angeles and Chicago. Internationally, she has performed in Buenos Aires' famous Teatro Colon, in Salzburg, Vienna and Prague and in Islamabad and Lahore, Pakistan.
Actively sought out as a master class clinician and teacher, Ms. Young has presented classes in Argentina and in major music schools in Texas. She maintains a studio of private students in Houston.
Praised by the Oakland Press for his "first-rate conducting", Charles Anthony Johnson has directed orchestras in Germany, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, where he lead the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic in a recording of MacDowell piano works that he orchestrated, (Albany Records, Troy 224). Dr. Johnson received his M.A. in composition and his Ph. D. in musicology from UCLA. From 1967 to 1978, he was on the faculty of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, teaching music history and theory, and conducting the orchestra. Since 1973, he has pursued a dual career as a conductor and violist, performing with the Houston Ballet Orchestra, where he has also served as guest conductor. He is presently in his twenty-first season as Music Director of the Clear Lake (Texas) Symphony and has served as Music Director of the Houston Civic Symphony and the Bryan-College Station (Texas) Chamber Orchestra.
"I hope the future will bring my music to a larger audience, one not interested in Trends and the 'Now' but MUSIC FOR ALL TIME, for all humanity, to satisfy the emotions and the mind and reaffirm the strength of Beauty even when harsh, but Beauty none-the-less."
Recorded in Zlin, Czech Republic, January 16-18, 1998
Executive Producers: Alison Young and Charles Anthony Johnson
Recording Engineer: Reinhard Geller
Photography: Charles Edwards
Special thanks to Vicki Seldon, rehearsal pianist, Peter Conover, orchestra librarian,
and all of the Friends of American Flute Music for their generous support in this project.
American Music for Flute and Orchestra
“some of the finest flute playing I have heard” - David Diamond
Flute Concerto, David Diamond (b. 1915)
1 Allegro moderato ma vivo (9:27)
2 Adagio cantabile (9:04)
Night Music, Antal Dorati (1906-1988)
5 Andante affetuoso (4:29)
9 Soliloquy, Bernard Rogers (1893-1968) (4:09)
Suite, op. 147, Ernst Krenek (1900-1991)
11 Allegretto moderato (0:59)
12 Andante con moto (2:42)
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