Barber redux

This weekend I’ll be playing Samuel Barber’s violin concerto with the Milwaukee Symphony and Edo de Waart. I’m really looking forward to it for various reasons, and I’m reminded again how underrated he still seems to be as an artist. Centenary anniversaries are good for reexaminations.In addition to the concerto, I’ve also been at work on a project recently published by the Hal Leonard Corporation featuring works of Barber for violin and piano. It was a really satisfying experience; there are various transcriptions of art songs and some other works (we couldn’t avoid the Adagio), and some real revelations as well. The most significant was a movement from a “lost” violin and piano Sonata that he composed at the age of 18 while still a student at Curtis. Evidently Barber destroyed the second movement, but the surviving one was discovered in 2006 as a holograph that came from the estate of an artist who once boarded at the Barber family home. It’s not a student work at all, quite bold and substantial; kind of Brahmsian, actually. It was a real privilege to participate in the first edition and recording; you can hear a clip here. The excellent pianist is Michael Mizrahi.

Other discoveries included a couple of really early compositions (he was 11 years old), and Barber’s own transcription from his piano concerto, entitled Canzone. Any lieder fans will want to hear the song transcriptions- I personally was unaware of his amazing contributions in this genre, and the music is so great that I think they hold up even without his carefully chosen texts. Info and audio samples from the whole CD are on the Hal Leonard page here.

For anyone interested, there’s also been a great deal of significant research into the genesis of the Violin Concerto, which seems to be the piece that really started his career. Remember the old story of the last movement being too difficult for the guy he wrote it for, etc., etc.,? All nonsense, but it turns out the truth is even more interesting, and happily this concerto is now a staple of the repertory. Read about it here.

Despite his fame and obvious significance as a major American cultural figure, in his lifetime Barber often got typcast as a lightweight by much of the “establishment”. He wasn’t terribly prolific, and in an age of labels and categories like “neo-Romantic” or “serialist” many seemed to find him difficult or impossible to define artistically and were perplexed by his indifference to much of what “public life” offered. Fortunately posterity has shown otherwise-  it seems to me that the major characteristics of his musical language (his focus on lyricism and melody along with a highly evolved and individual sense of tonality and orchestration) for which he was maligned by so many are precisely the elements that have secured his iconic status as a composer, and made him so popular with both musicians and the public.

The Adagio is still incredible, but I’ve found a great deal more to admire.