Barber’s Toccata Festiva: A Celebratory Flourish for Organ and Orchestra

On a day in 1960, Mary Curtis Zimbalist phoned Eugene Ormandy, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with exciting news. The wealthy patron and founder of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music had decided to provide the Academy of Music, the orchestra’s home at the time, with a pipe organ. Additionally, Zimbalist would commission Samuel Barber, the esteemed American composer who had enrolled in Curtis’ first class in 1924, to write a piece …

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Barber’s Cello Sonata: Echoes of Brahms

Imagine the kind of music Johannes Brahms might have written had he lived into the twentieth century. Chances are good that it might have sounded something like Samuel Barber’s Cello Sonata, Op. 6. The Sonata’s harmonic language is firmly rooted in the twentieth century, even as it renounces the prevailing twelve tone atonality in favor of C minor. At the same time, its melodic construction, deep, rich piano voicing, and Romantic pathos …

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Barber’s Cello Concerto: Music Which Stands on Its Own Terms

Lushly Romantic, nostalgic, and autumnal, Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto, Op. 22 has, in recent years, begun to emerge from the shadows of obscurity. Completed in November of 1945, around the time of Barber’s discharge from wartime service in the United States Air Force, it is the second of the composer’s three concerti, bookended by the Violin Concerto (1939) and Piano Concerto (1962). The work’s neglect has been attributed to its extreme technical …

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Barber’s “Summer Music” for Wind Quintet: A Soundtrack for Languid Days

With the title, Summer Music, Samuel Barber did not have anything specifically programmatic in mind. Instead, the single movement piece for wind quintet conveys a general atmosphere. Barber said, “It’s supposed to be evocative of summer—summer meaning languid, not killing mosquitoes.” Indeed, the lazy opening moments of Summer Music are enveloped in haze and humidity. Fleeting blues strains combine with primal echoes of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. As the piece continues, the musical conversation among …

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Samuel Barber’s Capricorn Concerto: An Homage to the Baroque

Completed in 1944, Samuel Barber’s Capricorn Concerto for Flute, Oboe, Trumpet, and Strings is a twentieth century homage to the Baroque concerto grosso. This is the form in which solo instrumental voices engage in contrapuntal conversation with one another, and with a full ensemble. It is a thrilling dialogue which plays on the contrast between large (grosso) and intimate forces. Barber’s scoring mirrors the instrumentation of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. The Capricorn …

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Samuel Barber’s “Let Down the Bars, O Death”: Conspirare

It was during the summer of 1936 that Samuel Barber composed the String Quartet that would give rise to the iconic Adagio for Strings. During the same summer, Barber created an a cappella choral setting of Emily Dickinson’s 1891 poem, Let Down the Bars, O Death. It unfolds as a somber, homophonic chorale. As with the Adagio, it reaches upwards in search of a searing climax. When the poem’s first line returns, the hushed opening phrase is transformed …

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Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto: Straddling the Tonal Precipice

Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, Op. 38 is lushly cinematic. It is an exhilarating drama between two dueling titans—the brazen, summit-scaling solo piano and the twentieth century orchestra, with its vast sonic power. The Concerto’s expansive Neo-Romantic lines straddle the precipice between tonality and serialism. The music never loses its tonal bearings, yet it often ventures far into a tumultuous chromatic sea. The legendary American music publisher G. Schirmer commissioned Barber to write the …

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