Adam Tendler and I present this program in memory of the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, pianist, author and diarist, Ned Rorem, who died late last year in his Manhattan apartment at the age of ninety-nine. Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana into a Quaker family: the son of business executive C. Rufus Rorem, whose ideas served as the basis for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans. He received his early education in Chicago, at the American Conservatory of Music and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and finally the Juilliard School in New York City. In 1966, after many years spent living in Paris, he published The Paris Diary, which, like his subsequent New York Diary, brought him great notoriety for his extremely frank descriptions about his life as a gay man, living in both the gay subculture as well as the cultural elite of both cities. Rorem wrote extensively about music as well, in several books of collected essays, and composed works on commission for most of the great American orchestras. Rorem composed in a chromatic yet largely tonal idiom throughout his career, and was not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde. His notable students included Jonathan Bailey Holland, Daron Hagen, Russell Platt and David Horne, and he joins W.H. Auden, Count Harry Kessler and Gore Vidal as one of the great chroniclers of gay culture in its golden age of the twentieth century. Finally, his work and persona were an inspiration to countless gay American artists.
One of Rorem’s great mentors was the great father-figure of twentieth-century American music: Aaron Copland, an earlier American-in-Paris as one of the great students of Nadia Boulanger, and whose seminal Piano Variations begins tonight’s performance. Composed in 1930, the Variations mark the high-point of Copland’s early compositional phase in the modern, twelve-tone style, before his pronounced return to traditional tonality and — as was typical of artists in the years of the Great Depression — a simpler, more populist style with another of his great, short masterpieces, the El Salon Mexico of 1936. That said, the mastery of the Piano Variations is plainly for all to hear, as it remains one of Copland’s most succinct and satisfying works. As Vivian Perlis noted,
“Copland’s first major piano piece caused a stir from the time the composer gave the premiere performance at the artists’ colony Yaddo, where he had started a festival of contemporary American music. He wrote that the Piano Variations “was the first work where I felt very sure of myself.” Critic Paul Rosenfeld prophesied: “One felt its author the composer of the coming decades.” The work has continued to draw attention and has been described as strong, spare, and granitic. While Copland adapted the twelve tone method for the piece, the twenty variations and coda flow naturally in a style that is recognizably Copland’s own.”
The Maverick’s own late Program Annotator, Miriam Villchur Berg, was also illuminating in her description:
“Copland was one of the first homosexual composers to live openly with his partner, photographer Victor Kraft. Copland and his partner had a cabin in Woodstock in the summer of 1939. Benjamin Britten and his partner Peter Pears rented a cabin nearby, and the four spent their evenings together, playing tennis or making music…Copland began work on his first major piano piece, the Piano Variations, immediately after his return from Paris in 1930. He wrote to a friend that he composed them out of order, but still wanted each one to flow from the previous one: “I cannot explain this contradiction. One fine day, when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place.” The work consists of a theme, twenty variations, and a coda. The germ from which the variations grow is a four-note cell that is heard at the outset, ranging over two octaves. Copland inverts it, mirrors it, reverses it, and makes other careful use of it, but always within the context of making music out of it rather than adhering to mere academic interest or cleverness.”
If ever there was a work of music that described Paris in the rain, it is the Ned Rorem Second Sonata for piano, composed near the beginning of his famous (and infamous) years in that city, in 1949.
Rorem’s Second Piano Sonata reflects a unique blend of European and American musical traditions, integrating influences from French Impressionism—and in particular, the mock-sentimental style of Francis Poulenc—and the “open-air” style of his mentor Copland, and with the more formalistic modes of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. His evocative language and impressive command of the piano’s tonal and rhythmic capabilities make the Second Sonata a challenging and rewarding piece for performers and listeners alike, and in the opinion of many is his most impressive work for the instrument. The pioneering recording from the 1960s by Julius Katchen—another of the great American artists living and working in Paris in the postwar years—remains unsurpassed, both as an interpretation and as a document of its time and place.
When the Dalai Lama visited North America in 1979, Philip Glass—arguably, the very last of the great American students of Nadia Boulanger, in Paris—wrote Mad Rush to honor the occasion. Although originally conceived as being of “indefinite length,” the published version indicates only three repetitions of the entirety, or a binary form with a shortened coda. The opening three-voiced texture emphasizes two-note patterns playing against each other with two-against-three rhythm. This contrasts with a four-bar idea of running 16th notes in both hands that adds two extra beats during the fourth bar. The overall effect—in the hands of a great pianist— is hypnotic, one of the great monuments of Glass’ minimalistic style. Simone Dinnerstein presented a notable performance of the work at the Maverick Concerts, in 2022.
Darius Milhaud, one of the great musical figures of Paris whom Rorem knew and admired, will go down in history as one of the group of loosely-allied composers known as Les Six—Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, and the pioneering Germaine Tailleferre—who, along with Falla, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Ravel, defined the art-music milieu of Paris in the years between the wars.
Milhaud’s Album of Madame Bovary is a set of piano pieces subsequently taken by the composer from the music he wrote for a cinematic treatment of Gustave Flaubert’s immortal novel, in 1933. In a tradition made famous by the composer’s widow, this will be a performance in which excerpts from the novel itself, in English, will be recited in between the various movements of the music. It should be noted that Milhaud’s intention was to give only the broadest outline of the plot of Flaubert’s original, and rather to give a series of brief impressions from this realistic tragedy of Emma Bovary, and her failed struggle to escape from the bourgeois conventions of 19th-century France. While a truly first-rate film based on Madame Bovary has yet to be realized—as with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, such a task may be impossible—this fleeting series of vignettes for piano and a narrator may be the purest alternative.
Finally, in homage to this year’s theme of Latin Voices at the Maverick Concerts, in which we celebrate some of the great jazz and classical artists of the Latin American world, Adam appropriately ends tonight’s performance with the amazing 1952 Piano Sonata No.1 of Alberto Ginastera—in many ways, the Argentine equivalent of our own Aaron Copland; the music, without question, is of similar accomplishment, and as with Copland, Ginastera veered between European/modernist and populist, folk-based traditions throughout a long and internationally successful career.
The Sonata was premiered in, of all places, Pittsburgh; not surprising, really, to those of us who have long admired the cultural pedigree of that city, as Ginastera was commissioned by the Carnegie Institute and the Pennsylvania College for Women to write a piano sonata for the Pittsburgh International Contemporary Music Festival. The performance was given by pianist Johana Harris, wife of American composer Roy Harris, and the work was dedicated to both Harrises. Ginastera’s intention for the piece was to capture the spirit of Argentine folk music without relying on explicit quotations from existing folk songs.
The first movement poses two contrasting themes that grow and evolve as the music progresses. The second movement is energetic and scherzo-like; the third is lyrical, with an initial theme that returns after a contrasting middle section. The final movement is a driving toccata filled with busy rhythms, all building to an explosive conclusion. Ginastera’s great achievement in the Sonata is to combine the European modern style with that of the bravura manner of late-Romantic, virtuoso pianism, and with a genuine inclusion of the spirit of the South American folk tradition.
– Alexander Platt
