JOAN TOWER Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman #6
JOHN CORIGLIANO Gazebo Dances
GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue
Sara Davis Buechner, piano
A Tribute to Duke Ellington, arr. Ralph Burns
Benefitting Partakers: College Behind Bars
Soloist Bio
+ Sara Davis Buechner, piano
Noted for her musical command, cosmopolitan artistry, and visionary independence, Sara Davis Buechner is one of the most original concert pianists of our time. Lauded for her “intelligence, integrity and all-encompassing technical prowess” (New York Times), “thoughtful artistry in the full service of music” (Washington Post), and “astounding virtuosity” (Philippine Star), Japan’s InTune magazine sums up: “Buechner has no superior.”
In her twenties Ms. Buechner earned a bouquet of top prizes at the world’s premiere international piano competitions — Queen Elisabeth (Brussels), Leeds, Mozart (Salzburg), Beethoven (Vienna), and Sydney. She was a Bronze Medalist of the 1986 Tschaikowsky Competition in Moscow and the Gold Medalist of the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition.
Ms. Buechner has performed in every state and province of North America — as recitalist, chamber musician and soloist with top orchestras like the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and Philadelphia Orchestra; and in venues such as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Hollywood Bowl. She has toured throughout Latin and South America and Europe; and she enjoys a special following in Asia, where she has been a featured soloist with the Sydney Symphony, New Zealand Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic and Shanghai Philharmonic, among many others.
She has commissioned and premiered important contemporary scores by composers such as Michael Brown, John Corigliano, Ray Green, Dick Hyman, Vitězslavá Kaprálová, Jared Miller, Joaquín Nin-Culmell, and Yukiko Nishimura. Ms. Buechner’s performance versatility extends to unique collaborations with film and dance (including tours with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and Japanese kabuki-mime-mask dancer Yayoi Hirano).
Ms. Buechner has released numerous acclaimed recordings of rare piano music by composers such as Rudolf Friml (“a revelation” — The New York Times), Dana Suesse, Joseph Lamb, Joaquín Turina, Miklós Rózsa, and Ferruccio Busoni (including the world première recording of the Bach-Busoni “Goldberg” Variations). Stereophile magazine selected her Gershwin CD as “Recording of the Month,” and her interpretation of Hollywood Piano Concertos won Germany’s coveted Deutsches Schauplatten Preis. Most recently her recorded traversal of the score to Carl Dreiser’s silent movie classic Master of the House (1925) may be heard on Criterion Collection DVD.
Sara Davis Buechner joined the faculty of Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance in 2016, after previously teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, New York University and the University of British Columbia. She has presented masterclasses and workshops at major pedagogic venues worldwide, adjudicated important international piano competitions, and is also a contributing editor for Dover Publications International. In 2017 Ms. Buechner marked her 30th year as a dedicated Yamaha Artist.
As a proud transgender woman, Ms. Buechner also appears as a speaker and performer at important LGBTQ events, and has contributed interviews and articles about her own experience to numerous media outlets worldwide.
Sara is a dual American-Canadian citizen who makes her home in Philadelphia.
Program Notes
Written by Steven Ledbetter
© Steven Ledbetter (www.stevenledbetter.com)
+ JOAN TOWER Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 6
Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York, on September 6, 1938. She composed the sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman in 2014 for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its director Marin Alsop, who conducted the premiere in May of that year, in connection with the orchestra’s centennial. The sixth Fanfare is the only one of the set for full orchestra. Duration is about five and a half minutes.
In the last three decades, Joan Tower has emerged as one of our most significant composers. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, had the distinction of being the only American work on the 1982 United Nations Day concert of the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, following performances on their regular subscription series at Lincoln Center, and it quickly entered the repertory. She spent three years (1985-88) as composer-in-residence at the St. Louis Symphony as part of the Meet-the-Composer Residency program, and Silver Ladders, composed during that period, won the 1990 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition.
Though born in New Rochelle, New York, Joan Tower grew up in South America, where her father worked as a mining engineer. When she returned to the United States, she attended Bennington College and Columbia University, and founded the Da Capo Players (winner of the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music in 1973), of which she was the pianist for fifteen years, until her composing career took off so brilliantly. (Indeed, she once joked that she used to be known as a pianist who composed; now she is a composer who also plays the piano.)
She has also been the subject of a nationally broadcast TV documentary produced by WGBH TV, which won Honorable Mention at the American Film Festival. She taught at Bard College from 1972 until her retirement.
She attracted a great deal of attention in 1987, when the Houston Symphony Orchestra premiered a three-minute work for the orchestra’s brass section with the catchy title Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Its combination of homage to one of Aaron Copland’s best-known pieces and overt recognition that women have so often been left out of musical celebrations was good press release material, but more to the point, its quality as a fanfare led to commissions for more such works, which now number six, for various instrumental combinations and of various lengths.
The present work represents the culmination of the series, being the only one composed for full orchestra. It begins with a pulsing repeated note that continues almost without break, except when briefly interrupted by flip insertions from different corners of the orchestra. The sonority builds in varying colors, always reverting to the repeated-note figure that maintains the basic pulse under the growing textures to a splendid culmination of climactic color and sonority.
+ JOHN CORIGLIANO Gazebo Dances
John Paul Corigliano was born on February 16, 1938, in New York, where he lives now. Gazebo Dances is an orchestral version of four pieces for piano four-hands written at various times for friends and gathered to form a suite in the orchestral version, which he wrote in 1974. The score calls for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (three players: bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, snare drum, tenor drum, triangle, tambourine, xylophone, handbell), and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
John Corigliano achieved early recognition as one of the most talented younger American composers. He grew up in an intensely musical household (his father, John Corigliano, Sr., was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic for twenty-three years) and attended the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. His teachers have included Otto Luening, Vittorio Giannini, and Paul Creston. As this list might suggest, his style is generally conservative, though he has experimented in various eclectic ways with diverse musical traditions, emphasizing tonal harmonies in a style that is often markedly lyrical. As he remarked in a 1980 interview, “The pose of the misunderstood composer has been fashionable for quite a while, and it is tiresome and old-fashioned. I wish to be understood, and I think it is the job of every composer to reach out to his audience with all means at his disposal. Communication should always be a primary goal.”
Corigliano clearly achieved that goal in his opera The Ghosts of Versailles, produced at the Metropolitan Opera with extraordinary popular success. Not long before that, his Symphony No. 1, Of Rage and Remembrance, a memorial to friends and colleagues who had died of AIDS, composed during his term as composer-in-residence of the Chicago Symphony, was premiered with great acclaim and has been very widely performed. It received the 1991 Grawemeyer Award. Since then he has gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2 (for string orchestra), and has been celebrated for several remarkable film scores, including Ken Russell’s Altered States and the 1998 François Girard film The Red Violin, tracing the fictional “history” of a mysterious violin through three centuries, and countries; he later returned to that Oscar-winning score to create no fewer than three concerto-like works based on its themes: a Chaconne for violin and orchestra, a Suite from the film score, and a violin concerto entitled The Red Violin.
All in all, his voluminous and growing output included three symphonies, eight concertos, chamber music for ensembles large and small, piano pieces, and much else.
Gazebo Dances is one of Corigliano’s earliest large works that is performed with much frequency. It is an expansion of a group of piano pieces to be played by two pianists at one instrument (“four-hands”) a favorite means of social music-making for at least two centuries. Having written these pieces for various friends, Corigliano decided to orchestrate them, adding the brilliance of his ever-resourceful handling of the orchestra to the already lively and witty pieces. The opening movement has done double duty as an overture to Molière’s great comedy The Imaginary Invalid, and knowing that fact alone can suggest the spirit in which to listen to this music.
+ GEORGE GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26, 1898, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on July 11, 1937. He composed Rhapsody in Blue between January 7 and 25, 1924; Ferde Grofé arranged the orchestral part for the dance band of Paul Whiteman, slightly enlarged with extra strings. Gershwin played the solo piano part in the premiere in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12; Whiteman conducted his orchestra. In 1926 Grofé enlarged the orchestration for symphony orchestra, the version to be heard here. In addition to the solo piano, it calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet), two bassoons, three horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, three optional saxophones (two altos, one tenor), optional banjo, timpani, snare drum, suspended cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, bass drum, tamtam, and strings. Duration is about 16 minutes.
A perpetual debate of the 1920s revolved around the question of whether jazz was good music—or even music at all! Most established musicians, with their European training, were blind to the merits or possibilities of jazz, their views certainly tainted by racism, conscious or subliminal. The man most responsible for making jazz respectable to white audiences was Paul Whiteman, who was not really a jazz musician himself but rather one who wanted to use whatever was new in the world of popular music. His encouragement of “symphonic jazz” produced the first concert success by George Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue. And that success in turn began to set Gershwin thinking of working in larger forms and led to such works as the Concerto in F, An American in Paris, and Porgy and Bess.
Whiteman planned a concert for New York’s Aeolian Hall to celebrate the rapprochement between symphonic music and jazz. He had spoken in general terms with Gershwin about wanting a new piece for that concert, and the composer had vaguely agreed, but no date had been set, and Gershwin forgot about it only to be reminded suddenly on January 3, 1924. George was playing pool with Buddy DeSylva (of the songwriting team DeSylva, Brown and Henderson) while his brother Ira was reading the Herald Tribune when he suddenly came across an announcement of Whiteman’s concert, “An Experiment in Modern Music,” to be given in New York’s Aeolian Hall on February 12.
Whiteman’s concert, so the announcement ran, would involve a committee of judges whose task it would be to pass on the question, “What is American music?” (Ironically—but typically for the time—not one of the judges was American! They included pianist-composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Efrem Zimbalist, and singer Alma Gluck.) Given the shortness of time, and Gershwin’s limited experience in scoring his works, Whiteman offered the services of his arranger, Ferde Grofé, to orchestrate the new work as it was being composed.
At the time, Gershwin was busily putting the finishing touches on a show called Sweet Little Devil, due to open on January 21. What became the Rhapsody in Blue took shape in his mind as he was traveling to Boston for the show’s out-of-town tryout.
"It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang that is often so stimulating to a composer....And there I suddenly heard—and even saw on paper—the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston, I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance."
Later, at a party in New York, Gershwin was improvising on the piano—he always spent parties at the piano, playing non-stop, and almost always his own music—when, as he later said, “I heard myself playing a theme that must have been haunting me inside, seeking outlet. [It] oozed out of my fingers.” Ira, who was becoming not only Gershwin’s closest collaborator on the lyrics, but also his best listener, encouraged him to use this theme as the lyrical climax of the work, a powerful contrast to the jazziness of the opening.
The famous opening clarinet glissando actually predated the rest of the composition. Whiteman’s clarinetist Ross Gorman had developed the trick of playing a two-octave upward glissando, something that had been believed impossible before. Gershwin had already been captivated by this sound, which was familiar from the Jewish klezmer tradition. He had attempted to notate it in one of his sketchbooks, and early on he thought of it as the perfect opening for the work.
Time was so short that Gershwin left a number of the solo piano spots blank, to be improvised in the performance (Whiteman’s score simply said, “wait for nod.”) And Victor Herbert, who had a piece of his own on the concert (his last work to be performed publicly, since he died suddenly just three months later), was present at the rehearsals and made a suggestion that Gershwin accepted. Just before the appearance of the big tune, the romantic E-major melody that is the heart of the rhapsody, which Gershwin had improvised at the party, there was a transition in which the piano simply repeated a rising passage in contrary motion. Herbert suggested that, instead of a sterile repetition, it would be much more effective to have a climactic rise to a grand pause, then launch the new theme. Gershwin accepted the suggestion, and the passage was changed to the version we know today. (There is something particularly touching in this incident: Victor Herbert, the last great figure of an earlier generation of American popular music—his career had begun when he played for Liszt in the 1880s and spent a year in the Strauss orchestra in Vienna—was a greatly generous man who recognized and welcomed Gershwin’s talent. He even offered him free lessons in orchestration, which the younger man was not yet ready to accept, and by the time was interested in pursuing that skill, Herbert had died.)
Though Whiteman had announced a “concerto,” Gershwin decided that it would be better to follow the freer form of the rhapsody. The score plays with the ambivalence between major and minor, with choices of the “bent” notes called “blue” from their use in the traditional singing style of the blues, which hover between major and minor and sometimes sit right in the middle. The prevalence of “blue” notes and the rhapsodic ground plan of the work suggested to Ira the title that George gratefully accepted: Rhapsody in Blue. It was a perfect title indeed: the first word was redolent of the European tradition, the remainder instantly evoked modern America.
Gershwin began the manuscript on January 7 and finished it about the 25th; Ferde Grofé orchestrated directly from the manuscript and finished on February 4. At the concert, eight days later, the glittering audience included just about every musical dignitary in New York that week. But the event was overlong, and as it dragged on and on, it looked as if it would be a flop.
Rhapsody in Blue came next-to-last on the program, and the audience was restive. Gershwin strode out to the piano and nodded to Whiteman; the performance began with Ross Gorman’s clarinet “wail.” The effect was electrifying. This was something really new, and everyone recognized it at once. The rapturous audience response at the end elevated Rhapsody in Blue immediately to the position it has never left, as one of the top favorites in American music for listeners and performers of every type.
There were a few criticisms of the score’s loose structure. But when critic Irving Kolodin asked Gershwin a decade later whether he didn’t think he could improve the piece, he replied, “I don’t know; people seemed to like it the way it was, so I left it that way.”
+ A Tribute to Duke Ellington, Arr. Ralph Burns
Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington (1899 1974) is the classical composer of jazz, the man who created one masterpiece of jazz composition after another at the rate of about one a week during his best period. Most of his work was designed to be purely instrumental, but melodies from these scores were often published with lyrics and took on a new life as popular songs. Such was the case with the four tunes presented here in an arrangement by Ralph Burns. The medley consists of four of the best known and most characteristic tunes of the Ellington band: the sensuous "Sophisticated Lady," the band’s theme song "Take the 'A' Train," the slinky "Mood Indigo," and the driving "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."
Audience Health and Safety
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