Program Notes: Yuja Wang with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra

**Overture to The School for Scandal, Op. 5 by Samuel Barber**

In composer Samuel Barber’s day and age, the play The School for Scandal was standard fare at the theater.

The Anglo-Irish writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan penned his famous comedy of errors back in 1777, a bright satire on the difference between appearing virtuous and actually being virtuous, centered on a colorful set of London socialites. In Sheridan’s world of social climbers, names like Lady Sneerwell and her hireling Snake and the brothers Charles Surface and Joseph Surface are on the nose, and by the time honesty prevails, the gossipers have all suffered horrid embarrassment. It’s good fun.

As a student at the Curtis Institute, Barber selected the play as a subject for his concert overture for a school assignment, his first work for a full orchestra. He delivered in spades — the overture captures some of the quick repartee of the play in the whirling melodies and driving rhythms, and it helped bring Barber to the attention of the broader musical world.

The overture begins with a dazzling whirl, before a string melody begins to skip merrily along, gossiping and worrying, the first main theme. It repeats, this time more hysterical, before the music transitions to a more lyrical second theme, fronting an oboe solo.

The overture is in sonata form — Barber builds the overture from these two primary themes, stating them outright and then blending and deconstructing them before restating them once more, slightly changed. It’s a more familiar, romantic style than the spiky modernism his later work would embody.

Barber would go on to become one of the most-performed composers of the 20th century. He was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, into a cultured family. He had entered Curtis early at the young age of 14, and by the time he graduated, he’d had numerous chances to hear his music performed at a professional or near-professional level.

By his early 20s, Barber had already produced works of professional assurance, including songs and orchestral pieces that attracted national attention. His early success was marked not by experimentation, but by a refined lyrical voice and formal clarity that set him apart from his contemporaries. Asked in an interview about his music later in life, Barber responded, “I don’t like to talk about my music. I think it explains itself.”

Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber

When the American composer Samuel Barber finished the second movement of his String Quartet Op. 11, he knew he had something special on his hands. “I have just finished the slow movement, and it’s a knockout!” he wrote to a family member at the time. Barber was 26 and visiting Austria on a grant — the Op. 11 was to be his only quartet, but only his first brush with what quickly became his most-popular and most-performed work.

That same year, he created an arrangement of this movement alone for string orchestra, and it’s this version of the work that has become America’s unofficial mourning music. Barber would later arrange a choral version of the Adagio, setting a portion of the mass. Other musicians, ranging from film composers to jazz musicians like Art Tatum and famous DJs, have adapted or sampled the Adagio, as well, helping its melody filter into pop culture.

The Adagio begins simply, with the violins sounding a B-flat. A couple of beats later, more instruments enter, thickening the texture with restless harmonies, and the violins begin to emote. The music has a calming, hummable quality. Most melodies involve a mix of stepwise motion between adjacent notes and leaps to create their shapes. Here, the composer uses largely stepwise motion, leaping only in moments of high drama.

Tension builds throughout the music, with the melody and harmony creating poignant dissonances. It cycles through simple patterns of motion and rest, with winding phrases building to great, anguished chords that freeze, fading to silence or beginning with new motion as other instruments begin their own melodies. And, to close, it fades out softly, its final chord failing to resolve back to the main key of the music and leaving the music with a sense of unrequited longing.

It is perhaps one of America’s most famous contributions to the classical canon.

Barber grew up in a musical family. His aunt was an opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera, and his uncle was a composer. At the age of 9, Barber himself declared that he would be a composer, as well, in a letter asking his parents to stop pressuring him to play football. He never wavered from that decision. He began attending the Curtis Institute, one of America’s finest musical institutions, at the age of 14, and he traveled Europe for a time after graduating on a variety of scholarships and musical awards. He settled in New York City upon returning to the States.

Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms

No. 5, 6 & 7

Johannes Brahms, best known as a composer of great music, also loved to dance, though he was more comfortable in beer halls than at a Viennese ball. He’d spend hours in local taverns, soaking up culture and melody alike, sometimes dancing and sometimes merely listening and watching.

His fascination with Hungarian folk dances began during his teen years. In 1848, the Hungarian Revolution displaced numerous residents, and many fled through Brahms’ home city of Hamburg, Germany, on their way to America.

One of the refugees, the violinist Ede Hoffmann — also called Reményi — struck up a relationship with the young, impressionable Brahms. A few years down the road, Reményi would return to Germany and launch a European tour with Brahms as his accompanist in 1853, with the pair performing a variety of music, including Hungarian dances.

Later, Brahms, inspired by these tunes, would publish a total of 21 Hungarian Dances in four volumes for piano duet, two published in 1869 and two published in 1880. In their original form, they were simple enough to be performed by amateurs, which made them extremely profitable. (In a note to his publisher, Brahms called them “perhaps the most practical article so unpractical a man as myself can offer.”)

The dances have since been rearranged for numerous ensembles, including full orchestra. Several different composers have worked on the arrangements; the dances on this program were arranged by Martin Schmeling.

The Hungarian Dance No. 5 is the best-known melody of the lot, with its energetic leaping about of the melody in the violins and stylized, sudden changes in tempo. Like most of the dances, it is in three parts — a quick, minor-key opening, a slower, contrasting major-key episode in the middle, and then a repeat of the opening music. The No. 6 is a brighter, cheerier affair, with quirky off-beat accents giving the music a humorous, off-kilter pace. Finally, the No. 7 is a more stately, calm affair, pleasant and tuneful.

Brahms believed he was using actual folk tunes from Hungary in these dances, but this may not have been the case. His former collaborator, Reményi, claimed some of the tunes were his own compositions after encountering Brahms collections, years later. Scholars aren’t positive of the truth, but it’s well-documented that Reményi passed off a few of his own compositions as traditional folk tunes, meaning Brahms was acting in good faith when he titled the works.

Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland

Imagine a time when politicians sought to inspire through their rhetoric. In 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president, Henry A. Wallace, delivered a speech at a Free World Association luncheon in New York City intended to rally listeners and the country during WWII, in which he remarked, “Some have spoken of the American Century. I say that the century on which we are entering, the century which will come out of this war, can be and must be the century of the common man.”

The Brooklyn-born composer Aaron Copland, reserved, witty, and principled, remarked in return that “it seemed to me that if the fighting French got a fanfare, so should the common man, since, after all, it was he who was doing the dirty work in the war.”

Thus was born his brief Fanfare for the Common Man, written at the behest of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

That ensemble’s conductor, Eugene Goossens, an Englishman, had commissioned a series of fanfares to rally his country’s spirits during WWI. The idea took hold, and he later repeated it during WWII — by which time he had moved to the United States — when he asked several American composers for fanfares. (Later, the Cincinnati Symphony would reprise the project during the pandemic years.)

Copland’s fanfare, tuneful and glorious, is the only one that is still performed to this day. While the music commands gravitas and has been used in the Olympics and is a possible inspiration for film composer John Williams’ scores for Superman and Saving Private Ryan, it’s actually a collection of sketches Copland hadn’t figured out how to use previously. The project allowed him to stitch them together, orchestrating the fragments for brass and percussion — the Fanfare has since become one of America’s most used ceremonial works.

Copland had embraced dissonance and modernism early in his career, but this gave way to a more Americana-influenced, simple style meant to capture the public’s ear. It was during this period that he wrote works like the ballets Appalachian Spring and Rodeo, classical takes on American tales. His popular Symphony No. 3, which quotes heavily from the Fanfare, came not long after the conclusion of WWII.

Later in life, he would return to more “serious” styles of music, like 12-tone music, but it’s his populist phase that continues to resonate most with today’s listeners.

Piano Concerto, Op. 38 by Samuel Barber

The classical music world is quite fond of its anniversaries. There are frequent celebrations of particular composers or works to honor the 100th, 150th, or 200th year after their birth or premiere, an easy way to call attention to a particular musician or piece.

Well, sheet music publishing companies get in on the fun as well, at times. G. Schirmer, founded in 1861 in New York City, is the oldest publishing company in the United States. To commemorate its 100th anniversary, the company hired American composer Samuel Barber to write a new piece to mark the occasion at the height of his career.

Or so the story goes. In actuality, the Boston Symphony Orchestra had commissioned Barber, a shy and withdrawn man with a rapier wit, to write Piano Concerto, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 after he’d already earned that honor in 1957 for his opera Vanessa. Schirmer rather opportunistically linked the piece to their own centenary in marketing the concert and musical score. It was clever, if a bit unscrupulous.

Regardless, at the request of the Boston Symphony, Barber wrote the work for pianist John Browning, a talented pianist who would perform the concerto often and record it twice — it’s possible to hear what the original performer, who worked with Barber to premiere the work, sounded like, a rare treat in the classical world. Barber described the concerto himself in an essay for the liner notes for one of those recordings:

The Concerto begins with a solo for piano in recitative style in which three themes or figures are announced, the first declamatory, the second and third rhythmic. The orchestra interrupts, piu mosso, to sing the impassioned main theme, not before stated. All this material is now embroidered more quietly and occasionally whimsically by piano and orchestra until the tempo slackens (doppio meno mosso) and the oboe introduces a second lyric section. A development along symphonic lines leads to a cadenza for soloist, and a recapitulation with a fortissimo ending.

The second movement (Canzona) is song-like in character, the flute being the principal soloist. The piano enters with the same material which is subsequently sung by muted strings, to the accompaniment of piano figurations.

The last movement (Allegro molto in 5/8), after several fortissimo repeated chords by the orchestra, plunges headlong into an ostinato bass figure for piano, over which several themes are tossed. There are two contrasting sections (one ‘un pochettino meno’ for clarinet solo, and one for three flutes, muted trombones and harp, ‘con grazia’) where the fast tempo relents, but the ostinato figure keeps insistently reappearing, mostly by the piano protagonist, and the 5/8 meter is never changed.