Rhapsody in Blue

Yes indeed, Shakespeare knew about summer, as he knew about most things—that “Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines.” Yet, like most of us, he lamented summer’s brevity— that “summer’s lease hath all too short a date.” Now, we are fortunate (as Shakespeare was not), in that we have the Kamloops Symphony ready to launch their 2023-24 season in a delightful concert that begins by savoring warm memories of summer.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947)

Samuel Barber (composer of the widely and justly admired Adagio for Strings) was the musically precocious son of a Philadelphia physician and his wife. At age 14 he was accepted into Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of music to study piano, voice and composition. He was successful almost immediately with works like the Overture to The School for Scandal, (1931) and Music for a Scene from Shelley (1933); these and other compositions won him Pulitzer prizes and also a prestigious American Prix de Rome. When the USA entered World War 2 in December 1941, Barber was conscripted but did not see active service owing to imperfect eyesight. Nonetheless, his war years were productive musically, seeing the completion of his Second Symphony and, just after the war’s end, his Cello Concerto and his ballet Medea for Martha Graham. These works clearly established his musical reputation in the Western Hemisphere alongside that of Aaron Copland.

In spite all his wartime productivity, the war’s disruption provoked other reactions in Barber, a yearning perhaps for a return to the quiet and grace and earlier certainties of his youth. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 which he completed early in 1947, a time when his father’s health was in serious decline, reflects these feelings. The work is a setting for soprano and orchestra of a passage of poetic prose by author James Agee (1909-1955), an autobiographical fragment that Barber had encountered a year earlier. As Barber himself described, “the summer evening [Agee] describes in his native southern town reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home.”

The setting is lightly scored, and opens with a sentence from Agee’s novel A Death in the Family: ”We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in a time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” A five-bar introduction leads to a lilting section for the soloist, Andante un poco mosso, a catalogue of evening sounds and scents. The orchestra reprises this material until the noisy rumble of a streetcar interrupts. The orchestra and soloist carry us forward as the night sky becomes “one blue dew” and the family group rests “on the rough wet grass”. The singer enumerates (and blesses) his adult companions and at the mention of death, “the hour of their taking away,” the music becomes Maestoso. Then comes the restful concluding section, “After a little while I am taken in and put to bed. . .” and we are left to ponder the child’s final wistful thought—that those closest to him “will not ever tell me who I am.”

George Gershwin (1898-1937): ”Summertime” from Porgy and Bess (1935)

Porgy and Bess is based on the novel, Porgy, by poet DuBose Heyward. It was first staged in Boston in the fall of 1935. The critics were not enthusiastic. It ran for only 124 performances and was a loss financially: Gershwin did not even make in royalties what it had cost him to have the orchestral parts printed. But the composer himself loved it. “I think the music is so marvelous” he commented — “I really can’t believe I wrote it.”

For Gershwin Porgy and Bess was, by his own admission, “a labour of love.” He viewed it as an opera, but an opera for the theatre not for the opera house, and that meant he could write songs for it. “I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs.” Well, Porgy and Bess is full of the lovely melodies Gershwin produced at all stages of his career, and the tender cradle song, “Summertime,” with its echoes of negro spiritual, is among the loveliest of them all, a blend of vitality and sadness that is part of special appeal of Gershwin’s music.

Florence Price (1887-1953): Piano Concerto in One Movement (1934)

Florence Price was born in 1887 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Her mother was a music teacher and it was she who directed Florence’s early musical education. Her talent showed early: she gave her first piano performance at age four and had her first composition published at age eleven. Opportunities for more advanced musical education for women of colour were distinctly limited in the South so her mother enrolled her in the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. There she majored in piano and organ and studied composition. After graduation she returned to the South, taught and married. Racial pressures of the Jim Crow era, however, prompted her move north to Chicago, and it was here that she made connections with other black artists, Marion Anderson and Langston Hughes among them, and began to find success herself. In 1932 Price won first prize in the Wanamaker Foundation Awards for her Symphony in E minor, and in the following year the symphony received its premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — the first composition by an African-American woman to be played by a major orchestra, an event that brought her a measure of national recognition. Changes in musical styles before and after World War 2, and Price’s death in 1953 overshadowed the impact of her music, as did the actual loss of some of her works. Recent rediscovery of a cache of her manuscripts, including violin concertos and another symphony, have begun to restore her reputation once more.

Price’s Concerto in One Movement for piano was premiered in Chicago in 1934 with Price herself as pianist. The premiere was followed by another performance in Chicago by the Woman’s Symphony of Chicago, with Price’s student Margaret Bonds as soloist.

Although its title declares otherwise, Price’s piano concerto is comprised of three different “movements,” Moderato—Adagio—Allegretto, that are played through without interruption. A meditative call on the trumpet opens the concerto with fragments of a theme, the melody encompassing the pentatonic scale in D minor, deliberately calling to mind African American folk song. The woodwinds reply and this dialogue continues briefly until the piano introduces itself emphatically in an impressive cadenza. The second movement, Adagio, in the key of D major, is almost a piano solo with little orchestral accompaniment. The pentatonic scale helps voice the melody’s unmistakable Spiritual qualities. And this lyrical theme is treated in a variety of ways: “calls” and responses between oboe and the lightly scored orchestra with piano embellishments, western harmonies that converge with chromatic excursions, even a few jazzy outbreaks. The concluding movement, also, draws on black musical traditions, this time a spirited folk dance, specifically the lively body percussion style known as “pattin’ juba.” Price uses this dance form in other of her works both for piano and for orchestra. Here she develops the movement’s theme through a range of keys and rhythmic patterns, and exciting interchanges between orchestra and piano which, with all its inherent folksy energy, brings the concerto to a boisterous conclusion.

Phil Nimmons (1923): Medley of Original Tunes (I Love to Play – Tides – Too Late Now – Not soon enough)

Now is a time to celebrate the achievements of a great Canadian musician, a centenarian no less, Kamloops born, Vancouver raised, clarinetist, composer, arranger, bandleader and educator Phil Nimmons through a special commission by the Kamloops Symphony in which you will discover four of his original tunes arranged by Stéphanie Hamelin Tomala.

Nimmons originally attended UBC intending a career in medicine, and while there he played in local dance bands, including that of long-time band leader Dal Richards, and began his calling as an arranger and composer. Medicine’s loss was Canadian jazz’s gain. Nimmons went to the Juilliard School in 1945-47 to study clarinet, and then to the Royal Conservatory of music to study composition. In 1953 he formed his own jazz group which in 1957 became the Nimmons’N’Nine, and then, in 1965, was enlarged to Nimmon’N’Nine plus Six. This big band group performed and gave clinics in many Canadian schools, toured widely in Canada and twice performed at Canadian Armed Forces bases in Europe.

Nimmons was a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers, and also established jazz programmes at several schools and universities, including Banff, and the University of Toronto where he became director emeritus of the degree program in jazz studies. His composing career has been long—his early compositions include a Sonatina for flute (1948), Toccata (1949), String Quartet (1950), and many other works through the 1960’s and 1970’s. After his band dissolved in the 1980’s he had more time for composition including several commissioned pieces, some for fellow clarinetist James Campbell, as well as a trumpet concerto and a concerto for vibraphone and piano. Over the years, his composing has included collaborations with radio, especially CBC, with television, in film work and, naturally, recording. We salute his astoundingly productive and influential career for which he is justly referred to as the “Dean of Canadian Jazz”.

George Gershwin (1898-1937): Rhapsody in Blue (1924)

Born in Brooklyn, American composer George Gershwin was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. He described himself musically as a “modern Romantic,” his style rooted in jazz and in the urban “folk music” of New York. That is, in part, because he left school early to make his living as a pianist and “song-plugger” in Tin Pan alley, playing the latest popular songs to entertain (and sell to) shoppers as they shopped. Initially self-taught as a composer he was, even before the age of twenty, contributing his own songs with increasing success. Inspired by the example of composers like Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, his music introduced a new style of sophisticated jazz coloured by subtle rhythmic inflection and a delicacy that is uniquely Gershwin’s.

Gershwin had taken some lessons in composition and theory, however, and was eager to master “classical” techniques and to establish himself as a composer of concert as well as popular music. His opportunity came in 1924 with a commission from band leader Paul Whiteman for a concerto for piano and jazz band. The result was Gershwin’s first purely instrumental work, Rhapsody in Blue, which he described as “a kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot.” The adaptation of jazz to the concert hall was not entirely new—there had been French composer Milhaud’s ballet “La Création du Monde” in 1923, and ragtime flavoured pieces by Debussy and Stravinsky earlier still, though Gershwin may have been unaware of these. In Gershwin’s Rhapsody may hear echoes of Franz Liszt who evolved the loosely structured “rhapsody” form in the 19th Century, and at moments the piano style may remind us of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky. For the rest, from the opening clarinet glissando, to the solo “improvisations” on the piano, to the blues and jazzy riffs, Gershwin is pretty much right: this is music that has a distinctly American identity. That unique clarinet glissando by the way was itself a happy improvisation by the Whiteman orchestra’s clarinetist replacing the simple chromatic scale Gershwin had written. The first version of the Rhapsody was scored for Whiteman’s Big Band, but the version we will hear tonight is the orchestral one scored by the American composer, Ferde Grofé, the version most frequently performed nowadays.