Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
An American Overture

In the spring of 1939, Benjamin Britten and his companion Peter Pears sailed for North America, eventually settling in Amityville, Long Island.  In 1941, five months before his return to the UK, he wrote An Occasional Overture for the conductor Artur Rodzinsky.  It was never performed and Britten himself forgot about it until it was brought to his notice in 1972.  As the original title had already been given to a later work, it was re-named An American Overture.   It was not performed until 1983 (by the CBSO under Simon Rattle). 

Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Concerto for Violin, opus 14

Perhaps best known for his Adagio for Strings, Samuel Barber is an American composer – his style, gentler and less dissonant than that of either Copland or the mature Ives, has been called neo-romantic and has something in common with our own William Walton,

The Violin Concerto, composed in 1939–40, has a curious history.  An American soap magnate (manufacturer of Fels Naptha Soap – in later years Barber referred to the concerto as “concerto dal sapone”)  - commissioned it for his adopted son, a young virtuoso violinist named Iso Briselli. When Briselli saw the first two movements, he complained that there was not enough chance to show off his skill: they were too simple. So Barber sat down and wrote a finale so brilliant that Briselli said he could not play it,  Fels reneged on the commission and demanded that the money already advanced be repaid. (Barber had already spent it). To rescue the commission a special performance was arranged.  A (surely brilliant) student at the Curtis Institute was handed the pencilled violin part and given a few hours to study it, with the injunction that "it must be played very fast". The student, Herbert Baumel – who had not been told the purpose of this bizarre audition – later recalled the evident tension in the room when he entered. He gave dazzling evidence that the finale was indeed playable. The assembled luminaries decreed that the commission must be paid in full and that Briselli had lost his right to the first performance.

 

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Ceremonial Fanfare
Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo

The story of Aaron Copland is quintessentially that of an American family.    Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900, he was the youngest son of Russian immigrants.   They instilled in their son enduring values based on immigrant themes of independence, self-reliance and motivation.  Throughout his life, Copland would demonstrate uncommon vision, exceptional talent, noble ideas, organizational excellence, and intense dedication to his art and craft. His extensive influence on and contribution to American music made him one of the most highly regarded composer-musicians of the twentieth century. 

In the 1930s Copland too was moved to try and create American music for an American public and not just the New York intelligentsia. He made a fruitful collaboration with the choreographer, Agnes de Mille, producing three ballet scores for her company: Appalachian Spring, the best known, and two with Wild West scenarios, Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942). A year later, Copland extracted music from Rodeo to form the Four Dance Episodes. 

In 1969, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned five composers,  Aaron Copland,  Walter Piston,  Virgil Thomson,  Leonard Bernstein, and William Schuman, to write fanfares commemorating its centennial.  Copland’s Ceremonial Fanfare was completed the same year and premiered on his seventieth birthday on November 14, 1970. The composition was used to publicly open the Metropolitan’s new exhibit entitled “Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries,” which represented “5000 years of the art of civilized man.”

Antonin Dvořák (1913-1976)
American Suite

From 1892 to 1895, Dvořák was the directorof the National Conservatory of Music in New York City,    Dvořák initially wrote the Suite for piano (opus 98). While he composed it in New York between February 19 and March 1, 1894, he orchestrated it in two parts more than a year after his return to the United States and immediately before his departure for Europe. The pianistic version was performed soon after its composition, but the orchestral version waited some years. The orchestral version of the American Suite was first played in concert in 1910 and not published until 1911, seven years after Dvořák's death in 1904.