Sounds of Spring Fill the Concert Hall

By 1943, when Aaron Copland began drafting the music that would become Appalachian Spring, the American composer had undergone a seismic change in style. His early works from the 1920s and '30s had incorporated jazz-infused rhythms and the crunchy dissonances favored by the European vanguard. But as the Great Depression continued to devastate the lives of his fellow Americans, Copland was motivated to shift his artistic mission: He would compose music not for the approval of the musical elite, but to uplift and inspire the American people.   

To do that, Copland adopted recognizable elements of American folk music — from accessible melodies that could easily be whistled, to catchy foot-stomping dance rhythms and open harmonies modeled after the tuning of standard folk instruments like the banjo and fiddle. He began applying this new style to his work, including a pair of ballet scores: Billy the Kid and Rodeo, both of which captured the pioneer spirit of the American frontier.  

Those ballets grabbed the attention of choreographer Martha Graham. A leader in the development of modern dance in the United States, Graham had begun commissioning scores related to American history and culture, and she knew Copland would be an ideal collaborator for her next ballet. After the composer signed onto the project, Martha sent him an overview of the piece's subject matter to inspire his work:  

"This is a legend of American living, like a bone structure, the inner frame that holds together a people. This has to do with living in a new town, someplace where the first fence has just gone up." 

Guided by Graham's bare outline, Copland set to work on his "Ballet for Martha," which by the time of its 1944 premiere had become the Appalachian Spring we know and love today. Brought to life by Copland's cinematic score for 13 instruments, teeming with tender lyricism and high-kicking country dances, Graham's ballet progresses through eight scenes that evoke a frontier settlement in 19th-century Pennsylvania, where we meet a young couple celebrating their wedding day, a revivalist preacher and his fervent followers, and a woman whose dreams of reaching the Promised Land fuels hope for a better tomorrow. 

As the U.S. military fought to turn the tide of World War II across multiple fronts, the ballet's feelings of optimism, nostalgia, and resilience were embraced at home, where it was lauded as a celebration of American ideals. Copland's score would soon take on a life of its own in the concert hall thanks to the suite he drafted for full orchestra in 1945 — the same year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Appalachian Spring. 

© Michael Cirigliano II

Composer Dates: 1910-1981
Composition Date: 1939-1940; revised 1949
Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Jun Märkl led Simone Lamsma and the Oregon Symphony on May 20-22, 2023, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
Instrumentation: solo violin, two flutes (second doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion, piano, and strings

It's fitting that Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto was commissioned by the president of a soap manufacturing company, since the process of bringing the work to the stage proved as dramatic as a soap opera.

In 1939, Samuel Simeon Fels was eager to launch the solo career of his adopted son, a violinist named Iso Briselli. Knowing the young virtuoso would benefit from a specially commissioned work he could perform with orchestras around the world, Fels turned to Barber, who had attended Philadelphia's prestigious Curtis Institute of Music with Briselli. Barber began work on Briselli's concerto in a small Swiss village nestled among the mighty Alps, but the outbreak of World War II that summer forced the composer to return to the United States, where he continued working in another idyllic landscape — Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains.

Delays caused by this unexpected transatlantic journey meant that by the time Barber was scheduled to deliver his score to Briselli, he had only completed the first two movements. But Briselli loved what he saw — a pair of deeply romantic expressions of intense longing, complete with lush harmonies and ravishing moments of lyricism for the solo violin.

Briselli had just one request: He wanted the finale Barber had yet to compose to showcase his virtuosity, with opportunities to showcase plenty of technical fireworks. Barber took Briselli's wish to heart, but when he submitted the final movement a few weeks later, the violinist was disappointed. He felt the closing movement — a rapid-fire fever dream of perpetual motion that requires the soloist to navigate a hurricane of notes flying across the page — was too "lightweight" and didn't connect musically or emotionally to the concerto's earlier movements.

Briselli asked Barber to flesh out the finale, but the composer was happy with his creation and refused to change a single note. With soloist and composer deadlocked, Briselli gave up his rights to premiere the work, and another violinist, Albert Spalding, premiered Barber's concerto in 1941 with the Philadelphia Orchestra — the first of many performances for a work that is now regarded as one of the most sublime of all 20th-century violin concertos.

But Barber, who missed out on collecting half of his commission fee when Briselli walked away from the project, would always mockingly refer to the work as his Concerto da Sapone — "Soap Concerto."

© Michael Cirigliano II

Composer Dates: 1865-1957 
⁠Composition Date: 1915; revised 1916 & 1919 
⁠Most Recent Oregon Symphony Performance: Norman Huynh led the Oregon Symphony on February 23-26, 2018, at Bauman Auditorium at George Fox University and the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
⁠Instrumentation: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings 

Jean Sibelius frequently found inspiration for his work in the Finnish countryside. He grew up in a small town near Finland's southern coast, where the sight of cranes, geese, and swans soaring above nearby lakes sowed the seeds for the composer's lifelong fascination with nature.  

"Even by Nordic standards," biographer Erik W. Tawaststjerna wrote of the composer, "Sibelius responded with exceptional intensity to the moods of nature and the changes in the seasons: He scanned the skies with his binoculars for the geese flying over the lake ice, listened to the screech of the cranes, and heard the cries of the curlew echo over the marshy grounds. He savoured the spring blossoms every bit as much as he did autumnal scents and colours." 

One morning, while likely searching for those spring blossoms on a walk near his country home outside Helsinki, Sibelius witnessed a vision of nature's glory that left him in absolute awe. In a diary entry from April 1915, he wrote: 

"Today at ten to eleven I saw sixteen swans. One of my greatest experiences! Lord God, what beauty! They circled over me for a long time. Disappeared into the solar haze like a gleaming silver ribbon." 

The composer soon commemorated the scene in the final movement of his Fifth Symphony, which the Finnish government had commissioned to celebrate Sibelius' 50th birthday. The symphony's premiere in December 1915 served as the centerpiece of the birthday festivities, where the audience was introduced to a work of radiant splendor, calm, and a bold optimism that nourished heart and soul during a dark time, as their oppressed country struggled to gain independence from Imperial Russia. 

But Sibelius, forever tormented by self-doubt and creative crisis, was unhappy with his new work — so much so that he greatly revised the symphony twice over the next four years. "I wish to give my symphony another — more human — form," he wrote about the task at hand. "More down-to-earth, more vivid." 

In November 1919, Sibelius completed the last of his changes to the Fifth. In this final form, the composer merged the first two movements into one expansive opening statement — with the French horns' mystic, gently blossoming tune introduced in the opening bars establishing the thematic materials Sibelius would use to create a movement of breathtaking sweep and speed. In contrast, the short central movement offers calm respite in its light-hearted variations on a folk-like theme, delivered initially in the playful sounds of plucked strings and chirping flutes. 

A swarm of activity takes over at the beginning of the symphony's finale, with the orchestral strings moving breathlessly about as fragments of melody swirl through the woodwinds and brass. But barely a minute into the action, a moment of breathless magic overtakes the scene: A quartet of French horns launches into a chorus of sublime beauty — Sibelius' "swan hymn," inspired by that springtime walk in 1915 — that grows even grander when taken up by the full brass section. 

After a shadowy central section increasingly spiked with dissonance and shadows, the swan hymn proves triumphant once again as Sibelius brings the symphony to a close with six thunderbolts from the full orchestra — jolts of primal energy that leave our ears ringing in the cavernous silence that follows. 

© Michael Cirigliano II