Barber sings Barber

Synopsis

Among the talented music students at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute in the late 1920s, a teenager named Samuel Barber must have stood out. After all, he was an incredibly gifted triple talent: a pianist, composition student, and a singer. Maybe it just ran in the family: his mother was a talented amateur pianist, his uncle Sidney Homer a respected composer of art songs, and his aunt Louise Homer was a leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera.

On today's date in 1933, it was another Metropolitan Opera artist, mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton, who gave the premiere of one of Barber's early masterworks: a setting of a text by the British poet Matthew Arnold entitled "Dover Beach" for voice and string quartet.

This first recording of "Dover Beach," made in 1935, however, featured Barber himself as the vocalist, making him perhaps the only classical composer to sing one of his own works on a professional, major-label recording.

When the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams heard Barber sing his setting of "Dover Beach," he urged Barber to continue to compose. The young man took his advice, and rather than make a name for himself as a concert pianist or opera baritone, rapidly established himself as one of the major American composers of the 20th century.

Music Played in Today's Program

Samuel Barber (1910 - 1981) Dover Beach Samuel Barber, baritone; Curtis String Quartet Pearl 0049

On This Day

Births

• 1853 - American composer Arthur Foote, in Salem, Mass.;

• 1887 - Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, in Rio de Janeiro;

Deaths

• 1778 - British composer Thomas Arne, age 67, in London;

• 1947 - Italian composer Alfredo Casella, age 63, in Rome;

• 1953 - Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev, age 61, in Moscow (the same day that Joseph Stalin died);

Premieres

• 1735 - Handel: Organ Concertos Op. 4, nos. 2-3, in London as intermission features during a revival performance of Handel's oratorio "Esther" at the Covent Garden Theater (Gregorian date: March 16);

• 1818 - Rossini: opera "Mosè in Egitto" (Moses in Egypt) (1st version in Italian), in Naples at the Teatro San Carlo;

• 1868 - Boito: opera "Mefistofele," at the Teatro della Scala in Milan;

• 1889 - MacDowell: Piano Concerto No. 2, with the composer as soloist, in New York City;

• 1892 - Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 1 (Gregorian date: Mar. 17);

• 1904 - Liadov: symphonic poem "Baba Yaga" (Gregorian date: Mar. 18);

• 1904 - Ravel: String Quartet, in Paris, by the Heymann Quartet;

• 1905 - Frederick S. Converse: "The Mystic Trumpeter" by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Fritz Scheel conducting;

• 1933 - Barber: "Dover Beach" for medium voice and string quartet, at the French Institute in New York City, by mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton and the New York Art Quartet;

• 1933 - Malipiero: Violin Concerto No. 1, by the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orcherstra with Pierre Monteux conducting and Viola Mitchell the soloist;

• 1940 - Copland: "John Henry," on a CBS "School of the Air" radio broadcast, by the Columbia Broadcasting Symphony conducted by Howard Barlow;

• 1942 - Cage: "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" (text by James Joyce) for voice and piano, in New York;

• 1942 - Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad") by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, conducted by Samuel Abramovitch Samosud, in Kuibyshev (the temporary Soviet capital where the orchestra and Shostakovich had been evacuated);

• 1944 - Piston: Symphony No. 2, in Washington, D.C., by the National Symphony, Hans Kindler conducting;

• 1965 - Piston: Symphony No. 6, by the Boston Symphony;

• 1990 - David Ward-Steinman: "Intersections II: Borobudur," for percussion and "fortified" piano, at the Canberra Institute of the Arts in Australia, by percussionist Daryl Pratt and the composer at the piano;

• 2003 - Bright Sheng: Tone Poem for Pipa, Sheng, Cello, Piano, and Orchestra ("Song and Dance of Tears") with Wu Man (pipa, Wu Tong (sheng), Yo-Yo Ma (cello) and Emanuel Ax (piano), with the New York Philharmonic, David Zinman conducting.