I’m only perhaps one sitting away from completing Howard Pollack’s biographical doorstop (at some 700 pages) “Samuel Barber: His Life & Legacy,” issued last month by University of Illinois Press. Barber was one of America’s greatest concert composers. Surely, you recognize him, at the very least, for his ubiquitous “Adagio for Strings.”
Pollack’s book is praiseworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it kindles a desire in the reader to listen to Barber’s music, but also to revisit those pieces one may not have encountered in a very long time. Furthermore, it exposes even a fairly conversant Barberophile like myself to a number of works I never even knew existed.
One of these is the “Chorale for Ascension Day,” which Barber composed between “Antony and Cleopatra,” the opera that opened the Met at its new location in Lincoln Center in 1966, and “The Lovers,” his choral settings of poems by Pablo Neruda, given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1970.
The chorale may not stand as one of Barber’s major works, but since I only just discovered it in time for Ascension Day, today, I figured I’d take the opportunity to give another plug to Pollack’s book, which goes into exhaustive detail about virtually everything Barber ever wrote, and to share a link to this, for me, until-now unknown music.
The work was originally composed for brass choir for the dedication of the new Gloria in Excelsis Tower at the Washington National Cathedral in 1964. The cathedral’s organist and choral director, Paul Callaway, had premiered Barber’s “Toccata Festiva” with the Philadelphia Orchestra to inaugurate the Academy of Music’s new Aeolian-Skinner organ in 1960.
Callaway likely saw to it that new works for the tower dedication were also commissioned from the likes of Lee Hoiby, John LaMontaine, Ned Rorem, and Stanley Hollingsworth. Soon after the premiere of Barber’s brass chorale, the composer provided Callaway with a setting of the piece for chorus, in this case employing a text by Robert Pack Browning.
The piece is also sometimes identified as “Easter Chorale.” On the basis of what I can find on YouTube, it appears that the choral version is much more common. All the brass ensembles, it seems, would rather play arrangements of “Adagio for Strings!”
“Chorale for Ascension Day”
Dedication of the Gloria in Excelsis Tower
“Toccata Festiva”
“Adagio for Strings”
Learn more about Pollack’s book here:
Leave a Reply