This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” in anticipation of Memorial Day, we’ll have two symphonies composed for the armed forces.
Morton Gould wrote his Symphony No. 4 for the United States Military Academy at West Point. It was his first large scale piece for symphonic band. The score calls for a “marching machine,” but the recording we’ll hear, issued on the Mercury label, employs the feet of 120 musicians of the Eastman School Symphony Band. Frederick Fennell directs the Eastman Wind Ensemble.
Samuel Barber composed his Symphony No. 2 in 1943, while he was serving in the U.S. Army Air Force. 20 years later, he revised and published the slow movement as a separate opus, titled “Night Flight,” and then jettisoned – and actually tried to destroy – the rest. The work was reconstituted after the composer’s death, and is now back in circulation. We’ll hear a recording with Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
I hope you’ll join me for “Orchestrated Maneuvers” – American military symphonies for Memorial Day – tonight at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Corporal Samuel Barber with the score of his Second Symphony