If you’re going to throw your hat into the operatic arena, you’d better have the stomach for a long fight.
Composer Lewis Spratlan was the recipient of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Music for a concert version of Act II of his three-act opera “Life Is a Dream.” Spratlan had actually composed the work between 1975 and 1978, on a commission from New Haven Opera. But while he was at work on the piece, New Haven Opera ceased to exist. It wasn’t until 2000 that Act II was first heard at Amherst College (where Spratlan taught) and then Harvard University. The complete opera would be heard at Santa Fe Opera for the first time only in 2010.
Spratlan composed a second opera, “Earthrise” for San Francisco Opera. His third, “Architect,” a chamber opera about Louis I. Kahn, was released on Navona Records in 2013. There’s also a fourth opera, “Midi,” which transplants the Medea story to the French Caribbean.
A recipient of a number of fellowships from Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bogliasco, NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and MacDowell, among others, Spratlan also produced significant orchestral, chamber, choral, and instrumental works.
He is remembered by his students for his empathy and his generosity. Not one to impose his own aesthetic values, he allowed his pupils to develop their own compositional voices, but on a firm musical foundation, always with a consideration of structure and technique and an historical awareness of what came before.
Spratlan died on February 9. He was 82 years-old. R.I.P.
Spratlan on “Life Is a Dream”
“Invasion,” his response to the war in Ukraine
“Bangladesh”
“When Crows Gather”
Characteristically fine album from Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP)
“Vespers Cantata: Hesperus is Phosphorus,” a truly lovely work composed for The Crossing and Network for New Music
John Adams, the composer, may be no relation to John Adams, our second president, but today he is most definitely feeling the spirit of “76.” Adams was born on this date in 1947. Considered by some to be America’s preeminent living composer, he emerged from the haze of Minimalism to become the most versatile and substantial of early proponents of the style. In 2003, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 9/11 memorial “On the Transmigration of Souls.”
Personally I’ve always been divided on Adams’ music. Some of it I find to be fun; some of it I find to be quite good; some of it I find to be boring, clumsy, or downright embarrassing. But what do I know? I’m just some dope posting on the internet.
My subjective evaluations do nothing to mar Adams’ influence or his standing. Happy birthday to John Adams on his 76th birthday, and congratulations on his long-term success!
FUN FACTS: Adams’ name may recall our second president, or perhaps his son, sixth president John Quincy Adams, but the composer’s middle name is actually Coolidge. Presidents John Adams and Calvin Coolidge were third cousins five times removed, through John and Priscilla (Mullins) Alden of the Mayflower fame. Admittedly, none of this has to do with the composer, beyond the fact that he was indeed named for Adams the president, who had no middle name.
A few of my Adams favorites:
“Short Ride in a Fast Machine”
“Shaker Loops”
“Nixon in China,” here introduced by Walter Cronkite
The first African American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music was born 100 years ago today.
George Walker was awarded the prize for “Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra.” “The unanimous choice of the Music Jury, this passionate, and very American, musical composition… has a beautiful and evocative lyrical quality using words of Walt Whitman,” stated the committee. That was as recent as 1996.
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1922, Walker was a longtime resident of Montclair, NJ. His father emigrated from Kingston, Jamaica, to study at Temple University School of Medicine; Walker’s mother supervised his first piano lessons. He was accepted into the Oberlin School of Music at the age of 14. He was then admitted to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and later attended the Eastman School. For two years, he studied in Paris with Robert Casadesus and Nadia Boulanger.
Walker’s own academic career included posts with Dillard University in New Orleans, the Dalcroze School of Music, the New School for Social Research, Smith College, the University of Colorado Boulder, Rutgers University (where he served as chairman of the music department), the Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University, and the University of Delaware.
He was the father of two sons, violinist and composer Gregory T.S. Walker and playwright Ian Walker. His sister was the pianist Frances Walker-Slocum. George Walker died in 2018, at the age of 96.
As a composer, he produced an impressive body of work, in a career that spanned some 80 years. By his own assessment, as an artist, he was more interested in building “elegant structures” than in “creating beauty.” Depending on one’s sensibility, it could be argued that he achieved both.
I saw him in person only once, in 2009, when the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the world premiere of his Violin Concerto, with his son, Gregory, as soloist, and Neeme Järvi conducting. On a separate series of concerts that season, the orchestra also performed “Lilacs.”
However, it is for a piece Walker composed while still a student at Curtis that he is probably best-known. The “Lyric for Strings,” dedicated to the memory of his grandmother, is touching in its simplicity. It deserves to be as widely played as Barber’s “Adagio,” although Walker’s is quite a different piece. The tender recollection manages to be moving without spilling over into anguish.
I often wonder if Walker ever got tired of hearing about his resume of firsts. In relation to his skin color, I mean. It was always the first thing you ever read or heard about him (and this post is no different). In addition to his landmark Pulitzer win, Walker was the first black pianist to present a solo recital at New York’s Town Hall (in 1945). He was the first black performer to appear as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra (playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3). He was the first black musician to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music (where he studied with Rudolf Serkin, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and Rosario Scalero).
All important achievements. But he was also so much more than a statistic. In an interview given in 2012, Walker commented, “I’ve always thought in universal terms, not just what is black or what is American, but simply what has quality.”
Happy birthday, George Walker.
“Lyric,” in its original version for string quartet:
“Lilacs,” with Faye Robinson (the movements are posted separately, so allow it to play through)
Walker plays his Piano Sonata No. 1
Brief 2012 documentary on Walker, in which he is interviewed, for the occasion of his 90th birthday:
A fascinating interview conducted by Frank J. Oteri. Also includes some great photos!
Kevin Puts is 50 today. Puts was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2012 for his opera “Silent Night,” about the real-life, unsanctioned 1914 Christmas truce between Scottish, French, and German troops on the Western Front. It’s a poignant story, in whatever form. (It was also dramatized in the 2005 film “Joyeux Noël.”) The opera beautifully captures the transcendent moments of humanity, like shafts of sunlight piercing clouds, during one of the costliest and most violent conflicts in the bloody history of warfare. The work was given its world premiere by Minnesota Opera in 2011. I was lucky enough to catch Opera Philadelphia’s production in 2013.
Puts’ latest opera, “The Hours,” co-commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, was projected to be unveiled at the Met in 2022. It looks like it’s been pushed back to next season. In the meantime, two concert performances will be given by the Philadelphia Orchestra, on March 18 & 20, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. The cast for the Met debut was to have included Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara, and Joyce Di Donato as Virginia Woolf. For the Philadelphia performances, Fleming and O’Hara will be joined by Jennifer Johnson Cano.
I’ve never heard anything by this composer that hasn’t been direct, beautiful, and worthwhile. He’s a contemporary artist who has had the good fortune to be rewarded for his courage to remain true to himself, avoiding the pitfall of gussying up what he wishes to express with a lot of extraneous modernist effects, in order to maintain his street cred, as some composers of a clearly romantic bent had done in the previous generation. Nor is he a post-modernist hipster, a keyboard noodler, an overweening pop artist, or a soft-headed, wannabe film composer.
Puts’ language is romantic, but it is not the lingua franca of the 19th century. In embracing tonality and melody, he honors the most fundamental purpose of music, which is not simply to express, but to communicate, and he does so intelligently, in a manner that is capable of reaching a wide audience without cheapening his art.
Furthermore, at 50, he still has a long career ahead of him.
Many happy returns, Kevin Puts.
“Inspiring Beethoven” (with disturbing slideshow)
The Flute Concerto, which flirts with Mozart in its second movement
The Symphony No. 2, a response to the events of 9/11
It seems like Husa’s barely left us, and already it is time to mark his centenary.
A former student of Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger, Husa fled to the United States from his native Czechoslovakia in 1954. He became an American citizen in 1959.
Ten years later, he became the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his String Quartet No. 3. It’s ironic that an artist so highly regarded for his wind music should win the Pulitzer for a string quartet! In 1993, he was also recognized with a Grawemeyer Award for his Cello Concerto. However, it is for his “Music for Prague 1968,” inspired by the Soviet bloc invasion of his homeland, that he is probably best known.
Husa held a professorship at Cornell University from 1954 to 1992. He was also a lecturer at Ithaca College from 1967 to 1986.
Performance of his music was banned in Czechoslovakia for over three decades. At the time of his death, in 2016, he was 95 years-old.
Husa’s mode of expression can come across as a little angsty at times, but I think I’ve managed to come up with a nice cross-section of some of his more accessible works. Click the links below, and fear no Husa!
Concertino for Piano and Winds
“Music for Prague 1968”
Trumpet Concerto
Five Poems for Wind Quintet, inspired by the composer’s love of birds. As the title suggests, it’s in five movements, so if you want to hear the whole thing, let the playlist run through all five videos.
