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Tag: Pulitzer Prize

Kevin Puts at 50 Pulitzer Winner & Composer’s Career

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

“Dona nobis pacem” from “Silent Night”

January 4, 2022
Explore the Music of Karel Husa

Who’s afraid of Karel Husa?

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.

Concerto for Percussion and Wind Ensemble

Interviewed by Bruce Duffie

http://www.bruceduffie.com/husa.html

August 7, 2021
George Walker Pulitzer Winner Remembrance

George Walker would have been 99 years-old today.

Walker was the first African-American recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music – as recently as 1996 – for “Lilacs for Voice and Orchestra.” He 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 (performing 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 and Rosario Scalero).

Walker died on August 23, 2018, at the age of 96. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll celebrate this trailblazing artist with a program of four of his original works, including his Piano Sonata No. 2 (with the composer himself at the keyboard), the award-winning “Lilacs” (after poetry of Walt Whitman), “Address for Orchestra” (his first major orchestral work), and “Lyric for Strings” (his most famous music, in its original version for string quartet).

Born in Washington, D.C., 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 admitted to 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 famed pedagogue 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.

By his own assessment, Walker was a composer more interested in building “elegant structures” than in “creating beauty.” Depending on one’s sensibility, it could be argued that he achieved both.

I hope you’ll join me in “Perambulating with Walker,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

A fascinating interview with Walker by Frank J. Oteri, which, among other things, lends an added dimension to Walker’s most frequently performed music (the “Lyric”) and offers insights into his life and musical philosophy. Also, some great photos!

https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/george-walker-concise-and-precise/

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June 27, 2021
Tania León Wins Pulitzer for “Stride”

Here, with all the hullabaloo, I forgot all about the Pulitzers being announced yesterday. Congratulations to Tania León, the recipient of this year’s prize for music, for her composition “Stride.”

“Stride” received its world premiere by the New York Philharmonic on February 13, 2020. The music is a response to the orchestra’s “Project 19” commissioning program, for which 19 women wrote works to mark the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed a woman’s right to vote. The inspiration for León’s piece was Susan B. Anthony.

León discusses “Stride”

The work in rehearsal:

You’ll find an interview with the composer, in which she talks about the piece, here:

https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2021/06/11/1005649919/tania-leon-wins-music-pulitzer-for-stride-a-celebration-of-womens-suffrage

León, born in Havana, settled in New York in 1967. Among her teachers was Ursula Mamlok.

This year’s other finalists in the category were Ted Hearne, for “Place,” and Maria Schneider, for “Data Lords.”

It’s a good thing it’s still breakfast, because I really feel like I’ve got egg on my face for having forgotten, especially after devoting this past Sunday’s “The Lost Chord” to Pulitzer Prize winning music! If you missed it, you can still catch the show as a webcast at the link below. The playlist includes works by William Schuman (the very first recipient of the music prize), William Bolcom, and Caroline Shaw (the category’s youngest honoree).

https://www.wwfm.org/post/lost-chord-june-6-further-pulitzer-surprises

June 12, 2021
Forgotten Pulitzer Music: Beyond the Familiar

Beyond Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3, how many Pulitzer Prize winners are actually known to the average concertgoer? Sure, the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti and Robert Ward get revived from time to time, and Jennifer Higdon has been exceptionally fortunate for a composer in her prime. But most Pulitzer winners tend to languish in relative obscurity.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” in advance of Friday’s announcement of this year’s winners and nominees, we’ll take another look back on Pulitzer history and sample three honored works.

The very earliest recipient in the music category, in 1943, was William Schuman’s “A Free Song.” Schuman sets a text drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Drum Taps,” verse which grew out of the poet’s Civil War experiences, but also spoke with vigor and optimism to a country once again caught in the throes of conflict. The work was recorded for the first time only in 2011.

Also on the program will be music by William Bolcom. Bolcom, who only just turned 83, is a composer at home in all genres. His cabaret recitals with his wife, Joan Morris, have always been great favorites; his rag, “Graceful Ghost,” receives heavy air time around Halloween; and his magnum opus, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” is a kaleidoscopic, two-and-a-half-hour journey enlivened by bluegrass, country, soul, folk, vaudeville, rock, reggae, and classical influences. We’ll hear selections from Bolcom’s “12 New Etudes for Piano,” the Pulitzer-winner from 1988, performed by the unflappable Marc-André Hamelin.

Finally, we’ll turn to Caroline Shaw and her extraordinary “Partita for 8 Voices,” which was awarded the Pulitzer in 2013. Shaw, the youngest recipient of the prize for music, was only 30 years-old at the time and a doctoral candidate at Princeton University. Her “Partita” navigates a dizzying array of genres and techniques. The piece will be presented in a flabbergastingly virtuosic performance by the a cappella ensemble Roomful of Teeth, of which Shaw is a founding member.

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of prized Pulitzer music. That’s “Further Pulitzer Surprises,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

PHOTO: Caroline Shaw (front left) with Roomful of Teeth

June 6, 2021

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