This Sunday night on Then we’ll turn to “The Lost Chord,” round out your Thanksgiving weekend with two works inspired by William Penn.
An early hero of American liberty, Penn founded Philadelphia (the “City of Brotherly Love”), named the state of Pennsylvania in honor of his father, and signed a landmark treaty with the Lenape. He was enshrined in music by at least two Philadelphia composers.
We’ll hear a selection from the opera “William Penn,” by Romeo Cascarino. Cascarino, born in South Philadelphia in 1922, was largely self-taught as a composer. His fascination with Penn took root at an early age, when he was moved by a plaque posted on City Hall of “Penn’s Prayer for Philadelphia.” He first set the Prayer to music as a choral work in 1950, and later set the Treaty, as well.
These led naturally to the conception of an opera on a grand scale, for which Cascarino asked poet Peg Gwynn to craft a libretto, based on Penn’s life and writings. He spent the next quarter century crafting his magnum opus, even as he composed other works and continued to teach harmony and composition at Philadelphia’s now-defunct Combs College of Music.
The opera was heard twice in concert, performed by the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia at Drexel University, in 1975 and 1977. Tom DiNardo, critic for the Philadelphia Bulletin, recognized the exceptional quality of the music, and surprised the composer by arranging for a couple of staged performances at the Academy of Music in 1982.
The chorus is especially prominent, but arguably the most powerful moments are the intimate glimpses of Penn with his family. These were the days of immense and hazardous ocean voyages, remember, and when a man went to sea, there was no telling when – or even if – he’d be reunited with his loved ones. This knowledge lends an added poignancy to our experience of Penn the man.
Tonight, Metropolitan Opera singer John Cheek assumes the title role, and Penn’s wife, Gulielma, is portrayed by Dolores Ferraro, then married to the composer.
The second half of the program will be devoted to “Four Squares of Philadelphia,” by Louis Gesensway. Gesensway was born in Latvia in 1906. A violin prodigy, he was one of the founders of the Toronto Symphony. He arrived in Philadelphia, at the age of 19, where he played in the Philadelphia Orchestra under both Stokowski and Ormandy.
In his mid-20s, he took a leave of absence to study composition with Zoltán Kodály. “Four Squares” was described by the composer as a “symphonic poem for large orchestra, narrator and street criers.”
The piece opens with Penn’s prayer for the city and celebrates the distinctive characteristics of each of the public spaces he planned: “Washington Square” in early morning during Colonial times, with street criers hawking their wares; “Rittenhouse Square” on a bright and cheerful afternoon; “Logan Square” with its fountains at dusk; and “Franklin Square” at night, evocative of noisy bridge traffic, with a side excursion into Chinatown and musical interjections from the honky-tonk joints located around the square in the 1950s.
We’ll hear it performed by Gesensway’s colleagues of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Eugene Ormandy conducting.
Penn’s influence is not stationary. As the days grow shorter and the nights colder, warm yourself with a nice steaming bowl of “Quaker Notes,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
