Samuel Barber

Born: March 9, 1910, West Chester, Penn.
Died: January 23, 1981, New York City

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14

• Composed: 1939
  
• Premiere: February 7, 1941 by The Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting; Albert Spalding, violin
• CSO Notable Performances:
  • First: April 1978, Leonard Slatkin conducting; Jaime Laredo, violin. 
  • Most Recent: March 2019, Louis Langrée conducting; Augustin Hadelich, violin.
  • Notable: As part of the 1995 Centennial Season European Tour, Jesús López Cobos conducting; Alyssa Park, violin and Pamela Frank, violin
• Instrumentation: solo violin, 2 flutes (incl. piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, snare drum, piano, strings
• Duration: approx. 25 minutes

Samuel Barber’s success as one of America’s greatest composers was both early and lasting. Born and raised in a small town on the outskirts of Philadelphia, he received a sound appreciation of music as a boy from his mother, a talented pianist, and from his aunt, the noted Metropolitan Opera contralto Louise Homer. In 1924, at the tender age of 14, he entered the first class enrolled at the Curtis Institute and received instruction in piano, voice and composition, winning the Bearns Prize in composition in 1928. Three years later he composed the sparkling Overture to The School for Scandal, which was premiered by Alexander Smallens and The Philadelphia Orchestra in August 1933, and secured for the young composer an immediate reputation. In 1935, Barber won both the Pulitzer Scholarship and the American Prix de Rome, enabling him to study in Europe. While abroad, he conducted, gave recitals (he had an excellent and well-trained baritone voice) and met some of the most important musicians of the day, including Toscanini, who became a champion of his works. The great Italian conductor premiered both the Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for Strings during the 1938 season of the NBC Symphony, making Barber the first American composer whose works Toscanini conducted with that ensemble.

In his 1954 study of the composer, Nathan Broder wrote as follows of the genesis of the Violin Concerto: 

In the summer of 1939, after a visit to England and Scotland, Barber settled down in the village of Sils-Maria in Switzerland to work on a violin concerto, which had been commissioned by a wealthy Philadelphia merchant. This progressed slowly and he set off for Paris, planning to complete the work there during the fall. But he had hardly arrived in Paris when all Americans were warned to leave. He sailed for home, and word reached the ship before they arrived in New York that German troops had invaded Poland. 

The work was completed after Barber returned home and premiered on February 7, 1941 by Albert Spalding with The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. It has become one of the most frequently performed of all 20th-century concertos.

The change from the warm lyricism of the Violin Concerto’s first two movements to the aggressive rhythms and strong dissonances of the finale is indicative of the stylistic evolution Barber’s music underwent at the outbreak of World War II. The idiom of the works of the earlier years — Overture to The School for Scandal (1932), Essay for Orchestra (1937), Adagio for Strings (1938), those pieces that established his international reputation as a 20th-century romanticist — was soon to be broadened by the more modern but expressively richer musical language of the Second Symphony (1944), the Capricorn Concerto (1944) and the ballet for Martha Graham The Serpent Heart (1946), from which the orchestral suite Medea was derived.

The concerto’s opening movement, almost Brahmsian in its songfulness, is built on two lyrical themes. The first one, presented immediately by the soloist, is an extended, arching melody; the other, initiated by the clarinet, is rhythmically animated by the use of the “Scottish snap,” a short–long figure also familiar from jazz idioms. The two themes alternate throughout the remainder of the movement, which follows a broadly drawn, traditional concerto form. The expressive cantabile of the first movement carries into the lovely Adagio. The oboe intones a plangent melody as the main theme, from which the soloist spins a rhapsodic elaboration to serve as the movement’s central section. The return of the main theme is entrusted to the soloist. Moto perpetuo (“perpetual motion”) is how Barber marked the finale of this concerto, and the music more than lives up to its title. After an opening timpani flourish, the soloist introduces a fiery motive above a jabbing rhythmic accompaniment that returns, rondo-like, throughout the movement. A whirling coda of vertiginous speed and virtuosic brilliance brings this splendid concerto to a dazzling close.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda