Samuel Barber

• Born: March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania
• Died: January 23, 1981 in New York
  

Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 22

• Composed: 1945, commissioned by the Boston Symphony and Sergei Koussevitzky
  
• Premiere: April 5, 1946, with Raya Garbousova as the soloist and Sergei Koussevitzky conducting the Boston Symphony 
• Duration: approx. 7 minutes

Samuel Barber was born into a musical family (his aunt was famed Metropolitan Opera singer Louise Homer) and began his musical training at a young age. At age 14, he entered the newly founded Curtis Conservatory’s (known today as the Curtis Institute of Music) young artist program where he studied voice, piano and composition. After graduating high school, Barber entered the adult professional school at Curtis, where he met people who would influence the rest of his life, including Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who introduced Barber to the Schirmer family (music publishers) and Gian Carlo Menotti, who became his lifelong partner in both life and the music profession. Barber gradated in the spring of 1934, and it wasn’t long thereafter that his career as a composer skyrocketed.

By the time Koussevitzky commissioned Barber to write a cello concerto for his friend and fellow Russian expatriate, Raya Garbousova, Barber had already composed several of his would-be famous works, including the Adagio for Strings (premiere conducted by Arturo Toscanini), Symphony in One Movement (the first work written by an American to be played at the Salzburg Festival) and his Violin Concerto (first conducted by Fritz Reiner at Curtis, then given its public premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy with violinist Albert Spalding). Koussevitzky had already premiered Barber’s Second Symphony in 1944 and had commissioned a choral-symphonic work in 1942, but the premiere of the latter was delayed until 1954.

The commission for the cello concerto came while Barber was serving in the Army Air Corps. Barber was drafted in 1942, but was allowed to write music while in service. He insisted on hearing Garbousova play so that he could understand her performance style, sound and technical abilities. Barber and Garbousova worked together closely in 1945 until the work was all but finished (it still needed to be orchestrated) in September 1942. The result is a piece that was highly tailored to Garbousova’s playing, with extreme technical demands on the part of the soloist. Garbousova championed this concerto but, after her retirement, the piece languished due in large part to its difficulty. Barber edited the solo cello part before the work was published in 1950, and he intended to edit the cello part further, but illness and other projects prevented him from doing so.

—Tyler M. Secor