Samuel Barber was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on March 9, 1910, and died in New York on January 23, 1981.  The first performance of Night Flight took place at Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 8, 1964. George Szell conducted the Cleveland Orchestra. Night Flight is scored for piccolo, three flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, suspended cymbal, piano, and strings. Approximate performance time is eight minutes.

While serving as an Army corporal during World War II, Samuel Barber received a commission from the Air Force to compose a new work. That work, Barber’s Symphony No. 2, premiered at Boston Symphony Hall on March 3, 1944. Serge Koussevitsky conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In the Symphony No. 2, Barber attempted to “express the mood, the adventure, the vivid action of the individual Army flying man.”

Over time, Barber grew dissatisfied with the Symphony, and withdrew it from the public in 1964. At the same time, Barber converted (with minimal changes) the work’s slow-tempo second movement into an orchestral tone poem entitled Night Flight. In his program notes for the October 8, 1964 premiere, Barber explained the music was “suggested by the feelings of a lonely flier at night, whose only human contact is through a radio-beam. St. Exupéry, of course, has expressed this better than anyone else and in admiration I have used his title.” Barber ended his program notes with a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1931 novel, Night Flight, that reads in part: “A single radio post still heard him. The only link between him and the world was a wave of music, a minor modulation. Not a lament, no cry, yet purest of sounds that ever spoke despair.”

program notes by Ken Meltzer