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ABOUT THE PROGRAMPETER HALSTEAD SAMUEL BARBER (1910–1981)
Souvenirs, Op. 28
This is one of Samuel Barber’s ballet scores from the 1950s. Barber had been enormously successful with his Adagio
for Strings (which was the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, which he arranged for string orchestra in 1936). Even in 2006, the Adagio was the highest-selling classical piece on iTunes. Barber’s Violin Concerto of 1939 became an instant part of the repertoire after its first two performances by Eugene Ormandy (although, scandalously, the teacher of the violinist who commissioned it said the last movement was “like placing a small basket of dainty flowers among tall cactus in a vast prairie,” and talked the violinist out of premiering it and the patron out of paying for it). Barber lived in a modern house in Mount Kisco (the town where I grew up) with Gian Carlo Menotti, later the founder of the Festival of Two Worlds in both Spoleto, Italy, and Charleston, South Carolina. Menotti was well known for his accessible and charming 1951 Christmas opera, Amahl and the Night Vistors. Kids have idols when they’re young, and mine were Barber and Menotti (and Bernstein). To quote Thomas May in his excellent notes for the Kennedy Center:
Souvenirs began as a bit of private musical enter- tainment for piano from 1952—the instrument for which Barber had first tried his hand at composing. That had been when he was a boy of seven; along with his piece young Barber sent his mother a note informing her that he had a “worrying secret,” namely, that he “was meant to be a composer.”
Barber’s biographer Barbara Heyman reports
that the composer’s mother used to take her son to the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel for tea on trips to New York—memories he tapped into when he wrote a set of duets for himself and his friend Charles Turner (piano four hands) in the
in the Palm Court in “about 1914, epoch of the first tangos,” observed the composer. But such souvenirs were “remembered with affection, not in
irony or with tongue in cheek, but in amused tenderness.” This version of Souvenirs for piano became a favorite among Barber’s inner circle and was often trotted out at parties. (A two-piano version was also recorded by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, at the time a popular piano duo.)
Lincoln Kirstein, the co-founder of New York
City Ballet, commissioned Barber to orchestrate the pieces for a ballet. Budget problems and other interruptions delayed the premiere of the new ballet Souvenirs until 1955. In the meantime, one London critic of a performance of the orchestral version declared that Souvenirs was “likely to rival the Ada- gio for Strings in popularity, even if it is not one of the composer’s finest works, nor truly representative of his style.”
Barber’s Souvenirs stylishly surveys the following dance types, in this order: the waltz, schottische, pas de deux, two-step, “hesitation tango” (Barber’s phrase), and galop. Anchoring these different dances in a setting reminiscent of the Palm Court and of a more innocent time in America, the choreographer, Todd Bolender, devised a cheeky and mischievous scenario of pantomime and dance in the silent film era. Bolender and the costume and set designer drew on imagery from early-20th-century fashion magazines to create a story set in a seaside resort hotel just before the start of World War One.
Heyman quotes the response from the New York critic Francis Herridge, who described “a thorough- ly engaging potpourri of Mack Sennett bathing girls, thin-mustached Lotharios and bloodthirsty vampires.” Along with a parody of “Irene Castle dance styles [the opening waltz],” the ballet unfold- ed in brief sketches involving a hotel hallway farce [the schottische], three wall flowers at a dance [the pas de deux, from “a corner of the ballroom”], a bedroom seduction [the hesitation tango], and an afternoon on the beach [“the next afternoon,” with its galop finale].
© Thomas May
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The Music at Tippet Rise