Program Notes: Benjamin Beilman Plays Barber Violin Concerto

MALCOLM ARNOLD 
Peterloo Overture 
BORN: October 21, 1921, in Northampton, Northamptonshire, England 
DIED: September 23, 2006, in Norwich, Norfolk, England 
WORK COMPOSED: 1968 
WORLD PREMIERE: June 7, 1968, by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall, London, conducted by the composer. 

In 1968, Malcolm Arnold was commissioned to compose music celebrating the centenary of the British Trade Union Congress — the federation of British workers’ unions, whose origins lay in the industrial heart of Manchester. Arnold captured the year’s turbulent zeitgeist by depicting an earlier suppression of British political protest that had also taken place in Manchester: the 1819 Peterloo Massacre. A peaceful gathering of around 60,000 people was violently broken up by yeoman cavalry, which charged directly into the crowds, swords drawn and muskets firing. Eighteen people were killed and 700 injured.  

Arnold was a hugely successful composer, scoring both films — most notably winning an Academy Award for his work on The Bridge on the River Kwai — and also more traditional concert music. For Peterloo, he chose a forceful, almost cinematic sound world. Perhaps this choice was made with the first audience in mind, the Union Congress, to make the drama of the music vivid and unmistakable. 

The overture begins with simple and noble melodies, which are interrupted by a gradual approach of snare drums, menacing brass and woodwind stabs — a striking musical effect that has been compared with the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and Charles Ives. The "charge" is a series of galloping movements and violently discordant fanfares. A funereal aftermath follows, but the scene resolves, returning with almost uncanny speed to its initial tranquility. A short episode with pealing chimes closes the piece in triumph.  

Peterloo found its place more as a piece for wind or brass band than its original symphonic form, and early audiences found its emotional arc a challenge to believe. But lately, it has re-appeared on the orchestral stage. The Seattle Symphony plays Peterloo for the first time this week, prompted by Kahchun Wong’s recent performances with The Hallé orchestra in Manchester, where he is Music Director.

Raff Wilson © 2025

SAMUEL BARBER
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14 
BORN: March 9, 1910, in West Chester, Pennsylvania
DIED: January 23, 1981, in New York City
WORK COMPOSED: 1939–1940 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 7, 1941, in Philadelphia, by The Philadelphia Orchestra, with Albert Spalding on violin and Eugene Ormandy conducting.

Throughout his career, which spanned the middle decades of the last century, Samuel Barber was one of America’s most admired composers. He still is. Barber’s penchant for lyricism, lush sonority and strong emotional expression, his allegiance to traditional tonal harmonies, and his unabashedly 19th-century style of orchestration and musical rhetoric have resonated well with the neo-Romantic sentiment that has so strongly marked the musical spirit of recent years. As result, his stock has probably never been higher, his works never so frequently performed nor so widely appreciated as they are now. 

Barber’s Romanticism is nowhere more evident than in his Violin Concerto, Op. 14. This was the composer’s first piece for solo instrument and orchestra (he would later produce concertos featuring cello and piano), and the largest orchestral composition he had written so far in his young career. The work had its genesis in a commission from Samuel Fels, a businessman who had made a fortune as a soap manufacturer. (Fels Naptha soap was once among the leading products of its kind in this country.) A trustee of the Curtis Institute, the elite Philadelphia music school where Barber was one of the charter students, Fels had taken it upon himself to sponsor a young violinist from Odessa, a former child prodigy named Iso Briselli.  

Barber knew Briselli at Curtis and later encountered him again in New York, where both had gone to pursue their careers. The composer was already establishing an important reputation with works like his first Essay for Orchestra and the famous Adagio for Strings. These successes could not have escaped Briselli’s notice, nor that of Mr. Fels. And so, in the spring of 1939, Fels offered Barber $1,000, a sizable fee at that time, to write a concerto for Briselli. 

Barber agreed and spent the summer composing the concerto’s first two movements. He completed the finale that autumn. In the end, however, Briselli expressed dissatisfaction with the piece and surrendered his right to its first performance. This was given instead by the violinist Albert Spalding, who played the premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy in February 1941. 

Barber cast his work in the venerable concerto design that served composers throughout the 19th century: three movements in a fast–slow–fast arrangement, though the opening Allegro is more relaxed in tone than either tradition or its tempo indication might lead us to expect. The composer presents the flowing principal theme of this first movement at once, assigning it to the solo instrument. A second idea, more sprightly in character, is introduced by the clarinet before being taken up by the violin. Both themes recur transfigured in various ways as the movement unfolds, a full-throated restatement of the principal subject by the orchestra providing the emotional climax.   

The slow movement begins with a long-breathed melody sung by the oboe. Presently, the violin counters with a new theme, whose extension occupies the central portion of the movement. The oboe’s initial melody finally returns, but now in the voice of the concerto’s featured instrument. 

In marked contrast to the lyricism of the first two movements, the third is an athletic romp featuring moto perpetuo figuration for the solo violin. With angular melodic lines, brittle textures, sharp off-beat accents from the orchestra and a touch of sardonic humor, it is not only more energetic but more modern in sound than what has gone before. 

Paul Schiavo © 2010, revised 2025

BÉLA BARTÓK  
Concerto for Orchestra 
BORN: March 25, 1881, in Nagyszentmiklós (Great Saint Nicholas), Hungary 
DIED: September 26, 1945, in New York, New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1943 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 1, 1944, in Boston, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting. 

Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is his most popular orchestral composition and one of the most familiar of all his works. Ironically, it was written at a time when its author had, in despair, all but abandoned his creative endeavors.   

Bartók had arrived with his wife in America in 1940, and his fortunes, spirit and health soon declined alarmingly. In his native Hungary he had achieved considerable recognition as a composer, pianist and authority on Hungarian, Balkan and North African folk music. But in New York, where he settled, he was just one of many refugees from the Nazi conquest of Europe. Moreover, the late 1930s and early 1940s were proving a more conservative period for music than the previous two decades had been, and Bartók’s sometimes acerbic modernism was falling out of favor with many performers and listeners. How much so can be gathered from a bitter complaint that Bartók wrote at the end of 1942: “My career as a composer is as much as finished; the quasi-boycott of my works by the leading orchestras continues; no performances of either old works or new ones. It is a shame — not for me, of course.” Faced with this situation, Bartók composed no new music during his first three years in this country.   

Unfortunately, the curtailment of his activities as a composer was not the only difficulty confronting Bartók at this time. Able to secure only part-time work researching Romanian folk music at Columbia University but refusing any form of charity, the composer lived in precarious financial circumstances. Then, in the spring of 1943, he was hospitalized with the first signs of polycythaemia, a blood disease that often develops into leukemia.    

It was at this low point in Bartók’s life that something like a miracle happened. In May 1943, the composer received a visit in his hospital room from Serge Koussevitzky, the renowned conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who brought with him a formal request for a new orchestral work. Actually, this commission had been arranged by two of Bartók’s supporters, the conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti, but knowledge of their intervention had to be kept secret. A longtime friend of Bartók, Szigeti understood full well that the composer’s pride would never allow him to accept an offer he suspected of being tainted by charity. 

The commission proved a formidable tonic. Bartók worked on it throughout the summer of 1943, finding that the return to composition dramatically restored his spirits and health. “Through working on this [piece],” he told a friend, “I have discovered the wonder drug I needed to bring about my own cure.” By autumn his Concerto for Orchestra was complete, and on December 1, 1944, Koussevitzky led the premiere. The composer, who traveled to Boston for the occasion, reported that “the performance was excellent. Koussevitzky is very enthusiastic and says it is the best orchestra piece of the last 25 years ...” Since then, the Concerto for Orchestra has emerged as one of the most frequently played orchestral works from the 20th century. 

Bartók wrote that “The title of this symphony-like orchestral work is explained by its tendency to treat the single orchestral instruments in a concertante or soloistic manner.” The composition opens with a somber declamation by the low strings; they are answered by atmospheric tremolo and scale figures in the violins and flutes and, soon, by an ominous motif from the trumpets. That last figure is taken up by much of the orchestra, the music accelerating to an impressive climax. All this is an introduction to the main body of the first movement, which launches forth on an energetic melody presented by the violins. Two other ideas are prominent during the course of the movement: a vigorous subject heard in the trombones and a gently rocking theme introduced by the oboe.   

Bartók titled the second movement “Game of Couples,” a reference to the succession of duet passages that forms the bulk of this portion of the work. We hear in turn pairs of bassoons, oboes, clarinets, flutes and trumpets, leading at last to a chorale melody for the brass. The ensuing third movement is a haunting elegy, stark and funereal. 

Bartók also gave a title to the Concerto’s fourth movement, calling it an “interrupted intermezzo.” It begins with a folk-like melody given to the oboe and proceeds to a more pastoral subject in the strings. Into this placid music, however, comes the clarinet with a melody rather similar to the march theme in Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony. Bartók had heard that piece during its famous radio broadcast in 1942, and its parody here is a sign of his resentment (made certain by a loud “raspberry”) at the success of what he considered an inferior work. Soon the entire orchestra has taken up this tune, enjoying a humorous romp before the more sedate initial material reasserts itself. Bartók closes the composition with a colorful finale. The flavor of its themes is distinctly Hungarian, and a brilliant contrapuntal development forms its central episode. 

Paul Schiavo © 2011, revised 2025