Samuel Barber

Barber, born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, was a pianist, baritone and conductor as well as a composer. His language is tonal and song-like, built on nineteenth-century harmony rather than modernist methods. After about 1940 he allowed more dissonance and chromatic writing, as in the Cello Concerto of 1945 and the Piano Sonata of 1949.

The Adagio for Strings (1936) is the string-orchestra version of the slow movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11. It is in B-flat minor with modal touches. It begins softly on a single note in the first violins, and the melody climbs and falls by step in a long arch. Four loud chords mark the peak, a long pause follows, and the opening returns and fades on an unresolved chord. Toscanini and the NBC Symphony gave the first performance on radio in November 1938.

Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1947) sets selected passages of James Agee's prose recollection of a childhood summer evening, for soprano and orchestra. Eleanor Steber commissioned it and sang the first performance with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky in 1948. Barber called it a lyric rhapsody. The Piano Concerto, Op. 38, was first played by John Browning at the opening of Philharmonic Hall in 1962. It has three movements: an Allegro appassionato, a Canzone adapted from a 1959 flute elegy, and a finale in 5/8 over a pounding ostinato with heavy brass.