The concert opens with Richard Danielpour’s “Toward the Splendid City,” a work the composer wrote in 1992 while he grappled with whether to return to his hometown of New York City after a residency with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra.ĭedicated to both New York and the New York Philharmonic, which commissioned it, “Toward the Splendid City,” Yeh says, describes Danielpour’s mixed emotions about the Big Apple, a city he loves but also has reasons to dislike. It’s as fast as possible in an even and unrelenting way.” “From the beginning to the end of the third movement, it’s all fast triple eighth notes in the orchestra’s part,” Kim says. Then comes the third movement with its quick moto perpetuo tempo. It’s amazing how he builds up and sustains that climax.” “It has a very personal and touching moment that reveals itself very slowly throughout the movement. “The second movement is the movement I enjoy the most,” she says. Kim describes the second movement as “painfully gorgeous.” … The violin keeps going up and up in duet with the timpani part, which brings a huge grandeur to this piece.” “The harmonic part is very Romantic and full with the orchestra. “The first movement is more like - how should I say it? - very lush harmonically and just beautiful and gorgeous,” she says. The first movement, Kim says, begins slowly and builds to an “amazing climax” between violin and timpani. “I think to understand his language harmonically, it is hard,” she says, “because it is a little different from other Romantic composers while also being very Romantic and beautiful, but I think if you understand that, this piece is so enjoyable.” Instead, she says, she thinks the third movement provides a perfect festive conclusion following the two lush, Romantic movements that precede it. The work was commissioned for one of his 1934 Curtis classmates, Iso Briselli, but, according to the website, the violinist ultimately rejected the version Barber submitted because he and his violin coach didn’t think the third movement was violinistic and Briselli thought it was lightweight compared to the first two movements. Toward the Splendid City is, in addition to being a portrait of New York, a tribute to its Philharmonic Orchestra.Written in 1939 and now considered an essential part of the violin repertoire, Barber’s Violin Concerto encountered controversy early on. The work’s title comes from the heading of Pablo Neruda’s Nobel Prize address in 1974, in which he included the following: “We must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song - but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human.” It was, needless to say, a relationship badly in need of resolution.Įventually, upon returning to Manhattan, I began to understand that the humanity and the difficulty of New York were inseparable - and that if in the difficulties of urban life humanity is to be embraced, then the inconveniences must also be accepted. I was, however, not without a certain pang of nostalgia for my home town, and as a result Toward the Splendid City was driven by my love-hate relationship with New York. Life was always complicated in the city and easier, it seemed, everywhere else. At the time I was nearing the end of a year-long residency with the Seattle Symphony, and had serious second thoughts about returning to New York. Work on the piece began in Seattle in the spring of 1992 and was completed in mid-August of that year in Taos, New Mexico. While Toward the Splendid City was composed as a portrait of New York, the city in which I live, it was written almost entirely away from home.
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