of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Introduced by ICAMus American-music scholar Aloma Bardi, with tenor Salvatore Champagne and pianist Howard Lubin of Oberlin College, this concert focuses on composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) and his settings of Walt Whitman and other American poets.
Loved by Castelnuovo-Tedesco himself, who refers to it in his recently published autobiography A Life of Music (Una vita di musica) as among his best works, the ten-song cycle Leaves of Grass (1936) is still unpublished, and has been performed on extremely rare occasions.
The Leaves of Grass cycle is here presented together with other Whitman songs by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and his settings on other American poets, contemporary to the composer, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) and Robert Nathan (1894-1985).
The selection of musical pieces draws on the important Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Collection at the Library of Congress Music Division, and it provides an unusual outlook on unpublished musical manuscripts that are among the most significant in this composer’s vast archive.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, an internationally renowned concert pianist and composer in Europe, emigrated from Florence to the United States in 1939, following the enforcement of Racial Laws in fascist Italy. His selection of Whitman poetry in the 1930s was a daring choice; the musical style of these text-oriented pieces is warmly original and highly eloquent, in its avoiding the rhetoric and stereotypes of the time.
The other settings on American poets express the composer’s interest and affection for his new country, which was to become his home for the rest of his life. In the United States, Castelnuovo-Tedesco would work intensely as a composer for film music, and give a remarkable contribution to the development of this musical genre, while continuing to produce classical music.
IN COLLABORATION WITH
DOORS OPEN AT 6:30 AND CLOSE AT 7:00PM PROMPTLY
RSVP
Please click on “Make a Reservation” by October 22, 2013 at 2 PM
The Reservation System will allow you to register until we reach
capacity or by the event’s date and time above (whichever comes
first.)
PLEASE NOTE: RESERVATION IS REQUIRED FOR OUR EVENTS FOR SECURITY REASONS. A RESERVATION IS NOT A GUARANTEE OF A SEAT. OUR VENUE HAS LIMITED SEATING AND WE WILL ACCOMODATE GUESTS ON A FIRST-COME FIRST-SERVED BASIS. GUESTS WITHOUT SEATS ARE WELCOME TO STAND IF THEY LIKE.
PHOTO ID REQUIRED
LOCATION
Embassy of Italy
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
MORE INFO
THE PROGRAM
Introduction
Two poems of Walt Whitman – 1819-1892
Louisiana op. 89a; composed: 1936; published: Galaxy Music Corp., 1940
Ocean op. 89c; composed: 1936; unpublished manuscript, The Library of Congress Music Division
Two poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay – 1892-1959
Recuerdo op. 105; composed: 1941; published: Fischer, 1941
Tavern; composed: 1940; unpublished manuscript, The Library of Congress Music Division
Two poems of Arthur Guiterman – 1871-1943
The Legend of Jonas Bronck; composed: 1941; published: Galaxy Music Corp., 1941; at end of manuscript score, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s handwritten copy of Guiterman’s poem.
New York; composed: 1940; published: Delkas Music, 1944
Short lecture
Leaves of Grass
10-Song Cycle op. 89b; composed: 1936; unpublished manuscript, The Library of Congress Music Division
What think You I take my Pen in Hand?
I Dream’d in a Dream
Sometimes with One I Love
We Two Boys Together Clinging
Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?
When I Peruse the Conquer’d Fame
A Glimpse
This Moment Yearning and Thoughtful
Trickle Drops
The Base of All Metaphysics
Download The American Songs texts: HERE
Salvatore Champagne
Salvatore Champagne is Associate Professor of Singing and Director of the Vocal Arts Division at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. A graduate of Oberlin and the Juilliard School, his singing career began in 1988 when he was chosen to be the tenor soloist in a European tour of Leonard Bernstein’s Songfest conducted by the composer. Immediately thereafter he joined the ensemble of the Badisches Staatstheater in Germany, appearing in a wide range of leading tenor roles. For the next ten years he was engaged as guest artist in many of Europe’s finest opera houses and concert halls. Mr. Champagne is a much sought after voice instructor and appears frequently throughout the country giving master classes and seminars. His students have won many prestigious competitions and appear regularly with premiere performing organizations throughout the United States and abroad.
Howard Lubin
Howard Lubin holds degrees in German Literature and piano performance from Oberlin College. At the completion of his graduate studies at the Juilliard School he was awarded the Roeder Prize for outstanding pianistic achievement and was subsequently hired as a faculty member of Juilliard’s American Opera Center. His work in European opera houses led to engagements as head music coach with the Cologne Opera, where he assisted James Conlon, Philippe Auguin, and Rico Saccani, and as guest artist with the Bregenz and Spoleto Festivals. Mr. Lubin has worked with members of the Metropolitan Opera’s Young Artist Program and collaborated with many premiere artists in concert and master classes. The master classes he accompanied for Sherrill Milnes were released as a commercial videocassette. He is now musical coordinator in the opera program at the Oberlin College Conservatory.
Aloma Bardi
Aloma Bardi is an Italian-born U.S. music historian, musicologist, and translator. She is an American-music specialist, and also a scholar of opera theaters. As an author and translator, she has worked with Italian publishers, theaters, periodicals, cultural institutions and the Italian and Swiss radio, and is active on the international lecture and conference circuit.
Aloma Bardi is the founding director of ICAMus, The International Center for American Music www.icamus.org, a Non-Profit Organization incorporated in 2002, affiliated with the University of Florence, Department of Music and Performing Arts, and an Affiliate Member of SAM, Society for American Music. ICAMus is led by an international Board of Directors and an Advisory Board of specialists in the field. The Center is committed to the study, performance and teaching of American music. In several European countries and in the United States, ICAMus has had an experience of numerous productions over the years. Among the concerts, events devoted to Charles E. Ives, and to American Art Songs.
She is the author and editor of the new ICAMus Web site www.icamus.org, inaugurated in 2012.
From 2006 to 2011, she taught History of Music in the United States of America at the University of Florence, the first and only academic course ever taught of this subject at a European university. She works as a consultant for M.A. Theses and Doctoral dissertations in American music on an international level.
She has been an associate of the Florence Opera Theater for the last thirty years. She is the author of Catalogo delle manifestazioni 1928-1997, 2 vols. of Chronology and Index and a cd-rom, Aloma Bardi, Mauro Conti, eds., on a research project by Aloma Bardi (1998). The 2nd edition of the Catalogue (A. Bardi, L. Berni, M. Conti, eds.) was published in 2008. It includes a data-base covering all the Theater productions (1928-2007) and a 1st volume of updates (1997-2007). The cd-rom archive consists of 7,495 records, and 97,029 names and titles.
As a translator, Aloma Bardi has worked on books, articles, opera and musical comedy librettos, and plays. She is an associate of Prescott Studio, a society created in 1996 to provide surtitles for the theater and the performing arts. In recent years she has worked on titling for the new technologies.
She has a wide experience of scholarly translations. As groundwork for her Italian translation of the literary and philosophical writings of Charles E. Ives, (published in 1997) she studied Charles Ives’s manuscripts at the Ives Archives of the Yale Music Library.
Aloma Bardi has just completed a book on musical adaptations of S. An-Ski’s play Der Dibuk (1914), Esotismi musicali del Dibbuk. Ispirazioni da un soggetto del folclore ebraico [Musical Exoticisms of the Dybbuk. Inspirations from a theme of Jewish folklore], published by The University of Naples, Center for Jewish Studies, forthcoming October 2013.
Aloma Bardi is a constituent member of the National Artistic Council of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence in 1895, into a prominent Jewish family. In his city he began studying at the Luigi Cherubini Conservatory in 1909, graduating in piano in 1914; in 1918 he graduated in composition from the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s earliest works date from his childhood, and his earliest published piece dates from 1910. A highly educated musician, he launched his European career in Italy as a pianist and composer. His early works were regularly published and performed by prestigious soloists, conductors, orchestras and institutions, such as Jascha Heifetz, Arturo Toscanini, Vittorio Gui, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino. In the 1920s and 1930s he frequently appeared as a pianist in performance of his own music and of pieces by other composers, as a soloist, with orchestras, in chamber music formations with other instrumentalists and with singers, playing a wide-ranging international repertoire. The escalation of fascism in Italy and the alliance with Nazi Germany soon created dangerous life conditions for the composer and his family, his life Clara and their two sons Pietro and Lorenzo. In 1938, as a consequence of the enforcement of the racial laws, his music was banned. With the help of Heifetz and Toscanini, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his family left Italy for the United States in the summer of 1939. After spending a year in Larchmont, NY, they settled in Beverly Hills, CA, where Castelnuovo-Tedesco started a new career, employed as composer of film scores at the Music Department of the MGM Studios in Hollywood. In the US, for many years he worked on soundtracks for about 200 motion pictures, and gave a remarkable contribution to the development of film music, while continuing to produce a vast output of classical music. He died in Beverly Hills in 1968. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed for numerous genres, and vocal and instrumental ensembles: operas, oratorios, concertos for solo instrument and orchestra, chamber music, art songs. Among his operas: The Merchant of Venice (from Shakespeare, 1956), Saul (after Vittorio Alfieri, 1958-1960). He wrote Oratorios inspired by Biblical texts (e.g., The Book of Ruth, 1949), Orchestral Ouvertures to Shakespeare plays (e.g., i, 1940). Castelnuovo-Tedesco was particularly sensitive to languages and literature, to the intonation and expression of poetry. He wrote many text-oriented art songs, a genre particularly dear to him; he set to music the greatest Italian poets (Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi) as well as his contemporaries (such as Palazzeschi) and popular, vernacular texts. Among his settings of English literature, the Shakespeare Songs (1921-1925) and Shakespeare Sonnets (1944-1947). He worked closely with performers, such as guitarist Andrés Segovia, who requested pieces that are among this composer’s best known and most frequently performed, and have enlarged the guitar repertoire. A cultivated writer, he also published articles on his experience and challenges as a composer. Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s autobiography, Una vita di musica (A Life with Music) written in the 1950s, was recently published in Italy (Cadmo, 2005). It is an affectionate, detailed narrative of a composer’s life on the background of cultural and social events in the first half of the 20th century on both sides of the Ocean, and expresses the author’s love for both his native and adoptive countries, whose combination was to become the synthesis of his own life and art. The Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Papers at the Library of Congress Music Division in Washington, DC are a large collection of his published and unpublished music, correspondence, photographs, and documents; the Castelnuovo-Tedesco Papers are open to research.
About ICAMus
ICAMUS – The International Center for American Music is a Non-Profit Organization committed to the study, performance and teaching of American music and America’s musical life.
The Center was founded in Florence by American-music scholar Aloma Bardi in 2003, after the incorporation of the Organization in the United States in 2002. ICAMus is led by an international Board of Directors and an Advisory Board of specialists in the field; among the Advisors, H. Wiley Hitchcock (1923-2007), Barbara Heyman, Richard Crawford, Gianfranco Vinay, and Marcello Piras.
The International Center for American Music maintains an inclusive orientation towards musical life in the United States, from its beginning to contemporary time. Significant attention is devoted to Early American Music. The Center provides specialist advisory service on American music to scholars and performers, as well as orientation for students of all levels.
ICAMus works in close cooperation with Universities, Schools of Music, theaters and performing artists on an international level. The Center has an experience of numerous productions over the years. Among the concerts, events devoted to Charles E. Ives, to American music and literature, and to American Art Songs. Other activities include conferences, seminars, radio programs, online publications. Landmarks in scholarly meetings have been a conference on Gershwin and Porgy and Bess (2005), and the seminar American Music and Its Histories (2006). Series of radio programs have been produced on Ives, American Art Song, and the American sources of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West. In the years 2006-2011 a graduate course of History of music in the United States of America was taught by Aloma Bardi at the University of Florence, Italy, the first and only ever taught of this subject at a European university.
The Organization has collaborated with numerous institutions, such as Syracuse University and New York University in Florence, École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8. The Center has offered events in numerous venues, such as the historic Teatro della Pergola in Florence, Teatro Metastasio in Prato, Salle des Actes, École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, as well as in churches and concert halls.
Official Website: www.icamus.org
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-35823371-1’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
This page is best viewed in the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari