CABARET
NEWS
BOSTON - NEW ENGLAND - TORONTO AREAS
AMERICAN CLASSICS PRESENTS MUSIC FROM AND INSPIRED BY THE JAZZ
AGE
American Classics (http://www.amclass.org/
) presents "Flappers and Philosophers" on Friday, February 9th at 7:30p
m at FOLLEN COMMUNITY CHURCH (755 Massachusetts Avenue, East Lexington,
MA - 781-861-7689) and on Sunday, February 11th at 3:00 pm at PICKMAN
CONCERT HALL of the Longy School of Music (27 Garden Street, Cambridge,
MA - 617-254-1125). The program is performed by Mary Ann Lanier, James
Busby, and Fredericka King. Music for voice and piano and for solo piano
includes pieces by Scott Joplin, George Gershwin, Charles Tomlinson
Griffes, and May Aufderheide, including contemporary works by two of
Boston's leading living composers: selections from John Harbison's Gatsby
Songs and the song cycle Wasting the Night with music by Scott Wheeler
and poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
With Flappers and Philosophers American Classics once
again showcases the work of current Boston-based composers. John Harbison's
Gatsby Songs are written in the style of 1920s popular songs for use
in his operatic version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Scott Wheeler's Wasting the Night sets poems of the great Jazz Age,
modernist, poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay in a thoroughly contemporary
style while evoking the mood and sounds of her time. Flappers and
Philosophers is the title of F. Scott Fitzgerald's first collection
of short stories published in 1920, a book encompassing popular and
serious material which is reflected in this concert's programming.
Two of the great innovators of early 20th Century American
music are also featured: George Gershwin and Charles Tomlinson Griffes
who each died unexpectedly in their thirties, Gershwin of a brain
tumor and Griffes from exhaustion. French Canadian mezzo-soprano and
champion of new music Eva Gauthier admired both composers and championed
their works. In 1923 Gauthier sang a set of Gershwin's songs on her
Aeolian Hall recital with Gershwin at the piano. His early songs were
programmed with, among other sets, the premiere of Schoenberg's "Wood
Dove's Song" from his Gurrelieder. Flappers and Philosophers highlights
early Gershwin songs and his Preludes for piano.
A very different composer, Griffes trained in Germany
for three years but lived the rest of his life in the United States
and wrote "serious" modern music in a completely original voice. He
struggled to gain recognition and had just had pieces played by the
Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras when he succumbed
to illness and died. One of his most famous pieces for piano The White
Peacock is featured on Flappers and Philosophers as are four of his
songs including an impressionistic masterpiece, Waikiki.
The program begins with two pieces in the style that
foreshadowed "Jazz" and changed the rhythms of American popular and
classical music, "Ragtime". Bethena: A Concert Waltz (1905) is by
Scott Joplin, who was known as the king of ragtime. Much like George
Gershwin, Joplin strove to take to his "popular" music to new artistic
heights as can be heard in his opera Treemonisha and "concert" works
such as Bethena.
A Totally Different Rag was written by the greatest
of the lady ragtime composers, May Aufderheide. One of a group of
Indianapolis ragtime composers and players, her career was shortened
not by illness as were the lives of Gershwin, Griffes, and Joplin
but by a difficult marriage to an alcoholic and by a troubled adopted
child.
Tickets are $20
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