Box of frogs!

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This week's selection might illustrate how music can ride on its composer's reputation. It was lost and rediscovered, became quite frequently performed in the early 20th century, and then fell out of the standard repertoire when its composer's identity was discovered.

The “Jena Symphony” is so nicknamed because it was discovered in 1909, in the form of orchestral parts without a title page, in the archives of a defunct concert society in Jena. The discoverer, musicologist and organist Fritz Stein, believed that it was an unpublished early symphony by Beethoven. Several years before he completed his 1st Symphony, Beethoven had mentioned in letters that he was working on a C major symphony modeled on Haydn's 97th, and it was uncertain whether that symphony was his eventual 1st Symphony or a different, never-completed symphony. The discovery of the Jena Symphony seemed to resolve that debate: Stein spotted a number of musical parallels between it and Haydn's 97th Symphony, and suggested that the handling of the wind parts pointed to Beethoven as the most likely composer.

For almost half a century the Jena Symphony was widely regarded as Beethoven's earliest symphony, which Beethoven had presumably not seen fit to publish or give a number. It was on the periphery of the standard orchestral repertoire, performed with some frequency as an early Beethoven work. Then, in 1957, a manuscript score was found at an Austrian monastery, bearing the signature of Friedrich Witt (1770-1836). Performances and recordings of the Jena Symphony vanished almost overnight. Prior to a second revival of interest in the 1990s, almost all the extant recordings of the piece were made before 1957.

Witt, it turns out, was a fairly well-known composer during his life. Born the same year as Beethoven, he had a more settled career, working first as a court composer for the Prince of Würzburg and later as music director at the city theater in the same city. He made at least three highly successful concert tours with his employer's permission in the 1790s. He was most famous during his lifetime for several operas and oratorios he composed between 1800 and 1810. But he composed less and less in middle age because of poor health, and completely stopped composing by 1824, by which point he had been completely overshadowed by Beethoven.

The Jena Symphony was most likely composed in 1793 for one of Witt's concert tours. This was when Haydn was in the midst of composing his London symphonies and three years before Beethoven's earliest mention of work on a symphony; this makes it a contemporary of Haydn rather than a later imitation. While very Haydnesque, the Jena Symphony indeed seems to foreshadow Beethoven's early symphonies, especially in its orchestration.

Movements:
I. Adagio - Allegro vivace
II. Adagio cantabile (8:45)
III. Menuetto e Trio: Maestoso (14:56)
IV. Finale: Allegro (18:22)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Alfred Hill (1869-1960) was one of the most important figures in the development of music in Australia and New Zealand, founding a number of the two countries' earliest performing arts institutions. He was also a prolific composer, with over five hundred works to his name including thirteen symphonies and eight operas, but his music is largely neglected and he is remembered mainly as an arts administrator.

Hill was born in Melbourne and spent most of his early life in New Zealand. He went to Europe and studied violin and conducting at the Leipzig Conservatory; while in Europe he appears to have been at least tangentially part of the musical circle surrounding Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Joseph Joachim. Unlike many other composers from outside Europe, he did not stay in Europe for long; he returned to New Zealand immediately after graduating to accept an appointment as director of the Wellington Orchestral Society. In 1897 he moved back across the Tasman Sea to the Sydney area, where he was active as a conductor and chamber musician. In the following two decades, he founded two conservatories that are still among the leading music schools in the region today (the NSW State Conservatorium of Music and the New Zealand School of Music) as well as the Australian Opera League, the Sydney Repertory Theatre Society (for which he wrote several one-act plays under a pseudonym), and the Music Association of New South Wales. When the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was formed in 1932, he was a founding member of its music advisory committee.

Hill began to compose while he was in Leipzig, completing a violin sonata there and beginning work on a symphony and a string quartet. His first symphony, completed in 1901, is believed to be the earliest symphony by an Australian-born composer. But for most of his life, though he was a professional musician, he was decidedly an amateur composer. Perhaps not surprisingly given his level of activity as an organizer and administrator, most of his music was composed in his retirement years: the second of his thirteen symphonies did not appear until he was 71 years old. A few of his other pieces were notable during his lifetime. His first string quartet, composed in 1896 and first published in 1913, was widely performed in the US for about a decade after being championed by the California-based Zoellner Quartet. His eleventh string quartet, composed in 1945, was the first Australian string quartet to be recorded commercially. The only piece of music he wrote that remains well-known today, though, is a popular song titled “Waiata Poi” that was recorded by a number of singers in both Australia and New Zealand.

Hill's Viola Concerto was composed in 1940, three years after he retired from his professional activities and devoted the rest of his life to composition. The viola suffers from a dearth of Classical and Romantic repertoire because it did not come into its own as a solo instrument until the 20th century – which perhaps makes this concerto even more deserving of attention. Though his most productive years were in the middle of the 20th century, Hill largely eschewed 20th century developments in art music, with the exception of a number of pieces derived from his research in Maori music. And Hill himself was a violist, having switched from violin some time between 1911 and 1913. His viola concerto, very much in the Leipzig tradition of Brahms, Grieg, and Bruch, is one of the very few viola concertos in the Romantic idiom, and shows the intimate familiarity with the instrument's quirks that the composer developed through a quarter-century of professional playing experience.

Movements:

I. Moderato
II. Andantino (10:55)
III. Deciso (15:40)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Prior to the 20th century, Spain was seen as a country on the periphery of European music. While many composers from other countries wrote pieces inspired by Spain, and several Italian expatriates in Spain won great fame, Spanish composers were largely ignored despite several being quite accomplished. Miguel Marqués (1843-1918) was one of these. He was one of Berlioz's favorite students, and was a highly prolific composer with more than thirty stage works and five symphonies to his name, yet for his entire career made a living as a violinist and pedagogue rather than as a composer.

Despite not being born into a musical family, Marqués showed unusual talent early in his life and quickly exhausted the musical opportunities in his hometown of Palma de Mallorca. After becoming one of the best violinists in the city by his early teens, he went to Paris at sixteen, and was admitted to the Conservatoire two years later, initially for violin performance but later changing his focus to composition. During his student years, he supported himself by playing violin in opera orchestras. After returning to Spain and completing his compulsory military service, he remained in Madrid, continuing to make his living as an opera violinist until he retired in 1894, returned to Mallorca, and spent much of the rest of his life writing on philosophy. During his time in Madrid, he became a respected violin teacher, published a leading Spanish-language violin method. He had some popularity as a musical theater composer for a time, but his music for the concert hall was largely ignored even at the height of his career. Of his five symphonies, only his first and third were performed in his lifetime. Only his third symphony was published in his lifetime; the other four had their first publications between 1993 and 2002.

Marqués's Fourth Symphony is probably his most frequently performed piece today. It was composed in 1878, as he was beginning to transition from composing mainly for the concert hall to composing almost entirely for the theater. He was well-established as a pedagogue in Madrid at the time; he was appointed Inspector of the National Music Schools the same year. Perhaps not surprisingly given his career in the orchestra pit, this symphony has a certain operatic character, with both grand theatrical gestures and aria-like melodies.

Movements:

I. Allegro con moto
II. Andante (10:29)
III. Allegretto scherzando (21:09)
IV. Allegro moderato (26:55)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Many concertgoers like to read program notes before hearing their local symphony orchestra; some of the more avid classical listeners like to listen to several recordings of a piece and think about the varying interpretations of it. But Jeanne Beyerman-Walraven (1878-1969) took her concert obsession to a totally different level. She and her equally obsessed husband, according to their daughter, would study scores and sometimes even read through the music on two pianos before attending concerts.

Perhaps that was the kind of obsession it took to become a highly competent composer, given her musical isolation early on in her life. Jeanne Walraven was born in Semarang in the Dutch East Indies (for the first few years of her career she may have been the most significant composer born in Asia) in a banking family that moved back and forth between the East Indies and the Netherlands through her childhood. Because of long stretches in Asia, her only music training before adulthood consisted of piano lessons from her mother. She studied composition in The Hague for a time in her twenties, but was a mostly self-taught composer. Her style changed dramatically over the decades that she was active. Her compositions from before 1920 were late Romantic in style. In 1911 she married Theo Beyerman, a physician who was an avid concertgoer; attending concerts on a regular basis shifted her own compositions first toward French impressionism and then toward the serialism of the Second Viennese School. From the 1930s onward, she was regarded as a “revolutionary” composer at the extreme forefront of modernism.

Though Beyerman-Walraven's compositions were played by world-renowned musicians during her lifetime, most were forgotten after only a handful of performances. She did little to promote her own music, as she was uncomfortable in the spotlight. Apart from attending concerts with her husband, her daughters described her as a “recluse.” Her Concert Overture, composed in 1910, is one of those pieces that were quickly forgotten. It was Beyerman-Walraven's first successful piece for orchestra, hailed as a masterpiece when first performed in Utrecht in 1910, but completely disappeared from concert halls after early 1911. It was not heard again until 1981, when it launched a revival of interest in the Romantic period in her career.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This week's feature is a piano concerto by a man Sergei Rachmaninoff reportedly called "the Canadian Mozart," André Mathieu (1929-1968), whose score was lost and reconstructed from a recording. He was born into a musical family: his father Rodolphe was probably the first Canadian to make a living as a full-time composer of art music, and his mother was an accomplished amateur violinist. Despite his father's initial refusal to teach him music (Rodolphe often struggled to make ends meet and hoped his son would not follow in his footsteps), the young André was extremely precocious. He was talking and singing before his first birthday, and at one point as a toddler, entirely without his parents' prompting, he climbed up onto the piano bench and picked out "O Canada" by ear. Once his father reluctantly decided that a child so enthusiastic about music should have competent training, André learned remarkably quickly, performing his first solo recital at six with pieces by Schumann alongside some of his own compositions. At seven, he played his own Concertino for Piano and Orchestra in a concert broadcast nationally by the CBC.

At some point, the parallels to Mozart began to extend to his family. It would have been difficult to live in Quebec at that time and not hear about Mathieu. One music critic suggested that André Mathieu might be even better than Mozart, noting that his music was more sophisticated than Mozart's juvenilia. And so, over several years, Rodolphe Mathieu transformed from a reluctant teacher to his son's most active promoter -- much like Leopold Mozart, he never turned down an opportunity to monetize his son's talent, and became prone to exaggerating André's precocity by claiming he was younger than he was or by claiming pieces were composed earlier than their actual dates. At the end of 1936, Rodolphe decided to uproot the entire family to advance his son's career and relocated to Paris, ostensibly to allow André to study there but not without a heavy dose of public promotion. The decline in Mathieu's fame began not long afterward. He continued to have some success even after the outbreak of war forced the family to return to Canada, and in 1941 he won first prize in the composition competition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. But as he entered his teens, he became harder and harder to sell as a "child prodigy," and impresarios began to tire of his father's increasingly obvious exaggerations. In addition, a relentless touring schedule between 1939 and 1943 gave him little time to compose or expand his piano repertoire, which made it difficult to get repeat engagements with orchestras.

For a time, the collapse of Mathieu's performing career as a "child prodigy" seemed to revive his career as a composer. In adolescence, he rebelled against his father's heavy-handed control of his career and spent much of his time around musical colleagues, and in 1946 he went back to Paris on his own for a year to study composition with Arthur Honegger. (A historical footnote: for about five weeks, he lived in a dormitory for foreign students with future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau.) He produced most of his best compositions between 1947 and 1958, in a neo-Romantic style that was to some extent a rejection of his father's avant-garde, atonal music. But the brief revival was a veneer over personal problems that had never gone away. He may have had bipolar disorder; he was rumored to have attempted suicide at least four times in his life, and at other times was prone to grandiose outbursts. He drank heavily beginning when he was as young as fifteen. (Alcohol abuse may have begun even earlier, as family friends reported that his father had sometimes given him a shot of cognac before concerts.) He grossly mismanaged his own career, continuing to rely on his child prodigy persona by putting his own juvenilia on recital programs. He also suffered financially from his father's mismanagement of his early career: because of a contract his father had signed when he first composed the piece in 1943, he had to pay royalties every time he played his own Piano Concerto No. 3 (also known as the Concerto de Québec), even when he played the 1947 revision. His breakdown in the 1950s was spectacularly public. His frequent drunken outbursts, frequently the subject of gossip columns in Montreal papers, caused his concert engagements to dwindle. From 1955 onward his only public performances were in "pianothons" in which he attempted to break endurance records; he was briefly in the Guinness Book of World Records for a continuous piano performance of more than 21 hours. He moved back in with his parents, spent the 1950s and 1960s in and out of rehabilitation for alcoholism, and died suddenly, most likely of cardiovascular disease, in 1968.

When Mathieu died, nothing he composed after 1948 had been published; though some had been performed, it existed only in hand-copied form. Some of his music returned to public awareness when his friend Vic Vogel was hired to compose music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Vogel made the ceremonial music somewhat of a tribute to Mathieu, basing most of it on melodies found in Mathieu's later unpublished works. Several concerts of Mathieu's orchestral and chamber music followed. But one piece was missing from the revival: Mathieu's fourth and last piano concerto, composed in 1948. This concerto was considered his greatest masterpiece, and he performed it numerous times between 1948 and 1955, but the score and parts were lost and for many years no recording was known to exist. But it turned out that Mathieu himself had made a recording of a 1950 concert performance and given the discs to a friend. In 2005, as pianist Alain Lefevre was on a concert tour aimed at reviving Mathieu's work, that friend met Lefevre backstage and gave him the recording. Lefevre and composer Gilles Bellemare reconstructed the score from the concert recording, and in 2013 Mathieu's fourth piano concerto was heard for the first time in almost 60 years.

I. Allegro


II. Andante


III. Allegro con fuoco

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

This week's piece might not be so forgotten lately, seeing as I heard it twice in the last week, once in concert on Sunday and once on the radio earlier today. But when I attended the concert (Mozart to Mendelssohn Orchestra in San Francisco), the conductor asked the audience for a show of hands from everyone who had heard of the Swedish composer Franz Berwald (1796-1868), and my hand was one of only three that went up.

Berwald was an amateur musician for most of his life, with a remarkably eclectic career, and only ever heard a few of his compositions performed. He struggled to make a living as a professional violinist in Stockholm and Berlin in his 20s, and when his father died and his family was no longer able to support him, Berwald was forced to seek other employment. He turned to orthopedics, and became highly accomplished in that field. His orthopedic and physiotherapy clinics in Berlin and Vienna brought him wealth and a certain degree of fame, and he invented several orthopedic devices that remained in widespread use into the 20th century. Eventually he returned to Sweden in 1849, when he was hired to manage a sawmill and a glass factory. He was not recognized as a composer until he was an old man. His opera Estrella de Soria -- which he had composed in Vienna two decades earlier -- had a successful run in Stockholm in 1862. He finally earned his first full-time musical job in 1867, when he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Stockholm Conservatory at the age of 71. Commissions for new compositions began to roll in around that time, but most were left unfinished as Berwald contracted pneumonia and succumbed in early 1868.

Berwald composed prolifically in the 1840s and 1850s, but only had a handful of pieces performed before the 1860s, with most of the performances involving members of his family: his brother was the soloist who premiered his violin concerto in 1821, and his cousin conducted the premiere of his first symphony in 1843 and two operettas in the mid-1840s. His music was not well received at the time, possibly because it was so far ahead of its time. Though the recently-passed Beethoven and Berwald's contemporary Mendelssohn were clear influences on his music, he tried radical experiments with the symphonic form in the 1840s that would not be widely accepted until near the turn of the 20th century, and his harmonies and atmospheric effects anticipated Late Romantic symphonists such as Bruckner and Sibelius. Even though Berwald did receive some recognition at the end of his life, most of his music would not be performed until the 20th century.

Berwald's 3rd Symphony, which he titled "Sinfonie Singulière," was completed in 1845 but not heard until 1905. The title is an apt one. The symphony opens with a sort of tone painting that would have been right at home at the turn of the 20th century when it was first performed, but which audiences would have found extremely unsettling when it was composed 60 years earlier. The entire first movement, though composed in traditional sonata allegro form, seems to create a feeling of constant transition. The second movement is the most unique of the three. It begins as an adagio movement reminiscent of Schumann, then a startling timpani strike breaks the calm and launches the orchestra into a playful scherzo. Eventually the adagio returns just as suddenly, but with a noticeably different and distinctly more modern texture. The finale, equal parts dramatic and lyrical, features some of the robust orchestration and unusual harmonic progressions that listeners often associate with much later Scandinavian composers; this movement in particular has been described as a cross between Mendelssohn and Sibelius.

I. Allegro fuocoso
II. Adagio - Allegro assai - Adagio (11:37)
III. Presto (20:33)

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter (1792-1871), who went by the name Cipriani throughout his life, worked in what has been regarded as a "dark age" in British music. British music from between 1800 and 1880 has long been seen as staid and backward-looking, trailing trends on the European continent by two or three decades. Potter was one of the few exceptions among British composers, not only keeping up with his contemporaries on the continent but anticipating the late Romanticism of Wagner and Bruckner with some of his harmonic language. Though he was Britain's first great Romantic symphonist, he had the misfortune of working in Beethoven's shadow during his most productive years.

During his life, Potter was known mainly as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna for a time, become friends with Beethoven during his years there, and after returning to England he played the English premieres of no fewer than three of Beethoven's piano concertos. He went on to champion the piano music of Schumann and Brahms in the British Isles. His performing career was a long one; his last appearance on a concert stage was in 1871, the last year of his life, aged 78. Potter's career as a composer, however, was strangely short. He composed almost his entire catalogue by his mid-40s. Though he continued to revise his past compositions until the end of his life, after 1837 the only new music to come from his pen was a handful of short piano pieces and one march for orchestra.

Potter is believed to have completed 12 symphonies, all between 1819 and 1834, of which 9 survive. The numbering is rather confusing. Some modern sources number the surviving symphonies 1-9 in order of composition, while others use the numbers 1-12 with the lost symphonies inserted in presumed order of composition. Potter himself numbered some of his symphonies but not others, and seems to have used at least two different numbering systems. The symphony presented in this post, for example, is listed as his 6th symphony today, but Potter himself referred to it as "No. 2" and "No. 10" at different times. ("No. 2" may be because it was his second G-minor symphony; "No. 10" may be in order of last revision.)

Potter's 6th (or 10th) Symphony was completed in 1832, five years after Beethoven's death, and was probably revised in the early 1850s. Not surprisingly for its original composition date, it is very much a successor to Beethoven, with the final movement even seeming to contain some echoes of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. Where Beethoven was known for surprise modulations into distant keys, Potter takes it a step farther, with ingenious rapid-fire sequences of key changes and long periods of tonal instability that critics of his time found unsettling. In this sense, Potter was part of the bridge from Beethoven to the late Romantic era. This symphony may even have influenced Wagner directly: Wagner is known to have admired Potter and conducted this symphony in 1855 during his brief period as a full-time orchestral conductor.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

Carl Helsted (1818-1904) had an inexplicably short career as a composer, completing his last work at 33 and living another half-century without composing a single piece of music. The son of a military bandsman, he began his musical career as a flautist in military bands himself. But his passion seems to have been for opera, as he left the army band after three years, traveled to Paris to study singing, and worked mainly as a singer and voice teacher after he returned to Denmark. Helsted's composing career started promisingly: when he was still a student, his Concert Overture in D minor was runner-up in a prestigious competition and created a sensation at its Copenhagen premiere. Although several more pieces were similarly successful, Helsted abruptly stopped composing without explanation in 1851. Perhaps he felt he was being overshadowed by Niels Gade, one year his senior, who had recently returned to Denmark from a stint as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. But it also seems likely that Helsted had simply become too busy to compose between his increasing number of students and his own performing engagements. He was one of the most sought-after singing teachers of his time, and as a singer he remained an active performer well into his eighties.

The years after Helsted returned from Paris were his most prolific. His First Symphony is a product of this period, composed in 1842. Like his contemporary Schumann, Helsted forms somewhat of a link between the nascent Romanticism of Beethoven and Schubert and the mature Romanticism of Brahms -- but unlike Schumann, who was responsible for unearthing Schubert's Ninth and later knew Brahms personally, Helsted worked in what was then a musical backwater. This symphony's resemblance to Schumann's later orchestral music is especially striking because Schumann only began to compose for orchestra in 1841.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

The first three African-American composers to have symphonies performed by major orchestras emerged in surprisingly rapid succession. Just two years after William Grant Still's "Afro-American" Symphony No. 1 made its debut on the concert stage in 1930, Florence Price followed with her own 1st Symphony. The third composer was William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), whose Negro Folk Symphony was played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski in 1934. Dawson eventually gained a reputation as a choral composer and conductor, which largely overshadowed his own instrumental music.

Dawson was born in 1899, the first of seven children in a poor family in rural Alabama. His father, a former slave, was an illiterate day laborer. At the age of 13, he ran away from home to study music as a pre-college student at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), paying his tuition in part by working as the school's music librarian and in part through farm work. He learned to play most of the instruments in the orchestra while in high school, and his job in the music library allowed him plenty of time to study scores. As a result, he began his conducting career early. While an undergraduate at Washburn College in Kansas, he supported himself by directing high school bands. While completing a master's degree in composition at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, he won several prestigious competitions as a band director. In 1930, he returned to the Tuskegee Institute as director of its School of Music, a position he held for 25 years. During that time, he personally directed the Tuskegee Institute Choir, making it one of the nation's best collegiate choral ensembles. Most of his compositions were written for the Tuskegee Institute Choir and many are still regularly performed today. After Dawson retired from the Tuskegee Institute in 1956, he continued to be a sought-after conductor for choral festivals and workshops around the world.

The Negro Folk Symphony was one of his few important instrumental works. Following the Romantic nationalist music that had come into vogue first in Europe and increasingly in the Americas, Dawson composed with the late Romantic harmonic and orchestral palette, while weaving blues scales and melodies from African-American folk songs and spirituals throughout the symphony. It received great acclaim and was performed more than thirty times across the United States before the end of 1934; one newspaper review called it "the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has been so far achieved." But the Negro Folk Symphony's main effect on Dawson's career seems to have been to draw attention to his choral music. Though Dawson became famous, the symphony became an occasionally-performed footnote in his biography. In 1952, after returning from a tour of West Africa, Dawson revised the symphony to include more African rhythms, writing that he wanted to re-introduce "the missing elements that were lost when Africans came into bondage outside their homeland." The revision resulted in a handful of performances and recordings, but nothing resembling the sensation that greeted its premiere; it was only after 2010 that the symphony began to see a real revival.

It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Viennese society went crazy for all things Turkish. Music was no exception to the trend: all the leading composers of the day, including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, produced what they referred to as "Turkish music." This was, of course, ersatz Turkish music filtered through a Western classical lens. The European idea of Turkish music was a limited one. Austrian soldiers had heard Janissary military bands during the Ottoman invasions of Europe in the 17th century, and when the Treaty of Karlowicz ended the wars between the Austrian and Ottoman empires, the Ottoman diplomatic delegation brought a Janissary band to perform before civilian audiences in Vienna. From then on, it became fashionable for European monarchs to import Janissary bands. For European audiences, "Turkish music" had two connotations: Eastern and military. Therefore, the "Turkish music" of Viennese composers invariably meant little more than the use of heavy percussion instruments (or in the case of Mozart's piano music, percussive effects) to imitate the sound of Turkish military bands.

The rest of Turkey's musical heritage took far longer to penetrate into Western art music. Western music began to take root in Turkey around the same time that Vienna became fascinated with Turkish music. Italian opera was popular in Istanbul by 1800, and by the middle of the 19th century, European symphonic music was regularly performed in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. But throughout the 19th century Western and Turkish music remained stubbornly separate. The separation continued after the fall of the Ottoman Empire: Atatürk and his revolutionaries, in their effort to modernize Turkish society, required Turkish composers to follow the principles of Western tonal music. In Atatürk's view, the future of Turkish music was in combining Turkish folk melodies with Western music theory. He saw Ottoman music -- the music of the court and of urban popular entertainment -- as backward and unsuitable for the Turkish Republic's entry into Western civilization, and banned it from radio broadcasts for a time. Beginning in 1926, the Atatürk government began to send talented young composers to Western Europe for further education. The crowning achievement of this policy was the emergence of a group of composers known as the "Turkish Five," among whom was Hasan Ferid Alnar (1906-1978).

That was the prevailing narrative of 20th century Turkish art music, anyway. Hasan Ferid Alnar, however, occupied an especially precarious position in the Turkish musical establishment because, alone among the "Turkish Five," he had been a composer and performer of Ottoman classical music prior to the revolution. While the others were trained exclusively in Western music and Western instruments, Alnar was a virtuoso on the kanun, a microtonal zither used in Ottoman court music. Ironically, having learned Western music theory to preserve his livelihood, Alnar went to Vienna and found encouragement to look to his roots in Ottoman music and challenge the suppression of his first musical idiom. Though he composed in Western forms like his colleagues, he unapologetically drew from Ottoman classical music, even composing a concerto for the kanun that premiered in Vienna in the 1950s. Because of his continued connection to a banned genre of music, Alnar was the least-performed of the Turkish Five in Turkey, but perhaps the second most successful abroad.

Alnar's Cello Concerto, composed in 1942, was his first major work to integrate Ottoman ideas into Western music. With it, Alnar broke a seven-year silence as a composer. After receiving great critical acclaim for his Prelude and Two Dances for orchestra when it premiered in Vienna, Alnar had moved back to Turkey in 1935, accepting a teaching position at the newly founded Ankara State Conservatory and a conducting position at the Ankara State Opera. For several years, he was mainly known for several productions of Western operas in Turkish translation. During the years after Atatürk's death, attitudes toward Ottoman classical music had begun to soften. Commissioned to compose a concerto for the local symphony orchestra's principal cellist David Zirkin, Alnar saw the opportunity to act on his Viennese teachers' advice. He used several Ottoman scales in the concerto, and rather than the kinds of virtuosic figures and techniques typically found in cello repertoire, he deliberately tried to evoke the falsetto singing of the Ottoman vocal tradition. The concerto was highly successful with the public -- but with the exception of a handful of individuals who attributed the impact on the audience to the Ottoman stylistic features, most Turkish critics savaged the piece and emphasized the departures from Western tonality as proof of Alnar's inferiority. The concerto would be his only major work to premiere in Turkey. From 1945 onward, virtually all of his compositions premiered in Germany and Austria, and in 1961 he moved back to Vienna himself. His music remained rarely performed in Turkey until the turn of the 21st century.

Movements:
I. Moderato
II. Largo ma non troppo (13:55)
III. Allegro con brio (23:52)