Symphonic Dances From West Side Story Program Notes Photo

• West Side Story Remake

Symphonic Dances from West Side StoryLEONARD BERNSTEINBORN: August 25, 1918. Lawrence, MassachusettsDIED: October 14, 1990. New York CityThe San Francisco Symphony is during the 2017-18 season.COMPOSED: The musical West Side Story was composed principally from autumn 1955 through summer 1957, and Bernstein assembled portions of the score into the Symphonic Dances in early 1961, overseeing the orchestration for this version as it was carried out by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal. The Symphonic Dances are dedicated “To Sid Ramin, in friendship”WORLD PREMIERE: The musical was premiered on August 19, 1957, at the National Theatre in Washington, DC; the Symphonic Dances were first performed on February 13, 1961, with Lukas Foss conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, in a pension fund gala concert titled “A Valentine for Leonard Bernstein”SFS PERFORMANCES: FIRST—May 1971. Seiji Ozawa conducted.

MOST RECENT—September 2008.

CONTACT: ProgramNotes@aol.com'Kenneth LaFave writes program notes that appeal to people with all levels of musical knowledge. He does an exemplary job of writing in a way that is both approachable and readable.' Britting, Assoc. Director of Communications, The Philadelphia OrchestraIf you need program notes for the next concert of your symphony orchestra, choir, chamber group or voice studio, you've come to the right place. Annotator Kenneth LaFave has written for The New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Juilliard School, The Phoenix Symphony, the festivals at Aspen and Tanglewood, and many other organizations.You can purchase already-written notes, or commission new ones. To peruse notes now available, click the drop-down menu above and choose a category.

Choose from symphonic, chamber, choral, art song, solo keyboard, opera, contemporary and miscellaneous. (Miscellaneous includes light music and more.) Or put a composer's name in the search window in the header, above right.

When you find the title you're looking for, you'll be able to read the first third-to-half of the note as a blog post. If you like what you read, just follow the payment instructions at the end of the excerpt.To commission a new note, contact Kenneth LaFave directly at ProgramNotes@aol.com. The cost for a set of notes to a full-length concert averages $350. Sergei Rachmaninoff began and ended his career as a symphonic composer with humiliating defeats. In 1896, age 24, his reputation as a young lion and the probable successor to Tchaikovsky was based largely on his piano scores, especially the Piano Concerto No.

1 and the astonishingly popular C-sharp minor prelude. That year, he composed his Symphony No.

1, using themes derived largely from the gestures of Russian chant.The symphony’s premiere in 1897 was a failure of monumental proportions. One critic likened the work to the ten plagues of Egypt. A deficient performance may have been to blame, particularly the conducting of Alexander Glazunov, a known alcoholic. Rachmaninoff, accustomed to nothing but praise for his music, was stunned, and sank into a depression that lasted for three years. Only intensive therapy with psychologist Nikolai Dahl brought him out of it, and when it did, he composed what is arguably his single best-loved work, the Piano Concerto No.

2, dedicating the score to Dahl.It was many years before Rachmaninoff ventured once more to write a symphony; his third and last was premiered in 1936. Most of his reputation continued to turn on works for piano solo and piano with orchestra. But in 1940, now living in the United States after having weathered the storm of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Rachmaninoff composed one last, large-scale symphonic piece, the Symphonic Dances.

While not a formal, numbered symphony, it summarizes the composer’s approach to symphonic writing and makes a grand statement in the tradition of the symphony. It is today his most-often performed work without piano.Yet even this beautifully crafted, intensely orchestrated, personal utterance filled with vivacious rhythms and haunting melodies ran afoul of critics. TO PURCHASE THIS NOTE IN ITS ENTIRETY, send an email to: ProgramNotes @aol.com with “symphonicdances” in the subject line. You will receive the note (780 words total) as an email document and be invoiced for $50. Payment is requested within 10 business days by PayPal or major credit card. The price for reprinting a note is indicated at the end of each post.

West Side Story Remake

For notes under 500 words, the price is $25; for 500-800 words, it's $50; for 800 to 1,200 words, $75; and for notes longer than 1,200 words, $100. You always pay less than 10 cents per word to reprint notes originally written for such major organizations as The Philadelphia Orchestra and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.Please observe: WHEN QUOTING FROM THESE NOTES, YOU MUST CREDIT THE AUTHOR, KENNETH LAFAVE, AND CITE THIS WEBSITE AS YOUR SOURCE. Thank you. Great Composers Tees and Mugs.