“You can’t identify him, that’s the problem,” said conductor Joan Falletta in a recent interview.
Falletta, the longtime music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, was talking about Lucas Foss, who led that ensemble in the 1960s and is turning 100 this year.she and the orchestra are celebrating the occasion on monday concert dedicated to his work at Carnegie Hall.
The learned Foss was an accomplished and versatile conductor, but he considered himself primarily a composer. His music grazed freely between Copeland-esque Americana, prickly cereal, wild chance-based, angular neo-classical, vaulted neo-baroque, and churning minimalist styles. But that eclecticism works against his enduring popularity, Falletta believes.
“He was so proud of what he had accomplished,” she said. “He believed that the more techniques he used, the richer his vocabulary as a composer.”
Born Lucas Fuchs in Berlin in 1922 into a Jewish family, he was gifted with musical talent from an early age. With the rise of the Nazis, the Fuchs fled to Paris, then Pennsylvania, where he changed his name to Foss, and Lucas studied piano, composition, and conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
“The Prairie,” a long poem by Carl Sandberg and an oratorio-style choral piece, made his name as a composer when it premiered in 1944. It was a shameless love letter to his adopted country and the beginning of a prosperous and productive writing career. — Foss, who died in 2009 at the age of 86, has racked up podiums in Buffalo, Milwaukee and elsewhere, helping to ensure that contemporary music remains as worthy a place as its older standards.
Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project precious recordings In recent years, Foss’s work—various yet full of distinctive voice and curiosity—has been rarely played.
“There’s a kind of sadness about him that he doesn’t have many champions right now,” Falletta said, adding that he hopes the Carnegie concerts will help with that in some small way. If you give them the opportunity to explore other things, that’s great.”
In an interview, she talked about some major Foss productions she’ll be leading on Monday.
“Three American Peace” (1944)
“It was originally a violin and piano duo,” Falletta said of the work Foss orchestrated in 1986, nearing the end of his composing career.
“When he first wrote it, it was part of his love for his new country. It’s very interesting. There’s a little bit of this open-air quality, Ives or Copeland. But Copeland’s It wasn’t really like his Language, because he was an immigrant. How strange it is immigrants who gave us the sound of our country. Foss had no direct relationship with the Frontier. But there is a mixture of folk sounds such as blues and ragtime. I think his style of Americana and his affection is so wonderful. ”
Symphony No. 1 (1944)
“I think he’s not just reflecting his appreciation for the United States here,” Falletta said. The symphonic tradition is there, but the second movement is blues — classical symphony! There is structural tightness, but it is always unpredictable. I don’t think he was the type to break convention, but he loved bending it. ”
In the late 1940s, Foss wrote a lively opera based on Mark Twain’s novel The Famous Leaping Frog of Calaveras County. The first opera commissioned by NBC for television, Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” (1951), was the first opera NBC commissioned for television because it showed such a flair for dramatic scripting that it would appeal to children.
Inspired by a fairy tale about a rebellious young demon, Foss’ delightful outcome was broadcast on November 6, 1955. Falletta said it was “the last part of an era when classical music was for everyone”.
“Psalms” (1956)
“When you hear this, remember that the Chichester Psalter by Leonard Bernstein, Lucas’ best friend from Curtis, has not yet been written.”
In the 1940s, Foss had already performed two cantatas for vocal and orchestra, “Songs of Anguish” and “Songs of Songs,” which were also found in biblical texts. “The most dramatic part is the middle part,” she said. “It’s very rhythmic, it’s very jazzy, it’s very Bernstein, it’s very vivid. The movements on the outside are short and slow.”
Fosu’s most famous work, this work for soprano and orchestra, dates back to a time when he began experimenting with alternatives to purely notated music. In 1957, he founded and taught the Improvisation Chamber He Ensemble at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra premiered “Time Cycles,” in which four vocal movements (including jumpy vocal lines and text by Oden, Hausmann, Kafka, and Nietzsche about time and its ambiguity) are improvised. It is played alternately with instrumental interludes.
“Echoy” (1963)
In his work for small groups, Foss was able to delve deeper into avant-garde experimentation than he could in writing for large ensembles. “Echoi” for clarinet, cello, percussion and piano utilizes a kind of chance strategy that John Cage made increasingly famous throughout the 1950s. Foss’s is his four-section boisterous work, partly structured and partly open to performer-determined deviations.
String Quartet No. 3 (1975)
“He went his own way,” Falletta said of Foss. Granted, he wasn’t a trend follower, but he kept his ears open for new styles and certainly heard the groundbreaking work that Philip Glass and his young Steve had been producing since the late 1960s. rice field. The quartet of shifting textures throughout is permeated with the intense, propulsive regularity of classical minimalism, but with the kind of spiky, gritty that Reich and Glass were less concerned with. Married to dissonance. (“Six Music” Years later, I am exploring Glassian iterations, sometimes in a calmer, more meditative mode.)
“Renaissance Concerto” (1985)
“When I was assisting Lucas with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, my first assignment was to go on tour with the orchestra to Europe,” Falletta said. “And he always missed deadlines, so he was working on this piece. I’ve brought you an anthology of Greenberg’s lute tunes.”
The flute was especially close to him. The piano was the instrument he played most often. “The third movement is taken from Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’, in which Orpheus laments the loss of Eurydice: ‘Goodbye sun, goodbye sky, goodbye earth’. And he tries to bring her back to life, and And Lucas has a little string and flute group backstage, following like a few beats, a few steps behind the orchestra, and then it’s gone. increase.”