10th Anniversary Celebrations
Peter Stumpf Plays Barber’s Cello Concerto
Saturday, March 14, 2020, 8pm and Sunday, March 15, 2020, 3pm
All Saints Parish
1773 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA 02445
Tickets are $15 general admission, $10 for students and seniors, and free for children 12 & under.
Tickets available for purchase in advance online, or at the door the night of the performance.
Samuel Barber, Cello Concerto
Featuring guest soloist Peter Stumpf
Samuel Osborne Barber II was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. Barber won the Pulitzer Prize twice: in 1958 for his first opera Vanessa, and in 1963 for his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
Barber’s Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra in A minor, Op. 22, was the second of his three concertos (the first being his Violin Concerto and the third his Piano Concerto). Barber was commissioned to write his cello concerto for Raya Garbousova, an expatriate Russian cellist, by Serge Koussevitzky on behalf of Garbusova and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Barber was still on active duty with the U. S. Army at the time he received the commission, and before beginning work asked Garbousova to play through her repertoire for him so that he could understand her particular performing style and the resources of the instrument. Garbousova premiered it with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Symphony Hall, Boston in 1946. The concerto won Barber the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1947.
Peter Stumpf is professor of cello at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Prior to his appointment, he was the principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 9 years following a 12 year tenure as Associate Principal Cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. At the age of 16, he began his professional career, winning a position in the cello section of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. He received a bachelor’s degree from the Curtis Institute of Music and an artist’s diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music.
A dedicated chamber music musician, he is a member of the Weiss-Kaplan-Stumpf Trio and has performed with the chamber music societies of Boston, Philadelphia and the Da Camera Society in Los Angeles, and is a participant at the Marlboro and Santa Fe chamber music festivals. As a member of the Johannes Quartet he collaborated with the Guarneri Quartet on a tour including commissions from composers William Bolcom and Esa Pekka Salonen.
Concerto appearances have included the Boston Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and at the Aspen Festival among others. Solo recitals have been at Jordan Hall in Boston, on the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society series, on the Chamber Music in Historic Sites series in Los Angeles and at the Philips and Corcoran Galleries in Washington D.C. His awards include first prize in the Washington International Competition.
He has served on the cello faculties at the New England Conservatory and the University of Southern California.
Antonín Dvořák, Symphony No. 9 in E Minor
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer that frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of his native Bohemia. Dvořák's own style has been described as "the fullest recreation of a national idiom with that of the symphonic tradition, absorbing folk influences and finding effective ways of using them."
Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World", popularly known as the New World Symphony, was composed in 1893 while he was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America. The symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic.
Dvořák was influenced not only by music he had heard, but by what he had seen, in America. He wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had, if he had not seen America. It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the American "wide open spaces" such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893.
At the premiere in Carnegie Hall, the end of every movement was met with thunderous clapping and Dvořák felt obliged to stand up and bow. This was one of the greatest public triumphs of Dvořák's career, and popularity spread throughout the world. The universal popularity of the symphony has persisted, possibly most notably illustrated by the fact that astronaut Neil Armstrong took a tape recording of the New World Symphony along during the Apollo 11 mission Moon landing in 1969.