Welcome to Music for Life, enhancing the Armstrong concert experience. I'm your host, Ryan Malone. In today's episode, we conclude a two-part series where we play a concert presented in Armstrong Auditorium on April 8th, 2021, given by Grammy-winning cellist Sarah Sant'Ambrosio. The theme of Sarah's program was a journey through North and South America, and today we will finish the first half of the program, two works by Astor Piazzolla, and play the entirety of the second half, featuring works by Samuel Barber and Manuel DeFaia. So stick around as we finish reliving this wonderful concert that took place at Armstrong today on Music for Life.
In our previous episode, we began hearing a concert presented here at Armstrong Auditorium on April 8th. It was one of only a handful of concerts that we've had this season, but we've been able to replay all the ones that we've had on the series so far, which is exciting. Grammy-winning cellist Sarah Sant'Ambrosio joined me at the piano for a program titled Journey Through North and South America. It started with George Gershwin's Porgy and Best Fantasy that Sarah arranged for cello and piano. After that, we performed my rondo for cello and orchestra, with me playing the orchestra part on the piano, of course.
Then came the Orientale from the Spanish Dance No. 2 by Enrique Granados. And then the Rechiebros by Gaspar Casado. And that was where we finished our previous episode. Now, the first half of the concert finished with two works by the tango nuevo composer Astro Piazzolla, which we'll start today's episode with. And then, of course, we'll go into the second half today to hear the exciting cello sonata by Samuel Barber and the thrilling Dance of Fire by Manuel de Faya.
So let's get right into it. I did a whole Music for Life episode about the Argentine composer Astro Piazzolla and the tango nuevo style that he created, with a lot of obstacles, actually, if you go back and listen to that episode. You can look that up in the program archives at kpcg.fm, as well as on our iTunes and SoundCloud pages. And that is, of course, where you could also pick up last week's program, in case you missed that, the first part of this concert. As I mentioned, Sarah did two famous pieces by Piazzolla, the first being Oblivion. And after that, she played his most famous work, Libertango.
She set up both of these pieces quite well in her concert at Armstrong when she spoke to the audience, so we'll hear these one right after another along with her comments preceding each. So the next piece that we're going to play for you is by the great tango master, Astor Piazzola. It's, I think, one of the most beautiful melodies I've ever heard in my life. It originally was written, actually interestingly, for oboe and orchestra for the score for a film called Henry V, an Italian film. But the second I heard it, I just fell in love with it. And so first, my trio, we did a trio version, but it was haunting my dreams. I just, every night, it would be in my dreams over and over. And so then I arranged it for cello and piano.
And it still was haunting me. And I was like, how am I going to get this out of my head? I've got to get a good night seat at some point. And so then I arranged it for cello and orchestra. And that's actually on my latest recording with the Royal Philharmonic. I recorded both the next two pieces that I arranged also for cello and orchestra with Elgar Concerto and a New American Concerto. And I just think, you know, it is beautiful on the oboe. I mean, it would be beautiful on trombone quartet for not to say. It's just so beautiful. But I am a little biased. I think it's the most beautiful on the cello.
This is Oblivion by Astor Piazzolla. And it's actually not a tango, it's a milonga, which is the popular song form of the pampas of the plains. So instead of the urban hustle and bustle of the tango, you hear these wide open spaces. So the last piece I'm going to play for you before intermission is probably Oscar Piazzolla's most popular and famous piece. It's really interesting about the human spirit. So he was a very strong critic of the fascist government in Argentina and he was commanded by Perón to write tango because before Piazzolla the tango was just this sort of bar music.
that nobody was never in a concert hall. And it sort of grew up in an interesting combination of the immigrant groups that were in Buenos Aires. So it was somewhat German marching band, which is very surprising, right? But that's where that bandoneon comes from, is from the German marching band. And then Spanish, of course, and then African rhythms. And that's how the tango, that mixed.
And that was just sort of the thing that they would play in bars, like we'd have a group just playing it. And so Piazzolla is the one who brought it from the brothels and bars into the concert hall. And they called it Tango Nuevo. And it ignited a huge tango craze across the world. And so Perón commanded Piazzolla to write a tango in celebration of the great Peronista government. And so Piazzolla was really conflicted because he didn't...
want to write anything that would celebrate the fascist government because he was absolutely everything about it. So he wrote this piece, Liber Tango, Freedom Tango, and he put everything that he loved about the human spirit and about the joy of freedom and freedom of expression and the antithesis of what fascism stood for, and he put it into this piece. And this piece became so popular, very soon afterwards he had to flee Argentina, but it became so popular that actually there are more than 500 recordings of this piece the last time I looked. I was researching it. From everywhere from, you know, like Bandoneon to orchestra versions to Grace Jones did a singing version of it, like in a pop in like the 80s or something, which was actually very cool. If you ever get a chance to hear it, you should listen to it. It's very interesting. And so it just, to me, it's such a testament to the universality of the human longing for freedom and joy and how we all just immediately, it lifts our spirits. And I actually have written an original cadenza to start it because it's sort of a prayer for me.
You are listening to Music for Life. I'm your host, Ryan Malone. This is KPCG. In today's episode, we are playing a concert presented in Armstrong Auditorium here in Edmond, Oklahoma on April 8th, 2021, given by Grammy-winning cellist Sarah Santambrosio. We are hearing the end of the first half and the entirety of the second half as we close out this two-part series. We just heard the final number of the first half, the famous and exhilarating Libertango by Astor Piazzolla.
Sarah began the second half of her program with a cello sonata by the American composer Samuel Barber. We discussed some of this more at length on the program leading up to Sarah's concert, but I'll review a little of that here. Barber. is one of the most significant figures of American contemporary music. Born in Pennsylvania in 1910, he began taking interest in music at an early age. And as we mentioned on that previous episode, this was to his parents' chagrin because they wanted him to become a football player. He started composing at age seven, and by age 14, he entered the famed Curtis Institute of Music, where he would spend the next 10 years as a pianist, baritone, and composer. It was during this period of life where he would compose his cello sonata, a very prolific period of his life, in fact, as Sarah will tell us about. This work is in three movements. The first movement is moderately fast.
and is in the traditional Sonata Allegro form, where basically two themes are contrasted. The second movement is slow and lyrical, but with a sprightly quick middle section. And then the last movement is torrential and full of vim and vigor. I'll let all three of these movements play without interruption. But we'll also hear Sarah Sant'Ambrosio introduce this work. She also shares some personal experience that she had performing this in Russia back in 1986.
So this piece that we're going to play for you next is by the American composer Samuel Barber. And he wrote some of the most beautiful melodies that anyone has ever written. I'm sure, even if you don't know the name of it, I am sure that the second you heard the Adagio for Strange, you would recognize it. It's been used in so many films, like Platoon. It's so heartbreaking. And he had this extraordinarily...
inspired and prolifically creative period of time, just as he was at Curtis Institute of Music, which is where I went first when I was 16. He was studying there as a composition student and he wrote a series of pieces, all of which were just astonishing for a teenager to be writing. And this sonata is one of them, just his last year at Curtis. He wrote this piece, and he ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize. But he also wrote the Adagio for Straits, which is just one of the most beautiful pieces you'll ever, ever hear. If you haven't ever heard it, I recommend just going to YouTube and trying to hear it, because it's so beautiful, it's so short. He wrote the Violin Concerto, which is stunningly beautiful. He wrote Dover Beach, and this was all just before World War II, and then just into it as well. And he just wrote piece after piece, and it was just extraordinary, because it was as if he just came out of nowhere, this small-town boy. He comes to Curtis and...
something just awoke in him. And he just had this extraordinary, I'm just amazed sometimes when I play this piece that someone so young could be such a master and create really this new language that's so lyrical and so instantly accessible. And so this is the Barber Sonata, it's Opus 6, which means it's just the sixth piece that he wrote and then was published. So it's just kind of, I just find it astonishing because a lot of these other pieces that we play through, they were in the height of their powers, you know, when they wrote them. And this is really, and you hear the youth. I have a funny story about this piece. When I did the Tchaikovsky competition in Russia, and it was in 1986, and so it was still the Soviet Union, and it still was an iron curtain. And after I won, there was this recital that I gave right after in Moscow. But my pianist, who I brought for the first two rounds, the whole competition takes over a month. It's literally like a stamina endurance test. It's just unbelievable how much music you have to play and how long it takes. I mean, my first round, I was on stage for almost two hours straight, just my round.
And in fact, in that first round, while I was playing a box suite with my eyes closed, a cleave light above me exploded and rained glass down on top of me. But I didn't notice because I was so focused. I had been aiming toward the Tchaikovsky competition since I was 16. And so it's only once every four years. It's the Olympics of classical music. And so I finished the suite and I stood up and walked off to get my pianist for the next piece. And I was like, what's on my eyelashes? And she goes, don't touch, don't touch. And she had seen it from the wings. And she said, just close your eyes. And she blew in my face and blew the glass off my face. And then afterwards, she told me what happened. And I could sit here and talk to you for hours about this competition. But in the final, I played the Barber Sonata as my American piece. I had two pieces that I've
and chose American pieces, both of which I don't think the audience had ever heard. And so when I had to play after the competition, this third round of the competition is two concertos back to back. So my pianist from America flew back to America, because she'd rather be home than starving in the Soviet Union, which we were starving. I mean, I lost 15 pounds in that month, which is unbelievable. And I don't really have a lot of extra weight, so I was really skinny. But I was hungry all the time. And so I played with a Russian pianist.
And in this piece, in the middle of the first movement, in this big climax, all of a sudden the audience started screaming and applauding and stamping their feet. And I turned to the pianist and I said, don't they know it's not finished yet? And they said, oh no, they do. They just want you to go back and do that again because they liked it so much. And I was like, wow, I love this. This is fun. It's like an interactive sport here. But apparently what it was was that in the 19th century, not only very much in opera, but also in recitals and instrumental music.
It was very common because, you know, there wasn't recordings. And so if you happen to catch a performance of a piece, that was your one shot probably in your lifetime to hear it. So if there was something that you really liked, you just started clapping to make them do it again. So you get to hear it twice. And in Russia, in 1986, that still persisted because it had been behind the Iron Curtain since 1917. And so they hadn't run out of style yet like it had in the rest of the world. So I actually really loved it. I just thought that, I mean, I'm such a hero. I was like, yeah, I'll definitely do it again. So, yeah, so listen and see if you can figure out where it was that they did that. But just enjoy the music because it's so beautiful.
You are listening to Music for Life. I'm your host, Ryan Malone. This is KPCG. In today's episode, we have been playing a concert presented in Armstrong Auditorium on April 8th, 2021, given by Grammy-winning cellist Sarah Sant'Ambrosio. We have heard the end of the first half and nearly the entirety of the second half as we close out this two-part series, so we'll conclude today's episode by hearing the final work on this concert program.
More information about events happening at Armstrong Auditorium can be found at armstrongauditorium.org or by following Armstrong Auditorium on various social media platforms. Remember that this program is on Twitter at musicforlifepcg. That's musicforlifepcg. And all our previous episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and of course, kpcg.fm. All right, so back to the concert we're almost done hearing. Again, the majority of the second half was taken up by Samuel Barber's cello sonata, which we just heard all three movements of uninterrupted.
Now, to conclude the concert, and to conclude today's episode, we'll hear The Dance of Fire by Manuel de Faya, technically another composer from Spain, not South America, but one of that country's most influential 20th century musicians. He lived from 1876 to 1946, and this is an adaptation of a movement from his 1915 ballet. As I said on the pre-concert episode before this event, the arrangements that came from this ballet's music are more well-known than the ballet itself, and as this work's title suggests, it's a fiery work, and certainly a fitting conclusion to this wonderful program. It works both as a finale and even as a programmed encore, so to speak. I hope you enjoy, and I hope to see you sometime soon at Armstrong. You have been listening to Music for Life, a production of KPCG 101.3 on the FM Dial in Edmond, Oklahoma. From the Herbert W. Armstrong College campus, I'm Ryan Malone. Thanks for joining me.