"Scene of the Rhyme" indeed - it was a new kind
of creative verse that Lukas Foss brought to Buffalo once-upon-a-short-time-ago. But some might say - 'Wait a minute, that was forty-six years ago.' Yes, in fact, Foss arrived in
Buffalo to take over the podium of the Buffalo Philharmonic in the fall of 1963. But his direct influence over the cultural and artistic heritage of Buffalo resonates yet today at
both the Philharmonic and at UB. Time Cycle at work.An historic perspective: In the early 60s, the musical activities in Buffalo had a truly old-world, classical feel. The famed
Budapest Quartet was in residence at UB, adding luster to the Music Department that had been founded by the venerable Cameron Baird. And in the 1963-64 season the Buffalo Chamber
Music Society ran its usual top-of-the-line offerings including the Marlboro Trio and the Julian Bream Consort. As for the Philharmonic, it had matured for nine years in the grand
European manner under the baton of the Viennese maestro Josef Krips. The Orchestra was a classical showcase, featuring deep and vibrant strings, articulate woodwinds and mellow brass
and percussion, serving up full measures of the standard orchestral repertoire. Buffalo was 'traditional mainstream' to the max.
Then came a stroke of creative lightning - Lukas
Foss was appointed as maestro of the Buffalo Philharmonic. In short order, the music scene in Buffalo would never be the same. Yes, the beloved 'old-world music' was given its fair
due, i.e. Foss' very first concert on October 23, 1963, featured Brahms' epic Symphony No.1. But there was a catch: the concert had opened with Ives'
Unanswered Question, after which the staid and placid walls of Kleinhans shook for the first time with the peal of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The audience
went wild - Buffalo had never heard anything like it.
But that was merely a pre-echo of what followed. Within just three seasons the Buffalo Philharmonic led the entire
symphonic world in the performance of new music. But to tell the whole truth, there were more than a few BPO subscribers who felt that most of the 'modern stuff' was written by
musical impostors. However, because Foss was such a genuine item (the late Seymour Knox once remarked: "Lukas is the only genius I ever met"), the adventurous maestro
somehow managed to balance the traditional symphonic repertoire with doses of untested new music, from The Grateful Dead through the take-no-prisoners avant-garde. In sum, a permanent
sea change had prevailed over the great swells in Kleinhans. Some called it a riptide.
But beyond the Philharmonic, during that premiere season of 1963-64, Foss had a lot
more mischief up his sleeve. He teamed-up with UB music department chairman Alan Sapp to convince both the Rockefeller Foundation and New York State to sponsor the Center for the
Creative and Performing Arts on the UB campus. By the fall of 1964 the Foss-Sapp liaison had pulled off one of the greatest coups in the history of 20th century new music. The Center
opened at UB with nineteen full-time, non-teaching appointments of extraordinary young composers and instrumentalists from around the world. While the necessary high level of State
funding prevailed for just a few years, the Center nevertheless managed to maintain its Evenings for New Music series at the Albright-Knox Gallery and at Carnegie Recital Hall for
more than a decade. The creative inertia from those years at UB later evolved into the June in Buffalo Festival, originally initiated by Morton Feldman for the performance of new
music, currently directed by UB's David Felder. A lapse in the JIB events for several years was filled in the 1980s and early 90s at UB by the North American New Music Festival,
initiated by the late Yvar Mikhashoff and co-directed by Jan Williams.
But while all of this new-energy storm transpired here in Buffalo, Lukas maintained his own frenetic pace as a
composer, a performer (Glenn Gould described him as 'the greatest pianist in the world') and as a conductor. As a maestro in demand, Foss made countless guest appearances on the
podiums of the world's greatest orchestras. Following his eight-year tenure with the BPO, Lukas became the music director of the Milwaukee Symphony and the Jerusalem Philharmonic, and
later, the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Yet another aspect of Foss' extraordinary career was his committment to young composers. In 1953 Foss suceeded Arnold Schönberg as the head of the
composition department at UCLA, and over the years he appeared as a guest lecturer at dozens of colleges and universities, not only in the United States and Canada, but in Europe and
South America. He has only recently retired from his composition post at Boston College.
Finally, our retrospective gets back to the very beginning. Lukas Foss was born in Berlin in
1922, and very early revealed his extraordinary gifts. He was already known as a wunderkindt when he and his family fled the Nazi peril in 1933, arriving in Paris, then moving to the
United States in 1937 where he attended the Curtis Institue in Philadelphia. By age 17, Lukas was already a Fellow at Tanglewood, performing and studying conducting with Koussevitzky.
In 1939-40, Foss studied advanced composition with Paul Hindemith at Yale, after which followed a variety of new scores in the genres of theater, choral, ballet and concert. From 1944
through 1950, Foss served as the pianist of the Boston Symphony, followed by support from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations which enabled him to become a Fellow at the American
Academy in Rome until his appointment in 1953 at UCLA, as noted above.
by E. Yadzinski
---------------------------------------------------------------
Foss - Two-Part Invention #3:*anquillo ma mosso (1938)
Bach - Invention #1 in C major, BWV 772
Foss - Two-Part Invention #2:*legretto (1938)
Foss - Renaissance Concerto (1985)
Foss - For Lenny: Variation on New York, New York (1988)
Vigeland - 3 1/3 Dances (2005)
Foss - Solo (1982)
Foss - Time Cycle (1960)
---------------------------------------------------------------
Diversity
defines the key and center of Foss' original music. But the composer is also keen to the idea of 'one foot in the past, the other in the future,' i.e. with the 'present' at center stage. The current program offers a sample of Foss' remarkable wealth of reverence and discovery, with equal measures of serendipity along the way. True to form, the past is reflected in the Bach-inspired
Two-Part-Inventions, Nos. 2 and 3 from Lukas' early years, and is likewise au courant in his tip-of-the hat to the Enlightenment in the Renaissance Concerto
for Flute and Orchestra, offered here with piano.
About For Lenny, Charles Bornstein writes:
"For Bernstein's 70th birthday in 1988, Lukas Foss took his 'cookbook - instructional style of minimalism' and wrote out a
Habanera-like variation on the main opening notes of New York, New York. Foss gives it a somewhat reminiscent quality in the combination of Foss-Americana and
Foss-Minimalism that transform this music into sounding more Foss than Bernstein."
For his 3 1/3 Dances, composer Nils Vigeland writes:
"The title of the piece refers to its form. The first two pieces are binary movements based on a single idea. The third starts this way
as well but then sidetracks as though morphing into a fourth dance but this music cuts off and is left incomplete. The original music of the third piece then
concludes.
In his brief note about Solo, Foss observes:
"It was in the summer of 1981 that I composed Solo, my first piano piece in 28 years. An initial 12-tone motive reigns. Yet this
is not 12-tone music. Nor is this minimal music, in spite of an insistent, repetitive element. Solo
is 'senza sonata' - lumbering, struggling eighth-notes, circling, spiraling, forging ahead, always on the way, never pausing, never giving up, forever closing in upon."
Commissioned by the Humanities and Arts Program of the Ford Foundation, Time Cycle
was completed in 1960. The work is dedicated to soprano Adel Addison. During the premiere of the piece at Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic, conductor Leonard Bernstein turned and addressed the audience: "My colleagues on the stage and I think so highly of
Time Cycle that, if you wish, we will repeat the whole piece for you. And if there are only twelve people who want to hear it again, we will play it just for them."
About the genesis of the work, Foss relates his inspiration derived from the cryptic lines of Kafka. "It was when I read this sentence that the idea
of a song-cycle came to me."
Die Uhren stimmen nicht überein, die innere jagt in einer teuflischen oder dämonischen oder jedenfalls unmenschlichen Art, die äussere
geht stockend ihren gewöhnlichen Gang.
(The clocks do not synchronize; the inner one chases in a devilish or demonic, or at any rate inhumane
manner; the outer one goes haltingly at its usual pace.)
Foss then assembled four literary episodes (Auden, Housman, Kafka and Nietzsche), each with regard to time, bells, clocks and the symbolic
stroke of midnight. The only unifying musical element common to each setting is a chord, C#-A-B-D#, intoned subtly along the way in various permutations and fragments.
