Knoxville: Summer of 1915

With single non-subscriber tickets for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra's 2009-10 season going on sale August 17th, it's a good time to look ahead to see what is in store this year.

The big work on the September concerts (September 24,25) will be the wonderful Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures At An Exhibition.  However, another work on the program will have special interest for Knoxvillians: Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915,  based on a nostalgic prose poem by Knoxville native writer James Agee. Barber's 1947 work is a work for soprano and orchestra that was commissioned by soprano Eleanor Steber for her performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1948.

In an interesting piece of trivia...Knoxville's Mary Costa sang the soprano part when the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra first performed the work on February 13, 1960.

"We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."

Barber put these words from Agee's piece on the title page of the score, but he actually used only the final third of the poem for his text.  Agee's piece had originally been published as an independent prose poem in The Partisan Review, although it was later used in the prologue to his novel A Death in the Family, published posthumously in 1957.  As part of a post-war nostalgia, Barber latched onto the poignant quality of the essay saying "The summer evening he describes...reminded me so much of similar evenings when I was a child at home."

The soprano soloist in the KSO's performance will be Knoxvillian Jami Rogers. Rogers was a  National Winner of the 1996 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and a 1995 winner of the Opera Index Awards.

Also on the September concert will be William Grant Still's The American Scene: The South and John Williams' Suite from the film The Reivers with narrator Bill Williams.

The second half of the concert will feature the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures At An Exhibition.

The September concerts begin at 7:00 p.m.

While there are many excellent recordings of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, you won't be disappointed with the RCA Gold Seal release Leontyne Price Sings Barber with Thomas Schippers conducting The New Philharmonia Orchestra  and the diction-perfect Leontyne Price as soprano soloist.  You also can't go wrong with the Nonesuch Barber: Knoxville, Summer Of 1915 with Dawn Upshaw and David Zinman conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke's.