Essential Barber
For many music lovers, Samuel Barber’s name is synonymous with just one work, and just one mood – the lush, compelling melancholy of his Adagio for Strings. But Barber was a true modern American master, who tried his hand – and triumphed – at symphonies and concertos, music for the opera house, and chamber music and song. Stylish, sincere, and – beneath his elegant surface – passionately emotional, he’s one of those composers whose music grows richer and more surprising the more closely you listen.
Read more…Samuel Barber knew from the age of nine that his life could take only one path: “I was meant to be a composer, and will be I’m sure”, he wrote to his mother, with all the confidence of a prodigy. From the age of 21 he was acclaimed as the great hope of American music: a composer of European finesse, in the body of a sophisticated East-Coast American. That tension gives Barber’s music both its poignancy and its power: he’s a dazzlingly skilled, unmistakably 20th-century artist with the soul of a red-blooded Romantic. This is a composer who could write music celebrating his wartime service in the US Air Force alongside witty song cycles and grand, haunted romantic operas, and his finest work combines art deco flair with a profound tenderness. It’s music in which head and heart meet in eloquent debate, and more often than not find a balance that’s arresting, elegant and utterly original.