Samuel Barber: Neo-Romantic Melodist

Note: this meeting will exceptionally take place on a Friday.

Perhaps the 20th century’s most significant American composer, Samuel Barber was certainly one of the most celebrated, garnering two Pulitzer Prizes for Music. He wrote some of the most beautiful, immediately accessible and moving works in the musical repertoire. Truly a modern Romantic, Barber, who began his career as a professional baritone, had an extraordinary gift for melody, while meticulously reinvigorating structures from past eras.

Although Barber’s musical style is less American than international, he was largely impervious to the mid-20th century’s fascination with serial composition, resisting the fervor for experimentation in harmony, rhythm and structure that gripped so many of his American and European contemporaries.

While Barber wrote much purely instrumental music, about two-thirds of his works are vocal, comprising over 100 art songs for voice and piano or voice and orchestral, some choral music and three operas.

Please join our host Corrine to enjoy some of this tasteful, rigorously constructed music, full of beauty, and varying in mood from the serenely contemplative to the rhapsodic to the excitingly motoric.

Instructions on how to attend the event will be sent confirmed participants one day ahead.