Leonard Bernstein Five Anniversaries (1949-51) 00:00 1- For Elizabeth Rudolf born on January 23, 1894 2- For Lukas Foss born on August 15, 1922 3- For Elizabeth B. Ehrman born on January 22, 1883 4- For Sandy Gellhorn born on April 23, 1951 5- For Susanna Kyle born on July 24, 1949 Thirteen Anniversaries (1960-1988) 07:29 1- For Shirley Gabis Rhoads Perle born on April 7, 1924 2- In Memoriam: William Kapell September 20, 1922 -October 29, 1953 3- For Stephen Sondheim born on March 22, 1930 4- For Craig Urquhart born on September 3, 1953 5- For Leo Smit born on January 12, 1921 6- For My Daughter, Nina born on February 28, 1962 7- In Memoriam: Helen Coates born on July 19, 1899 8- In Memoriam: Goddard Lieberson April 5, 1911-May 29, 1977 9- For Jessica Fleischmann born on September 19, 1965 10- In Memoriam: Constance Hope December 23, 1904-June 13, 1977 11- For Felicia, On Our 28th Birthday (& Her 52nd) February 6, 1974 12- For Aaron Stern born on November 3, 1949 13- In Memoriam: Ellen Goetz June 16, 1930-January 27, 1986
Dorella Sarlo, piano
The Five Anniversaries date from 1945-51 and their most famous dedicatee is surely the American composer Lukas Foss, to whom the second piece is dedicated, where the two hands follow each other almost continually in simple canon imitation. Alongside the very lively third (almost a Gigue), and the fifth (a very delicate piece), the fourth and first have the tone of simple ditties; the fourth, given the date of birth of the dedicatee was written for the birth of a little girl and is curiously reminiscent of many passages of the twenty-fifth piece in Schumann's Album für die Jugend. The Thirteen Anniversaries were written between 1960 and 1988; the printed edition of the collection is dated 1989 and as such counts among the last works published in Bernstein's lifetime. Many of the works bear the mark of the skilled song composer: among them number six for his daughter Nina and number eleven for his wife Felicia on the anniversary of their first meeting; with family intimacy the former begins whispering \"Nina, Nana\" on two close notes. Some pieces were written \"in memoriam\", but we should not think that all the numbers were written in sadness: number two, for example, is a bold and lively piece, made up of staccato sounds and angular sequences of fourths; number nine has a witty tone, almost like a musical. In number ten, Bernstein rather suprisingly inserts a dodecaphonic series over which two verses by Edgar Allan Poe are pronounced \"like a recitative\". The last piece in the set possesses a simple motion and elegiac, absorbed, meditative tone, sounding the most heart-felt of all: it transmits a sense of intimate emotion and is a little pearl of musical intuition. One curiosity: number nine includes the insertions by the pianist of a little sound effect, a sort of ‘tsk’ which regularly enters the gentle melodic progression. From Music Notes by Mauro Balma