Roger Sessions: Black Maskers Suite, Finale Juilliard Orchestra Paul Zukofsky, conductor To our joyful banquet will come one more guest. I commend him to your attention. His eyes are fire, his bright locks are clouds of gilded smoke, his voice is the roar of the impetuous flame that devours stone, and his godlike visage is flame and fire and boundless, pellucid light. Such a masker, ladies and gentlemen, you have never seen! ~ Leonid Andreyev, The Black Maskers Sessions wrote the music for The Black Maskers for a 1923 Smith College production of a murky, symbolic drama by the Russian playwright Leonid Andreyev: A wealthy man arranges a fantastic masquerade in his castle, and hordes of mysterious and threatening maskers show up. The castle is the soul, we are told. The lord of the castle is man, the master of the soul; the strange Black Maskers are the powers whose field of action is the soul of man and whose mysterious nature he can never fathom. The score, dedicated to Ernest Bloch, shows Sessions mentors influence. In 1928, Sessions extracted four of the original eight episodes and rescored them for large orchestra; on December 5, 1930, they received their premiere in this form by the Cincinnati Orchestra under the direction of Fritz Reiner. ~ Eric Salzman
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 03:01:53 +0000
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