Melinda Wagner's Pulitzer premiere

Synopsis

On today's date in 1998, in Purchase, New York, the Westchester Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new flute concerto by a 41-year old composer named Melinda Wagner. The soloist was Paul Lustig Dunkel, who had asked Wagner to write the concerto.

Wagner's concerto won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1999—a gratifying mark of recognition for Wagner, who claims she had developed 20 years of calluses from all the rejections and minor defeats that are the common experience of most young composers in America. Along with the bumps and scrapes, Wagner also had picked up a number of other honors along the way, including awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, Meet the Composer and ASCAP, to name just a few.

Wagner says her flute concerto took as its models the sound worlds of two famous 20th century compositions she admired: Bela Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste," and Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade, after Plato's Symposium." "Composition," says Wagner, "is like writing a kind of love letter to performers. They will be interpreting something that is incredibly personal, so it feels like a love affair. As for the audience, to try to try to second-guess them to figure out what they're going to like, and write that, would be an insult to them. I just hope they can plug into the communication that's happening between the performers and me."

Music Played in Today's Program

Melinda Wagner (b. 1957) Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion Paul Lustig Dunkel, flute; Westchester Philharmonic; Mark Mandarano, cond. Bridge 9098

On This Day

Births

• 1656 - French composer and viola da gamba virtuoso, Marin Marais, in Paris;

• 1804 - French composer, pianist and teacher (Jeanne-) Louise Farrenc (née Dumont), in Paris;

Deaths

• 1809 - Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn, age 77, in Vienna;

• 1967 - American composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, age 51, in New York City;

Premieres

• 1817 - Rossini: "La Gazza Ladra" (The Thieving Magpie"), at La Scala in Milan;

• 1884 - Puccini: opera "Le villi" (The Willies), in Milan at the Teatro dal Verme;

• 1961 - Penderecki: "Threnody in Memory of the Victims of Hiroshima" for strings, in Warsaw;

• 1998 - Melinda Wagner: Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion, at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Purchase, with flutist Paul Lustig Dunkel and the Westchester Philharmonic, Mark Mandarano conducting; This work won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1999.