In today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column I write about Harold Shapero, an American composer who never received his due. Here’s an excerpt.
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“My day will come,” said Gustav Mahler, and he was right. A half-century after his death in 1911, his near-forgotten music was revived by Leonard Bernstein and other influential conductors. Today he is one of the world’s best-known classical composers, and it looks like he’s going to stay that way. Most artists, however, aren’t so lucky. Some win fame in their lifetimes, then slip into the shadows, while many more start out obscure and remain so—usually with good reason. Saddest of all, though, are the first-class artists whose work is revived time and again, but who somehow never manage to find a lasting place in the bright sun of posthumous renown….
The American composer Harold Shapero, who died two years ago at the age of 93, is a prime example of the perpetually rediscovered artist. He was extravagantly admired by his contemporaries, foremost among them Aaron Copland, who praised his “phenomenal ear” and “wonderfully spontaneous musical gift.” Bernstein gave the premiere of his Symphony for Classical Orchestra in 1948, then recorded it to thrilling effect five years later. Alas, the winds of favor blew elsewhere, and soon Shapero was devoting most of his energies to teaching instead of writing music of his own….
Now Shapero is in the news again, albeit in a modest way: Sally Pinkas, who teaches piano at Dartmouth, has released a superlatively well-played CD of his piano music on Toccata Classics. It actually came out a few months ago, but I only just heard about it last week via a Twitter posting by Richard Brody, a Shapero fan who writes about film for the New Yorker. Somehow it seems fitting that it was a film critic, not a music critic, who drew my attention to this album, which includes an exquisite performance by Ms. Pinkas and Evan Hirsch, her husband, of the sparkling Sonata for Piano, Four Hands that Mr. Shapero wrote in 1941. It’s a masterpiece, but the chances that you’ve heard it, or of it, are microscopic….
The problem, if that’s what you want to call it, is that Shapero Shapero wasn’t the kind of composer whose music grabs you by the lapels, gets in your face and insists on its own greatness….
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Read the whole thing here.
From their new CD of Harold Shapero’s piano music, the Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo plays the first movement of Shapero’s Sonata for Piano, Four Hands, composed in 1941: