by Mike Telin

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. —James Agee, in the preface to A Death in the Family

While searching for a text for the solo piece with orchestra  that would become Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Samuel Barber said that Agee’s prose-poem particularly struck him because it reminded him so much of evenings when he was a child at home.

“I found out, after setting this, that Mr. Agee and I are the same age, and the year he described was 1915, when we were both 5,” Barber told James Fasset during a 1949 interview. ‘You see, it expresses a child’s feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep.”

Swedish soprano Johanna Wallroth said during a Zoom call that “Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is one of my absolute favorite pieces, and I’m very excited about making my Cleveland Orchestra and U.S. debut with it.”

On Thursday, February 12 at 7:30 pm at Severance Music Center, conductor Barbara Hannigan will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in an all-American program that features Barber’s haunting work along with George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape, Charles Ruggles’ Sun-Treader, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture (arranged by Robert Russell Bennett). The program will be repeated on Saturday at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online.

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