by Mike Telin

Marin Alsop will make her Severance Hall debut on December 8, 9 and 10 with Barber’s Symphony No. 1, Bernstein’s Serenade with Peter Otto as soloist, and Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 (“Organ”) featuring Joela Jones. Barber’s symphony received its American premiere in 1937 by The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, an event that inspired us to take a look in the Cleveland Orchestra Archives to see what critics had to say about the work and composer.

At a very young age, Samuel Barber was already aware that he was destined to become a composer — a fact he made quite clear to his mother at the time. The Archives preserve an article from International Musician of December, 1961, where John Briggs writes

Early in this century an eight-year-old resident of West Chester, Pal, already with a number of compositions to his credit, left a note on his mother’s dressing table. It read in part:

“To begin with, I was not meant to be an athelet (sic) I was meant to be a composer, and will be, I’m sure…Don’t ask me to try to forget this…and go play foot-ball.—Please—Sometimes I’ve been worrying about this so much that it makes me mad! (not very).” [Read more…]