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Fifty four years ago today music fans had extra reason to be grateful. Contemporary listeners should give thanks too – recordings from this feast of a concert were unearthed at the Library of Congress in 2005:

Epistrophy from At Carnegie Hall
Thelonius Monk Quartet with John Coltrane

Francis Hopkinson’s 1759 manuscript of My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free, the earliest extant American art song. [Hopkinson later composed music honoring the nation’s first leaders, some of which I’m hoping to perform this coming season.]

Here is the first verse of the Thomas Parnell poem upon which My Days is based:

My days have been so wondrous free,
the little birds that fly
with careless ease from tree
to tree were but as blest as I.

Those words could easily stand in as a description of our Independence Day holiday weekend here in Iowa. Hoping yours was equally full of careless ease!

Ellington – Nutcracker Suite, Overture [arr. Tyzik]
WCFSO – December 2005

Valentine’s day, rooted as it is in violence, invites a revisiting of the old Veronese feud.

Juliet: My only love, sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathèd enemy.
William Shakespeare – Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene v [138-141]

Sergei Prokofiev – Romeo and Juliet, Suite no. 2, the Montagues and the Capulets, opening
WCFSO – February 2008