Seven works, spurned but beautiful

And if you’ve never heard of her, you’re not alone.

Fine, who died in 2000, is among a sizable group of American composers from the middle of the 20th century who remain inexplicably overlooked today. Consider this: Although Fine taught for years at the Juilliard School and New York University, the New York Philharmonic has never performed her music.

What explains this neglect? It might be collateral damage from a period when American composers squared off in opposing stylistic camps.

On one side were those whose complex modernist languages involved various atonal and serial methods. On the other were self-described “postmodern” composers, who experimented with minimalism and found common ground with rock, jazz and ethnic music.

As the polemics raged on, a large number of composers — including Fine, Walter Piston, Vincent Persichetti, Roy Harris, Harold Shapero and others — occupied a kind of neoclassical middle ground. They continued using essentially tonal languages and tried to reinvigorate classical forms with fresh harmonic and rhythmic techniques. But they were perceived, especially by serialists based in universities who claimed the intellectual high ground, as dated and irrelevant.

Many of these composers, though, brought well-honed skills, artistic integrity and a touch of American feistiness to their music. Conductors like Leonard Slatkin, Gerard Schwarz, Marin Alsop and others have tried to bring attention to them, to little avail.

Last month Leon Botstein, who has tirelessly worked to bring to light worthy scores by neglected composers, led his American Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in the New York premiere of Fine’s Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1944), with accomplished pianist Charlie Albright as soloist, part of a program devoted to overlooked mid-20th-century American works. I knew some of Fine’s works but not this bracing 17-minute piece in two movements.

Vivian Fine: Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1944)

Although in her early years, Fine composed in a dissonance-saturated language of hard-edged contours and jagged counterpoint, she mellowed as she matured. This piece, an outlier, adopts a deliberately neoclassical, almost neobaroque idiom and abounds in contrasts: Lacy, lyrical passages for piano often lead to stretches of tangled, industrious counterpoint; warm, rich string sonorities segue into flinty, brassy harmonies.

The restless, spirited second movement is intoxicating. I especially love the moody first movement, especially a pensive, near-atonal episode about six minutes in.

Walter Piston: Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1957)

For more than 30 years, Piston was a respected music professor at Harvard. He literally wrote the book on harmony, a textbook still in use today. Yet his music came to be perceived, unfairly, as well made but a little, well, professorial. This great 25-minute viola concerto is just one of many Piston scores that should enter the repertory. During a meditative opening episode, the viola wanders lyrically atop clear-textured modal harmonies, until the music presses the opening melodic motif into service as a building block for the animated main section, rich with intricate interplay between soloist and orchestra.

Amid brass fanfares, the finale takes off like some frenetic rondo, although metric dislocations and out-of-nowhere restrained passages keep you off guard. The slow middle movement is the most beguiling, a neoromantic adagio with an intensely soulful viola theme cushioned by soft, wistful strings. This concerto could fill the slot on orchestra programs that typically goes to Mozart or Beethoven. Piston’s piece occupies a 1950s American version of the same neighborhood.

Harold Shapero: Symphony for Classical Orchestra (1947)

In 1948, Aaron Copland wrote of his younger colleague Shapero that “few musicians of our time put their pieces together with greater security,” adding that Shapero’s technical adroitness serves “a wonderfully spontaneous musical gift.” No work exemplifies this more than his 45-minute Symphony for Classical Orchestra.

Leonard Bernstein conducted the premiere in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1953, he also led a recording, made on a single, hectic day while he was suffering from a fever. Although a little shaky, the recorded performance is exhilarating. Beethoven’s Seventh, slyly quoted at one point, was a model for Shapero’s piece, which opens with an elusive adagio, all flickering chords and sustained sonorities, that shifts into a bustling, densely contrapuntal allegro.

A tenderly lyrical yet quizzical slow movement leads to a misbehaving scherzo and then a herculean finale. André Previn had a triumph with the piece at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the late 1980s and later recorded it. Although Botstein led a performance in 2016, this demanding piece mostly languishes today. American orchestras planning yet another run-through of Beethoven’s Seventh might instead take a crack as Shapero’s masterpiece.

Norman Dello Joio: Meditations on Ecclesiastes for String Orchestra (1956)

Dello Joio, born in New York, probably thought the future of this piece was assured when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1957. Alas, it’s all but disappeared. I last heard it performed by the Boston University Symphony Orchestra in the late 1970s.

The string writing somehow remains shimmering and transparent even when sonorities turn thick and textures gnarly. The interplay between darkly contemplative music, as in the piercing “To everything there is a season” opening movement, and quixotic episodes, like the spirited “... and a time to dance and to laugh ...,” is so deftly handled you hang on every shift.

Irving Fine: Symphony (1962)

Of late, there has been a welcome renewal of interest in the Boston-born Irving Fine (no relation to Vivian). A splendid 2015 recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project drew fresh attention to his works. The album opens with his first completed orchestra score, the ebullient and impish Toccata Concertante (1947), a piece that could become a surefire concert opener for orchestras.

His later, skittish, tartly modernist scores skillfully combine neoclassical structures with a vigorous but free use of 12-tone techniques, as in the final movement of his 1962 Symphony, generally considered Fine’s major statement. He led a performance of the symphony at Tanglewood in 1962 just days before his death at 47.

Samuel Barber: Piano Concerto (1962)

Yes, I know: Barber is hardly neglected. His Adagio for Strings is world-famous. But why is his darkly neoromantic and teeming Piano Concerto almost never performed these days? At its 1962 premiere by the Boston Symphony, with John Browning as soloist, which helped inaugurate what was then called Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, the piece “made a decided hit with the audience,” Harold C. Schonberg of The New York Times reported, adding that it may be that Barber “has supplied a repertory piece.” Listen, and you’ll hear why. It ends with a demonic finale, full of pummeling chords and frenetic energy.

Virgil Thomson: Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1928)

Although Thomson completed this piece in 1928, it did not have its official premiere until 1945, when he conducted it with the New York Philharmonic. The piece can seem a dizzying assemblage built from distinctive musical chunks: evocations of old-time hymn-singing; a kind of spare, modal melodic writing that Thomson called his “Missouri plainchant” style; fractured fanfares and down-home-marches; faux-serious bursts of counterpoint.

The musical language can be unabashedly brash and dissonant one moment, defiantly diatonic the next. Yet in a good performance it comes across as an inspired, if iconoclastic, entity, and somehow exuberantly “American” — whatever that means. No surprise: Botstein led the last performance I know of in New York, which was recorded live. May he keep up the fight for neglected 20th-century Americans.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.