To the editors:
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If there is any area where Henry Fogel deserves the hearty support of CSO listeners and players it is in his support for new music and American music being added to the CSO repertoire. Aside from the bizarre concept of a union leader opposing a programming move that adds work for more musicians, Vosburgh’s apparent position ignores the extraordinary importance of the CSO’s bringing a powerful and accessible piece of American music to Europe next year. Corigliano’s piece, completed during his tenure as CSO composer-in-residence, is one of the most artistically and commercially successful American pieces premiered in more than a decade and it stands alone as an orchestral response to the AIDS crisis that has so devastated the world of classical music.
The symphony, dedicated to the memory of the sorely missed Chicago pianist Sheldon Shkolnik, has already garnered Corigliano the prestigious $150,000 Grawemeyer Award and the CSO’s recording of the piece has risen to number three on the current Billboard classical chart (an obvious money-maker for the CSO and well ahead of the orchestra’s recording of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben released simultaneously and barely making a dent in the charts). Leonard Slatkin has programmed it for concerts with the New York Philharmonic this season and the CSO will take the work to Carnegie Hall next year.
PS: Ted Shen really must have been “mesmerized” by Larry Combs’s clarinet solos in the CSO’s first encore of their free Grant Park concert on September 21 (Music review, September 27). Combs and company were playing Fred Fisher’s “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town),” not “My Kind of Town (Chicago Is),” by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen. Morton Gould arranged Fisher’s “Chicago” for Benny Goodman and the CSO in the 1960s, the aforementioned combination recorded it then, and it has been a staple repertoire novelty for the symphony–and for Combs–ever since.
