2010 celebrates the centenaries of the birth of both Samuel Barber (right) and William Schuman. Events take place worldwide throughout the year. To coincide with the anniversary year, Peter Dickinson has compiled Remembering Samuel Barber: A Centenary Tribute. The main source for the book, published by University of Rochester Press, is a panoply of vivid and eminently readable interviews by Peter Dickinson for a BBC Radio 3 documentary in 1981. The original BBC program lasted an hour but the full discussions with many of the main figures connected with Barber have remained unpublished until now. These include Barber’s friends Gian Carlo Menotti and Charles Turner; his fellow composers Aaron Copland, William Schuman and Virgil Thomson; performers with whom he worked closely such as Leontyne Price (soprano), John Browning (piano) and Robert White (tenor); the historian H .Wiley Hitchcock; and publishers Hans W. Heinsheimer and Edward P. Murphy. There are also three of the very few interviews extant with Barber himself as well as a discussion with cellist Orlando Cole, recorded in 2005 when he was in his
mid nineties. Cole was one of the first
students to enter the Curtis Institute with Barber in 1924.
Also in 2010, legendary Danish avant-garde and pioneer figure Bent Lorentzen turns 75 on February 11. Electro-acoustic music, graphic notation, music comics, instrumental theatre, chamber and full scale operas - Lorentzen has done it all. Just now he is working on a piece for shouting choir and percussion for the Danish shouting choir Tinnitus.
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