Robert Stern

Orchestra 2(2+picc)2(2+EH)2(2+bcl)2 - 4231 - timp - strings

Editor's Note:

Robert Stern’s Grant Us Peace (“An Orchestral Prayer”) is an orchestral work of approximately seven minutes’ duration. The piece received its premiere performance on Saturday, April 2, 1960, at the Memorial Chapel of the University of Redlands in Redlands, California, as part of the Fifth Annual Orchestral Symposium of American Music. The performance was given by the University-Community Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Edward C. Tritt, founder and music director of the ensemble.

Founded in 1950, the University-Community Symphony Orchestra brought together musicians from the University of Redlands and the surrounding community and played an important role in the musical life of Southern California. The annual Orchestral Symposium of American Music presented by the ensemble was devoted to works by contemporary composers.

A review of the symposium concert in the Redlands Daily Facts (April 4, 1960) described Stern’s work as “a sensitive episode in tonal colors, seriously drawn and not over-extended.” Stern had previously been represented at the Redlands symposium in 1956, when the festival presented the premiere of his orchestral work In Memoriam Abraham (published by the American Composers Alliance).

This present work was subsequently performed in 1961 at the Third Annual Symposium of Contemporary American Music at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where the Symposium Orchestra, conducted by Robert Baustian, presented new orchestral works by contemporary composers including Stern.

Grant Us Peace was later performed by the Hartford Civic Orchestra on Thursday, January 31, 1963, conducted by Robert Brawley, in a concert held at King Philip School in West Hartford, Connecticut. Writing in the Hartford Times, reviewer Patricia Macko described the work as “a somberly lyric work that, to these ears, has more the character of chamber music…”