Robert Stern

Chamber Orchestra 1111 - 2110 - timp, pno - strings

Editor's Note:

Prologue for Small Orchestra was composed in July 1954 while Robert Stern was a twenty-year-old undergraduate at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. The manuscript identifies the work as an “Eastman student assignment.” During this period, composer, pedagogue, and author Kent Kennan — in his only term of teaching at Eastman — was on the faculty.

Also dating from the summer of 1954 is Stern’s Piano Sonata — his only work in the genre — which is dedicated to Kennan and is likewise published by the American Composers Alliance. The two works appear to have originated during the same summer period of study.

Prologue for Small Orchestra received its premiere in Kilbourn Hall at the Eastman School of Music on August 3–4, 1954, performed by the Eastman Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Frederick Fennell (1914–2004). The work appears on the program for the “Two Symposium Sessions of Music for Chamber Orchestra by students from the classes of Bernard Rogers and Kent Kennan."

Lasting approximately five minutes, Prologue is a concentrated orchestral statement. Dramatic and expressive in character, its harmonic language refects Stern's unique take on mid-twentieth-century American sound.

The lush string writing may also be heard as anticipating Stern’s prize-winning In Memoriam Abraham (written the following year, in 1955), likewise published by the American Composers Alliance.