College Music Society - Northwest Regional Annual Conference
American composer Howard Hanson's beautiful "Symphonic Rhapsody, Op. 14," gets its international debut in this performance and lecture for the College Music Society. Composed in 1919 the work has remained in obscurity having never been published (the work is still in manuscript form). Once thought to be a piano transcription of an orchestral work, research has revealed that Hanson himself was very proud of his "Rhapsody" and performed it on piano often! On one such occasion music reviewer Clarence Urmy, writing for the San Jose Evening News, declared that the work "should be added to the repertroire of every advanced pianist." Hanson himself wrote that "The form is, I believe, 'absolutely original'… as it is an attempt to put the emotional contents of an entire four movement sonata into one movement of considerable length. Also I believe that the material is the strongest that I have ever written, at least it seems to express more nearly what I am trying to say."