New Transfer of Knoxville: Summer of 1915

I had a request for a reup of the first recording of Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and decided to do a new transfer instead. My first attempt was done in the early months of this blog, and because the original LP was noisy, I used a reissued edition that had added reverb. This time I went back to the first 10-inch LP for the transfer, and the results represent a substantial improvement and are closer to the original intentions.

The piano pieces on the LP are also newly transferred, and there are fresh scans as well. All the noise problems have been addressed and the latest version (September 2023) is mastered in ambient stereo.

Samuel Barber and Eleanor Steber

Here is what I had to say about the music when first posted:

"Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is one of the high points of American music. It is a setting of a prose poem by composer Samuel Barber's exact contemporary, James Agee. Both the music and the words are inspired.

"This is the first recording of the work, done by the distinguished American soprano Eleanor Steber, who commissioned it and first performed it with the Boston Symphony and Serge Koussevitzky in 1947. This November 1950 recording is of the revised version for smaller orchestra.

Rudolf Firkušný

"The modest LP above is also notable for including what I believe to be the first recording of Barber's Four Excursions, in a jaunty performance by Rudolf Firkušný. These items are based on familiar idioms, somewhat akin to the Copland and Gershwin piano pieces that are discussed below. Composed in 1944, they also were recorded in November 1950 in Columbia's 30th Street studio in New York.

"Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is often considered a nostalgic idyll, but it is much more than that. in 1915, Agee was 5 years old, and the piece is a memory and meditation on an evening that summer, in the year before his father's death. Agee's words were set to music by Barber when his own father's death was near.

James Agee

"Agee places the themes of family, self, time, and place in a context that is at once extraordinarily specific and timeless, minute and cosmic; full of love for his family, the poem ends nonetheless with the remarkable observation that the members of his family "treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." This unusual, rapt, evocative piece is set to music that could not be more right.

"Steber also recorded the Barber composition later for her own Stand label; an intense live version. This version is cooler, with Steber's ample soprano and cloudy diction making the interpretation seem a little distant."

I only want to add to my previous comments that the playing by the so-called Dumbarton Oaks Chamber Orchestra under William Strickland is fully equal to this extraordinary music.

Note (September 2023): the download now includes a 1949 interview with Samuel Barber about Knoxville: Summer of 1915, in an edition from NPR, which mixes it with excerpts from Dawn Upshaw's excellent 1988 recording of the work.