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George Rochberg (1918-2005) Symphony No. 2 (1955-56) Imago Mundi (1973) George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey on 5th July, 1918, and died at...

George Rochberg (1918-2005)


Symphony No. 2 (1955-56) Imago Mundi (1973)

George Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey on 5th July, 1918, and died at Newtown Square, near Philadelphia, where he had lived for over forty years, on 30th May, 2005. From 1951, he was Director of Publications for the music publishing house Theodore Presser, in 1960 becoming Chairman of the Music Department at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1979 he was designated Annenberg Professor of the Humanities, retiring from the University in 1983. Rochberg's music has been honoured since his earliest substantial compositions, his Night Music receiving the George Gershwin Memorial Award in 1953. Since then, Naumberg Recording Awards, Guggenheim Fellowships, Honorary Doctorates, a Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and Fulbright Scholarship in 1950-51 (the year in which he met and befriended Luigi Dallapiccola), the ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and countless other honours accumulated in ever greater profusion. In 1996, his manuscripts and papers were acquired for the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

Although not completed until the spring of 1956, George Rochberg's Symphony No. 2 is unquestionably a wartime work. Living in New York in 1941-42 with his new wife, Gene, making ends meet by playing at jazz bars and clubs while studying with Hans Weisse, Leopold Mannes and George Szell at the Mannes School of Music, Rochberg's student life and idyllic early years of marriage were interrupted by call-up into the United States Army in November 1942. There followed three testing years serving as a captain with Allied forces in Europe. At the Battle of the Bulge, Rochberg was severely wounded, spending close on a year in recovery and rehabilitation. As the war ended, he was able to take up his studies again at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he honed his skills in counterpoint under the great Rosario Scalero, who had been a member of Brahms's circle in Vienna sixty years earlier.

The hour-long First Symphony [to appear on Naxos 8.559214], written in 1948-49, was the first large-scale work to result, an important stepping-stone on the way to the Second. Exploring the power of the orchestral palette for the first time, delineating his expressive boundaries and challenges, establishing a powerfully individual personal language, still essentially "tonal" but ever more sharply pressing the harmonic limits of that language, the First Symphony is a young composer's assertive laying-down of the gauntlet.

All of the accumulated anger and anguish about the Second World War was now freed, through the First's refinement of a mature technique, to explode onto the page in unfettered spontaneity, an immediacy of compositional vision sharpened, if anything, by the four years spent polishing the score of the Second in the intervals of other work.

"My war experience had etched itself deep in my soul. After the end of the war, I lived with an ever sharpening awareness of the approach to the abyss I saw in a world coming apart at the seams.

I was distressed at the growing slovenliness of people's bad thinking and worse behaviour and became nauseated by the growing narcissism on all sides, more particularly as it surfaced in public comments and statements of leading artists and writers of the day, but even more as it showed itself in the works being produced in a never ending stream of bad taste, bum ideas and sloppy craftsmanship. There was no recourse but to stubbornly pursue my own purposes and disregard virtually everything and everyone else."

Disc 1

Symphony No. 2 (more info)
Performed by: Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: George Rochberg
Conducted by: Christopher Lyndon-Gee


1.   I. Declamando - 8:49
2.   II. Allegro scherzoso - 5:28
3.   III. Adagio - 9:45
4.   IV. Quasi tempo primo - 5:00
5.   V. Coda - 2:26


Imago mundi (more info)
Performed by: Saarbrucken Radio Symphony Orchestra
Composed by: George Rochberg
Conducted by: Christopher Lyndon-Gee


6.   Imago Mundi - 24:06:00

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