Andrew Imbrie, Violin Concerto i. Allegro - Part 1 of 2
"The concerto is the largest instrumental work I have completed to date. It was commissioned by the Serge Koussevitsky Music Foundation inte Library congress, dedicated to the memory or Serge and Natalie Koussevitsky. Its composition occupied me during the period between 1950 and 1954. The work was done in Berkeley and Princeton, and finished in Rome, January 5, 1954, during my stay at the American Academy while on a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The first movement is characterized by the alternation of two tempi: allegro and andante. The first appearance of the allegro is only two measures long, and furnishes an orchestral upbeat to the first violin solo. Near the end of the passage, a bell-like sound is heard, which appears at other key points throughout the concerto. A brief cadenza ushers in the allegro proper, which begins with an orchestral tutti. The entrance of the violin carries this section toward its climax, whose dissolution is accompanied again by the bell-like motive. The more lyric andante returns, and is then followed y an extensive development, allegro. Tension toward the climax is built by having the figuration of the solo violin imitated by groups of orchestral instruments at closer and closer time intervals. The climax brings the return of the lyric andante, a more elaborate solo cadenza, and a culminating coda in a faster tempo."
- Andrew Imbrie
In 1959 Andrew Imbrie was awarded the Walter W. Naumburg Recording Prize for his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. That work was spontaneously acclaimed by the critics at its premiere performance during a festival dedicating the University of California's new music center at Berkeley. In covering the event, Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle remarked, "It [Imbrie's concerto] impressed me as being the most important composition of its kind since the violin concerto of Alban Berg."
Andrew Imbrie, Violin Concerto ii. Poco adagio
Andrew Imbrie, Violin Concerto i. Allegro - Part 2 of 2
Imbrie's repertoire included instrumental as well as vocal music, and he wrote three symphonies, eight concertos, numerous songs, sonatas, chamber works and choral compositions. He also composed two operas: the fantasy "Three Against Christmas" (1960), and the nationally acclaimed "Angle of Repose" (1976), commissioned and performed by the San Francisco Opera for the nation's bicentennial. "Angle" was based on Wallace Steger's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about California's Gold Rush.
His pieces were performed at UC Berkeley throughout his career.
Former San Francisco music writer Robert P. Commanday described Imbrie's music as "unique and individual, independent of any trend, current or school."
"I don't like to predict what a piece is going to be; I let ideas go where they lead," Imbrie was quoted as telling The Oakland Tribune in 1977. "I am in a constant state of dialogue with my material. It talks back, and you have to fit its demands. You lay yourself open to subconscious suggestion."
Born April 6, 1921, in New York City, Imbrie began studying the piano at the age of four. In 1937, he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, a French composer, conductor and music professor. He returned to the United States the following year and attended Princeton University, where he worked with composer and professor Roger Sessions, who became his mentor. Imbrie earned his undergraduate degree at Princeton in 1942 and his senior thesis, a string quartet, was recorded by the Julliard Quartet.
Imbrie served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps from 1942-1946 as a second lieutenant, working as a translator of Japanese.
He moved to Berkeley in 1946 to study with Sessions, who had begun teaching at UC Berkeley. Imbrie earned his M.A. in music at UC Berkeley in 1947, and joined the faculty in 1949.
In addition to teaching music composition, theory and analysis at UC Berkeley, Imbrie was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, New York University, Brandeis University, Harvard University and the University of Alabama. He also taught at the San Francisco Conservatory, the Sand Point Music Festival and Tanglewood Music Center.
Imbrie's colleague and friend, Olly Wilson, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of music, said Imbrie was a "gracious, perceptive teacher" and composer who was generous with his time, knowledge and skill.
Imbrie's commissions included the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, the Halle Orchestra of England, the Francesco Trio, the Pro Orte Quartet, and the Ford and Naumburg foundations.
Awards earned by Imbrie included the Prix de Rome, the New York Music Critics Circle Award, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, two Guggenheim fellowships, a Boston Symphony Orchestra Merit Award, an Alice Ditson Fellowship, the Walter W. Naumburg Recording Prize, and the first Walter Hinricksen Award. Imbrie also received the New York Music Critics Circle Award in 1994 for the first of his five string quartets, written while he was a student at Princeton.
He also was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was honored with a week-long celebration of his work in San Francisco in 1985.
Imbrie received a commission from the San Francisco Symphony in 1981 for a choral and orchestral work shortly before his son, John, an athlete, musician and Princeton University freshman, unexpectedly collapsed and died. He wrote "Requiem" in his son's memory, using texts from the Latin funeral mass and the poem "To the Evening Star" by William Blake, John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," and "Prayer" by George Herbert.
