On today’s date in 2022, violinist Roger Zahab and the University of Pittsburgh Symphony premiered a Violin Concerto written some 50 years earlier by American composer Julia Perry. In his program notes, Zahab tells the story this way:

“One afternoon near the end of my undergraduate studies — around 1978–my violin teacher stepped out of his office and handed me a score by Julia Perry. She had sent … her Violin Concerto to him in the hope that he might know of someone who would play it, and he handed it to me. I called her phone number and spoke with her mother, who said that Julia was right next to her but unable to talk.”

Perry was unable to talk because she had suffered a debilitating stroke seven years earlier at 46, derailing her career as a composer. Cared for and nursed by her mother, Perry persisted in working on the concerto that would be her final work, as she died shortly after making contact with Zahab. For his part, the violinist made it his mission to create a full orchestral performance score of the concerto from Perry’s surviving sketches, a daunting project that took him decades to complete.

Julia Perry (1924-1979): Violin Concerto; Curtis J. Stewart, violin; Experiential Orchestra; James Blachly, conductor; Bright Shiny Things 200

On today’s date in 1951, Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2. Ives was then 76 and living in Connecticut. Heart disease and diabetes left him far too weak to attend the Carnegie Hall premiere. Nicholas Slonimsky recalls once asking the thin and pale Ives how he was feeling, to which Ives replied he felt so weak that he said, “I can’t even spit into the fireplace.”

Ives didn’t own a radio, so he visited his neighbors, the Ryders, to hear Bernstein conduct the Sunday afternoon broadcast performance of music he had composed some 50 years earlier.

“There’s not much to say about the Symphony. I express the musical feelings of the Connecticut country in the 1890s. It’s full of the tunes they sang and played then, and I thought it would be a sort of a joke to have some of these tunes in counterpoint with some Bach-like tunes,” he said at the time.

His neighbor, Mrs. Ryder, recalled how he reacted to the radio broadcast: “Mr. Ives sat in the front room and listened as quietly as could be, and I sat way back behind him, because I didn’t want him to think I was looking at him. After it was over, I’m sure he was very much moved. He stood up, walked over the fireplace, and spat! And then he walked out into the kitchen and said not a word.”

Charles Ives (1874-1954): Symphony No. 2 New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 429 220