Moby Dick, concertato for orchestra

• Date: 1952
• Composer: Peter Mennin
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

While Peter Mennin was working on one symphony for the Louisville Orchestra and had an orchestral commission pending from the Erie (Pennsylvania) Philharmonic, someone sent him a rough sketch of a libretto to consider for setting as an opera. The libretto was an effort to capture Herman Melville's great American novel, Moby Dick, on the musical stage. Reading over the libretto impelled the composer to return to the original novel and reread it. Rather than stimulating his interest in writing an opera on the subject, this exercise gave Mennin the subject for this 11-minute orchestral piece, a rare programmatic piece in the output of this composer of primarily abstract music.

As it happened, Mennin, in his notes for the original performance, did try to distance the work from any specific program by noting that it "depicts the emotional impact of the novel as a whole rather than musically describing isolated incidents occurring in the novel."

Thus there is little that is specifically ocean-like or whale-like in the music. Careful listeners might liken a particular wind theme in the Allegro section of the piece to a sea chantey. The piece begins with a sustained note in the violins, against which the woodwinds play a mysterious chord progression. The chord progression becomes the basis of a theme, which in turn forms the primary melodic idea of the whole work. The piece is entitled "Concertato" because it is essentially a mini-concerto for orchestra. ~ Joseph Stevenson, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
New York Philharmonic: An American Celebration [Selections from the new 10 CD set]	1999
Peter Mennin: Moby Dick; Symphonies Nos. 3 & 7	1996
Peter Mennin: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6; Concertato, "Moby Dick"; Fantasia for String Orchestra	1997

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