MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Music of Samuel Barber (with Howard Hanson: Piano Concerto)

Samuel Barber is widely known for his famous Adagio for Strings, the slow movement of a string quartet he wrote in 1936. Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania in 1910, he was one of the first students at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he studied piano, conducting, singing and composition. Awards allowed subsequent study in Rome. He taught briefly at the Curtis Institute but soon withdrew, sharing a house with his former fellow-student Menotti. His music remained neo-Romantic in idiom, although not without contemporary influences.