(Section D)
Led by Marie Wilson
Conducted by Clarence Raybould
Anis Fuleihan , of Syrian origin, was bom in Cyprus (where his father was a British Government physician) in 1900. He began his serious musical training in 1915 when he settled in America. He first appeared as a pianist in 1919 and as a composer the following year. Since then he has written ballets, orchestral suites, two piano concertos, a viola concerto, a string quartet, and the symphony to be played this evening.
The Symphony was written in the summer of 1936 and first performed on December 31, 1936, by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Barbirolli. According to Fuleihan 'it is, in a sense, a picture of the people of my own country: Syria '. The first movement suggests aspiration towards a distant, vaguely-defined ideal ; the second is ' the song of people who work in the fields' ; in the third ' the dread of war beats upon the pulses of people who wonder what it's all about ; the fortissimo termination of the fugue phrase is supposed to be in the nature of a supplication ' ; the finale ' expresses the exuberance of the youth of the country ; it is supposed to have a " song of the people" character, hence the commonplaceness of some of the harmonies '.