Our February 1st and 2nd concerts will feature “Concerto a Tre” (also called “concertino”) that Ingolf Dahl wrote for Benny Goodman, and which was premièred with Goodman on the clarinet at Bovard Auditorium at USC in 1948.

Dahl, a Hamburg native who became an American citizen in 1943, was part of a group of European composers whose lives and careers were upended or destroyed by the rise of the Nazis. He first emigrated to Switzerland as the Nazis were coming to power; then he worked for more than six years at the Zurich Opera, where he served as vocal coach and chorus master for the world premieres of Berg’s Lulu and Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler. But as hostility grew toward émigrés of Jewish descent (his father was German Jewish and his mother Swedish), Dahl fled to the United States in 1939.

He settled in Los Angeles, the hometown of his future wife, Etta, whom he met in Zurich in the late 1930s. Dahl joined a vibrant community of expatriate composers who included Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. “It turned out to be a wonderful place for music at the time and for a society of émigré composers of the first rank,” said Anthony Linick, Dahl’s stepson, from his home in London, and whose 645-page biography of the composer was published in 2008.

Dahl’s American career can be divided into three main phases. After his arrival, it took him little time to be absorbed in this country’s classical scene. In February 1944, Dahl wrote in his journal of the euphoria of walking down a street in New York, arm in arm with three fellow composers: Copland, David Diamond and Harold Shapero. But in part because he was such a perfectionist and composing did not come easily to him, Dahl was not as prolific as many of his peers; he wrote just over 30 pieces, many centered on small ensembles. “He never took the easy or fashionable way out in his works,” said Tilson Thomas in a remembrance of the composer published in the Los Angeles Times shortly after Dahl’s death. “He would revise them until, like the works of Bach and Ockeghem, which he much admired, they had a sense of oneness, of tension and balance and hidden craft like a work of architecture.”

The 1948 recording of Dahl’s Concerto a Tre, with Benny Goodman:

Ingolf Dahl – A World Premier With Benny Goodman – 1948 – Past Daily Weekend Gramophone

Benny Goodman is of course known as the “King of Swing” with his world-famous big band in the 1930’s and 40’s, and his Christmas music has become “classic” during the holidays season. Below is a link to Benny Goodman’s “Jingle Bells”… MERRY CHRISTMAS !!

Hervé