Karl Miller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>How about a list of concert works written by composers known primarily for
>their popular music efforts.  ...

I can think of two Latvian composers, Imants Kalnins (born in 1941) who,
although he is regarded as a "serious" composer, gained much of his
popularity with "rock-operas" (not everybody likes his symphonies, which
are striking and rather original in the 1960s Soviet context, but do not
always seek refinement or depth), and Vilnis Salaks (born in 1939) who
is mostly known for his numerous folk-song collections, although he also
composed 4 symphonies, which I never heard.  Of course, in "recent" musical
countries with ancient folk music, the borderline between "serious" and
"folk" is sometimes less obvious.

Likewise, Silvije Bombardelli (1916) is a Croatian "serious" composer, and
even seems to have been one of his country's first dodecaphonists, but he
definitely is better-known as the author of klapa songs (a klapa being an
a capella chorus, usually male, especially in Bombardelli's music...  Some
of those songs are wonderful, actually).  Sweden's Lille Bror Soderlundh
(1912-1957) belonged to the realm of light songs, but his Violin concerto
is a brilliant and successful work, in a country not so much given to
violin concertos.

(Conversely, Dag Wiren (Sweden, 1905-1986), who once composed relatively
light serious music such as the Serenade for strings but had turned to a
very strict and uncompromising language after 1945, seems to have composed
the Swedish entry for a Eurovision Song Contest in the 1960s!)

In France, we have an instance of a popular singer (Gilbert Becaud) who
tried to compose an opera in the early 1960s, I think, but this was not
very memorable, it seems.

Isn't Zawinul a not-so-classical composer who wrote at least one symphony?
Astor Piazzola also completed one ("Buenos Aires", if I remember correctly,
in 1951) before he became a master of tango.

Finally, but this is a different situation, there are many "serious" works
by cinema composers, such as Delerue, Morricone, Rozsa, (Schnittke!!!)...
Whereas Morricone's serious works are so stern and different from his
"hits" that they generally shock his "movie fans", Rota's world is much
more consistent, and the music of Visconti's fabulous movie "il Gattopardo"
(the cheetah) comes from his symphony (No. 3?), "Sinfonia sopra una
canzone d'amore", which almost seems to have been composed just for the
soundtrack, while it was completed more than 15 years earlier.  The slow
movement includes one of the most beautiful melodic themes to be found
anywhere in Romantic orchestral music...

Thanh-Tam Le