Archive of blurbs

June 17, 2013.  Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring.  Igor Stravinsky was born on this day in 1882, but just a couple weeks ago we passed another significant milestone: the one hundredth anniversary of the premier of Le Sacre du printemps, or The Rite of Spring, his seminal achivement.  The event took place in Paris on May 29, 1913 in the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.  The ballet was performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company; it was choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky; Nikolai Roerich created the costumes and stage design.  Stravinsky, then 31 years old, was already successful and quite famous.  Three years earlier he wrote music for his first ballet, The Firebird, also for Ballets Russe (Diagilev, the impresario, first approached more established composers, Liadov and Tcherepnin, but eventually gave the commission to Stravinsky).  The Firebird was a triumph, a breakthrough both for Stravinsky and Diagilev, who immediately asked the composer to collaborate with him on another project.  Stravinsky proposed The Great Sacrifice, a ballet he was discussing with Nikolai Roerich, which would eventually become The Rite of Spring; and Diagilev agreed.  Stravinsky started working on it the same year, 1910, but soon switched to a different project; Diagilev, with his keen ear, decided that it’s worth staging, and soon Petrushka was born.  If anything, it was even more successful than The Firebird: the immensely talented Vaslav Nijinsky danced the title role, created for him by Mikhail Fokine, and the celebrated painter Alexandre Benois designed the sets.  Soon after the premier Stravinsky returned to The Rite.  He was living in Clarens, a village on the shores of Lake Geneva, working in a small room with a piano and practically no furniture.  He completed the first half (The Adoration of the Earth) in the summer of 1912, and even prepared a version for four hands, which he performed with Claude Debussy in Paris.  The second half (The Sacrifice) and the orchestration were finished in March of 1912.  He showed the score to Maurice Ravel, who thought it a very important piece of music.  Pierre Monteux, then the conductor of the Ballets Russes and not a big fan of the score, suggested some changes that Stravinsky accepted.

The premier turned into a major scandal.  Protests started almost from the beginning, even before the curtain rose to reveal the stamping dancers, and it went downhill from there.  Witnesses said that the audience was screaming so loudly that it was almost impossible to hear the music.  Stravinsky soon left the hall and watched the rest of the performance from the wings.  Both the music and Nijinsky’s choreography were offensive to many in the audience.  With passions heating up, a fight broke out in the hall.  Eventually people’s ire turned to the orchestra and all kinds of things flew into the pit; the stoic Monteux continued conducting without interruptions (several arrests were made after the performance).   The public settled down somewhat during the second half; there were even curtain calls at the end.  Some critics thought the music “barbarous,” and it’s said that Camille Saint-Saëns left the theater in disgust; Puccini called the music “cacophony.”  This didn’t stop Diagilev from taking the troupe to London, were the response was not as hostile.  Critical opinion, however, changed rather quickly.  These days The Rite is acknowledged as one of the most influential pieces of music of the 20^th century, a masterpiece that influenced generations of composers.  It’s also one of the most often recorded compositions.  We’ll hear it in the performance by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting.

June 10, 2013.  Thomas Tallis.  Even though the ever-popular Edvard Grieg, who wrote many wonderful tunes and became the first national composer of the newly independent Norway, was born this week on June 15, 1843, we’ll write about him some other time.  Today we’ll remember a composer whose date of birth, together with much of the details of his life, were lost in centuries past: Thomas Tallis.  What we do know is that he was born early in the 16^th century (1505 is the commonly assumed year).  We also know that he worked as on organist in the Dover priory around 1530, and later at the Canterbury Cathedral.  Around 1543 he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, a group of clerics and musicians who traveled with the British monarchs in order to serve their spiritual needs.   In this capacity he played and composed for four kings and queens from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I.  In 1575 Tallis, who was then 70, and the composer William Byrd, half his age at the time, were given a monopoly to publish music and music paper.  Their first publication, Cantiones Sacrae, was a set of 34 motets, 16 by Tallis and 18 by Byrd, and it was the only music published during Tallis’s lifetime. 

 Tallis lived till the age of 80, and during his life England was transformed  from a Catholic country with a Latin liturgy to an Anglican one, with a liturgy in English.  He wrote both, and his output is divided between Latin and English pieces. Among his Latin works, the setting of The lamentations of Jeremiah were widely praised then and still remain one of his most celebrated compositions.  You can listen to it here, in the performance of the ensemble Magnificat directed by Philip Cave.  Another hauntingly beautiful example is his setting of Miserere Nostri.  It’s performed (here) by the eponymous ensemble, The Tallis Scholars.  And here is an example of his "English" music, a set of nine simple but beautiful psalms called "Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter," performed by the British ensemble Stile Antico.   The Tunes were written in 1567 for Matthew Parker, the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury.   The English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams used the third Tune, Why Fum'th In Fight (it’s the first one to be performed in this recording), for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.  The Tunes are still included in many Anglican hymnals.

Two notes: the portrait above was made by Gerard Vandergucht, a British engraver of Flemish descent, about 150 year after Tallis’s death, so there’s no certainty that he actually looked anything like it.  There were no portraits of Tallis made during his life, so we have to contend with this one.  Another note: apparently, Tallis’s music, a motet called Spem in Alium (here) is mentioned in the enormously popular soft-core novel Fifty Shades of Grey.  As a result, since the publication of the novel the sales of Tallis’s album with this motet exploded, reaching number one on the UK classical music charts.  Whatever it is that brings the listeners to his music, Tallis would’ve been pleased.

June 3, 2013.  Robert Schumann and more.  One of the greatest Romantic composers, Robert Schumann was born on June 8, 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony.  Schumann is central to modern music, especially the piano repertory, and we wrote about him and featured his music many times (our library contains more than 200 recordings of his music).  Schumann was also highly creative as a critic, and practically invented the genre of “programmatic” music.  All of his early compositions were for the piano, but he started writing for other instruments later in his career.  Schumann turned out to be an extraordinary songwriter, second probably only to Schubert.  He composed the cycle Dichterliebe (The Poet's Love) in 1840.  It consists of 16 songs, the texts to which come from Heinrich Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo.  The cycle was dedicated to the great German soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, so we know that Schumann intended it for a female voice.  The music was too good to be passed up by the male singers though, and is performed by them at least as often.  The great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau recorded Dichterliebe several times, among his collaborators were Vladimir Horowitz and Alfred Brendel.   So did the French baritone Gérard Souzay (we recently heard him exquisitely singing an aria from Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione).  The tenors Peter Schreier and, closer to our times, Ian Bostridge made memorable recordings as well.  The famed Lotte Lehmann recorded the cycle with the conductor Bruno Walter at the piano in 1940; several years later Walter accompany Kathleen Ferrier in yet another recording.  One of the very best, at least in our opinion, is the recording made by the great German tenor Fritz Wunderlich.  Accompanied by Hubert Giesen, Wunderlich made this recording in October and November of 1965 and July 1966, just two months before his untimely death at the age of 36.  It was too difficult to select "favorite" sections, so here it is, in its entirely.

Several other composers were born around this date, and we’ll write more about them at a later date, but here are two of them: the peripatetic Scott, Georg Muffat was born on June 1, 1653 in Savoy.  Here is his Sonata No. 2 in G minor from the set known as Armonico Tributo.  Composed in Rome, Armonico was clearly influenced by Arcangelo Corelli, whom Muffat met while staying in the city.  The Sonata is performed by Ensemble 415, Chiara Banchini conducting.  A century and a half later, also on June 1 but of 1804, Mikhail Glinka, "the father of Russian classical music," was born.  Like Muffat, he was influenced by the Italians, but had enough of his own original talent to produce operas that are staged even today, and not just in Russia.  Here is his Overture to the 1842 opera Ruslan and Lyudmila.  The recording was made by Evgeny Mravinsky and his famed Leningrad Philharmonic in concert in 1965.  It’s probably the speediest rendition of the Overture in the recording history, but the strings manage to play (practically) every note.

May 27, 2013.  Albéniz and Korngold.  Isaac Albéniz, the oldest of the three composers who put Spanish music back on the music map (the other two being Granados and de Falla), was born on May 29, 1860 in a small town of Camprodon in northern Catalonia.  He was a piano prodigy and started performing at the age of four.  Legend has it that he ran away from home twice before reaching the age of 13, each time supporting himself by playing public concert.  At the age of seven he passed the piano entrance exams at the Paris Conservatory but wasn’t admitted because of his age.  At 14 he briefly went to the Leipzig conservatory and when money run out, to Brussels’s Royal Conservatory where he received a grant.  In 1883 he returned to Spain to teach in Madrid and Barcelona.  Albéniz was composing from an early age but took the craft seriously only after meeting Felipe Pedrell, a teacher and composer, around the time he returned to Spain.  Three years later, in 1886, he composed Suite española for piano. The suite consists of eight pieces, each dedicated to different regions of Spain (the last one is called Cuba, then a Spanish colony).  In 1893 Albéniz moved to Paris, where he befriended Vincent d’Indy, Paul Dukas, and other composers.   Between 1905 and 1909 he wrote Iberia, a set of four “books,” each containing three pieces.  Iberia became his most famous and popular composition.  (The wonderful Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha was one of the best interpreters of Albéniz’s music.  Here she is playing Book 1 of Iberia: Evocación, El puerto and Fête-dieu à Seville).  By that time Albéniz was very sick with a kidney disease.  He died on May 18, 1909, age 48, in Cambo-les-Bains, a French Basque town on the border of Spain.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold was born on May 29, 1897 in Brno, the capital of Moravia in the Czech Republic, back then called Brünn and part of Austria-Hungary.  Korngold’s story is highly unusual.  He was an amazing child prodigy, and in his youth was compared to Mozart.  At the age of nine he showed his cantata, Gold, to Gustav Mahler, who pronounced him a musical genius and suggested that Korngold study with Alexander von Zemlinsky. At the age of 11 he composed a ballet, which was staged at the Vienna Opera in 1910 and performed for the Emperor Franz Josef.  He wrote his first orchestral piece when he was 14 and then at 17 not just one but two operas.  When he was 23 he composed Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), a major opera.  At that time Korngold was so famous that opera theaters competed to premier his work.  In the end, it was performed simultaneously in two cities, Hamburg and Cologne (in Cologne the conductor was none other than Otto Klemperer).  Later on the Nazis banned the opera (Korngold was Jewish), and it disappeared from the repertoire of the major houses.  Die tote Stadt wаs revived about 30 years ago and these days is staged often.  In 1923 he wrote a Concerto for Piano Left Hand for pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right hand in World War I (Ravel also wrote his famous Concerto for the Left Hand for Wittgenstein, as did Prokofiev with his concerto no. 4, although Wittgenstein never performed it).  In 1934 Korngold was invited to write music for theater and film in Hollywood, which he did very successfully.  He returned to Austria, but in 1938 Warner Brothers invited him back to compose the music to a new Errol Flynn movie called The Adventures of Robin Hood.  While he was in California, Hitler and his army entered Austria in what became known as Anschluss (later on Korngold would say that Robin Hood saved his life).  He continued writing film scores, very successfully until 1946, but that whole period was lost to the classical music.  He returned to classical composition with the Violin Concerto (premiered in 1947), but his style, rich, melodic and highly romantic, was completely out of vogue: it was way behind the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg and his disciples, behind Stravinsky, Bartok and so many others.  Music critics considered him a “film composer,” a disdainful designation.  It’s hard to imagine a greater transformation than what Korngold’s reputation underwent, from “genius” to a complete “has-been.”  The last 40 years saw somewhat of a rehabilitation: several of his operas were staged and recorded, the violin concerto became popular again, and so did some of his symphonic works.  It’s clear that Korngold never fulfilled the great promise of his early years; nonetheless, he was a composer of talent, even if this talent didn’t quite fit the musical developments of the 20^th century.  Here is Marietta’s Lied from Die tote Stadt, sung by the incomparable Renée Fleming.  And here Hilary Hahn performs Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35.  Deutsche Symphonie Orchestra is conducted by Kent Nagano.

May 20, 2013.  Richard Wagner 200.  Richard Wagner, this most exasperating of musical geniuses, was born on May 22, 1813 in Leipzig.  He was one of the most influential composers of the 19^th century; the list of musicians indebted to Wagner is enormous, from Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf and early Arnold Schoenberg in Germany to César Franck, Ernest Chausson, Jules Massenet and Claude Debussy in the francophone world (Debussy struggled with Wagner’s influence for years).  And it went well beyond opera: philosophers, starting with Friedrich Nietzsche, poets, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine, also writers, too many to mention, even painters fell under his spell.  Wagner had his detractors too: the German music world at the time was divided into “Wagnerites” on one side and followers of Brahms on the other.  Eduard Hanslick, an influential music critic, was an enemy.  Wagner was probably the only composer for whom an opera house was built: King Ludwig II of Bavaria, his major patron, helped to finance its construction in Bayreuth.  It was completed in 1876, just in time for the permier of Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle.  Wagner was also a notorious anti-semite and racist, but of course we cannot hold him responcible for the Nazi’s appropriation of his music half a century later.

Wagner wrote some symphonic music, none of it very successul.  His genius was fully realized in his operas, from the early Rienzi (1842) and The Flying Dutchman (1843), to Tannhäuser (1845) and Lohengrin (1850).  He started writing the story of Siegfried's Death in 1848.  He eventually expanded and rewrote the original libretto and turned it into the cycle of four operas called Der Ring des Nibelungen.  He started composing the first opera of the cycle, Das Rheingold, in 1853 and completed the Cycle in 1874 with Götterdämmerung.  In 1857 he temporarily stopped working on the Cycle and wrote one of his greatest creations, the mesmerizing Tristan und Isolde.  Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg followed in 1868.  His last opera, Parsifal, was written in 1882, less than a year before his death in Venice in February of 1883.  His body was taken by gondola and then by train to Germany.  He was buried in Bayreuth.

The singing roles in Wagner operas are extremely demanding, and require exceptional physical stamina.  Most of the operas are very (some might say excruciatingly) long: Die Meistersinger has about four and a half hours of music, Parsifal is not much shorter, both Tristan und Isolde and Sigfried are about four hours long without an intermission.  Wagner’s operas also require a very special clarity of tone, with practically no vibrato.  Wagnerian tenors, possessing power, richness of voice and drama, became known as Heldentenor, “heroic tenor” in German.  Probably the most famous Heldentenor of the 20^th century was Lauritz Melchior.  Siegfried Jerusalem, who recently finished his operatic career, and Ben Heppner, still quite active, are among the noted Heldentenors.  Wagner also created great (and very challenging) soprano roles; for example Brünnhilde in the four operas of the Ring, Isolde in Tristan, and Kundry in Parsifal.  Kirsten Flagstad and Birgit Nilsson were incomparable Wagnerian sopranos.  Jane Eaglen and Deborah Voight are active today and perform admirably in major opera theaters.

Here’s the Prelude to Act I of Tristan und Isolde, recorded in 1952 by Wilhelm Furtwangler and Philharmonia Orchestra (it was very effectively used by Lars von Trier in his film Melancholia).  From the same opera, the German soprano Waltraud Meier sings the famous Isolde Liebestod (here).  And here is an excerpt from the legendary 1935 recording of Die Walküre with Lauritz Melchior and Lotte Lehmann.  Bruno Walter conducts the Vienna Philarmonic.

May 13, 2013.  Claudio Monteverdi was born on May 15, 1567 in Cremona, a town famous as a musical center and even more so for its luthiers: by the time Monteverdi was born, the Amati family was already producing fine violins for two generations, the Guarneris were to come shortly thereafter, then followed by Antonio Stradivari.  Young Claudio took musical lessons from the maestro di capella of the Cremona Cathedral.  He wrote his first motets and madrigals at the age of 15.  Shortly after he moved to Mantua to serve at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga.  The duke was a major patron of arts, befriending the poet Torquato Tasso and employing the painter Peter Paul Rubens (two and a half centuries later Giuseppe Verdi would stage one of his most famous operas, Rigoletto, at the ducal palace).  Monteverdi stayed in Mantua for more than 20 years; he married there and had children.  His official position was that of the court conductor.  In 1613 he moved to Venice to assume the same position in the basilica of San Marco, were Andrea and then Giovanni Gabrieli served as organists before him.  In 1632 he became a priest.  He lived in Venice for the rest of his life, and died there in 1643.  He’s buried in the great basilica of dei Frari. 

Monteverdi’s music spans two styles, that of the late Renaissance and the nascent Baroque.  He wrote nine books of madrigals, church music and operas.  You can listen to Parlo, miser'o taccio?, a madrigal from Book VII, here  (Cettina Cadelo and Cristina Miatello, sopranos, Giovanni Faverio, bass) and to Dolcissimo uscignolo, from Book VIII, here (Anthony Rooley conducts his Consort of Musicke).  Monteverdi’s truly revolutionary achievements were in opera.  He wrote eighteen of them, but only L'Orfeo, which he wrote while in Mantua in 1607, Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria(The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland), written in Venice around 1639, and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppaea), 1643, survive in complete form.  L'incoronazione was revived at the end of the 20^th century, and there are several recording of the opera.  Here is the aria Disprezzata Regina from L'incoronazione.  It’s sung by Frederica von Stade with Raymond Leppard conducting the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

Maria Theresia von Paradis was born on May 15, 1759.  She lost her sight at anearly age, but continued to study music (one of her teachers was Antonio Salieri) and became a concretizing pianist and singer.  She also wrote several cantatas and some instrumental pieces.  She’s famous for three things: for being treated by Franz Anton Mesmer, the inventor of mesmerism, with no lasting effects; for being a probable dedicatee of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 18; and for writing a beautiful piece called Sicilienne, even though these days many musicologists doubt the attribution.  Here it is, played by Jacqueline du Pré, with Gerald Moore on the piano.

May 6, 2013.  Brahms, Tchaikovsky – and Stamitz.  Two great composers of the 19^th century were born on May 7: Johannes Brahms in 1833, and Pyotr (or Peter Ilyich, as by some twist of linguistic fate he became known in the English-speaking world) Tchaikovsky seven years later.  Last year to celebrate their birthdays we played their first piano concertos (Brahms wrote two, both great; Tchaikovsky – three, but only the first one remains popular, and for good reason).  This time we’ll turn to their violin concertos.  Brahms wrote his first and only violin concerto, Op. 77 in D Major, in 1878.  It was dedicated to Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s friend and one of the most prominent violinists of the 19^th century.  Joachim premiered the concerto the same year in Leipzig, in a concert that also featured Beethoven’s violin concerto.  Brahms himself conducted the Gewandhaus orchestra.  Joachim composed the cadenza, which is the version we’ll hear, in the performance by the violinist Vadim Gluzman, with Saarbrücken Radio Symphony, Günther Herbig conducting. 

As it happens, Tchaikovsky also wrote his violin concerto, Op. 35, also in D Major ,and also in 1878.  He was staying in Clarens, a small village not far from Montreux on Lake Geneva, recovering from his disastrous marriage to Antonina Milyukova. (Clarens had a number of connections with Russia: Stravinsky lived and wrote most of the Rite of Spring in Clarens in 1912, and later, in 1920, while there, wrote another ballet, Pulcinella.  Vladimir Nabokov is buried in Clarens).  Tchaikovsky dedicated his concerto to the famous violin teacher Leopold Auer, expecting him to play the premier.  But Auer, who read the score presented by the composer, decided that he didn’t like the concerto and refused to perform it.  Tchaikovsky was deeply hurt.  The work was eventually premiered in Vienna by Adolph Brodsky, and Tchaikovsky changed the dedication to him.  The concerto was rather poorly received; Eduard Hanslick, an influential critic and big supporter of Brahms, called it “pretentious.”  Perceptions changed quickly, however, and since then Tchaikovsky’s concerto  has become one of the most popular in the violin repertoire.  We’ll hear it in the performance by Julia Fischer; Yakov Kreizberg conducts the Russian National Orchestra. Kreizberg, the brother of another famous conductor, Semyon Bychkov, died at the age of 51 in 2011, five years after this recording was made.
 
Carl Stamitz is not as famous as either Brahms or Tchaikovsky, and deservedly so.  Still, he wrote some very nice music, and probably more clarinet concertos than any other composer - eleven in all.  Stamitz was born on May 8, 1745, in Mannheim.  His father, Johann, a noted composer and violinist, was appointed to the court of the Elector several years earlier, and was Carl’s first music teacher.  The Elector maintained an orchestra that was famous around Europe; Carl joined it at the age of 17.  Among the court musicians there were a number of composers, who are now collectively known as Mannheim School.  While not very famous nowadays, these composers, and Carl Stamitz among them, influenced both Franz Joseph Haydn and Mozart.  In 1770 Carl left the orchestra and began a career of a traveling virtuoso: he played violin, viola, and viola d'amore (Carl eventually wrote several works for this instrument).  He traveled all around Europe, playing concerts in Paris, London, Saint Petersburg, and many principalities of Germany.  Eventually he moved to Jena, and died there, impoverished, in 1801.  It’s said that in his last years his interests turned to alchemy.  Stamitz’s Viola concerto was written in 1774.  A lovely piece, it’s performed here by the German violist Tabea Zimmermann, with the European Union Chamber Orchestra, Dimitri Demetriades conducting.

April 29, 2013.  Alessandro Scarlatti.  These days Scarlatti-père is not as famous as his son Domenico, but in his day Alessandro was the foremost opera composer.  He was born in Palermo, the Kingdom of Sicily, on May 2, 1660.  At the age of 12 he was sent to Rome.  He wrote his first opera at the age of 19; Queen Christina of Sweden, who then lived in Rome, was impressed and offered her patronage.  His work was noticed in Naples, at that time one of the greatest music centers of Europe, and in 1684 he became Maestro di Cappella to the viceroy of Naples.  He stayed there till 1702 and wrote 40 operas.  For a while he moved to Florence but then returned to Rome, where he was offered a position of Maestro di Cappella at the court of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (just some years earlier Arcangelo Corelli had the same patrons, Queen Christina and Cardinal Ottoboni).  While in the employ of the Cardinal, he wrote several operas, including Il Mitridate Eupatore, which became very popular (here is the aria Cara tomba sung by the German coloratura soprano Simone Kermes).  In 1706 Scarlatti was elected to the Accademia dell'Arcadia (as was Corelli).  There he probably met the young Handel, who then lived in Rome and attended meetings of the Academy often.  In 1709 Scarlatti moved back to Naples, where he continued to write at a furious pace: operas (he wrote a total 115 of them), masses and chamber cantatas.  He retired from the viceroy’s court in 1723 and died two years later, on October 24, 1725.

By the end of his life Scarlatti’s operas were eclipsed by Handel; not many of them are performed these days, although lately there has been somewhat of a revival.  Still, not only did Scarlatti write some very lovely music, he was an innovator as well: for his operas he established a form of three-part overture, a forerunner of the classical symphony.  You can listen to two arias from Scarlatti’s early operas.  Beniamino Gigli, one of the greatest tenors of the 20^th century, sings the aria "Già il sole dal Gange" from L'honestà negli amori (the opera was written in 1680).   And here the technically perfect Cecilia Bartoli sings the aria O cessate di piagarmi from the opera Il Pompeo (1683).

April 22, 2013.  Sergei Prokofiev.  Tomorrow is the birthday of Sergey Prokofiev, one of the greatest composers of the 20^th century; he was born on April 23, 1891.  We have written about him pretty extensively before, so we thought we’d celebrate this anniversary by looking into some of his compositions.  Prokofiev was tremendously versatile and wrote in practically all musical genres.  He wrote for the piano, and not just sonatas, which are among the most profound pieces in his output, but also smaller pieces, among them the Toccata, Sarcasms, and twenty Visions fugitives.  He also completed five piano concertos.  A superb pianist himself, he transcribed some of his own symphonic pieces to piano and played them in concerts.  He wrote a lot of instrumental music: sonatas (and other pieces) for violin and for cello; he composed a wonderful flute sonata, which later, on the urging of his good friend David Oistrakh, he transcribed for the violin.  His violin and cello concertos are performed regularly.  He wrote symphonic music throughout his entire life, from Scythian Suite, his response to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in 1915 and Symphony no. 1, Classical, in 1916, to Symphony no. 7, which he completed while ill not long before his death in 1953.  And of course the ever-popular ballets; operas, some successful (like Igrok), some less so; and even very decent film scores.

Prokofiev returned from France to the Soviet Union in 1936.  He was promised independence and privilege, and for the rest of his life he did live a life very different from that of an average Soviet citizen.  Still, he felt compelled to write “appropriate” music, for example a Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, based on the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, which he started almost immediately upon his arrival in Moscow.  Unfortunately for Prokofiev, the music turned to be too unconventional, and wasn’t performed till much later, when both Prokofiev and Stalin were already dead.  That didn’t stop Prokofiev from trying: he wrote such pieces as the cantata Zdravitsa, hailing Stalin, and music for the film Alexander Nevsky.  These attempts to ingratiate himself with the Soviet leadership didn’t really help: Prokofiev, always under suspicion, completely fell from grace after the war, when the Party intensified its attacks on so-called “formalism.”  In 1948 his first wife Lina was arrested on the usual trumped-up charges of espionage.  Prokofiev had to work hard on creating “Soviet” music: instinctively, his music remained free of any traces of Social realism (in that he was very different from Shostakovich).  The case in point is the trio of piano sonatas, sometimes called War sonatas, numbers 6, 7, 8.  They were composed from 1939 through 1944.  These sonatas are among the greatest in the piano repertoire of the 20^th century.  Number 6 was written in 1939-40, and first performed by the composer himself.  Sviatoslav Richter became a great champion of this sonata.  No. 7 was completed in 1942, and premiered by Richter.  No. 8 was completed in 1944 and premiered by Emil Gilels.  Here’s piano sonata No. 6 in A major, Op. 82, performed by Sviatoslav Richter in Locarno on September 8, 1966 (live recording).  The sketch above of Sergei Prokofiev giving the premiere of his 3 Pieces Op.59 (above) was made in 1935 by Hilda Béatrice Wiener.

April 15, 2013.  Josquin des Prez.  We hope that admirers of Franz von Suppé’s operettas, Nikolai Myaskovsky’s symphonies and Giuseppe Torelli’s concerti grossi will forgive us if we skip their birthdays (all three were born this week) and instead write about a composer whose birthday is unknown.  Josquin des Prez, one of the greatest Franco-Flemish composers, was born around 1450 (or several years later), probably in the County of Hainaut, which occupied the land on the border between modern-day Belgium and France and then part of the Duchy of Burgundy.  The lands of the Duchy, geographically separated from the Burgundian proper and consisting of small counties that are now Belgium and the Netherlands, were inherited by the dukes at the end of the 14^th century.  The Duchy was one of the most developed European realms, both economically and artistically.  Philip the Good, the duke who ruled from 1419 to 1467, was famous as a patron of painters, Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden among them.  Guillaume Dufay, probably the most renowned composer of the time, worked in his employ.  Very little is known about Josquin’s youth.  It’s assumed that around 1477 he traveled to Aix-en-Provence and was a singer in the chapel of René, Duke of Anjou.  Around 1480 he worked in Milan, probably it the service of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, well known to the fans of the TV series The Borgias.  And it was probably Sforza who introduced Josquin to the Papal court in Rome.  From 1489 to 1495 Josquin sang in the papal choir; a wall of the Sistine Chapel bears a graffito with his name.  All the while he was also composing: we know that some of his motets are dated to those years.  He probably moved to Milan around 1498 to work for the Sforzas again, and after Milan fell to the French he moved to France.  In 1503 he was hired by Ercole, the Duke of Ferrara.  It was here that he composed a popular Miserere, a motet for five voices in plainchant, which was probably inspired by the life and execution of Girolamo Savonarola (you can listen to it here, performed by the ensemble De Labyrintho, Walter Testolin conducting).  In 1504 Josquin left Ferrara and returned to Condé-sur-l'Escaut, not far from where he was born.  He lived there till his death in 1521.

The attribution of Josquin’s opus is a work in progress in itself: rather than adding to it, musicologists subtract works that were traditionally credited to him.  Still, even in this diminished state, the surviving corpus is large: 16 masses (though the authenticity of some of them is in doubt), and a large number of motets and chansons.  His polyphonic style was highly influential, and he was the most famous composer till Palestrina more than half a century later.  Here is the motet Ave Maria, performed by Tallis Scholars, and here – the first two parts from his famous Missa La sol fa re mi, Kyrie and Gloria, performed by the same ensemble.  Josquin took the syllables of a phrase "Lascia fare mi" ("leave me alone" in Italian) and derived notes La (A), Sol (G), Fa (F), Re (D), and Mi (E) from it.  Different figures consisting of these notes appear throughout the Mass.

April 8, 2013.  Joshual Bell and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  Joshua Bell is one of the most successful American violin virtuosos, known forhis beauty of tone and exceptional technique.  Joshua studied with Josef Gingold at the University of Indiana and later took classes with Ivan Galamian and Henryk Szeryng.  When he was 14 he appeared as a soloist in a Mozart concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Riccardo Muti.  Three years later he played at Carnegie Hall with the St. Louis Symphony.  He went on to perform at all the major concert halls, in solo recitals and with orchestras.  Among his recordings are violin concertos by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Sibelius.  During his career he played and recorded with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Steven Isserlis and other musicians; he also partnered with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.  In 2007 in recognition of his achievements he was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize.

The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields is a famed chamber orchestra, which was founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1959.  Sir Neville led the orchestra till 1974, when the late Iona Brown took over (he stayed as the Chairman till 1992).  Murray Perahia was the principal guest conductor for a number of years, but since Neville Marriner the orchestra didn’t have a formal music director.  This changed in September 2011, when Joshua Bell was appointed music director of the Academy.  A CD containing two of Beethoven’s symphonies, numbers Four and Seven, is their first collaborative recording.

Sandwiched between the two giants, Eroica, no. 3 and Symphony no. 5, a somewhat less ambitious no. 4, op. 60 was composed in 1806, the same year Beethoven completed the violin concerto and piano concerto no. 4.  The symphony opens with a slow, pensive introduction, which eventually burst into a full-blooded Allegro vivace.  The stately second movement, Adagio, allows the Academy strings to shine.  The elegant third movement, also in the tempo of Allegro vivace, is shaped as a scherzo, and the fourth, Allegro ma non troppo, is, as the marking suggests, fast but not too much so, and is played as such.  Symphony no. 7 op. 92, completed six years later, also belongs to Beethoven’s “middle period.”  His hearing was deteriorating rapidly, but in 1812 he apparently still could follow a conversation and hear music.  Like the Fourth, symphony no. 7 consists of four movements.  The first movement, Poco sostenuto – vivace starts with a slow introduction, similar to the beginning of the Fourth, and then proceeds, rather solemnly, until it evolves into a more nimble Vivace.  Some of the tonal repetitions of this movement (as well as those in other parts of the symphony) sound almost maniacal, and prompted Carl Maria von Weber to call it "fit for a madhouse."  Nonetheless, it miraculously propels forward following its internal dynamics.  The second movement, the somber Allegretto, remains one of Beethoven’s most popular pieces.  You can listen to it here.  The contrasting third movement, Presto – Assai meno presto, is full of verve, and so is the symphony’s dance-like fast-paced finale, Allegro con brio.  It was not written elegantly, and the Academy interprets it that way, earthily and energetically.

For this recording, the Academy added several musicians for a total of about 40, still a relatively small ensemble compared to the modern symphony orchestra.  The sound is supple and well balanced, tempos sensible, without any excesses, and the phrasing compelling.  The recording sounds fresh and, we believe, portends a happy partnership between the orchestra and its new music director.  We look forward to their new releases.

April 1, 2013.  Busoni and Rachmaninov.  Two composers born this week were also some of the most influential pianists of the 20^th century: Ferruccio Busoni and Sergei Rachmaninov.  Busoni was born on April 1, 1866 in Empoli, Tuscani.  A child prodigy, Busoni first performed publicly at the age of seven.  He studied mostly in Germany, and then taught in Helsinki, Moscow, and Berlin, where he eventually settled and lived for the rest of his life (but for an interruption during the Great War).  In addition to being a piano virtuoso, Busoni had many students who became famous pianists and had many students of their own.  For example, Busoni’s favorite pupil, the brilliant Egon Petri, was in turn a teacher of Earl Wild, John Ogden – and Victor Borge, among many others.  A very different kind of pianist, Alexander Brailowsky, who became famous for his interpretations of Chopin’s music, was also a pupil.  Elena Gnessin studied with Busoni for a year while he taught at the Moscow conservatory, and then went on to establish a music school, which eventually became the Gnessin Academy.  Busoni died in 1924, and most of the acoustic recordings that he made during his life are, unfortunately, of rather bad quality.  There are also a number of original piano rolls, but in the opinion of his students, they do not fairly represent his pianism.  Wikipedia quotes the pianist Gunnar Johansen, Egon Petri’s student, who heard Busoni play, stating that the only adequate piano roll recording is that of the Feux follets, the fifth of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.   Here it is, courtesy of Youtube.

We are much luckier with Sergei Rachmaninov’s recordings.  Rachmaninov, who was born on the same day in 1873, is considered one of the greatest pianists of the modern era.  Just seven years older than Busoni, he lived in an era of much more advanced recording technology.  He made several recordings for Edison Records, and then, in 1920, signed a contract with Victor Talking Machine Company, the predecessor of RCA Victor.  While Busoni never recorded his own music, Rachmaninov played many of his own compositions for RCA: all four piano concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and many piano pieces.  Here is Sergei Rachmaninov playing the first movement, Moderato - Allegro of his Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.  Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski conducting.  This recording was made in April of 1929.

March 25, 2013.  Bartók and Haydn.  Béla Bartók was born on this day in 1881 in a small town in an Austro-Hungarian province of Banat.  The town, Nagyszentmiklós, was heavily Hungarian, but the region reverted to Romania after the First World War.  In 1899 he moved to Budapest to study at the Royal Academy of Music.  In his early years his composing style was influenced by Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy.   His first significant piece was Violin concerto no. 1, composed in 1907-08 but not published till 1959, fourteen years after Bartók’s death.  Three years later came his only opera, Bluebeard's Castle.  Now considered a masterpiece, it was rejected at the time as not fit for the stage.  During a very productive period, which lasted till the beginning of World War II, Bartók wrote two ballets, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin (the music to the latter, usually performed as an orchestral suite, became one of his most popular pieces), four quartets, two violin sonatas, and such masterpiece as Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936).  By the end of the 1930s the conservative regime of the “regent” Miklós Horthy was siding with the Nazi Germany.  Bartók, strongly anti-Nazi in his political convictions, felt increasingly uncomfortable in Hungary, and in 1940 he left for the US.  He and his wife settled in New York, but the country never became their home (it’s interesting that his former pupil, Fritz Reiner by then was enjoying a flourishing career with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Georg Solti and the pianist Lili Kraus, both his former pupils, had also left Hungary).  The Bartóks were often short on money, and in 1942 Béla fell ill.  Two years later Bartók was diagnosed with leukemia. His friends Joseph Szigeti, a famous violinist, and Fritz Reiner tried to help with commissions.  One of such commissions, from Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony, produced the famous Concerto for Orchestra.  Yehudi Menuhin commissioned a Sonata for Solo Violin.  Bartók died on September 26, 1945, leaving his Third Piano concerto and several other works unfinished.  Here is Concerto For Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

Franz Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 in a village of Rohrau in western Austria.  In addition to string quartets and symphonies, he wrote more than 60 piano sonatas.  We are fortunate to have a large collections of those: Davide Polovineo of Istituto Europeo di Musica undertook a research project into all of Haydn’s piano sonatas and uploaded many of them to Classical Connect.  Here’s Sonata Hob XVI: 20 in C minor; it was composed in 1777 while Haydn was working for the Esterházys.  It’s performed, superbly, by Alfred Brendel.

March 18, 2013.  Mostly Bach.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, a town in Thuringia, Germany.  His great Mass in B minor BWV 232 was one of his the last compositions to be completed in 1749 (Bach died a year later).  Bach was a Lutheran, practically all of his sacred music was composed for Lutheran services, so it’s quite a mystery why Bach decided to compose a Mass, a setting for a Catholic liturgy.  The Mass was probably never performed in its entirety till the revival of Bach’s music in the mid-19^th century; it’s not even clear if Bach intended for it to be performed that way, as different parts are scored for different ensembles.  As was so often the case in his career, Bach, who regularly had to compose a predetermined number of pieces on a tight schedule, reused much of his material written earlier.  In this case, he picked Kyrie and Gloria, which he composed in 1733 as the Missa, and included them without a change as the first part of the complete Mass (he also used several sections of the same Missa to compose a cantata, Gloria in excelsis Deo, in 1745).  Some music in the second part, Credo or Symbolum Nicenum, was also written earlier, but some was composed for the complete Mass.  The third part, Sanctus, is a copy of a work written in 1724, and most of the music in Part IV, Osanna, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei was resued from earlier compositions.  Nonetheless, by virtue of Bach’s genius, the complete Mass stands as a unified whole, and one of the greatest achievements in the history of music.   Here’s Kyrie eleison, the very first section of the Mass, and here is Sanctus, Part III, which consists of only one section, and Osanna in excelsis Deo, the first section of part IV, titled Osanna, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei.  They are performed by the Münchener Bach Orchester & Chor, Karl Richter conducting.

Georg Philipp Telemann, Bach’s friend and the godfather of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, was born on March 14, 1681 in Magdeburg.  One of the most prolific composers (he penned around 3000 pieces) Telemann’s legacy presents a striking example of changing fortunes.  During his life he was considered a major composer, popular not just in Germany but abroad and favorably compared to J. S. Bach.  Then by the 19^th century his reputation sunk to such a degree that Bach’s biographers used Telemann’s name as an example of inferior composers of the time (turns out that some of the work attributed to Bach was actually written by Telemann).  Of course many of the 3000 pieces Telemann wrote were mediocre, but that’s not how talents are judged.  Here’s his superb cantata, Allein Gott in der Höh sei Her, which should put to rest all speculations about Telemann’s gifts.  Performers are: Maurice André, trumpet, Barry McDaniel, bass, Chorale Philippe Caillard, Chamber Orchestra of Saarland Radio, Karl Ristenpart conducting.

March 11, 2013.  Van Cliburn may have been more of a pianist than a musician, and a cultural phenomenon above all, but he affected the lives of millions of people, and that alone has secured him a unique place in the musical Pantheon.  His recordings of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Rachmaninov’s Third are among the very finest; and even though his name won’t be mentioned in the same breath as Rubinstein, Richter, Horowitz, Michelangeli or Brendel’s, his death on February 27, 2013 of bone cancer was an event that made the front pages of all the major newspapers and news channels around the world.

When Cliburn came to Moscow in the spring of 1958, he was an acknowledged talent with a sputtering career.  He studied with Rosina Lhévinne at the Juilliard, receiving a diploma in 1954.  That year he won the prestigious Leventritt competition, which earned him an appearance at the Carnegie Hall.  But the mid-1950s also witnessed the ascent of an extraordinary group of young American pianists: Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis, Daniel Pollack, John Browning, Gary Graffman.  And of course Arthur Rubinstein, though in his mid-60s, was still playing exceptionally well (Vladimir Horowitz was on one of his famous hiatus).  All in all, a difficult time to start a major career.  It was Rosina Lhévinne who suggested that her former pupil enter the first international Tchaikovsky competition.  Ms. Lhévinne graduated from the Moscow Conservatory with the Gold Medal, and so did her future husband Josef; both studied with Vasily Safonov.  They emigrated from Russia before the First World War and eventually settled in New York.  In America, Josef Lhévinne, who by all accounts possessed a prodigious technique, had a small career as a concert pianist, but preferred to teach at the Juilliard.  Rosina worked as his assistant, and took over his class after Josef‘s death.  It became one of the most celebrated in the history of Juilliard.

As Cliburn later said in one of his interviews, he thought his prospects going to the Tchaikovsky competition were not very good, as he expected a Soviet pianist to win.  So did the Soviet musical establishment.  In a country where classical music occupied a very special place, both socially and politically, and successful musicians were feted by the State, the first international competition was an event of great magnitude.   Its results were not to be taken lightly.  The country was represented by several established, first-rate pianists, Lev Vlasenko and Naum Shtarkman among them (Shtarkman was already 30, older than the maximum allowed age, but organizers let him participate nonetheless).  Cliburn played well during the first round and was admitted to the second; word about the talented American with Russian musical roots started spreading around Moscow. 

He played his second round program, which included Chopin’s Fantasy in F minor, Op. 49 and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12, brilliantly.  Sviatoslav Richter, a member of the piano jury, gave Cliburn 25 points, the highest mark.  (The jury itself was spectacular: Emil Gilels was the Chairman, and among the members were Henrich Neuhaus, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Lev Oborin, and Carlo Zecchi).  By the third, and final round, Cliburn was the clear favorite not only of the jury but of the public as well.  To appreciate the excitement the Competition generated in Moscow, one has to remember the atmosphere of 1958.  It was just five years since Stalin’s death.  The Russian society, shut down behind the Curtain and traumatized by the terror of the previous 40 years, was opening up, just a bit, during Khrushchev’s “thaw.”  People were yearning for new things, and the gangly, 6-foot-4, smiling and irresistibly charming American, who for an average Muscovite looked like an alien, perfectly personified these desires.

The final round was a triumph.  The requisite Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov’s Third were spectacular.  When Cliburn finished, the public was on its feet, screaming “winner, winner.” In a highly unusual move, Gilels, the jury chairman, went backstage to congratulate him.  Richter called him a genius, adding that he does not use the term lightly.  Giving the first prize to an American required Khrushchev’s consent, but the premier, charmed as everybody else, approved.  The post-competition concerts in Leningrad and again in Moscow were immensely successful.  In the US the win also generated tremendous enthusiasm.  Just one year earlier, the US was stunned when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, thus undermining the idea of American technological superiority, and here was a young Texan, who beat the Russians in the cultural field, probably the only area in which the American psyche was still somewhat unsure of itself.  New York welcomed Cliburn with a ticker-tape parade, an event unimaginable these days.  Time magazine featured his photo with the caption: “The Texan who conquered Russia.”  He made a recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano concerto with Kirill Kondrashin for RCA, and it sold more than one million copies, eventually going triple-platinum (apparently, still a record for a recording of a concerto).  He went on tour of major American concert halls.  But as it turned out the years 1958 and ’59 were the peak of his career.  The public, and Sol Hurok, his impresario, wanted him to play the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov concertos over and over, and Cliburn had to oblige.  In his recitals, Cliburn attempted to expand the repertory but was met with criticism.  He went back to Moscow in 1960 and 1962; the general public still adored him, but some critics were less than satisfied.  The consensus was that while he played some pieces extremely well, (Prokofiev’s Third Piano concerto was one of them) other things worked less successfully, Beethoven in particular.  His concert schedule became less active, and by 1978 he dropped off the concert scene.

In the end, it doesn’t matter all that much.  Cliburn left us several wonderful recordings, conquered Russia and changed the history of two countries.  Here’s the historical 1958 recording of the Tachikovsky First piano concerto in B-flat minor.  Van Clibrun, Kirill Kondrashin, RCA Symphony orchestra.

March 4, 2013.  Vivaldi, Ravel, Gesualdo.  Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice on March 4, 1678.  One of the greatest and most influential of the  Baroque composers, these days he’s mostly known for the ubiquitous set of violin concertos known as The Four Seasons.  The prolific Vivaldi, who was also a virtuoso violinist, did write a large number of concertos (by some counts more than 500) for different instruments, most for violin, but also for cello, viola d’amore, and the winds, oboe, flute, recorder, and other.  But Vivaldi also wrote around 50 operas, which in his days were very popular.  In the 18^th century, Vivaldi’s influence spread all over Italy, France, and Germany (Bach transcribed many of his concertos) but soon after his death in 1741 his popularity started waning.  Many of his manuscripts were lost, and by the end of the 19^th century his music was rarely performed.  It’s interesting that Italian fascism was one of the reasons for the rediscovery of Vivaldi:  the search for “national roots” in the 1920s and ‘30s led the composer Alferdo Casella, and also Ezra Pound and his mistress Olga Rudge to his music.  In 1939 Casella organized a “Vivaldi Week,” which became a milestone; Vivaldi’s music has remained popular ever since.

For many years Vivaldi worked as an impresario, staging his own operas and also those by his fellow Venetians, for example Albinoni and Galuppi.  In the second half of the 20^th century Vivaldi’s operas also saw a revival, even if not to the same degree as his orchestral music.  Here’s an aria from Farnace, at one time one of his most popular operas, which was premiered in 1727 at the Teatro Sant'Angelo.  The young French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky is in the title role.  Ensemble Matheus is conducted by it’s founder Jean-Christophe Spinosi.  And here is the first aria from Vivaldi motet Nulla in mundo pax sincera.  The soprano is Magda Kalmár, with Ferenc Liszt Chamber Orchestra, Sándor Frigyes conducting.

The ever-popular Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875.  Here’s La vallée des cloches ("The Valley of Bells") from his piano suite Miroirs (Reflections).  The suite was written between 1904 and 1905 and dedicated to Les Apaches, a group of French artists and musicians.  Ravel was one of them, as was the pianist who premiered Miroirs, Ravel’s good friend Ricardo Viñes.  You’ll hear it in the performance by the Israeli-born pianist Ruti Abramovitch.

Carlo Gesualdo, the prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, was one of the most unusual composers in the history of music.  It’s hard to beat the description given to him by Wikipedia: “an Italian nobleman, lutenist, composer, and murderer.”  Gesualdo was born on March 8, 1566 in Venosa, in what is now the southern province of Basilicata, then part of the Kingdom on Naples.  In 1586 he married his first cousin, Maria d’Avalos, who was several years older than Carlo and already twice-widowed.  Two years later Maria began an affair with Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria.  On October 16, 1590, at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples, Gesualdo caught his wife and the duke in flagrante and stabbed both of them to death.  That being a crime of passion, Gesualdo was not prosecuted, even though the story was widely reported.  The famous poet Torquato Tasso, Gesualdo’s friend until the murder, wrote several sonnets eulogizing the lovers.  This episode didn’t prevent Gesualdo from marrying Leonora d'Este, a niece of Duke of Ferrara, in 1596.  Gesualdo composed five books of madrigals, music for the Passion, and some instrumental pieces.  His music was highly unorthodox, expressive and chromatic to an unusual extent.  Even today its modulations prick up listeners’ ears.  You can hear it in his setting of O Vos Omnes, performed by the Cambridge Singers, John Rutter conducting (here) or in the madrigal Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (I die, alas, in my suffering) performed by the Deller consort (here).

We mourn the passing of Van Cliburn, who died on February 27 of bone cancer.  We’ll dedicate the next entry to this phenomenal pianist.

February 25, 2013.  Rossini, Chopin, Smetana.  Three composers were born this week, Gioachino Rossini, Frédéric Chopin and Bedřich Smetana, Rossini on February 29, 1792, Chopin on March 1, 1810 (there is some confusion regarding the date: the record in the parish register says February 22, but it was entered a couple months after Chopin’s birth, and the family always celebrated his birthday on March 1), and Smetana on March 2, 1824.  We’ve written about Rossini before, and Chopin doesn’t need any introductions: he remains one of the most popular composers both with performers (we have more than 300 recordings of his works) and listeners.  So in lieu of commemorations, here’s Rossini’s overture to the opera La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).  According to Rossini himself, it was written on the day of the performance, on May 31, 1817 in Milan, with Rossini locked in a room, throwing pages of completed music through the window for the copyists.  If true, we have to acknowledge the professionalism of the musicians of La Scala orchestra, who were able to perform the Overture later that evening site unseen.  In this recording it is performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, Claudio Abbado conducting.  As for Chopin, here’s Bolero Op 19 from 1833, one of his less frequently performed pieces.  Lara Downes is at the piano.

Bedřich Smetana, the "father of Czech music," was born in a small picturesque town of Litomyšl not far from Prague, in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  German was the official language of Bohemia, and Czech music, as such, practically didn’t exist (Josef Mysliveček, 1737 – 1781, was born in Prague but wrote Italian opera seria and classical symphonies and spent most of his productive years in Italy.  Anton Reicha, 1770 – 1836, was also born in Prague, but lived mostly in Vienna, eventually settling in Paris and becoming a French citizen).  At the age of 15, Bedřich was sent to Pague, to the Academic Grammar school.  He didn’t fit in there, disliked the school and skipped many classes; instead he attended concerts, operas and even joined an amateur string quartet for which he composed several pieces.  He heard Franz Liszt, then at the height of his pianist career, play recitals, and decided that he should become a professional musician (later he and Liszt became close).  When his father learned about Bedřich’s truancy, he removed him from the city and placed him in the care of his uncle.  Four years later, 19-year old Smetana won his father's approval of his career choice and once again departed for Prague.  He recognized the need for formal musical training and took theory and composition lessons with Josef Proksch, then the head of the Prague Music Institute.  In the meantime, he earned some money teaching music to the children of a local nobleman.   In 1848, the year revolutions swept over Europe, Smetana took part in the uprising aimed to end the rule of the Hapsburgs and afford more autonomy for the Czech lands.  The rebellion was put down, but luckily Smetana avoided imprisonment. 

While Smetana’s earliest compositions were written in 1840, his most accomplished music dates from the 1860s.  In 1861, the Habsburg administrations, in an attempt to address the rising nationalism, laid out plans for the Provisional Theater dedicated to Czech opera.  Smetana saw it as a chance to create a new genre, following the example of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka.  For that he had to learn the Czech language: the first language of the majority of educated Czechs of the time, and Smetana’s, was German.  He composed the first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, in 1862-63, and based the story in 13th century Prague.  It was premiered at the Provisional Theatre in 1866.  What then followed was Smetana’s most successful opera, The Bartered Bride.  It premiered also 1866, and also at the Provisional Theatre.  By then Smetana was appointed the principal conductor of the Theatre.  Smetana wrote seven more operas, a large number of piano compositions, some wonderful songs, and several orchestral pieces.  Of these Má vlast, a set of six symphonic poems, is the best known.  The cycle was written between 1874 and 1879.  Here is the second poem, Vltava, sometimes labeled by the German name of the river, Die Moldau, in the performance by the Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting (courtesy of YouTube.).  According to the composer, the music describes the flow of this beautiful river from its spring in the hills of northern Bohemia, through Prague and other towns, and to the point where it joins the Elbe. 

In his late years Smetana suffered from deafness (he losthis hearing completely in 1874) and generally poor health, which didn’t stop him from composing some of his best music.  At the end of his life, his mental health deteriorated as well.  Smetana died in Prague on May 12, 1884 in a lunatic asylum.  His funeral became a national event.

February 18, 2013.  Boccherini and Handel.  For centuries, Italy, and Rome in particular, has attracted the best of composers of the time.  Starting with the Renaissance, when Flemish and Spanish musicians practically created Italian music before the Italians got to it, during the Baroque era, and even in the 19^th and 20^th centuries (take for example the French Prix de Rome), composers from different countries flocked to  Rome and Naples.  But of course it was not a one-way street, and some Italian composers went to foreign countries: Jean-Baptiste Lully – to France, Domenico Scarlatti – to Spain.  And so did Luigi Boccherini.  Boccherini was born in Lucca on February 19, 1743.  As a young boy he was sent to study in Rome.  When he was fourteen, his father took him to Vienna, where they worked in the band of the imperial Burgtheater.  In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid and stayed in Spain for the rest of his life (he died in 1805).  One of the best pieces he wrote was the Cello concerto in B flat Major, the ninth of his cello concertos.  Boccherini was a talented cellist himself, and composed 12 concertos for this instrument.  You can listen to it here (courtesy of YouTube) in the performance by the 22-year old Jacqueline du Pré, with Daniel Barenboim conducting the English Chamber Orchestra (the recoding was made in April of 1967; Barenboim and du Pré married in June of that year in Jerusalem, right after the end of the Six-Day War).

George Frideric Handel was born February 23, 1685 in Halle, now Germany and back then – Duchy of Mageburg in Brandenburg-Prussia.  He settled in England in 1712, becoming a British subject and, eventually, a national composer, but before that he, like so many, traveled to Italy.  The year was 1706, Handel was only 21 but already an author of two operas.  He arrived in Florence first, but then moved to Rome, where he stayed for four years.  He wrote two more operas, Rodrigo and Aggripina.  Both were staged outside of Rome, the former in Florence, the latter in Venice: at the time Pope Clement XI banned all opera performances in favor of sacred music.   Handel also wrote cantatas and several oratorios.  Here’s an excerpt from one of them, the oratorio La resurrezione, written in 1708.  It’s performed by the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Ton Coopman conducting (courtesy of youTube).

February 11, 2013.  Arcangelo Corelli.  The Italian composer and violinist was born on February 17, 1653 in a small town of Fusignano, not far from Ravenna.  He studied music in the nearby Faenza, better known for its ceramics than music, and then moved to Bologna, which indeed was an important cultural center of the time.  Bologna had a famous school of violin playing, and Corelli studied with several noted violinists.  It is said that around that time he probably made several trips abroad: to France, where he might have met Jean-Baptiste Lully, and to Germany.  He later moved to Rome, where he found several influential patrons, Cardianl Ottoboni and Queen Christina of Sweden being the major ones.  He had pupils, some of whom became quite famous as composers, for example Francesco Geminiani and Pietro Locatelli, and many violinists.  Corelli’s greatest contribution was in the development of Concerti Grossi.  In a concerto grosso the musical interplay happens between a small group of soloists and the full (usually string) orchestra.  Corelli’s concerti grossi constitute his famous Opus 6, the first eight compositions of which are designated as “church concertos,” and the following four – as concerti da camera, or chamber concerts.  They were not published till 1714, after Corellis’s death, but Georg Muffat, who stayed in Italy in the 1680s, reported to have heard Corelli’s concerti grossi in 1682.  One of the best known examples of concerti grossi was  written about 60 years later by Handel, also as his opus 6.   Corelli’s concerti became very popular throughout Europe, and are often played these days by authentic instruments ensembles.  Corelli influenced many composers, Giuseppe Torelli and Antonio Vivaldi more than other.  Johann Sebastian Bach studied his work and, copyright not being an issue in the seventeen century, based some of his music on Corelli’s.

One of the most popular of Corelli’s concerti grossi is number eight, commonly known as “Christmas Concerto.”  You can listen to it here, in a decidedly unauthentic but still pleasing performance by the Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

February 4, 2013. Centuries apart: Palestrina and Berg.  We missed Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina’s official birthday by one day: he was probably born on February 3, 1525, but back then church records were not kept very diligently, so we really cannot be sure: other records indicated that he may have been born a year later, on February 2, 1526.  One way or another, this is as good a time as any to celebrate this supreme master of Renaissance polyphony.  Palestrina’s name refers to the place where he was born, a small ancient town just outside of Rome (the town was a popular summer resort in ancient Roman times and was famous for the magnificent temple of Fortuna).  Palestrina went to Rome as a boy and probably started as a chorister at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.  He then worked as the organist at several churches and started composing around that time: his first book of Masses was published in1551.  It’s interesting to note that till that time, most of the church music performed in Rome was composed by the Franco-Flemish or Spanish composers, such as Guillaume Dufay, Orlando di Lasso, Josquin des Prez and Cristóbal de Morales.  Palestrina’s music so impressed Pope Julius III that he made him maestro di cappella of the papal choir at St Peter's, the Cappella Giulia.  Later he served as the choirmaster in other famous churches of Rome such as San Giovanni in Laterano and Santa Maria Maggiore, but eventually returned to St-Peters.  Palestrina composed a large number of Masses, probably around 100, many madrigals and motets for several voices, from four to twelve.  One of his Masses, Missa Papae Marcelli, is famous for saving, it is said, polyphony as art.  In the mid-16^th century, in reaction to the Reformation, the Catholic Church became concerned with the intelligibility of services, realizing that during Masses parishioners should understand the sacred words, something considered not important in earlier ages.  The many-voiced Masses were often unintelligible and the Pope was about to ban them, when, upon hearing Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli, with its beautiful but well-articulated voicing, the Church officials relented and allowed the polyphonic music to continue.  The Mass, as its name indicates, was composed in honor of Pope Marcellus II, who reigned for just three weeks in 1555.  Here’s Sanctus and Benedictus, performed by The Tallis Scholars, Directed by Peter Phillips.

Three century after the death of Palestrina, on February 9, 1885 Alban Berg was born in Vienna.  One of the three leading composers of the Second Viennese school, he, with Schoenberg and Webern, pretty much transformed our understanding of classical music.  Berg started composing when the prevailing trends were those of the late Romanticism.  His first piano Sonata, a very formidable opus 1, is written in this style, even though it already contains harmonies that would later develop into the atonal music of his mature period.  In 1924 he wrote his first opera, Wozzeck, which became one of the most important compositions of the 20^th century.  In 1934 - 35 he wrote most of his second opera, Lulu: the first two acts were completed, but Berg managed to finish only parts of the third act.  Berg died, impoverished, of blood poisoning at the age of 50, in 1935.  One of the reasons he failed to complete Lulu was the break he took from writing the opera to compose a violin sonata.  The sonata was a reaction to the death of Manon Groppius, the daughter of his friends Alma Mahler, the former wife of Gustav, and the architect Walter Gropius.  Here it is, performed by the violinist Nana Jashvili with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, Jonas Alexas conducting.

January 28, 2013.  Franz Schubert was born on January 31, 1797.  We wrote quite extensively about his life, especially his earlier years (this of course is practically a misnomer, as Schubert died tragically young at the age of 31).  During his short life he wrote more than 1000 compositions, of which 600 were songs.  We think that even if all he wrote were songs, he would still be considered one of the greatest composers ever.  His cycles Die schöne Müllerin, written in 1823, and Winterreise, written four years later, contain no less music of the highest order than symphonies of the  most gifted composers.  Both cycles were originally written for tenor, but are often transposed and performed by other voices.  The late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a baritone, was one of the greatest exponents (pianists such as Sviatoslav Richter, Alfred Brendel and Murray Perahia performed Schuber’s songs with Fischer-Dieskau).  Gute Nacht is the first of the songs in the Winterreise cycle.  Here it is performed by the German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff, with Daniel Barenboim on the piano (courtesy of YouTube).  Fritz Wunderlich was one of the most brilliant tenors of the 20^th century.  Unfortunately, like Schubert’s, his life was cut short: he was only 35 when he died in an accident.  Still, he left behind a number of exceptional recordings, Die schöne Müllerin being one of them.  Here he sings Der Neugierige ("The Inquisitive One"), the sixth song in the cycle.  Hubert Giesen is on the piano (courtesy of YouTube).  Of course there are many other wonderful songs.  Probably one of the most popular is An Die Musik, D. 547.  Here it is, in the 1950 recording, sung by the great Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.  She is accompanied by Edwin Fischer (also courtesy of YouTube).

January 27, 2013.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on this day in 1756, 257 years ago.  His genius reigns supreme today as it did 200 years ago, and as it will in 200 years.  Here’s one reason why: the finale of Le Nozze Di Figaro: Pace Pace mio dolce tesoro (Now peace, my dearest treasure).  Figaro: Bryn Terfel, Susanna: Alison Hagley, Count Almaviva: Rodney Gilfry.  It’s followed by Gente gente all'armi all'armi (People, to arms!) for the full ensemble.  The Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

January 21, 2013.  Approaching Mozart’s birthday.  The genius of Mozart, whose birthday we’ll celebrate on the 27^th, overshadows all other composers born this week, but their contributions are substantial and worth mentioning.  Henri Dutilleux will celebrate his 96^th birthday tomorrow: he was born on January 22, 1916 in the historic town of Angers on the Loire River.  Like so many other French composers, he studied at the Paris conservatory; he won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1938.  Even though he started writing music early, Dutilleux wouldn’t number his compositions till the age of 30, as he considered his earlier pieces, including the Prize-winning cantata L'Anneau du Roi, not worth mentioning.  Besides composing, he taught at the Ecole Normale de Musique and the Paris Conservatory.  While influenced by Debussy and Ravel, Dutilleux’s music is highly original and contemporary.  Here’s his String Quartet Ainsi la nuit (So, the night), from 1976.  It’s performed by Wonhyee Bae and Tessa Lark, violins, Vicki Powell, viola, and Paul Dwyer, cello. 

These days, Muzio Clementi, born January 24, 1752 and famous in his day, is mostly remembered as the composer of sonatas popular with music teachers, and also for his musical contest with Mozart in Vienna in 1781.  Clementi and Mozart were to improvise on the themes suggested by the Emperor Joseph II, and play selections from their own compositions.  The Emperor, for whose entertainment the contest was organized, diplomatically declared it a tie.  But, though forgotten, Clementi did write some lovely music.  Here’s his Sonata in B-flat Major, Op.24 No.2, played by the Korean-American pianist Young-Ah Tak.  Note the opening bars of the sonata: they were later used by Mozart in his overture to the Magic Flute!

Also, Witold Lutoslawski, one of the greatest Polish (and European) composers of the 20^th century, was born this week, on January 25, 1913.  He stared studying violin, but later switched to piano and composition at the Warsaw conservatory.  For a while he was also taking classes in mathematics at the University of Warsaw.  Lutosławski was in the military when the Germans attacked Poland in September of 1939.  He was captured but managed to escape.  He made it to Warsaw and earned money by playing piano duets with his friend, the composer Andrzej Panufnik.  After the Soviets liberated Poland and then installed a communist regime, life became increasingly difficult for Lutosławski.  He was accused of “formalism” and his compositions were censored.  These problems continued even after Stalin’s death, but eased somewhat after Lutosławski achieved international fame (Pierre Boulez premiered his Second symphony in 1966).  Lutosławski, who always opposed  communist rule, was a big supporter of the Solidarity movement in the early ‘80s.  He was very prolific till the very end of his life.  Lutosławski wrote four symphonies and a number of other symphonic compositions - concertos for piano, violin, cello (written and premiered by Mstislav Rostropovich) and many chamber and vocal pieces.  Here’s Capriccio notturno ed Arioso from his Concerto for Orchestra (1950-1954).  It’s performed by The Texas Festival Orchestra, Edwin Outwater conductor.  The piece is written in Lutosławski’s earlier, “folkloristic” style, far removed from the atonal and even aleatoric music of his later compositions.

January 14, 2013.  Even though César Cui was a minor composer, we decided to mention him because he was a member of The Five (or the Mighty Handful, as they are also known), a group of  Russian composers organized by Mily Balakirev, whose birthday we celebrated last week.  Cui’s father, a Frenchman, entered Russia with Napoleon’s army, and after its catastrophic defeat settled in Vilnius, Lithuania.  That’s were César was born, on January 18, 1835.  As a boy he received piano lessons, but at the age of 15 was sent to St-Petersburg to prepare for engineering school, which he eventually entered.  Upon graduating, he became quite famous for his work on military fortifications; he also taught at several engineering schools.  But all along music was his real love, and he expressed it through composing and criticism (Cui wrote more than 800 articles, some of which were quite influential at the time).  He composed several operas; these days are rarely staged, although Liszt seemed to have like one of them, William Ratcliff.   Cui also wrote a large number of songs, some quite exquisite.  Here ’s one, The statue in Tsarskoye Selo, Op.57, no. 17 on a poem by Alexander Pushkin.  Recorded in 1954, it is sung by a 25 year-old Nikolai Ghiaurov who at the time was still studying at the Moscow Conservatory; a year later his career was launched.  Ghiaurov of course became one of greatest basses of the 20^th century.  The portrait of Cui on the left is by Ilya Repin.

Cui’s French connection leads to two composers who were also born this week: Chabrier and Chausson.  Emmanuel Chabrier was born in a small town in Auvergne on January 18, 1841.  His family moved to Paris when Emmanuel was 15.  Even though he was taking music lessons since he was six, his family felt that he should pursue a career in law, for which he was preparing while still in Auvergne.  In Paris he entered law school, and upon graduating in 1861 Chabrier became a civil servant with the Interior Ministry.  But, not unlike Cui, his real passion was music.  He made friends with several young composers, Fauré, Chausson, and d'Indy among them, but also with the leading Impressionst painters, such as Manet, Monet, and Degas: Chabrier started collecting their art early and left behind a large collection of contemporary French art).  He also became friends with a number of writers Zola, Daudet, and Mallarmé among them.  In 1882 Chabrier visited Spain and a year later wrote his most popular orchestral work, España.  You can listen to it here, with Igor Markevitch conducting the Orchestra of  Spanish Radio & Television (courtesy of YouTube).

Chabrier’s friend Ernest Chausson was 14 years his younger: Chausson was born on January 20, 1855.  His father Prosper was a wealthy contractor who helped Baron Haussmann to rebuild Paris.  To please his father, the young Chausson, like Chabrier, studied law, but had very little interest in it.  Ernest tried to write and paint, and then at the age of 25 started taking classes in composition with Jules Massenet at the Paris Conservatory.  One of Chausson’s best-known works is Poéme, Op. 25.  You can listen to it here, performed by Judy Kang , violin, and Kay Kim, piano.

Last week we mentioned the birthday of yet another Frenchman (and one of our favorites), Francis Poulenc.  Here is his Piano Concerto in C sharp minor.  The pianist is Jean-Bernard Pommier, with The City of London Sinfonia, Richard Hickox conducting.

January 7, 2013.  In this first post of 2013 we’d like to mention several composers whose birthdays fall on the first week of the year: Mily Balakirev, Giovanni Pergolesi, Nikolai Medtner, Max Bruch, and Alexander Scriabin.  On top of this, Francis Poulenc was born on this day.  A mighty handful for sure.  “Mighty handful” was, of course, the name given to a group of Russian composers of the mid-19^th century, and Balakirev, born on January 2, 1837, was one of them.  Probably not the most talented (musically, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov were in a different league), he is now known mostly as an educator and incessant promoter of classical music in Russia.  He did, however, compose a piano piece which to this day is considered one of the most difficult, a poem Islamey.  Here it is, performed by the Italian pianist Sandro Russo. 

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s life was tragically short.  He was born on January 4, 1710 and died at the age of 26, from tuberculosis.  He wrote his first opera when he was 21, the first truly successful piece, an intermezzo La Serva Padrona (The Servant Mistress), at the age of 23.  He wrote six operas altogether, a violin concerto, and some other secular music, but for the last two years of his life he wrote mostly sacred music.  He composed two Masses, several psalm settings and more.  You can listen to one of his most famous works, Stabat Mater, here; it’s performed by the Chicago authentic instruments ensemble Baroque Band.

Nikolai Medtner, born on January 5, 1880, was a younger contemporary of the much more famous Rachmaninov and Scriabin, but he wrote a number of charming piano pieces called Tales and several sonatas, some of them very interesting.  Here, for example, Marc-André Hamelin plays Medtner’s Piano Sonata no.13, Minacciosa (courtesy of YouTube).  As so many artists and composers, Medtner left Russia after the Revolution (he was helped by his friend Rachmaninov) and eventually settled in England.  He died in London in 1951.  His music is very much worth discovering.

Alexander Scriabin’s music doesn’t need to be "discovered" – it’s being widely played and recorded.  Still, his popularity these days cannot be compared to the adulation he receiving during his lifetime (accompanied by some criticism as well).  Scriabin was born on January 6, 1872.  His early piano compositions were heavily influenced by Chopin, though even then his style was individual and idiosyncratic.  Later it evolved, losing most of the romantic traces of the earlier period, and becoming more chromatic and dissonant.  Scriabin’s piano works are more popular these days than his orchestra music, but in the pre-Revolutionary Russia his The Poem of Ecstasy was one of the most celebrated composition (he received one of his many Glinka Prizes for it in 1908).  Here it is performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

We have to mention Max Bruch, born on January 6, 1838 and these days mostly famous for his Violin Concerto.  He also wrote a popular Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra, named after the ancient declaration recited in synagogues before the beginning of the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) service.  Bruch was a protestant, and introduced to the Jewish prayer by his teacher.  Still, many Germans though that Bruch was Jewish, and the Nazis even banned his music.  Here’s an arrangement of Kol Nidrei for viola and piano.  It’s performed by Viacheslav Dinerchtein, viola, and George Lepauw, piano.

December 31, 2012.  Forgotten birthdays.  Throughout the year we’ve celebrated dozens of composers, the great ones, whose work form the foundation of  western musical tradition, as well as some minor ones along the way.  We try to do it on the weeks of their birthdays, but that creates a problem: we don’t know when some of the composers were born!  Here’s an incomplete list of very influential composers who never made it on our pages for that very reason: Josquin des Prez, who was born sometime around 1450, the supreme master of the Renaissance polyphonic form; Thomas Tallis, one of the greatest early English composers, born around 1505; Orlando di Lasso, sometime spelled as Orlande de Lassus, born around 1530, a Franco-Flemish/Netherlandish composer as Des Prez and also a great master of polyphony; Giovanni Gabrieli, the Venetian born around 1550 and the master of San Marco; Tomás Luis de Victoria, the most famous (and important) Spanish composer of his time, who was also born around 1550; Dietrich  Buxtehude, born around 1637, one of the most interesting German Baroque composers of the era preceding Johann Sebastian Bach’s; and there are many more.

We’ll write about these composers in the future, but in the mean time here’s from one of our personal favorites, Tomás Luis de Victoria. It’s a short piece for four voices called O vos omnes (Oh, all ye) and it comes from his liturgical setting, Tenebrae Responsories, which is celebrated on early mornings of the last three days of Holy Week.  It’s performed by The Tallis Scholars (here, courtesy of YouTube).

The angel playing the violin, above, is by Caravaggio, from his Rest on the Flight into Egypt.  He painted it around 1597 in Rome, about 10 years after Victoria left the city, where he lived and studied the previous 20 years, to return to his native Spain.

Happy New Year to all!

 December 24, 2012.  Merry Christmas to all!  The wonderful leaf from a Choir book you see here comes from 1395 and contains a little bit of music and a little bit of art.  The music is the introit (entrance) to the Mass for Christmas Day.  The picture represents the Nativity and the Annunciation to the Shepherds.  This illustration was created by a monk, Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci who went on to become a rather well known painter (but not as famous as his younger partner, Lorenzo Monaco, who worked with Gherarducci at the same monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence).

And here is the first movement of the first part, Chorus, of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.  It starts with Jauchzet, frohlocket, auf, preiset die Tage, or Celebrate, rejoice, rise up and praise these days, a good command to follow.  The performance is by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the baton of Sir John Eliot Gardiner (courtesy of YouTube).

December 17, 2012.  Zoltan Kodály.  One of the most prominent Hungarian composers of the 20^th century, fame he shares with Béla Bartók, Zoltan Kodály was born on December 16th of 1882 in a small town in central Hungary.  As a child he studied the violin with his father, and at the age of 18 entered Budapest University to study languages and, simultaneously, the Hungarian Academy of Music, a composition class of Hans von Koessler.  In 1907 he traveled to Paris to study with Charles Vidor at the Paris Conservatory.  Starting 1905 he went on regular field trips collecting folksongs, often in the company of Béla Bartók, his lifetime friend.  The folk tunes formed the basis of many, highly sophisticated, compositions of Kodály.  From 1912 he taught at the Budapest Academy of Music (Antal Dorati was one of his pupils).  Here are his Dances of Galánta, composed in 1933.  Galánta is a small market town on the old railway line between Vienna and Budapest, where Zoltan spent seven years of his childhood.  At that time, a famous gipsy band lived there.  According to Kodály, the principle melodies of the Dance come from that music. Throughout his adult life, Kodály was very interested in the problems of music education.  The Hungarian music education program that he developed in the 1940s became the basis for what is called the "Kodály Method".  Kodály, who was born in the Dual Monarchy and had his most productive period during the Hungarian Republic, lived long enough to see the advent of the Hungarian Peoples Republic – but not the end of it: he died in 1967, at age 84.

December 16, 2012.  Beethoven!  Today is the day to celebrate the 242^nd anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday.  Here’s Sviatoslav Richter’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 1 in f minor, op. 2, no.1.  The very first one of the eventual 32, the set that is still the pinnacle of piano literature, this sonata was written in 1795.  The young Beethoven dedicated it to his teacher of several years, Franz Joseph Haydn.  The portrait, by Carl Traugott Riedel, was made a bit later, in 1801.

December 10, 2012.  Three Francophone composers.  César Franck was born in Liège, in what is now Belgium, on December 10, 1822, but he spent most of his life in France.  His ambitious father wanted Franck to become a virtuoso pianist, à la Franz Liszt, and enrolled him in the Royal Conservatory of Liège.  In 1835 he brought César and his younger brother to Paris to study privately.  Two years later César entered the Conservatory (his father had to take French citizenship, as at that time the Conservatory didn’t accept “foreigners”).  César studied piano, counterpoint, and eventually took organ classes with François Benoist (Benoist was the professor of organ at the Conservatory for half a century, and, in addition to Franck, had as his students Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, Léo Delibes, and Adolphe Adam).  After a brief sojourn to Belgium, Frank returned to Paris to become a teacher and organist.  That was also the time he started seriously composing.  He became the organist at the newly constructed church of Saint-Clotilde, which had a beautiful organ built by the famous Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who also built organs for Notre Dame de Paris andLa Madeleine, reconstructed the great organ of Saint-Sulpice and worked with many other important churches in France and beyond, as well as  built organs for major concert halls, such as the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory.  After Benoist’s death, Franck was offered a position at the Conservatory.  In 1886 he wrote his Violin Sonata in A Major, probably his most famous composition.  The sonata was a wedding present for a fellow Liégeois, the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.  It became one of the most popular pieces in the violin repertoire, and we have many recordings of it in our library.  You can hear it performed by the Canadian violinist Kai Gleusteen, who spent some time studying in Paris (here).  Catherine Ordronneau is on the piano.  Franck continued composing for the rest of his life: his notable Symphony in D Major was written in 1888 and three organ chorals in 1890.  He died in Paris on November 8,1890.  The funeral mass, attended by practically all notable French composers of the time, was held in Franck’s church of Sainte-Clotilde.

Olivier Messiaen, without a doubt one of the greatest French composers of the 20^th century, was born on December 10, 1908.  As much an innovator as Franck was a traditionalist, Messiaen shared his love for the organ.  As Franck years earlier, Messiaen was appointed the organist of a Paris church, in his case that of Église de la Sainte-Trinité, not far from Gare Saint-Lazare a position which, like Franck, he held for the rest of his life.  In 1940, at the outbreak of World War II, Messiaen was drafted into the French army as a medical auxiliary (he had poor eyesight).  He was captured by the Germans soon after, at Verdun, the site of the terrible battles of the previous war, and sent to a camp.  There he met a violinist, a cellist and a clarinetist.  He wrote a trio for them, and eventually incorporated it into the Quartet for the End of Time, creating a part for himself on the piano.  It was first performed in January 1941 in the camp to an audience of prisoners and prison guards.  We’ll hear two movements from the Quartet: Movement III, Abyss of the Birds for solo clarinet (here) and Movement VI, Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets, for the full quartet (here).  It’s performed by Artisict Voyage, Yana Reznik music director (courtesy of YouTube).

We don’t have the time and the space for the most famous of the three composers, Hector Berlioz, who was born on December 11, 1803, but here’s the first movement of his masterpiece, Symphonie fantastique.  Igor Makevich is conducting the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.  Just an incidental link to Messiaen: Berlioz’s funeral was held at the new Église de la Sainte-Trinité (he died on March 8, 1869), where 62 years later Messiaen would become the organist.

And of course later this week we’ll celebrate the 242nd anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday.

December 3, 2012.  Padre Antonio Soler and more.  Antonio Soler was born around December 3, 1729 (we know that he was baptized that day) in Olot, a small town in Catalonia.  When he was six, he entered the choir school for boys at the ancient Montserrat Monastery.  When he was 15, he was appointed the organist at the Cathedral of La Seu d'Urgell in the Catalan Pyrenees.  He was ordained at the age of 23 – by then he was already employed at the Royal Court in El Escorial.  Soler wrote 150 keyboard sonatas (and many more works as well).  It is not known whether he studied with Domenico Scarlatti, who lived in Madrid from 1733 to his death in 1757, but it seems that the influence of the older master’s music is strong: listen, for example, to Sonata in D Major (it’s performed by the Ukrainian pianist Elena Ulyanova).  Though he served the King and lived many years in the Royal residence, no known portraits of Padre Antonio Soler exist.  The picture above depicts El Escorial where Soler spent more than half of his life.

Also this week: the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865 in the south of Finland, then part of the Russian Duchy, into a Swedish-speaking family.  Sibelius, born Johan, started using the French-sounding name Jean while he was a law student at the Imperial Alexander University.  He was much more interested in music than law, so he quit the University and entered the Helsinki Music School.  He went on to study in Berlin and Vienna.  Sibelius, who wrote during the period of flourishing experimentation in classical music, may sound rather conservative to the modern ear.  Still, his seven symphonies are masterly, his Violin concerto is one of the most popular, and so are his symphonic poems Finlandia and the Karelia suite.  Sibelius wrote his First Symphony when he was 35, and composed very intensely for the following quarter century.  Then, around 1926, he stopped and didn’t write a single work in the last 30 years of his life.  He died on September 20, 1957 at the age of 92.  Here’s the rousing Intermezzo, from the Karelia Suite Op. 11.  It’s performed by the Oslo Philharmonic, Mariss Jansons conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

And finally, a performance note.  The Lyric Opera of Chicago just started a run of Donizetti’s Don Paquale.  The role of the Don is sung by the bass-baritone Ildebrando D'Arcangelo whose voice has an enormous range.  In 1708 George Frederic Handel composed a “dramatic cantata” Aci, Galatea e Polifemo.  Among the cast of characters is a Cyclops named Polifemo.  One of his arias, Fra l'ombre e gl'orrori has a range of almost three octaves!  One wonders who was the Neapolitan singer that Handel had in mind for the role.  You can listen to the amazing performance by Ildebrando D'Arcangelo here (courtesy of YouTube).

November 26, 2012.  Jean-Baptiste Lully.  The great French Baroque composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully was actually born an Italian on November 28, 1632 in Florence. As a young child, he received little education and learned only the basics of playing the guitar, probably from a Franciscan friar. Apparently, he was pretty good because in 1646 Roger de Lorraine, the chevalier de Guise, took the lucky boy to France where he entered into the service of one of the noblest houses of the kingdom, that of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the eldest daughter of Gaston, the Duke of Orléans and a brother of Louis XIII.  Lully was taught to dance and studied music with Nicolas Métru, an organist and viol player who also taught Couperin.

In 1652, Mlle de Montpensier was exiled (she was one of the key leaders of the Fronde) and Lully left her court.  A talented dancer and musician, his skills brought him to the attention of the young King Louis XIV and he became a dancer in the king’s service. After composing some music for the Ballet de la nuit, Louis XIV appointed him leader of the Petits Violons, the king’s own private violin band. Lully’s favor in the king’s court continued to grow and in 1671, he was appointed the Superintendent of Music. Eventually, he was even given complete control over all music performed in France by the king.

The king liked to dance, and Lully composed many ballets for the court. His music changed the genre, introducing much livelier ballets in place of the slow, stately older dances.  With the aid of Molière, Lully also created the genre of comédie-ballet, which mixed spoken plays with dance and music numbers.  As Louis XIV aged, however, his interest in ballet, as well as his ability to dance, waned and in response Lully turned his attention on operas.  At that time the Italian opera, that of Monteverdi, Cavalli, and even lesser composers, reigned supreme throughout Europe (the first public opera house was opened in Venice in 1637).  Still, Lully found it unsuitable for the French language.  In his operas Lully removed the divisions between recitative and aria and, using good librettos by the dramatist Philippe Quinault, made the story move faster.  It is his operas that made Lully the foremost composer in France.

In January of 1687, while conducting a performance, Lully struck his toe with a long staff that he was using to beat time.  The wound became gangrenous, yet he refused to have the toe amputated.  The gangrene inevitably spread and on March 22, Lully died from the injury.

We’ll hear the aria Belle Hermione, hélas, hélas from Cadmus et Hermione, a "musical tragedy" on the libretto by Philippe Quinault.  It is sung by the wonderful French baritone Gérard Souzay, with Orchestre de la Société du Conservatoire Paris (courtesy of YouTube, here).

November 19, 2012.  Last week we celebrated the anniversary of Alexander Borodin but left out two major composers of the 20^th century, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith.  This week is even more prodigious, from Manuel de Falla to Benjamen Britten, Virgil Thomson, and Alfred Schnittke.  We’ll start with last week’s birthdays.   Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 into a family of recent Russian-Jewish émigrés (his father changed his name from Kaplan), studied in Paris, but became the most "American" of all American composers.  His use of hymns and songs, such as the famous rendition of Shakers’ "Simple Gifts" in Appalachian Spring harkens back to the Russian and Czech Nationalist composers, but his musical idiom was very much of the 20^th century.  Here is At the River, from Old American Songs.  It’s performed by the baritone Jonathan Beyer with Jonathan Ware at the piano.

Compared to the lyrical Copland, few composers are more different than the cerebral Paul Hindemith, even though both wrote tonal music and never ventured into the twelve-tone world.  Hindemith was born on November 16, 1895 near Frankfurt am Main.  He played violin and viola, and started composing at the age of 21.  Hindemith’s compositional career blossomed during the time Nazis were in power, and their relationship was complex.  Some Nazis despised Hindemith’s music, but other wanted to make him into a model German composer and ambassador of German culture.  Hindemith emigrated to Switzerland and then to the US in 1940.  In the US he taught at Yale; among his students were Lucas Foss, Normal Dello Joio, and many other.  Here is Hindemith’s Viola Sonata Op. 11 No. 4.  It is performed by Yura Lee and Timothy Lovelace. 

Benjamin Britten was the greatest British composer of the 20^th century and probably the first great British composer since Henry Purcell, or Handel, depending on whether the latter is counted as a German composer or an English one (our apologies to the devotees of Elgar, Delius and Vaughan Williams!).  He was born on November 22, 1913.  When he was 17 he entered the Royal College of Music, where he studied with composers John Ireland and Arthur Benjamin.  He started composing around that time.  In 1936 he met the tenor Peter Piers who strongly affected Britten’s musical development and also became his lifelong partner.  Britten and Pears moved to the US in 1939 (both were conscientious objectors), but returned to Britain in 1942.  Britten’s greatest work was in opera: Peter Grimes (1945) made him a star, and altogether he wrote 13 operas, Billy Bud, The Beggar’s Opera and The Turn of the Screw being among the most popular.  We don’t have Britten’s operas, but we do have a wonderful song cycle, A Charm of Lullabies, Op. 41 (here).  It is sung by the mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson with Scott Gilmore at the piano.  On a much lighter note, the late Dudley Moore’s parody of Pears singing the supposedly Britten’s rendition of Little Miss Muffet is hilarious and absolutely ingenious (you can find it on YouTube).

We’ll get back to Falla and Schnittke later, in the mean time enjoy the music.

November 12, 2012.  Borodin and more.   Alexander Borodin, a Russian composer and famous chemist, was born on this day in St-Petersburg in 1833.  He was an illegitimate son of a Georgian prince Luka Gedevanishvili, who had him registered as a son of one of his serfs, Porfiry Borodin.  Thus, Alexander Lukich Gedevanishvili was transformed into Alexander Porfirievich Borodin.  Alexander received a good education, and took some music lessons (that he was gifted became clear very early on – when he was nine he composed several small pieces), but at the age of 10 he fell in love with chemistry.  At 17 he entered the prestigious Medico-Surgical Academy and upon graduating pursued a career of surgeon and chemist, taking additional studies in Heidelberg and in Italy.  In 1862, Borodin became a professor of chemistry at the same Academy and taught chemistry there for the rest of his life.  His research in chemistry was significant and he became one of the most respected scientists in Russia; the famous Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, was his good friend and colleague.  All along, music was a love and a hobby to Borodin, second in priority.  The same year he became a professor at the Academy, Borodin met the composer Mily Balakirev and stared taking composition lessons with him.  His First Symphony, written in 1867, is not performed often, but the Second one (“Bogatyr”), became very popular.  In 1879 he wrote the String Quartet no. 1, two years later, the Second String quartet.  Borodin worked on his main composition, the opera Prince Igor, for 18 years.  It still wasn’t finished at the time of his premature death on February 27, 1887, at the age of 53.  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov completed the opera and the orchestration based on the materials left after Borodin’s death.  The opera was first performed in 1890 at the Mariinsky Theater in St-Petersburg to great acclaim.  It remains his masterpiece and one of the best known and loved Russian operas.

Borodin’s name was given to one of the most unique ensembles, the Borodin Quartet.  It is probably the oldest continuously performing quartet in modern history.  The quartet was formed in 1944 by the students of Moscow Conservatory.  Mstislav Rostorpovich was the first cellist, but very soon he withdrew and Valentin Berlinsky took his place.  Rudolf Barshai was the original viola player; he later founded the Moscow Chamber Orchestra.  The quartet first performed publicly in 1946 under the name of the Moscow Philharmonic Quartet.  It became known as the Borodin Quartet in 1955, Borodin of course being the founder of the Russian quartet tradition.  For many years the Quartet worked very closely with the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, whom they first met in 1946; all of Shostakovich’s quartets were in their repertory.  Also, they often performed with the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter.  Valentin Berlinsky, the cellist, performed continuously from 1944 to 2007, for an amazing 62 years; he died just one year later at the age of 83.

We’ll hear the 3^rd movement of Borodin’s quartet no. 2, Notturno, performed by the Borodin Quartet and recorded in 1965 (here, courtesy of YouTube).

Two prominent 20^th century composers were also born this week: Aaron Copland, on November 14, 1900, and Paul Hindemith on November 16, 1895.  We’ll present them at a later date.

November 5, 2012.  François Couperin, or Couperin le Grand, the great French Baroque composer, was born in Paris on November 10, 1668 during the reign of Louis XIV the Sun King.  François was born into a family of musicians (his uncle was a famous composer of his day).  His talents became apparent from a very early age.  His father was his first music teacher, and he inherited the position of the organist of the church of St-Gervais after his father’s death.  The church, not far from the Hôtel de Ville, is one of the oldest in Paris, and the organ that Couperins played is still there today.  In 1717 he entered the service of Louis XIV as an organist and composer.  Even though his major works were written for the harpsichord, he was never given the title of the harpsichordist to the King.  At the court, he gave weekly concerts, mostly of his own music: the “suites” for string and wind instruments and the harpsichord. 

As we mentioned, Couperin’s major works were written for the harpsichord.  In 1717 he published L'art de toucher le clavecin (The Art of Playing the Harpsichord).  He wrote it to instruct musicians in harpsichord playing so that they could perform, among other things, his own compositions.  Here is the famous Le Tic-Toc-Choc, from Book III of Pièces de clavecin, transcribed to the modern piano.  It is performed – insanely fast – by the Hungarian piano virtuosos Geroges Cziffra (a live recording from his recital in Strasbourg 19 June 1960, courtesy of YouTube).  Some listeners believe that he plays too fast but we think there’s enough music left to make it very interesting.  Altogether Couperin published four books of harpsichord music, 230 pieces altogether.  This music influenced Johann Sebastian Bach, and, much later, Richard Strauss, who in 1940 wrote a charming Divertimento for small orchestra (after François Couperin's keyboard works), Op. 86.  Le Tic-Toc-Choc is there, of course, as elegant in this chamber arrangement as it is in the original.  For Maurice Ravel Couperin was also a major figure, so much so that he wrote a piano suite Le tombeau de Couperin (Couperin's Memorial).  It’s performed here by the pianist Alon Goldstein.

October 29, 2012.  Bellini and more.  Vincenzo Bellini was born on November 3, 1801 in Catania, Sicily.  It’s said that he was a child prodigy: started studying music at the age of two, playing piano at three, and composed his first pieces at the ago of six.   We do know that at the age of 18 he went to Naples to study at the conservatory.  He wrote his first opera while still a student there.  His second opera, Bianca e Gernando, was staged at Teatro San Carlo, the main opera theater of Naples.  It was good enough to lead to a commission from La Scala.  Bellini composed Il Pirata, which premiered to great success on October 27, 1827.  With his career launched, Bellini moved to Milan.  He wrote several operas that were met with muted enthusiasm but then in quick succession wrote La sonnambula, which premiered in 1831, Norma, premiered the same year, and I puritani, first staged in 1835.  All three represent the pinnacle of bel canto.  The greatest sopranos all prove their mettle singing the role of Norma, one of the most difficult in all of the opera repertoire, and opera lovers will forever continue arguing whose Casta Diva was the finest.  Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas, Montserrat Caballé are the top contenders, at least for this site.  Here’s a live recording of Casta Diva, made in 1974 with Montserrat Caballé as Norma (courtesy of YouTube).  Ms. Caballé in an absolutely top form.  Bellini’s life was tragically short.  He died just nine months after the premier of I puritani of a disease which back then was diagnosed as “stomach inflammation.”  He was just 34 years old.

We don’t have many recordings from the Bellini’s operas for the same reason we’re poor on Verdi or Donizetti.  But we do have a fantasy by Franz Liszt called Reminiscences of Norma by Bellini.  Liszt’s birthday was last week, and we’re glad to have a chance to acknowledge it.  Liszt wrote this paraphrase 10 years after the premier of Norma and used, in a very free form, seven themes from the opera.  It’s performed here by the Canadian pianist Janice Fehlauer.

October 22, 2012.  Bizet, Liszt, Scarlatti, Paganini.  This week yet again we commemorate the anniversaries of several extraordinary composers: Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811, Georges Bizet on October 25, 1838, Domenico Scarlatti on October 26, 1685 and Niccolò Paganini  on October 27, 1782.  Last year we celebrated Liszt’s 200^th anniversary with a detailed account of his life.  We’ve written about Paganini and Scarlatti on more than one occasion.  Now we’ll focus on Georges Bizet.  

Bizet was born in Paris.  His mother was a fine amateur pianist, and his father a singing teacher.  He was admitted to the Paris Conservatory before turning 10.  A brilliant student, in 1857 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome and in 1857 went to Rome.  He enjoyed his life at the French Academy in Rome as much as Debussy would come to hate it some years later.  He returned to Paris in 1860.  Throughout the 1860s, he had little success.  His opera Les pêcheurs de perles was performed 18 times at the Théâtre Lyrique and then withdrawn (the next time it was staged was  in 1886, after Bizet’s death).  The two principal opera houses, the Opéra and Opéra-Comique, catered mostly to conservative tastes.  However, a staging of his one-act opera Djamileh at the Opéra-Comique in 1872, though a disaster itself, led to a further commission for a full-length opera.  Partnered with librettists Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, Bizet began discussions with the theater’s representative, Aldophe de Leuven, on the selection of an appropriate story.  After politely turning down suggestions made by De Leuven, Bizet suggested Carmen, a novella by Prosper Mérimée, which he possibly read during his trip to Rome. De Leuven, however, had several misgivings about it, particularly the risqué nature and amorality of Mérimée’s story.  Despite assurances from the librettists that the characters would be softened and even contrasted with morally upright counterparts, he still thought the planned opera to be unsuited for the Opéra-Comique.  Though he reluctantly agreed to go forward with the project, De Leuven eventually resigned from the theater in 1874 because of Carmen.  The premiere of Carmen took place on March 3, 1875. Despite promising final rehearsals and an enthusiastic response from the audience during the first act, by the end of the night the reception was poor.  Critics pounded Bizet for his “Wagnerian” score and the amoral nature of the title role, despite it being heavily toned down by the librettists from Mérimée’s original character.  Even the introduction of the virtuous Micaëla could not offset the seductive Carmen.  Furthermore, the audience was hard pressed to sympathize with the decline of Don José from upstanding soldier to a madman enslaved by his uncontrolled emotions.  Consequently, the opera was cancelled after its first year at the Opéra-Comique.

Bizet would not live to see the success that Carmen would eventually become.  After only its thirty-third performance, Bizet died suddenly from heart disease. Before his death, however, he had signed a contract to stage Carmen at the Vienna Court Opera.  The Vienna production became the impetus for Carmen’s success. The opera won praise from both Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Within three years, Carmen appeared in Brussels, London, New York and St. Petersburg.  After winning the international stage, Carmen triumphantly returned to Paris in 1883.

Here is Carmen Fantasy, a piece by Franz Waxman based on the themes from Carmen.   It’s performed by Irmina Trynkos, violin and Giorgi Latsabidze, piano.  And here is the final scene from Carmen, sung in Russia by the mezzo Lidiya Zakharenko and the tenor Zurab Andjaparidze.  Vladimir Fedoseev conducts the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra.

October 15, 2012.  Ives and Flynn.  The first internationally acclaimed American composer, Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1974 in Danbury, Connecticut.  His father, George, was an Army bandleader, and when Charles was young he listened to the bands practicing in the town square and later played drums in his father’s band.  He also learned to play piano and the organ, which apparently he did very well.  One might not expect a bandleader to encourage musical experimenting, but that’s just what George Ives did when he taught music to his son.  At the age of 14 Charles became a church organist, then moved to New Haven, and eventually entered Yale University.  There he wrote his 1^st Symphony, although he probably spent as much time playing sports as studying music – he was an excellent athlete.  Upon graduating from Yale, Ives joined an insurance company.  When it went broke, he and his friend started their own, Ives & Myrick.  A successful executive, Ives became well known within the industry and even wrote articles on aspects of the insurance business.  Composing music was what he did in his spare time.  In 1906 Ives wrote the first of his acknowledged masterpieces, The Unanswered Question, scored for trumpet, four flutes, and string orchestra, a very unusual but highly effective combination of instruments; Ives indicated that the strings should be positioned behind the stage, the flute on the stage, and the trumpet, the one “asking the questions,” in hall itself.  In 1908 Ives and his newly wed wife moved to New York; he lived there for the rest of his life.  The period from about 1908 to 1927 was very productive: Ives wrote the Concord Sonata, his most popular piano solo composition, several symphonies, including the one titled New England Holidays and the very successful Fourth.  He also wrote string quartets, violin sonatas, and songs.  Then, abruptly, one day in 1927 he told his wife that he could not compose any longer.  From that moment on he didn’t composed another single original tune, though he continued revising his older compositions.  He lived another 27 years and died at the age of 80.

We have two piano pieces by Ives, Song Without (Good) Words (here) and Some South-Paw Pitching (here), performed by Heather O'Donnell, an American pianist living in Berlin.  Heather O’Donnell is a big proponent of contemporary music.  To some extent she is a link to our next composer, George Flynn: in 2004 she organized a project, "Responses to Charles Ives," which commissioned seven composers to write piano works.  Each composition was supposed to reflect Ives’ influence; one of the contributors was George Flynn with Remembering.  Flynn says that in his youth he was greatly influenced by Charles Ives’s Concord piano sonata.  Recently, Southport Records issued a CD titled String Fever with three compositions by Flynn.  One of them is Together, a 27-minute continuous work for violin and piano.  Flynn describes it as developing through a series textures and moods, from quiet to more "aggressive," "jubilant," then moving to "floating serenity" and on.  The final sounds of Together return to the opening statement and "can thus serve to restart the piece."  This composition was originally written for the violinist Eugene Gratovich, a student of Jascha Heifetz and a big supporter of contemporary music.  In this recording Together is performed by the violinist Stefan Hersh with the composer at the piano.  You can listen to it here.

October 8, 2012.  Verdi and Saint-Saëns.  Giuseppe Verdi was born on October 9 (or on the 10th, we don’t know for sure) of 1813 in a village near Busetto, in the province of Parma, Emilia-Romagnia.  Through an accident of history, the great Italian composer who was to become the patriotic symbol of unified Italy was actually born on a French territory: Parma, after the Napoleonic wars, was a French Department (it continued to be ruled as a duchy by Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon, even after the Congress of Vienna reversed most of Napoleonic conquests).  Verdi studied composition in Milan, and wrote his first opera, Oberto, in 1839.  It was in 1842 that he achieved the first real success with Nabucco (you can listen to the famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Va, Pensiero, from the Metropolitan Opera 2001 production, James Levine conducting, here, courtesy of YouTube).   Verdi wrote a large number of operas in succession (he called this period “galley years”), none of great significance, till Rigoletto in 1851, a masterpiece and an immediate triumph.  He followed up with two more stupendous operas: Il Trovatore and La traviata.  The following years he produced one masterpiece after another: Un ballo in maschera in1859, La forza del destino in 1861, Don Carlos in1867.  Aida was written in in1871.  On our site we don’t have much of Verdi’s music and the reason is obvious: opera theaters are not in the habit of uploading their productions to independent music sites.  Still, we have an interesting historical performance of the Judgment scene, from Aida.  It was recorded at the Bolshoi Theater in 1969. Radamès is the brilliant Georgian-Russian tenor Zurab Andjaparidze, Amneris is Irina Arkhipova, one of the best Soviet mezzo-sopranos.  Mark Ermler leads the Bolshoi orchestra (here).  In Russia operas were often sung in Russian, so the Italian of this recording, however imperfect, is rather unusual.  This recoding was given to us by Mr. Andjaparidze’s daughter, the pianist and a friend of this site, Eteri Andjaparidze.

Camille Saint-Saëns was also born on October 9, in 1835 in Paris (we seem to know his birth date with more certainty than Verdi’s, Paris of the time being one of the most civilized and well organized cities in the world).  He lived a long life: when he wrote his first compositions around 1850, Berlioz. Liszt, and Wagner were at the peak of their careers.  When he wrote his last pieces, in 1921, the year of his death, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Schoenberg were at their most creative.  Even if Saint-Saëns wasn’t the greatest French Romantic, he wrote a lot of enjoyable music.  Here, for example, is one of his most popular pieces, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28.  It’s performed by the violinist Yang Xu and Janet Kao, piano.

October 1, 2012.  Kurtág at the Steans.  On several previous occasions we’ve written  about the Steans Music Institute, Ravinia Festival’s summer conservatory.  The Steans brings together talented young musicians from many countries; they study with great teachers, play music together and perform.  Public performances are an important part of the Steans, and their programming very often is creative and adventuresome.  This year it prominently featured the works of György Kurtág, one of the most interesting composers of the 20^th century.  Kurtág was born in 1926 in the city of Lugoj, in the Banat region, which after the WWI became part of Romania but had previously belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary.  Kurtág was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family.  He moved to Budapest in 1946 and enrolled in the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music.  There he met György Ligeti, also a Hungarian Jew from Romania, and also an aspiring composer.  They became good friends.  Following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris, where he studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.  During that time he also discovered the music of Anton Webern, which greatly influenced his own work.  He later returned to Hungary but retained some freedom of movement: in 1971 he was allowed to go to West Berlin for a year.  He left Hungary for good in 1986, and since then has lived in Germany, Austria, and France.

Kurtág wrote a relatively small number of works, many of them rather late in his career; the 1980s were probably his most productive years, although he continues to write even these days: his “Short Messages” Op.47 were published in 2011.  One of the works that were programmed by the Steans, Signs, Games and Messages for solo viola, is a series of short episodes, each in a distinct style and mood.  The work was formally started in 1989, even though some of the pieces were sketched earlier, and remains a work in progress, as some pieces are revised and other are being added to the growing collection.  Most of the movements are two-three minutes long; the shortest, Beating, is a Webernian 24 seconds long (To the exhibition of Sári Gerlóczy is all of four seconds longer), while the longest, In Nomine –  all’ ongherese, is the whopping four minutes and 40 seconds.

At the Steans, different violists performed selections from the work.  Molly Carr played Signs I, Signs II, and Hommage á John Cage (here).   Shuangshuang Liu continued with In Nomine—all’ ongherese and Virág – Zsigmondy Dénesnek (A Flower for Dénes Zsigmondy, one of the more unusual pieces), here.  Then Wenting Kang played Perpetuum mobile, Klagendes Lied (Plaintive Song) and Kromatikus feleselős (here).  Steven Laraia followed with Gerlóczy Sári Kiállitására (To the exhibition of Sári Gerlóczy), In memoriam Aczél György, and In memoriam Tamás Blum (here).   Finally, the French vioist Adrien La Marca plays Beating, J. H. Song,and The Carenza Jig (here).

September 24, 2012.  Rameau, Shostakovich.  Jean-Philippe Rameau was born on September 25, 1683 in Dijon.  Together with François Couperin, Rameau was the first truly French composer of the Baroque era: though Jean-Baptiste Lully was the pioneer of the French Baroque, he was born in Florence and moved to France as a teenager.  Most of Rameau’s early compositions were instrumental: he didn’t write an opera till he was 50, but once he had, they became a major event in France, not just musically but culturally.  Some people still preferred the operas of Lully, while others thought that Rameau was a much better composer.  In  17^th century France these were important matters: the “culture wars” erupted within the country, or at least among its literate part, dividing it into two camps, the "Lullyistes" and the "Rameauneurs"; the partisan pamphlets continued to be written for many years.  Rameau lived during the time of remarkable flourishing of the French culture in general.  He wrote operas to librettos by Voltaire.  He became a character in Diderot’s famous dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew).  And he earned the enmity of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered himself a composer, not just a writer and philosopher.  The 1730s and ’40s were the most productive period of Rameau’s life.  He wrote a number of "musical tragedies," such as Castor et Pollux, and the newly restored Les Boréades, which were never performed during Rameau’s lifetime; and many opera-ballets - Les Indes galantes being probably the most famous.  He received the title of "Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi" and a nice pension.  In his later years he wrote less, and by then his operas lost some of their freshness: the "Italian" operas came into vogue, their major proponent being Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose Orfeo ed Euridice was premiered in October of 1762.  Rameau died on September 12, 1764, two weeks before his 81^st birthday.  Here is Rameau’s Gavotte and Doubles, performed by the Israeli pianist Matan Porat.  Rameau wrote the Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin in 1726-27.  This collection forms two large suites, in A Minor and in G Major.  Gavotte and Doubles is from the former.

Dmitry Shostakovich was born on the same day in 1906.  We duly celebrate his birthday each year (for example, here).  This time we’ll just present one piece, the first movement of Symphony no. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 - the so-called Leningrad Symphony.  It was completed in December of 1941 and premiered in Kuibyshev on March 5, 1942.  (Kuibyshev, now restored to its historical name of Samara, was the city where the Soviet government evacuated its most important institutions to fearing that Moscow may fall to the advancing German armies.  The government relocated there, a never-used bunker for Stalin was built, and the prestigious Bolshoi Theater was moved to Kuibyshev as well).  Samuil Samosud conducted the orchestra of the Bolshoi, and the performance was broadcast all over the world.  The Soviets considered the symphony the musical epitome of the resistance to the Nazi invasion.  These days it’s much less clear whether that was the case: Rostislav Dubinsky, the first violinist of the Borodin Quartet, who knew Shtostakovich very well, maintained that the first movement was completed a year before the war started.  We’re not going to resolve this controversy, but you can listen to this movement (here), performed by the orchestra with an awkward Soviet name of The USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra.  At the time of this recording (1984), the music director of the orchestra was one of the most interesting Russian conductors of that era, Gennady Rozhdestvensky.  He is on the podium.

September 17, 2012. We have some unfinished business from the two previous weeks.  With the explosion of anniversaries we had very little time to write about Arnold Schoenberg and Antonin Dvořák.  With Schoenberg we traced his career to the point when he abandoned tonality in pieces such as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, written in 1912. Though very radical in its completeness, Schoenberg’s atonal music was not truly revolutionary: even Wagner extensively used shifting tonalities in his operas, sometimes to such extent that the major tonal center would seem to completely disappear (many of you may have heard it last week on public television during the rebroadcast of the wonderful Ring Cycle from the Metropolitan Opera).  Some works of Debussy had the same quality, but of course not to the degree as used by Schoenberg.  As unusual as it sounds, the atonal music still maintains the traditional tonal relationships, except that they are dispersed in small droplets within the composition.  Schoenberg didn't stop there: he evolved his style to eliminate all traces of tonality, making all 12 tones of the scale equal throughout a piece of music.  This style became known as dodecaphone, or the twelve tone technique. Schoenberg "invented" it around 1921.  By then he had already established a group of followers and pupils who became known as the Second Viennese School.  The key participants in this group were the tremendously talented Alban Berg and Anton Webern.  Among other noted members were Hanns Eisler and Viktor Ullmann.  All of them continued composing in the twelve tone style, which became extremely influential by the middle of the century.  Composers such as Milton Babbitt in the US, the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Italians Luciano Berio and Luigi Dallapiccola, and the Austrian-American Ernst Krenek were major proponents of the system. Even Stravinsky experimented with it.

In 1924 Schoenberg moved to Berlin, accepting the position of Director of the Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts.  He held this position till 1933, when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.  Fearing for his safety, Schoenberg moved to the United States and eventually settled in Los Angeles.  He taught at UCLA and the University of Southern California (John Cage and Lou Harrison were among his students).  He also continued composing; among the music written during this period are two concertos, one for the violin and another for the piano, and (the unfinished) opera Moses und Aron.  We'll hear the first movement of the Piano concerto, performed by Mitsuko Uchida and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate conducting (here, courtesy of YouTube). Schoenberg was also a serious amateur painter. The picture above is a self-portrait, painted in 1910.

It's hard to imagine a composer more different than Schoenberg, but here we are, celebrating Antonin Dvořák.  His anniversary was two weeks ago, but at that time we were too busy with Bruckner.  It's interesting that on a superficial but factual level, one can find a lot of similarities between Schoenberg and Dvořák.  A generation apart (Dvořák was born in 1841, Schoenberg in 1874) both were children of the Austrian Empire: Dvořák was born near Prague, the capital of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), which back then was an important part of the empire, Schoenberg in Vienna.  Both spent some time in the US: Schoenberg, the last 18 years of his life, Dvořák - three very productive years at the end of his.  Musically, both were influenced by Brahms, which, while unnoticeable in Schoenberg's later compositions, is very clear in all of Dvořák's oeuvre.  And during different periods of their respective careers, both were supported by Gustav Mahler.  But as far as their compositions are concerned, while Schoenberg was a revolutionary, Dvořák was everything but.  Which of course doesn't mean that he didn't write some wonderful music: his "New World" symphony, the cello concerto, the opera "Rusalka," some songs, quartets, and piano music are first class.  Here is his Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81. It's performed by Tessa Lark and Yoon-Jung Yang, violins, Yiyin Li, viola, Sébastien Gingras, cello and Helen Huang, piano.

September 10, 2012.  This week, very much like the last one, is abundant in anniversaries.  The only person we wrote about last week was Anton Bruckner, but several other composers are also worth mentioning..  Darius Milhaud, a wonderful French composer and a member of Les Six, was born on September 4, 1892.  Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons and an influential composer of the Classical era, was born on September 5, 1735 (Mozart loved his music and wrote three piano concertos based on J.C. Bach’s keyboard sonatas). Anton Diabelli was also born on September 5, but half a century later, in 1781.  Diabelli, a music publisher, wasn’t a good composer, but his ditzy waltz inspired Beethoven to write one of the most profound pieces in all of piano literature, the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, boring if played poorly, sublime if played well.  On the same day, but in 1867, Amy Beach, the first American woman to establish herself a classical composer, was born in Henniker, New Hampshire.  September 8th is the anniversary of the great Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, who was born in 1841.  We’ll write about Dvořák another time, but here’s his Romance, Op. 11. It’s performed by the violinist Natasha Korsakova, Charles Olivieri-Munroe conducting the North Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.  And on September 9 of 1583, Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the most interesting composers of the later Renaissance, was born in Ferrara.  All of this in one week!

This week is almost as rich with birthdays.  William Boyce, one of the most important English composers of the 18^th century was born around September 11, 1711 (he was baptized that day).  Friedrich Kuhlau, a Danish composer, was born on September 11, 1786.  These days he may not be performed very often in concert halls, but anybody who ever studied piano has most likely played one of his pieces.  September 11th is also the birthday of the one of most interesting living composer, the Estonian Arvo Pärt.  He was born in 1935.  We’ll definitely write more about him at a later time.  Clara Schumann, the wife of Robert Schumann, a pianist and composer and close friend of Johannes Brahms, was born on September 13, 1819.  But the person we’d like to commemorate today at least to some degree is Arnold Schoenberg.  He was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874 into a middle-class Jewish family.  The only musical lessons he ever took were from the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, his future brother-in-law.  Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were early supporters of Schoenberg, even though initially Schoenberg didn’t like Mahler’s music (he was "converted" after hearing Mahler’s Third Symphony).  His first significant work was the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899.  Clearly a late-Romantic piece, it’s still a tonal composition.  But in 1908 he wrote his Second Quartet, the fourth movement of which is Schoenberg’s first real atonal work (during that time his wife, Mathilde Zemlinsky, left him and started an affair with the young painter Richard Gerstl.  One wonders if there is a connection).  In 1912 he followed up with a hugely influential Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of 21 poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud.  It’s scored for a narrator (usually a soprano) and a chamber ensemble usually containing a clarinet, a flute, piano, and string instruments.  This is also an atonal work, but it’s still not a 12-tone composition: he would develop the 12-tone system several years later.

We’ll continue with Schoenberg and probably some other composers next week.  In the mean time, you can listen to Verklärte Nacht here.  It’s performed by Angelo Xiang Yu, violin, Yuuki Wong, violin, Hanna Lee, viola, Minkyung Sung, viola, and Karen Ouzounian, cello, Se-Doo Park, cello.

September 3, 2012.  Anton Bruckner was born on September 4, 1824.  This very fact gives one pause: Bruckner was born 9 year before Brahms!  Brahms has been part of the canon for more than a century, one of the “Three Bs.”  The music of Bruckner, while clearly of the Romantic tradition, feels new even today, fresh and absolutely original.  Its history was difficult; initially, Vienna rejected it.  Then, forty years after Bruckner’s death, the Nazis appropriated it, to some extent undermining it for the following generations.  Still, thanks to Bruno Walter, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Karajan, Günter Wand, Sergiu Celibidache, and many other conductors, Bruckner’s music thrives today, becoming a touchstone of sorts for any great orchestra.

Bruckner was born in a small village outside of Linz, Austria.  His first music teacher was his father, a local schoolmaster.  He started playing the organ very early, and greatly improved in his second school, where the schoolmaster was an organist.  After his father’s death, the 13 year-old Anton was sent to the monastery in Sankt-Florian, which had a great Baroque organ (see the photo below).  He sometimes played the instrument during services.  The following years were very difficult for Bruckner: his mother sent him to a teacher’s seminar, following which he had a number of low-paying teaching positions in St.-Florian and other towns.  In 1855 Bruckner started studying musical theory and counterpoint with the Viennese composer, organist, and music theorist Simon Sechter.  They mostly corresponded by mail, but Bruckner also made several visits to Vienna.  That was also the time when Bruckner was introduced to the music of Wagner, which he liked and studied diligently.  When Sechter died in 1868, the Vienna Conservatory offered his position to Bruckner.  He accepted and taught there for a number of years.  He later taught at the Vienna University.  Bruckner wrote most of his symphonies while in Vienna (there was an unnumbered “study” symphony that he wrote while in St.-Florian, and started his 1^st symphony there, although the revisions were written in Vienna). 

A man of genius, Bruckner was a very unusual person, and very unusual as a composer.  Mahler, who admired him, called him “half simpleton, half God.”  He was a direct opposite of the archetypical creator, an auteur impervious to all criticism.  Very humble and unsure of himself, he sought advice from everybody, from his students to conductors, and readily incorporated their suggestions.  He significantly reworked many of his symphonies.  Symphony no. 1 has three versions, as do symphonies 2 and 4.  Symphony no. 3 has four different revisions.  A provincial, he never got comfortable living in the capital.  That the musical tastes in Vienna were dictated by the famous critic Eduard Hanslick, an admirer of Brahms and anti-Wagnerite, didn’t help either: Hanslick strongly disliked Bruckner’s music.  Bruckner never married, although he made numerous proposals to very young girls.  He died on October 11, 1896, at age 72, and was buried under his beloved organ in St.-Florian.

We’ll hear the 3^rd movement (Scherzo) of his Symphony no. 4.  There’s a story connected to this symphony.  Hans Richter, the famous conductor who by then had worked with Wagner, was rehearsing for the premier of the symphony.  According to Richter, "When the symphony was over, Bruckner came to me, his face beaming with enthusiasm and joy.  I felt him press a coin into my hand. 'Take this' he said, 'and drink a glass of beer to my health.'” Richter took the coin, and later wore it on his watch-chain.  We’ll hear the original version (there are two others, each in more than one form.  Even Mahler got into the game and created a version).  It’s performed by Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt conducting (to listen, click here, courtesy of YouTube).

August 27, 2012.  Nana Jashvili, a friend of the site, is a violin virtuoso recognized by the press and critics for the emotional intensity and the profound lyricism of her playing.  Nana’s musical ability was developed under the influence of two cultures, Georgian and Russian.  She was born in Tbilisi into a musical family.  Her father, Luarsab Jashvili, a violinist and violist, was a professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory.  He was Nana’s first teacher.  Nana’s older sister, Marina Jashvili (Yashvili), who also took her first lessons with her father, became a famous violinist and a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.  Marina died on July 9 of this year at the age of 79 after a long illness, and we mourn her passing.

After studying with her father, Nana moved to Moscow and entered the class of the great violinist Leonid Kogan at the Moscow conservatory.  As a student she won several national competitions.  Then, at the age of seventeen, she had her triumphant breakthrough when she won the "Premier Grand Prix" at the International Jacques Thibaud Competition, the youngest winner ever.  She was also awarded the "Prix Special" for the best interpretation of Maurice Ravel's "Tzigane."  Several years later she also won the "Concours International de Montreal."  Since then Nana has given concerts in the great music capitals in Europe, Canada and Japan.  She has appeared as a soloist with the Concertgebouw orchestra of Amsterdam, the Gewandhaus orchestra of Leipzig, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Orchestre de Paris and the Moscow and Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestras.  She has worked with many great conductors, such as Claudio Abbado, Karl Böhm, Kurt Masur, Neeme Järvi, Yehudi Menuhin, Valerie Gergiev, Pavel Kogan, and Jansug Kakhidze.  Nana Jashvili is a welcome guest artist on the concert stages at the summer festivals of Vienna, Bregenz and Copenhagen.  Her repertoire extends from the Baroque to the contemporary.  Her interpretation of the violin concerto op.36 by Schoenberg at the Vienna state opera was celebrated as an exceptional event.  Nana is a professor at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen.  She plays a Nicola Gagliano violin.

Nana Jashvili’s recordings in our library suffer from many transfers from one media to another.  Still, we’re sure that you’ll enjoy several of them.  Here’s Béla Bartók’s Six Romanian Folk Dances.  Tchaikovsky’s Valse Scherzo in C Major is here.  Finally, the complete F-A-E Sonata, written by Albert Dietrich, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, can be heard here.  In all performances Nana is accompanied by the pianist Vladimir Skanavi.  We hope to bring you more and better quality recordings in the near future.

August 20, 2012.  Claude Debussy.  This week we celebrate a major event: the 150^th anniversary of one of the greatest composers of the late 19th – early-20^th century, Claude-Achille Debussy.  He was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a wealthy suburb of Paris (his family was not).  He started his musical studies at the age of eight, in Nice, where his mother, then pregnant again, fled during the Prussian occupation of Paris in 1870.  At the age of ten he entered the Paris conservatory and studied there for 11 years.  In 1884 he won the Prix de Rome and moved to the French Academy in Rome for a four-year residence.  He didn’t like it there, neither his companions nor the food.  He submitted several pieces, one of which was a symphonic cantata La damoiselle élue.  A pretty but rather straightforward piece with just a hint of the kind of harmonies that Debussy was to develop later, it was still labeled by the Academy as “bizarre.”  In 1888 he visited Bayreuth to see Wagner’s Parsifal and Die Meistersinger and, deeply impressed, made a return a year later for Tristan und Isolde. 1889.  As different as Wagner and Debussy are, it’s not surprising that the shimmering sonorities of Wagner’s orchestra affected the young Debussy.  He later disavowed both the influence and Wagner’s music in general.  Still, it seems that Wagner’s influence is discernable, and not only on Debussy’s only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande.

By about 1890, Debussy had fully developed his own musical language.  One of the first compositions to clearly manifest the new style was Suite bergamasque for piano (you can listen to it here, in the performance by the young Chinese pianist Xiang Zou).  During that period Debussy was spending a lot of time in Stéphane Mallarmé symbolist salon.  Four years later, influenced by a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, Debussy wrote a symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.  The poem was later made into a famous ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky.  His only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande premiered in 1902.  We had to borrow from YouTube to bring you an excerpt.  It is here; Pierre Boulez conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Donald McIntyre is Golaud, George Shirley – a Pelléas, Elisabeth Söderström is Mélisande.   One of Debussy’s most popular compositions, three symphonic "sketches" titled La mer was written in 1903.   A large number of piano compositions followed: Estampes, also in 1903, Children's Corner Suite in 1908, the first book of Préludes in1910 (the second book was written in 1913 and differs in style rather considerably).  Debussy’s works were becoming more angular, with a larger number of unresolved dissonances, such as in this Etude No.11 "Pour les arpèges composes," (1915) performed here by the pianist Jiyeon Shin.  And then in 1917 he wrote the violin sonata, which had much simpler harmonics (it is performed here by the Japanese violinist Mari Lee with Ieva Jokubaviciute on the piano).  We don’t know if there was a general shift in Debussy’s compositional style: he wanted to write six sonatas but completed just three, for violin, for cello, and for flute, viola and harp (you can find all of them in our library).  He died of cancer on March 25, 1918, while Paris was being heavily bombarded by the Germans.  He was buried at the Père Lachaise with no public ceremony.  The following year Debussy was re-interred at Passy, a small pretty cemetery behind the Trocadéro, in the 16^th arrondissement.

 August 13, 2012.  More mid-August birthdays.  This week is full of anniversaries, even if most of them are of minor composers.  Still, we think they should be noted.  Sorabji (Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji), born on August 14, 1892, was an English composer of Parsi descent.  He was quite controversial in his time and still is – among the people who’ve actually heard his music: some of  Sorabji’s pieces are of extreme length.  His piano sonata no. 5 runs for about five hours, and that’s not even his longest composition.  Some critics think of him as one of the most interesting composers of the 20^th century, while others, like The Guardian’s Andrew Clements, feel that Sorabji’s talent never matched his musical ambition.    We have a piece by Sorabji, Pastiche on Habanera, but it is not very representative, so here is the first movement of his piano sonata no. 1 played by Marc-André Hamelin (courtesy of YouTube).  If Hamelin though it worth studying and performing, that probably means that the sonata is not musically insignificant.

A totally different composer, the delightful Jacques Ibert, was born on August 15, 1890.  He studied at the Paris conservatory, and took private composition and instrumentation lessons with André Gedalge; his fellow students were Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud, both influential members of Les Six. Ibert, though friendly with both, never joined the group.  Ibert wrote operas, a ballet, several concertos, and a good deal of instrumental music.  His songs are among the best in his output.  Here’s Chanson à Dulcinée, from Chanson de Don Quichotte.  It’s performed by the bass Liam Moran; Renate Rohlfing is on the piano.

Two other French composers were also born this week: Gabriel Pierné and Benjamin Godard, Pierné was born on August 16, 1863, Godard on August 18, 1849.  Like Ibert, Godard studied at the Paris Conservatory, and like him, also won the prestigious Prix de Rome.  He wrote operas, ballets and instrumental music, but not much of it is performed these days.  But here is the first movement of his Sonata op.36 for violin and piano, and it sounds very nice.  It’s played by the French violinist Elsa Grether; Eliane Reyes is on the piano.  Benjamin Godard also studied at the Paris conservatory, and wrote an enormous number of compositions during his rather brief life (he died at the age of 45).  There are recordings of his music on the market, but they’re few and far between.  Here is a charming little morsel, Abandon.  It’s performed by Albert Markov, violin, his son Alexander Markov, violin, with Dmitry Cogan on the piano.

And finally, from a totally different era, Antonio Salieri. He was born on August 18, 1750 in Legnano, Italy but spent most of his productive years in Vienna.  Some day we’ll dedicate a whole piece to Salieri, but right now you can listen to part of his 26 Variations on the theme of La Folia.  It’s performed by the London Mozart Players, Matthias Bamert, conductor (here, courtesy of YouTube).

August 6, 2012.  Mid-August birthdays: Reynaldo Hahn, Alexander Glazunov, Maurice Greene.  These days Reynaldo Hahn is probably better known as Marcel Proust’s lover and friend rather than a composer, but in the 1890s his songs were very popular.  Hahn was born in Venezuela on August 9, 1874, his family moved to Paris when he was three.  He started composing when he was eight.  At the age of ten he entered the Paris Conservatory where he studied with Massenet, Gounod, and Saint-Saëns.  He was accepted into the popular salons of Paris when he was still in his late teens.  It was in one of these salons that in 1894 he met Marcel Proust, then just an aspiring writer.  Even though their affair was brief, they remind very good friends till Proust’s death in 1922.  Here is a song Si mes vers avaient des ailes (If my verses had wings) on a poem by Victor Hugo by the 14 year-old Hahn, which immediately became very popular.  It’s sung by the soprano Rebecca Wascoe, Jeffrey Peterson is on the piano.

Like Hahn, Glazunov was more popular during his own lifetime than   he is today.  Glazunov’s life spanned several eras: imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and exile in France.  Glazunov was born on August 10, 1865 into a wealthy family in Saint Petersburg.  He began composing very early, was noticed by Balakirev, who in turn introduced his work to Rimsky-Korsakov.  Rimsky took Glazunov under his wing, tutoring him in composition and in 1882 even premiering his 1^st symphony (Glazunov composed eight symphonies altogether).   In 1898 he wrote a still-popular ballet Raymonda, and in 1904 – a violin concerto (which Jascha Heifetz played throughout his career).  In 1905 Glazunov was appointed the director of the Saint Petersburg conservatory.  He stayed in this position through the 1917 October Revolution and then another eleven years.  Dmitry Shostakovich was one of his students.  In the later years he became an alcoholic, and apparently even taught lessons while drunk.  Nonetheless, his prestige was such that he stayed in charge of the Conservatory.  But in 1928 Glazunov went on a tour of the United States and Europe and never returned.  He eventually settled in Paris and died in France in 1936.  Glazunov wrote five concertos: two for the piano, one for the cello and at the end of his life a concert for the saxophone, but the one that’s being played on a more or less regular basis is his violin concerto.  You can listen to it here, performed by Dmitri Berlinsky with the Jupiter Symphony Orchestra, Jens Nygaard conducting.

Marice Green lived in a very different epoch.  He was born on August 12,1696.  As David Schrader writes in one of his program notes, “the youngest son of a well-to-do family of considerable lineage, Greene was likely trained under Jeremiah Clarke at St. Paul's Cathedral. When his voice broke, he was apprenticed to Richard Brind, the organist of St. Paul's since Clarke's death in 1707. While Greene is best known nowadays for his sacred music, he also contributed much to the secular music of London – he befriended Handel for a time, but something had caused a falling out between the two men so that Handel, according to Sir Charles Burney, the music historian, never mentioned his name without some injurious epithet.”   Here’s David Schrader and Baroque Band playing Green’s Overture No. 1 in D Major.

July 30, 2012.  Summer is upon us, and with it, all kinds of festivals and special programs.  One of them is the Steans Institute, Ravinia Festival’s music conservatory.  The Steans brings young talented musicians from all over the world to study and perform.  This year’s program for piano and string has just finished, and the vocal program will follow (the Steans has an interesting jazz program as well).  The Piano and Strings program featured master classes with such musicians as Menahem Pressler (piano), Gary Hoffman (cello), Ida Kavafian (violin), and the pianist and conductor Christoph Eschenbach.  Also on the faculty were the pianists Leon Fleisher, Gilbert Kalish and John O’Conor; Ralph Kirshbaum and Lawrence Lesser taught the cello.

The students gave twelve concerts, and those were programmed to present both solo and chamber playing.  All kind of music could be heard, from J.S. Bach to György Kurtág.  And as is the tradition at the Steans, some teachers participated in music making alongside the students.  We hope to bring to you this year’s concerts in the near future. 

While we’re waiting for the audio files to be processed, we can offer you some recordings from the previous seasons.  We start with last season.  The English pianist Sam Armstrong plays Capriccio in b minor, from Eight piano pieces, Op. 76 by Johannes Brahms (here).  We’ll follow with recording from 2008, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Trio No. 5 in D Major "Ghost" for violin, cello and piano Op. 70, No. 1 (here).  It’s performed by Sean Lee, violin, the cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan, and David Kaplan, piano.  Narek went on to win the prestigious Tchaikovsky competition in 2011.  We’ll follow with Antonin Dvořák’s Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81, from the 2007 season.  It’s performed by the violinists Tessa Lark (the 2012 Naumburg winner) and Yoon-Jung Yang, Yiyin Li, viola, Sébastien Gingras, cello, and Helen Huang, piano (here).   And finally,, you can listen to Felix Mendelssohn’s Octet for Strings in E-flat Major, Op. 20 (also from the 2007 season, here).  The performers are: Robin Scott, violin, Tessa Lark, violin, David McCarroll, violin, Miriam Fried, violin (she was teaching that year at the Steans), Yoonji Kang, viola, Yura Lee, viola, Blaise Déjardin, cello, Michael Nicolas, cello.  Enjoy!

July 23, 2012.  Enrique Granados was born on July 27, 1867 in a Catalan town of Lleida (or Lerida, as it’s known in Spanish).  As a young man he studied piano in Barcelona with Joan Baptista Pujol, one of the most important Catalan pianists and teachers of that time (Isaac Albéniz was also Pujol’s student).  When Granados was twenty he went to study music in Paris; in  Spain in the late 19^th century, one had to go to Paris to make  a name in classical music.  Alas, he was rejected by the Paris Conservatory.  Instead, Granados began his studies with Charles de Bériot, a Conservatory professor, among whose students were Maurice Ravel and Ricardo Viñes.  Viñes, who like Granados hailed from Lleida and also studied with Pujol, became famous as an interpreter of the music of Ravel, Granados, Albeniz, and other contemporary composers.

Granados returned to Barcelona in 1889, after just two years in Paris.  He played concerts and composed: his opera Maria del Carmen was well received.  In 1911 he wrote and premiered what was to become his most popular composition, the piano suite Goyescas.  It’s comprised of two "books," each containing three pieces.  Book 1: Los Requiebros (The Complimets); Coloquio en la Reja (Conversation at the Grille); El Fandango del Candil (The Oil Lamp Fandango).  Book 2: Quejas o la Maja y el Ruiseñor (Complaints or the Maiden and the Nightingale); El Amor y la Muerte: Balada (Love and Death: a Ballad); and Epílogo: Serenata del Espectro (Epilogue: Specter's Serenade).  Even though the suite was inspired by the paintings of Francisco Goya, there are no direct links between individual pieces and specific paintings.  Goyescas became very successful, and Granados wrote an opera on the same subject.

In 1915, in the midst of the Great War, Granados, accompanied by his wife, went to New York where his opera Goyescas had a successful premier..  Granados also played a number of concerts, both piano recitals and accompanying his friend, the great cellist Pablo Casals.  On their way back Europe, Granados and his wife traveled to England first, and then took a ferry, the Sussex, for Dieppe, France.  As they were crossing the Channel, the Sussex was attacked by a German submarine and a torpedo broke the ship in two.  The story goes that Granados made it to the lifeboat but without his wife.  When he saw her flailing in the water, he jumped in and attempted to save her.  They both drowned.

We’ll hear three excerpts from Goyescas.  First, the Chinese pianist Jie Chen plays Los Requiebros, from Book I (here).  Then the South Korean pianist Yoonjung Han plays El amor y la muerte, from the second book (here).   Finally, the Spanish pianist Gabriel Escudero plays Quejas, o la Maja y el Ruiseñor, also from the second book (here).

July 16, 2012.  From recent uploads: three pianists.   Sofya Melikyan was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1978. There she started piano studies at the age of five.  In 1994 Ms. Melikyan moved to Spain and continued her musical education in the Royal Conservatory of Madrid, as a student of Joaquin Soriano.  She graduated in 1999 with the Highest Honor Prize. Subsequently she studied with Galina Egiazarova in Madrid and Brigitte Engerer in Paris (who unfortunately died on June 29th of this year of cancer, at the age of 59).  In 2003 she completed the post-graduate program at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris and later studied at the Manhattan School of Music with Solomon Mikowsky.  Ms. Melikyan has been awarded First Prizes at the Marisa Montiel International Piano Competition in Linares, and the Ibiza International Piano Competition. She has also received top and special prizes at the 15th Jose Iturbi and Maria Canals International Competitions in Spain.  An avid chamber musician, Ms. Melikyan is a member of the New York-based Sima Piano Trio, an ensemble that is quickly becoming one of the leading young trios of its generation.  Here is Sofya’s performance of Robert Schumann’s Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), Op. 82.

Alexander Osminin is a young Russian pianist.  He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he was a student in the class of Eliso Virsaladze.  He continued his postgraduate studies with Ms. Virsaladze.  Alexander played many recitals in Russia and in Europe.  The highlight of his recent tour was the concert in Salle Cortot in Paris.  He played several concerts in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the New Russia orchestra of Yuri Bashmet, performing concertos by Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, and Ravel.  Alexander was successful in several international piano competitions: Concorso Pianistico Europeo "Luciano Gante" (First prize), Sviatoslav Richter International Piano Competition, and several other.  Here he is playing Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 5 in G-flat Major, and here – Romance in F-sharp Major, Op. 28, No. 2 by Robert Schumann.

English pianist Sam Armstrong has performed across Europe, Asia and North America as a recitalist, chamber musician and orchestral soloist.  He played in the Royal Festival and Wigmore Halls in London, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and made his New York solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in January 2009, as winner of the Nadia Reisenberg Recital Award. His performances have been broadcast on BBC Radio, French Television, Radio Suisse-Romande and WQXR New York.  Sam has been a top prizewinner in several competitions including the Beethoven Society of Europe Competition in London (2003) and the Porto International Piano Competition in Portugal (2004).  Sam recently completed his studies at Mannes College of Music in New York where for four years he was the only student of renowned pianist Richard Goode. Upon graduation he was awarded the Newton Swift Piano Award. He previously studied in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music, and he also worked with John O’Conor in Dublin. Here is Sam’s performance of Alban Berg’s Piano sonata op. 1.

July 9, 2012.  The Italian composer Ottorino Respighi was born on this day in 1879 in Bologna, Italy.  At the end of the 19^th century, music in Italy, one of the main European centers two- three hundred years earlier, was pretty much limited to opera.  While it’s true that Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti in the first half of the 19^th century, and Verdi’s in its second half brought the art of opera to new heights, orchestral and instrumental music, on the other hand, pretty much languished.  Ottorino’s father, a piano teacher, taught him to play piano and violin.  Respighi continued his studies at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, and upon graduating, went to Russia: the Imperial Mariinsky Theater was staging a season of Italian operas, and Respighi was hired as the principal violist in the orchestra.  While in Saint Petersburg, he studied compositions with Rimsky-Korsakov.  Upon returning to Italy he settled in his hometown, composing and concertizing across Italy, but in 1913 was invited to teach composition at the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome.  He stayed there for the rest of his life.  In 1916 he composed Fontane di Roma, a symphonic poem, which eventually became the first part of the “Roman trilogy,” his most famous set of compositions.  The second part, Pini di Roma, was written in 1924, and Feste Romane (Roman festivals) – in 1926.

As many of his colleagues (Alfredo Casella comes to mind) Respighi was interested in the old Italian music.  He published editions of music of Monteverdi, Vivaldi, and Marcello.  Unlike Casella, though, Respighi stayed away from politics and was never enamored with Fascism.  He died on April 18, 1936 of the same heart disease that had killed Gustav Mahler 25 years earlier. 

Fontane di Roma consists of four parts, each one “describing” a particular fountain during different hours of the day.  The first part is called "La fontana di Valle Giulia all'alba," the fountain of Valle Giulia at dawn (Valle Giulia is an area in Rome not far from Villa Borghese).

The second movement is called "La fontana del Tritone al mattino" (The Triton Fountain in the Morning).  The famous fountain, in the center of Piazza Barberini, was created by the great sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1642. 

The third movement is called "La fontana di Trevi al meriggio" (The Trevi Fountain at noon).   Probably the most popular of all Roman fountains, it was completed in 1762, but a fountain has existed on that spot from at least 1453.   Even during Roman times water flowed there: it was a terminal point of an aqueduct.

The last, fourth movement is called "La fontana di Villa Medici al tramonto" (The Villa Medici fountain at sunset).  There are many fountains in the gardens of Villa Medici.  Most likely Respighi had in mind the one in front of the villa.  The villa, which is adjacent to Villa Borgese, sits on top of the Pincio hill.  Overlooking the fountain, there’s a wonderful view of Rome, even though it’s now partly obscured by  trees.

You can listen to Fontane di Roma here.  It’s performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Lorin Maazel conducting (courtesy of YouTube).

July 2, 2012.  Gustav Mahler.  The great Austrian composer was born on July 7, 1860.  We mark his birthday every year, and every time it reminds us how inadequately he is represented in our library.  Mahler, uniquely among modern composers, wrote almost exclusively for the orchestra.  He completed nine symphonies, and published several song cycles for voice and orchestra: Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn), Rückert-Lieder, Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), and Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), which in reality is a full-blown symphony (Mahler himself described it as “a Symphony for Tenor and Alto (or Baritone) Voice and Orchestra”).  Superstitiously attempting to escape the “curse of the Ninth symphony” (he was thinking of Beethoven, Schubert, and Anton Bruckner, for whom ninth symphonies were their last), Mahler didn’t number his ninth, but gave it a name.  In the end, as we know, this “trick” didn’t work: Mahler went on to write an “official” Ninth symphony, and died while working on the Tenth.

In our library, we have a great number of composers wonderfully represented by very talented instrumentalists.  With American orchestras, however, the story is very different.  Most of them have very strict labor rules and do not allow streaming of their recordings, even those that are not commercial.  We have recordings of several of Mahler’s symphonies, and although these can provide the listener with a glimpse of his genius, they don’t present it on the level his music deserves.  We’d really like to play some of Mahler’s music during the week marking his birthday, so we turned to YouTube as a source.  Here’s Adagio, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony.  Mahler subtitled is Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend – very slow and even reluctant.  Leonard Bernstein, who is conducting the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, takes these directions quite literally: it’s one of the slowest performances on record and runs almost 30 minutes, about five minutes longer than an average performance of this movement; it’s incredible nine minutes slower than Pierre Boulez’s Grammy-winning account.  Some critics think that it’s self-indulgent but others believe it to be one of the best recordings of this heartbreaking work ever made.

The picture of Mahler above was made in 1907, two years before he started working on the Ninth Symphony and three years before his death on May 18, 1910, of incurable heart disease.

June 25, 2012.  On Italian Baroque.  Recently, while contemplating some pictures of Rome, we were struck, yet again, by the incongruity of terms we use to describe art.   This, of course, is part of a much larger problem, one with which this site struggles often when attempting to "describe" music and performances.  The way we try to deal with this issue here is by avoiding it whenever possible: we let our users listen to the music instead of talking about it.  Still, the problem remains and manifests itself not only when we attempt the impossible, as in "describing" music, but even in much more mundane areas, such as when we try to classify historical art periods.  The term "Baroque" is case in point.  The Baroque architecture of Rome has its origins in the late 16^th – early 17^th century (Carlo Maderno designed Santa Susanna around 1603), and reached its glorious zenith with the works of Francesco Borromini, Pietro Cortona and Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the mid-1600s.  When we think "Rome" – the façade of Saint Peter’s, the two iconic churches off Piazza Venezia, Santa Maria di Loreto and Santissimo Nome di Maria al Foro Traiano, the interior of the Gesù, the Trevi fountain – all of it is Baroque.  But the music that played in Santa Susanna was not "Baroque" in our understanding of the term.  Most likely it was written by composers of the Roman school, like Palestrina and the Spaniard, Tomás Luis de Victoria.  Another Roman, Gregorio Allegri, composed his famous Miserere in the1630s (it would not have been sung at Santa Susanna anyway, as it was composed specifically for use in the Sistine Chapel).  And as much as we like Palestrina and Victoria, it’s clear that music as art did notdevelop to the heights it had reached in its visual forms till much later, and it didn’t happen in Rome.  Lully, and later Rameau and Couperin in France, Purcell in England, and later still Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Bach and Handel brought it to the canonical level which we habitually allot to the great painter and architects of Italy.

The church in the picture above is Sant'Andrea della Valle, on what is now Corso Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome.  It was designed mainly by Carlo Maderno in 1608 and completed later.  Here is an example of the music that could be heard in this church during that time.  It’s a motet by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Sicut cervus desiderat, (“As the deer thirsts for the waters, so my soul longs for Thee, O God”).  It’s performed by the Westminster Cathedral Choir (courtesy of YouTube).

June 24, 2012.  Today is the birthday of a dear friend of Classical Connect, Lev Solomonovich Ruzer: he turns 90! A physicist by profession who successfully transitioned from running a research lab in the Soviet Union to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he’s also an amateur pianist.  He started piano lessons in his teens,continued playing while at Moscow University, and he still plays piano every day!  We suspect that music is what supports his amazing vitality and joie de vivre.  On this wonderful day we join his family in wishing him great health, lots of love and more music to enjoy.

We could probably record a Classical Connect rendition of Happy Birthday, but we suspect Lev Solomonovich would not be impressed.  Here, instead, is the Venezuelan-American pianist Gabriela Montero playing her own improvisation on the traditional tune.  She does a much better job with it.

June 18, 2012.  Igor Stravinsky.  We didn’t have time to talk about Stravinsky last week, but he’s too big a presence in classical music to leave him out completely, so we’ll do it this week instead.  Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in Oranienbaum, as small town just outside of Saint Petersburg, famous for one the imperial palaces located there.  In the past, we’ve written about Stravinsky quite a bit, both about his peregrinations and the radical changes in his compositional style.  There’s no doubt that Stravinsky was a musical giant.  His compositions, from the early “Russian” ballets The Firebird and The Rite of Spring, to neoclassical composition, such as ballets Pulcinella and Apollon musagète, two symphonies, in C and in Three Movements, and the opera The Rake's Progress, to the latest forays in serialism – practically his complete oeuvre belongs in the pantheon of  classical music of the 20^th century.  But what we thought we’d mention this time, especially in juxtaposition to Richard Strausswhom we wrote about last week, is the very trite but still somehow surprising fact that geniuses are not always necessarily good.  And we don’t mean being “good” in everyday life, although Stravinsky was, apparently, even though entertaining, a rather unpleasant person to be around.  We mean their beliefs and political views.  It’s well known that Stravinsky was anti-Semitic.  That’s not very surprising, considering his aristocratic background and the fact that the Russian aristocracy during the last years of the monarchy was to a large degree anti-Semitic, with wonderful exceptions, of course, such as the Nabokov family.  What comes as a shock is Stravinsky’s infatuation with Mussolini.  In an interview he gave to the music critic of Rome’s La Tribuna in 1930 he said: “I don't believe that anyone venerates Mussolini more than I… I have an overpowering urge to render homage to your Duce. He is the savior of Italy and – let us hope – Europe.”  He also wrote to a German publisher in 1933, “I am surprised to have received no proposals from Germany for next season, since my negative attitude toward communism and Judaism – not to put it in stronger terms – is a matter of common knowledge.”  It’s quite ironic that Nazi cultural censors declared Stravinsky a “Jewish modernist” and banned his work from Germany.

We probably could go on, but our site is about music, not politics.  Here is a wonderful piano arrangement by Guido Agosti of an excerpt from the Firebird Suite.  It’s performed by the pianist Daniil Trifonov.

June 11, 2012.  A bountiful week.  Richard Strauss, Edvard Grieg, Charles Gounod, and Igor Stravinsky were all born this week.  Richard Strauss was born on June 11, 1864.  He clearly deserves our full attention, but this week, so full packed with birthdays, we’d like to make just two comments. One is on his place in the musical Pantheon of the late 19^th – early 20^th century.  Strauss said, with amazing self-deprecation, "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."  We’d like to disagree.  The place of the composer is judged by his best output, not some abstract “average” weighted down by weaker pieces (think of the number of mediocre music written, for example, by Tchaikovsky).  Strauss’ tone poems, such as Also sprach Zarathustra, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, An Alpine Symphony are all first-rate.  As are his operas, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Salome, and other.  And so is his Violin sonata, op. 18 (you can listen to it here, performed by Ilya Kaler, violin, and Eteri Andjaparidze, piano.  He also wrote wonderful songs (here is Cäcilie, Op. 27, No. 2, sung by the soprano Janai Brugger-Orman, with Renate Rohlfing on the piano).  He clearly was a great composer.  And the other comment is to Strauss’ decency.  Totally apolitical, he maintained relations with Jewish writers and artists when it was already considered inopportune in Nazi Germany.  Here’s a great quote from his letter to the writer Stefan Zweig: “Do you believe I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German'? Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognize only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none.”

If we ever had some doubts about the accepted "rankings" of great composers, Edvard Grieg’s position would’ve been the one to question.  But the overwhelming popularity of his Piano Concerto and incidental music to Peer Gynt clearly outweigh any snobbish pretenses.  He also deserves additional points for being the only national composer in the modern history of Norway!  But before our listeners start sending us indignant messages, here is In the Hall of the Mountain King, from the Peer Gynt suite, played by  McKeever Piano Duo.  And here is Grieg’s wonderful Violin Sonata, op. 45.  It’s performed by Gregory Maytan, violin and Nicole Lee, piano.  And why are we writing about Grieg?  He was born this week, on June 15, 1843 in the city of Bergen in what was then the Union of Sweden and Norway.  The Union was dissolved in 1905, two years before Grieg’s death, so there are no questions about Grieg’s nationality!

Just one song from Charles Gounod, the oldest in this group: he was born on June 17, 1818.  The young mezzo-soprano Rebecca Henry sings Que fais-tu, blanche tourterelle?, Tom Jaber is on the piano (here).  We’ll write about Igor Stravinksy (June 17, 1882 – April 6, 1971), who clearly was one of the greatest composers of the 20^th century (but probably not as nice a person as Richard Strauss) some other time.

June 4, 2012.  Beatrice Berrut.  One of the first pieces that Ms. Berrut uploaded to Classical Connect was Schumann’s Piano Sonata no. 1.  Schumann was just 23 when he composed what he called Grosse Sonate ("Grand Sonata").  Schumann had at the time already written a number of great pieces, from Papillons to Toccata in C Major to Carnaval, but clearly he still wanted to write a serious, classical piece (perhaps to impress his bride, the young virtuoso Clara Wieck).  Beatrice was the same age of 23 when she recorded the sonata in 2009.  What impresses the listener in this recording is the depth, the seriousness of it, something you may not expect from a young performer.  This is the hallmark of Ms. Berrut’s art.  Whether she plays her beloved Schumann (she recorded all three piano sonatas for Centaur Records), Chopin, Brahms, or Scriabin, she digs deep into the music to uncover the essence and bring it to the listener.  The great violinist Gidon Kremer recognized this quality when he described Beatrice as “a wonderfully talented and musical pianist, with impressive seriousness, commitment and sensitivity.”

Beatrice was born in the Swiss canton of Valais, and started the piano rather late, at the age of 9, first in Lausanne with Pierre Goy (paino) and Pierre Amoyal (chamber music), and then at the Neuhaus Foundation in Zurich under renowned pianist Esther Yellin, a pupil of Henrich Neuhaus.  She then graduated from the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where she studied with Galina Iwanzowa.  She receives  regular guidance from Menahem Pressler and John O’Conor.  Beatrice says that she’s also influenced by her work with pianists Brigitte Engerer and Leon Fleisher.

The winner of the Société des Arts Competition in Geneva, she was the Swiss laureate at the Eurovision Contest for young classical musicians, and represented Switzerland at the European Contest in Berlin.  She also won the Bach special award at Wiesbaden International Piano Competition.  Since the release of her debut CD in 2003 featuring works by Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt, Beatrice has been in demand as a soloist both in recitals and with numerous orchestras, such as the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Kammerphilharmonie Berlin, Menuhin Chamber Orchestra.  She also appears regularly on Swiss, German, US, and Canadian radio and television.

A keen chamber musician, Beatrice was invited  in 2005 by Gidon Kremer to play several concerts at his festival in Basel, and in 2007 and 2008 by Shlomo Mintz to his festival in Sion as well as \duo recitals in Argentina in September 2011. In August 2011, she performed Schumann’s Quintet with Itzhak Perlman at the Hamptons, NY.

On Wednesday, June 6 Beatrice will perform at the Dame Myre Hess concert in Chicago.  On the program are two Bach chorales in Busoni’s transcription, Chaconne in d minor, and Liszt’s Après une Lecture de Dante.  If you cannot make it to the concert, you can listen to Après une Lecture here.

May 28, 2012.  Isaac Albéniz.  When Isaac Albéniz was born on May 29, 1860, Spanish classical music was in a long decline.  Spain was the country where music flourished during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.  In the early 16^th century Spanish composers were in the forefront of the polyphonic development.  Local musicians traveled to Burgundy, France and the Flemish cities, studied and made music with the best of them; many of the best composers went to the courts of Spanish kings.  The music of Cristóbal de Morales (1500 – 1553) was known in many European countries.  Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548 –1611) is considered one of the greatest composers of the late Renaissance, on par with Giovanni da Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso.  During the Baroque period, music continued to thrive.  Gaspar Sanz (1640 – 1710) was one of the most important composers for the guitar.  Domenico Scarlatti spent a large part of his productive life in Spain.  Padre Antonio Soler (1729 –1783) followed in his steps; Soler’s keyboard sonatas are part of the regular piano repertory and are played often.  Luigi Boccherini, like Scarlatti, was born in Italy but spent most of his life in Madrid.  By the 1800s, however, classical music waned, as did much of the Spanish culture in general.  Albéniz was the oldest of the first group of talented composer (together with Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Turina) to revive Spanish music in the late 19^th century and bring it into the 20^th.

We’ll hear three piano pieces by Albéniz.  First, Jorge Federico Osorio plays Granada, from Suite Española no. 1 (here).  Then the young American pianist Pia Bose performs El Albaicín, from one of the most important Albéniz’s compositions, the suite Iberia (El Albaicín comes from Book III), here.  And finally (here), the Russian-American pianist Dmitry Paperno plays Cordoba, Op. 232, No. 4.  Here’s what Paperno writes about Cordoba: "The slow introduction to this beautiful piece describes the stillness of a Spanish night. One moment in particular strikes me because it comes extremely close to the sound of Russian Orthodox choir music. This is apparently coincidental, although there are definitely some links between Spanish and Russian music (starting with two Spanish Overtures by Glinka). The faster part of Cordoba is like a melancholic serenade accompanied by guitar. Its victorious major key culmination is interrupted at its peak. The piece never gets all that fast, however, because Spanish music always contains a feeling of dignity and melancholy."  We’ll use this quote to segue into yet another anniversary, that of the above-mentioned Mikhail Glinka.  Glinka, who was born on June 1, 1804, was, like Albéniz, a pioneer: there was practically no original classical music before his time.  Here is Glinka’s piano piece, The Lark, it is performed by the American pianist Tanya Gabrielian.

May 21, 2012.  Richard Wagner was born on May 22, 1813 in the Brühl, a street in the Jewish quarter of the city of Leipzig – an ironic twist of fate, considering Wagner’s eventual anti-Semitism.  Richard’s father died six months after his birth. The following year, his mother married the playwright Ludwig Geyer and the family moved to Dresden.  In 1821 his step-father died and Richard was sent off to the Kreuz Grammar School in Dresden. At the age of thirteen Richard decided to become a playwright and produced a tragedy, Leubald. Determine to set it to music, Richard persuaded his mother to allow him to receive proper musical instruction. Moving back to Leipzig with his family in 1827, Wagner took his first formal lesson in harmony. There he was introduced to the symphonies of Beethoven, who became a huge influence. In 1831, he entered the University of Leipzig and began composition lessons with the cantor of the St. Thomas Church.  He composed a Symphony in C major, his only one and written very much under Beethoven’s influence; the symphony later received performances in both Prague and Leipzig.  At the age of 20, Wagner completed his first opera, Die Feen (“The Faires”); it was never staged during his lifetime. He married his first wife, Christine Wilhelmine “Minna” Planer, on November 24, 1836. A year later Wagner and Minna moved to Riga, then a part the Russian Empire, as the music director of a local opera. However, within two years the couple had incurred so much debt that they were forced to flee from their creditors. Their escape led them first to London and soon after to Paris. It was the stormy passage by sea to London that led to Wagner’s inspiration for his opera, The Flying Dutchman.  During his four years in Paris (1839-42), Wagner produced Rienzi, his first successful opera, and The Flying Dutchman.

Returning to Dresden in 1842, Wagner was able, through the support of Giacomo Meyerbeer, a noted German Jewish composer, to secure a performance of Rienzi by the Dresden Court Theatre. Further productions included The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser.  However, his return to Dresden was brief. Wagner became increasingly involved with a socialistic movement that sought to unify Germany and the adoption of a new constitution. When discontent finally reached the breaking point in 1849, the uprising was quickly put down by an alliance of Saxon and Prussian troops. Wagner was forced to flee Dresden for fear of being arrested.  The following twelve years were spent in exile in Zurich, Switzerland. During this time he composed Lohengrin and was able to convince his friend, Franz Liszt, to stage the opera in Weimar in August 1850. It was also during this time, that Wagner laid the groundwork for his colossal opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. 

We’ll have many occasions to talk about Wagner’s mature period, but today we’d like to note the passing of one of the greatest singers of the 20^th century, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died on May 18 at the age of 86.  Here’s Firscher-Dieskau in an aria from Tannhäuser with the Orchestra of Staatsoper Berlin under the direction of Franz Konwitschny (courtesy of Youtube).  This recording was made in the early 1960s. What an incredible voice!

May 14, 2012.  Double bass.  Usually we don’t think of the double bass as a solo instrument.  Surely it provides an indispensable aural foundation to any classical symphony; Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Strauss used the instrument extensively in their compositions, but as a solo?  It seems one would have to go back all the way to Giovanni Bottesini, the “Paganini of the double bass,” to hear music written for the bass as a solo instrument.   But don’t tell that to the people of the Bradetich Foundation.  The Foundation, established by the distinguished bassist and teacher Jeff Bradetich, was created  “with the sole purpose of advancing the performing, teaching and knowledge of the double bass,” as they put it on their web site.  The Foundation also runs an International double bass competition, and this, inaugural year, the winner was Artem Chirkov.  Listen to his virtuoso interpretation of Astor Piazzola’s Contrabajeando (here) and you’ll agree that the Bradetich Foundation has a point!

Artem Chirkov is the principal double bassist of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic orchestra, the youngest in orchestra’s 130-year-old history.  Artem began studying cello at the Special Music School of the St. Petersburg Conservatory and at the age of 16, switched to the double bass and continued at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with professors Alexander Shilo and Riza Gimaletdinov.  After graduating from the Conservatory, he went on to study at the Hochschule fur Music und Theater in Munich with Professor Klaus Trumpf.  In addition to winning the Bradetich Competition, Artem is also the First prize winner at the International competition Virtuosi 2000 in St. Petersburg; the Johann Matthias Sperger International Double Bass competition in Michaelstein, Germany; and International Double Bass competition in Brno, the Czech Republic.  He also received the 2nd prize in the International Double Bass competition of the International Society of Bass (Virginia/USA).

Atrem holds Principal Bass positions in numerous ensembles, including the St. Petersburg Camerata under conductor Saulus Sondeckis.  He gave numerous master classes: at the Mannes School in New York, at the USC-Los Angeles and Institute of Music San Diego, at the universities of Tokyo and Taipei, and many conservatories in Russia.  He performed solo at Pablo Casals festivals in Prades (France) and San Juan, Puerto-Rico, with St. Petersburg Camerata; International Double Bass week Zmok Wojnowice in Poland; with Yehudi Menuhin Society in Munich; at Oleg Kagan Music Festival in Kreuth; the Coburg Music Festival (Germany), Music Festival in Viana do Castelo, Portugal, among other.

We’ll hear several pieces performed by Artem and his wife, the pianist Mavzhida Gimaletdinova.  Here is Chant du ménestrel, Op. 71 by Glazunov.  The famous Vocalise by Rachmaninov is here.  And here is a solo piece by the Czech composer and double bass virtuoso Miloslav Gadjos, Invocation (2002).  You can listen to other performance by Artem Chirkov in our library.

May 7, 2012. Brahms and Tchaikovsky.  Two great Romantic composers were born on this day, Johannes Brahms in 1833, in the great Hansean city of Hamburg, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky in 1840, in a provincial city of Votkinsk (we usually follow the awkward tradition of using a patronymic in Tchaikovsky’s name but very much hope that it would be dropped: in Russia every person has a patronymic, but nobody presents Rachmaninov in English as “Sergei Vasilievich” or Mussorgsky as “Modest Petrovich.”  If anyone knows the history behind the tradition of calling Tchaikovsky “Pyotr Ilyich,” please let us know).

Considering Brahms’ talent and prodigious output, his first surviving compositions were written rather late: Opus 1, Piano Sonata no. 1 dates from 1853, when Brahms was already 20 (you can listen to it in the performance by Jean-François Latour).  (It’s interesting that by the age of 20, Mozart had already written at least 20 symphonies, eight piano concertos, five violin concertos, more than a dozen of violin sonatas, quartets too many to count, and several operas).  But we don’t really know the whole story: Brahms was an obsessive perfectionist and apparently destroyed a large number of his early compositions (he claimed to have destroyed 20 early quartets before eventually publishing one in 1773).  This is not the only example: the young Brahms worked on a symphony for a number of years, only to turn it into a piano concerto, his No. 1 (1859) – and a good thing too: it’s one of the greatest concertos in all of piano literature.  He also worked on his “official” First symphony for fifteen years, from about 1861 to 1876.  When he was 20, Brahms’ friend the violinist Joseph Joachim introduced him to Robert and Clara Schumann.  Robert was very impressed by Brahms and wrote an article praising the young composer.  Eventually Schumann and Brahms co-wrote (with Albert Dietrich) the “F-A-E” violin sonata and dedicated it to Joachim.  Brahms was passionately attracted to Clara Schumann.  After Robert’s attempted suicide he immersed himself into the family, serving as a go-between Clara and Robert.  When Schumann died in an asylum in 1856, Brahms moved into the same house as Clara into an apartment above hers.  We don’t know if they were lovers, but Brahms never married, (though he was engaged once), and they destroyed their correspondence.  Here is Brahms’s Piano Concerto no. 1.  It’s performed by Eteri Andjaparidze with the Russian State Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Valery Gergiev.

Tchaikovsky was even more of a late bloomer than Brahms.  His piano Scherzo op. 1 is dated 1867 when he was 27.  Tchaikovsky started his education in a School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, and at that time studied music only sporadically.  His regular music lessons started only when he was 15 (his teacher didn’t think much of his musical potential).  At the age of 21 Tchaikovsky attended classes on music theory organized by the Russian Music Society.  One of the organizers of the Society was Anton Rubinstein, and one year later, in 1862, the classes evolved, with the help of Rubinstein, into the St-Petersburg Conservatory.   (Four years later his brother, Nikolai, a good friend of Tchaikovsky’s, would establish the Moscow Conservatory).  Pyotr enrolled in the first class of the Conservatory.  Even though very little was composed by Tchaikovsky during those years, Anton Rubinstein considered him “a composer of genius.”  Still, he didn’t like his First Symphony, written in 1866. That year Tchaikovsky graduated from the St.-Petersburg conservatory and immediately accepted a professorship in the just-created conservatory in Moscow.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Concerto no. 1 in 1874-75.  He dedicated it to his friend Nikolai Rubinstein, expecting him to give the first performance.  Unfortunately Nikolai didn’t like the concerto.  The piqued Tchaikovsky withdrew the dedication and approached the pianist Hans von Bülow who was happy to oblige.  The concerto premiered in Boston in October of 1875 with Bülow at the piano and Benjamin Johnson Lang on the podium.  The public loved it, and a month later the concerto premiered in New York to great acclaim.  We’ll hear it performed by James Dick, with the Texas Festival Orchestra, Robert Spano conducting (here).

April 30, 2012.  The word “Wanderer” is close to our hearts these days.  It connotes so many states and emotions: nostalgia, wistful retrospection, but also the optimistic sense of beginnings, of new possibilities.  Franz Schubert, who didn’t travel much in his life, used the word Wanderer in the title of several very different pieces, and each time to denote a state of mind, not the body.  In 1816, when he was just 19 but already entering his mature compositional period, he wrote a Lied Der Wanderer (D. 493) on the text by Georg Philipp Schmidt, a minor German poet.  In the song, the protagonist, a "stranger everywhere," is searching for “his land,” his friends, a place he could call his own.  This beautiful Lied is sung here by the incomparable German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with Gerald Moore on the piano (courtesy of YouTube).

Six years later Schubert wrote a piano Fantasy, so technically demanding that he himself couldn’t play it at all.  Schubert used the theme from Der Wanderer in the second movement of the Fantasy, the Adagio (Theme and Variations).  That led it to be called Wanderer.  You can listen to it here in performance by the Israeli-American pianist Alon Goldstein.

In 1826, only two years before his death and the year preceding the composition of the great Winterreise song cycle, Schubert wrote a Lied to the text of Johann Gabriel Seidl’s poem Der Wanderer an den Mond ("The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon").  It has a simple, almost folk-like tune, with the accompaniment imitating the chords of a guitar. "Happy is he, who wherever he goes, stands on his native soil" is the concluding line of the poem.  This little gem (the songs is just a bit longer than two minutes) is sung by the baritone Thomas Meglioranza.  Reiko Uchida is on the piano (here).

The illustration, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.  It was made in 1818, just two years after Schubert wrote his first Wanderer.

April 30, 2012.  The word “Wanderer” is close to our hearts these days.  It connotes so many states and emotions: nostalgia, wistful retrospection, but also the optimistic sense of beginnings, of new possibilities.  Franz Schubert, who didn’t travel much in his life, used the word Wanderer in the title of several very different pieces, and each time to denote a state of mind, not the body.  In 1816, when he was just 19 but already entering his mature compositional period, he wrote a Lied Der Wanderer (D. 493) on the text by Georg Philipp Schmidt, a minor German poet.  In the song, the protagonist, a "stranger everywhere," is searching for “his land,” his friends, a place he could call his own.  This beautiful Lied is sung here by the incomparable German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with Gerald Moore on the piano (courtesy of YouTube).

Six years later Schubert wrote a piano Fantasy, so technically demanding that he himself couldn’t play it at all.  Schubert used the theme from Der Wanderer in the second movement of the Fantasy, the Adagio (Theme and Variations).  That led it to be called Wanderer.  You can listen to it here in performance by the Israeli-American pianist Alon Goldstein.

In 1826, only two years before his death and the year preceding the composition of the great Winterreise song cycle, Schubert wrote a Lied to the text of Johann Gabriel Seidl’s poem Der Wanderer an den Mond ("The Wanderer Speaks to the Moon").  It has a simple, almost folk-like tune, with the accompaniment imitating the chords of a guitar. "Happy is he, who wherever he goes, stands on his native soil" is the concluding line of the poem.  This little gem (the songs is just a bit longer than two minutes) is sung by the baritone Thomas Meglioranza.  Reiko Uchida is on the piano (here).

The illustration, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, is by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.  It was made in 1818, just two years after Schubert wrote his first Wanderer.

April 23, 2012.  Sergei Prokofiev was born on this day in 1891.  He belonged to a "post-Tchaikovsky" generation of Russian greats, together with the somewhat older Rachmaninov, who was born in 1873, and Stravinsky, born in 1882.  All three became accomplished composers before the Revolution of 1917 and all three left Russia after it happened.  But unlike Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, both of whom were quite anti-Soviet in their views, Prokofiev, after almost 20 years living in Europe, decided to return to the Soviet Union.  It was never clear why he made this decision.  He knew about the lack of artistic and political freedoms in the Soviet Union, and he had heard of the purges.  Still, he returned.  Part of the reason, it seems, was that his career in the West didn’t develop as well as he expected.  Ambitious, brilliant, talented, he expected to become a great success when he first moved to the US.   As successful as he was, however, the American public clearly preferred another émigré from Russia, the more conservative Rachmaninov.  On a number of occasions, Prokofiev was overheard saying, "There is no room for me here while Rachmaninov is alive, and he will live another ten or fifteen years."

In 1920 he moved to Paris, but there he found himself competing with Stravinsky.  For a Russian composer in Paris, the patronage of Sergei Dyagilev was very important.  In the 1920s, Prokofiev wrote several ballets, but only The Prodigal Son became really successful.  Stravinsky, on the other hand, already famous for his Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, had several hits with Pulcinella, the new version of Les noces, Apollo, and The Fairy’s Kiss.  Still, if one considers Prokofiev’s output from 1918 through 1936, this period was extremely productive: he wrote several operas, among them The Love for Three Oranges and the updated version of The Gambler, three symphonies, Romeo and Juliet (ballet and the orchestral suite), the Third, Forth and Fifth piano concertos and also concertos for violin and cello, and many other works.  Never quite a part of the Russian émigré community, sometime in the mid-20s Prokofiev began developing contacts with the Soviet musicians.  For propaganda reasons, the Soviets were very keen on having him return.  In 1927 Prokofiev accepted an invitation to tour the Soviet Union.  His opera The Love for Three Orange was staged in the Mariinsky Theater; Mayakovsky and Meyerhold were also wooing him back.  In1932 he started spending half of his time in Moscow, and by 1936 he had settled there permanently.   As a person famous in Europe and America, he expected immunity from the oppressive Soviet state, and at the beginning it seemed to work that way: he was given a large apartment, a car with a driver, and was promised the unheard of privilege of unrestricted travel to the West.  Unfortunately, these freedoms didn’t last.  Almost immediately, the musical censors went to work, criticizing some of his music as not sufficiently "Social Realist," and by 1948 he, as well as Shostakovich and some other composers, were officially denounced as  “formalists”; his works, written during the emigration, were banned and he lived his remaining years in virtual seclusion.  He died on March 5, 1953, the same day as Stalin.

April 16, 2012.  Two Trios by Schubert.  In Schubert’s time the piano trio was a very popular form: home music making was common, and many pieces, originally written for the orchestra, were often arranged to be played on three instruments: the violin, cello, and piano.  And of course by then a large volume of music was already written specifically for the trio.  Haydn, the pioneer, wrote 45 of them, Mozart wrote six, Beethoven, in addition to arranging two of his symphonies, also wrote several trios, including the famous "Archduke."  Schubert composed two of his trios at the very end of his short life.  He started both of them in 1827, the year when, in an immense burst of creativity, he wrote several masterpieces, including the song cycle Winterreise, the last three piano sonatas, the Mass in E-flat Major, and the String Quartet D. 956.  It is thought that the first trio, the one in B Major, was finished in 1828, the year of Schubert’s death; it wasn’t published till 1836.  The listener might not guess that this bright, lively and utterly charming piece, about which Robert Schumann said, “One glance at Schubert's Trio and the troubles of our human existence disappear and all the world is fresh and bright again," was written almost at the same time as the tragic Winterreise, and by a severely ill composer.  The trio is in a classical four-movement form (Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, Rondo); it is performed here by the Tecchler Trio (Benjamin Engeli, piano, Esther Hoppe, violin, and Maximilian Hornung, cello).

The second trio, in E-flat Major, D.929, was written in November of 1827, just weeks after the first one.  Schubert heard very few performances of his last compositions, but this one he did, as it was played in January of 1828 at a private party for his good friend, Josef von Spaun.  Very different in tenor than the sunny B-flat Major trio, it is much more dramatic and moody.  Stanley Kubrick, the movie director, brilliantly used the second movement of the trio, Andante con moto to create an unsettling, anxious atmosphere of his film Barry Lyndon.  The complete trio is performed here by Bella Hristova, violin, Dane Johansen, cello, and Adam Golka, piano.

(Illustration: Schubert at the piano, Gustav Klimt, 1899.  At that time Klimt was havinig a love affair with the young Anna Schindler who was soon to become Anna Mahler)

April 9, 2012.  The Ukrainian-born pianist Anna Shelest has delighted audiences throughout the world.  Born in Kharkiv, the second-largest city of Ukraine, she began her piano studies at the age of six. She attended the Kharkiv Special Music School for Gifted Children, and at the age eleven she performed at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris as the youngest prize-winner of the Milosz Magin International Piano Competition.  Anna continued her education in the US, first with Sergei Polusmiak at Northern Kentucky University and privately with Eugene and Elizabeth Pridonoff of the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music.  She then entered the Juilliard School and received her Masters in Music in the class of Jerome Lowenthal.  Anna won awards in a number of international piano competitions, including the Louisiana International Piano Competition; the Kawai American Recording Contest; and the Jefferson Symphony Young Artists Competition in Denver, among others.

Ms. Shelest made her orchestral debut at age 12 with the Kharkiv Symphony Orchestra, playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 1.  Since then she has performed on many prestigious stages around the world.  In the spring of 2010 she debuted at the Alice Tully Hall and at Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall in New York City.  She played at the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and gave recitals in Canada, France, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, and South Africa.  As a soloist she performed with some of the world’s most renowned orchestras, such as the Montreal Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, under Maestro Paavo Jarvi, and the Netherlands Symphony Orchestra. Among her other appearances are with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, Corpus Christi Symphony Orchestra, Northwest Florida Symphony Orchestra, and Kentucky Symphony Orchestra.

An avid chamber musician, Ms. Shelest established the successful Shelest Piano Duo with her husband Dmitry (in 2011 they won the Bradshaw-Buono International Piano Competition).  She’s also collaborated with the Amernet String Quartet, Cincinnati ARC Ensemble, and musicians from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

Recently Anna played a concert in Chicago.  On her program was Beethoven’s Sonata No. 24 in F-sharp Major, Op. 78 (here) and Nocturne No.6, Op. 63 in D-flat Major by Gabriel Fauré (here).  While her repertoire is wide, covering music from the Baroque to contemporary, she has a special affinity for Russian piano music.  She recently released a CD of Rachmaninov’s Etudes-tableaux op. 39 and Moments Musicaux op. 16 and another one with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as well as works by Tchaikovsky and Glinka.  Here’s Valse in A Flat Major, Op. 40 No. 8 by Tchaikovsky.  You can listen to Mikhail Glinka’s romance The Lark in the piano transcription by Mily Balakirev here.

April 2, 2012.  Rachmaninov and Busoni.  Sergei Rachmaninov was born on April 1, 1873.  The last composer in the Russian tradition of the 19^th century and a great admirer of Tchaikovsky, he wrote music that was unaffected be new developments in the early 20^th century and continued writing in the romantic style even as composers like Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Bartók were developing completely different and new idioms.  Rachmaninov was born into a family of Russian aristocracy and spend his early years in Semyonovo, the family estate in the Northwestern part of Russia.  He stared piano lessons with his mother at the age of four and continued with a professional teacher that was brought from St-Petersburg.  At the age of ten he entered the St-Petersburg conservatory.  Not the most diligent pupil, he failed some examinations before moving to the Moscow Conservatory in 1884 to study under a great disciplinarian Nikolai Zverev; the transfer was arranged by Alexander Siloti, a talented pianist and a relative of the Rachmaninovs (among Zverev’s other pupils were Scriabin, and two of the founders of the Soviet school of pianism, Konstantin Igumnov and Alexander Goldenweiser).   While at the Conservatory, Rachmaninov wrote the first version of his Piano Concerto no. 1, Trio élégiaque No. 1 (you can listen to it here in the performance of Jupiter Trio), and several other pieces.  For his graduation he wrote a one-act opera Aleko based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies.   The opera was a success, the Bolshoi Theater staged it one year later with Tchaikovsky attending the premier, and on the 100^th anniversary of Pushkin, in 1899, the great bass Feodor Chaliapin performed the title role in St-Petersburg.  Rachmaninov graduated the Conservatory with the gold medal, which he shared with Scriabin and Josef Lhévinne, the pianist and future husband of Rosina Lhévinne, the famed Juilliard piano teacher.   Soon after Rachmaninov wrote the Prelude in C-sharp minor, which made him famous.  A piano roll recording of Rachmaninov performing this prelude has been preserved, and you can listen to it here, played on a Bösendorfer Reproducing Piano (courtesy of YouTube).  Less than a year later Tachaikovsky, a mentor and a friend, died at the age of 53.  It was a personal blow to Rachmaninov, who immediately wrote the second Trio élégiaque in Tchaikovsky’s memory.  In some sense this episode marked the end of Rachmaninov’s youthful period.

We also remember the Italian pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who was born on April 1,1866.  A child prodigy, he started performing at the age of seven.  On a tour in Vienna in 1975 he met Liszt, Brahms and Anton Rubinstein and heard Liszt play.  He taught piano in several cities of Europe and in the US and eventually settled in Berlin.  Busoni had a large number of piano students, many of whom became famous and started their own piano schools.  He also taught composition; among his students were Edgard Varèse and Kurt Weill.  Busoni was an interesting composer, but these days he’s much better known for his piano transcriptions of the music of Bach.  Here is a piano roll recording of Busoni playing his famous transcription of the Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004.

March 26, 2012.  Bartók and Haydn.  The anniversary of the great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was this past Sunday, March 25.  He was born in 1881 in what was then the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary, in a small town of Nagyszentmiklós (Great Saint Nickolas in Hungarian; after World War I as the town, and most of the regions of Banat and Transylvania reverted to Romania, its name was changed to Sânnicolau Mare, which means exactly the same, only in Romanian).  When he was five, his mother began giving him regular piano lessons.  At the age of 19 he moved to Budapest and started lessons with István Thomán, a pupil of Franz Liszt.  While there, he met Zoltán Kodály who became his lifelong friend.   By 1907 Bartók was teaching piano at the Royal Academy.  Among his students were Fritz Reiner and Georg Solti, two Hungarian Jewish kids who became world-famous conductors and whose careers pinnacled at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Reiner was the CSO’s music director from 1952 to1963, Solti from 1969 to 1991).  Both were champions of Bartók’s music.  The period between the two world wars was tremendously productive for Bartók.  Starting with the ballet The Miraculous Mandarin in 1918, he wrote string quartets, two piano concertos, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and a large number of piano pieces and songs.  In 1940 Bartók, who was opposed to Nazism, emigrated to the US.  He never felt comfortable in America, and was not as productive as in previous years, although not long before his death he created one of his masterpieces, Concerto for Orchestra.  The last years of his life Bartók was quite ill; in 1944 he was diagnosed with Leukemia. He died on September 26, 1945 in New York.  His remains were transferred to Hungary and he was given a state funeral in 1988.  We’ll hear Romanian Folk Dances, based on the folk tunes of Transylvania that Bartók himself collected around 1910; it is performed by Camerata Chicago, Drostan Hall conductor (here).

Like Bartók, Franz Joseph Haydn was also born in Austria-Hungarian realm, but on the Austrian side, in a small village of Rohrau near the border with Hungary.  His birthday is March 31, 1732.  Haydn’s parents noticed his musical talents when he was a child and sent six year old Josef to live with their relative, a schoolteacher and choirmaster in Hainburg, a small town nearby.   He lived in poverty and hunger but learned to play the harpsichord and violin.  He also had a good voice, which brought him to Vienna as a chorister at the St. Stephen Cathedral, the musical center of the Empire.  In 1749, as he lost his boy soprano voice, Haydn was kicked out of the choir.  For the next 12 years he lead an uneasy life of a freelancing music teacher, accompanist, organ player, and also a composer.  He eventually was hired by the Esterházy, one of the wealthiest families in the empire.  He soon became the Kapelmeister with many responsibilities as composer, player and person in charge of the orchestra.  Haydn lived in the Esterházy’s estates in Eisenstadt and later in the newly built grand estate of Esterháza.  It was there that Haydn composed three piano sonatas, numbers 25, 26, and 27 in the Hoboken catalogue.  They’re performed by Nina Tichman, an American pianist living in Germany.  Sonata 25 in E-flat major is here, number 26 in A Major is here, and number 27 G major is here.

March 19, 2012.  Johann Sebastian Bach.  The great German composer was born on March 21, 1685.  Bach’s musical output was enormous, but for him composing was work: practically all his life Bach wrote music to order.  While at Köthen, where Bach was hired as Kapellmeister, he composed for the orchestra at the court of Prince Leopold.  And when later on he was appointed the Cantor (music director) of the Thomasschule, part of his job was to compose music for Sunday services at major churches of Leipzig, Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche.  All the while his main task was to instruct student in singing.  So it comes as no surprise that Bach recycled a lot of material from one composition to another (to reuse your own or even someone else compositions was quite acceptable in the 18^th century: Italian composers did it quite often, and Bach himself transcribed Alessandro Marcello’s oboe concerto to harpsichord and used a number of pieces from Vivaldi’s L'estro Armonico).  What is really interesting is how organically Bach’s music could be rearranged from one instrument (or set of instruments) to another.  A great example of such transformation is his harpsichord concertos.  These concertos were written while Bach was director of the Collegium musicum in Leipzig in 1730s, but scholars believe that most of these concertos are Bach’s own arrangements of violin concertos written inKöthen some years earlier.  The famous Concerto no. 1 (who hasn’t heard Glenn Gould’s stupendous recordings of this piece on a contemporary Steinway piano?) was most likely based on a now lost D minor violin concerto.  The harpsichord concerto in turn was later arranged by Bach as an organ concerto and was used in two of his Cantatas, the first movement of Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal (We must pass through great sadness), BWV 146, and the last movement (Sinfonia) of cantata Ich habe meine Zuversicht, (I have my confidence), BWV 188.  Here’s the first movement, Allegro, of the Wir müssen cantata performed by Gächinger Kantorei and Bach-Collegium of Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling, Director (courtesy of Youtube).

Bach was not the only one to transcribe his music.  In the 19^th and 20^th centuries his music was arranged numerous times, starting with the famous performance of Saint Matthew Passion by Mendelssohn in 1842, the first one in almost 90 years: it was abbreviated and re-orchestrated for a much larger orchestra and chorus.  Ferruccio Busoni made a large number of piano transcriptions of Bach’s works, including such repertoire staples as Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, originally a work for organ, and Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004.  We’ll hear Chaconne in performance by Russian-German pianist Elena Melnikova (here).  Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a wonderful if quite Romantic piano transcription of Overture from Cantata Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir (Unto Thee, O God, do we give thanks), BWV 29.   It’s performed by the pianist Nadejda Vlaeva (here).  The recording is from her new Hyperion CD of Bach transcriptions.

March 12, 2012.  Igor Cognolato plays Casella.  In one of our recent posts about Vivaldi we mentioned that Alfredo Casella played a very significant role in popularizing his music.  Casella (July 25, 1883 – March 5, 1947) was a very interesting composer in his own right, even though his music is rarely played these days.  He lived through one of the most turbulent periods in modern Italian history: the First World War, Mussolini’s fascist regime, and then the Second World War.  Casella entered the Paris Conservatory in 1896 to study piano and composition, and while there he met "everybody": Debussy and Ravel, Stravinsky and Enescu, de Falla and Richard Strauss.  He returned to Italy during the Great War and for some time taught at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome.  He became involved in the new "futurist" music and even wrote a "futurist" piece, Pupazzetti (Puppets), here.  But Casella’s interest in ahistorical Futurism was fleeting.  In 1917 he, together with composers Ottorino Respighi and Gian Francesco Malipiero founded the National Music Society to perform new Italian music and also "resurrect our old forgotten music."  In 1923 Casella, the poet and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio and the same Malipiero organized Corporazione delle nuove musiche (CDNM), again with the goals of promoting modern Italian music as well as reviving the old..  CDNM brought to Italy a number of composers, including Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith; CDNM’s concerts featured music of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Poulenc, Kodály and other contemporaries.  The 1920s was also the time of great interest in the European musical patrimony, the interest often tinged with nationalism.  Like Respighi, who wrote The Birds and Ancient Airs and Dances, and Stravinsky (Pulcinella), Casella created pieces that echoed the music of his predecessors, in his case Scarlattiana (1926), an orchestral piece based on Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas.   It was only natural that Casella became involved in research and promotion of the music of Vivaldi.  Ezra Pound and the violinist Olga Rudge, Pound’s companion, were also actively involved in reviving Vivaldi’s music.  Pound at that time was a strong proponent of fascism; Casella too was a follower of Mussolini, especially his effort to create a national, state culture based on Italian cultural “self-sufficiency.”  Casella of course was not the only one being seduced by  fascism: most of the Italian cultural elite of the time, from D'Annunzio to painters Filippo Marinetti, Mario Sironi and even to some extent De Chirico, were either supporters of Mussolini or were strongly influenced by fascist ideals.  Casella continued composing and teaching into the 1940s; his last composition was written in 1944, while Italy was a battlefield.  It was called Missa Solemnis Pro Pace – a mass for peace.  Among his students was the composer Nino Rota, who wrote Cantico in memoria di Alfredo Casella.

Italian pianist Igor Cognolato was born in Treviso.  He studied at the Academy "Benedetto Marcello" in Venice, and at the Academy of Music in Hanover.  Among his teachers were Aldo Ciccolini and Paul Badura-Skoda.  Mr.  Cognolato has extensively performer throughout Western Europe and North America.  We’ll hear him play three parts of the Casella’s Sinfonia, Arioso e Toccata, op.59.  Sinfonia can be heard here, Arioso – here, and Toccata – here.

March 5, 2012.  Ravel and C. P. E. Bach.   Maurice Ravel was born on the 7^th of March, 1875 in Ciboure, a French Basque town on the border with Spain.  This most French composer had a Swiss-born father (Igor Stravinsky, a good friend, called Ravel “the most perfect of Swiss watchmakers”) and a Basque mother who, prior to marrying Joseph Ravel, spent most of her life to Madrid.   Around 1900 Ravel joined a group of French musicians, writers and artists, who called themselves Les Apaches (in French the word not only refers to the native American tribe but also means hooligans).  Besides Ravel (and later Stravinsky), composers Florent Schmitt and Manuel de Falla also belonged to the band.  Ricardo Viñes, the pianist who premiered many of Ravel’s compositions, was a member.  Ravel even suggested a musical theme for the group, a rather wild and exotic entry to Borodin’s Second symphony.  Ravel dedicated his piano suite Miroirs, written in 1905, to Les Apaches, and each of the five movements to a different person: Noctuelles to the poet Léon-Paul Fargue; Oiseaux tristes – to Ricardo Viñes, who premiered this work in 1906, Une barque sur l'océan – to the painter Paul Sordes (for many years the group met every Saturday at his home); Alborada del gracioso was dedicated to the music critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, a big fan of Russian music, especially that of Mussorgsky and an advisor to Sergei Dyaghilev;  and La vallée des cloches – to the composer and pianist Maurice Delage.  We’ll hear all five: Noctuelles  is performed by the Italian pianist Igor Cognolato (here); Oiseaux tristes by the Chinese-born pianist Di Wu (here); Une barque sur l'océan – by Spencer Myer (here) Alborada del gracioso – by Milton Rubén Laufer (here), and La vallée des cloches – again by Igor Congnolato (here).

If we were asked to name a composer farthest removed musically from Ravel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach probably would make the list.  But here he is, born the same week, on March 8, 1714.  The fifth child of Johan Sebastian Bach became an important composer in his own right, one of the most significant composers of the era straddling Baroque and Classicism. His father was a great influence on him, as was his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, who in his time was at least as popular as J. S. Bach, if not more so.  Emanuel Bach was born in Weimar, studied at the famous St. Thomas School at Leipzig (his father became a cantor there just a year before he entered the school, in 1723), and then for 30 years lived in Berlin.  He started his service at the court of Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1738.  Two years later Frederick (who became known as Frederick the Great) succeeded his father as the king of Prussia, and Emanuel joined the royal orchestra.  By then he was already famous as a harpsichordist and composer.  The Berlin period was very prolific for Emanuel: he wrote a large number of keyboard sonatas and several orchestral pieces, among them a Magnificat and several symphonies.  In 1768 Emanuel left the service of Frederick to become the court composer for his sister, Princess Anna Amalia in Hamburg – a post previously occupied by his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann.  That was the time when Emanuel wrote most of his choral pieces, including the oratorio Die Israeliten in der Wüste (The Israelites in the Desert), cantatas, and different settings of the Passion.  He died on December 14, 1788.  Mozart, who regarded him very highly and called himself and other contemporary composers of the time "children of Emanuel Bach," was by then at the pinnacle of his career.  We’ll hear Rondo in F Major, Wq. 57 performed by the young Israeli pianist Einav Yarden (here) and Flute Sonata in G Major (here), performed by the flutists Martha Councell with Richard Steinbach on the piano.

February 27, 2012.  Rossini, Chopin, Vivaldi.  What a week - anniversaries of not one but three great composers.  And because it’s a leap year, we can celebrate Gioachino Rossini on his exact birthday, February 29^th.  He was born in 1792 in Pesaro, a city on the Adriatic coast.  Both of his parents were musicians, and his father gave him his first music lessons.  When the family moved to Bologna, Gioachino took lessons from one Giuseppe Prinetti, a cembalo player who also distilled and sold brandy on a side.  Rossini’s earliest surviving compositions are the six Sonate a quattro, scored for two violins, cello and double bass; he was twelve at the time.  He composed his first opera, Demetrio e Polibio, just one year later. By the age of 21 he was famous throughout Italy, having written a very successful opera Tancredi.  He was given a very lucrative contract as the music director of two theaters in Naples, the famous Teatro di San Carlo and Teatro del Fondo (as part of the agreement he was to write an opera a year for each theater).  In 1816, when he was 24, he created what was to become his most successful opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia.  It was written in just two or three weeks (later in his life Rossini boasted that he wrote it in 12 days).  The premiere was a failure, as it was sabotaged by the whistling and booing supporters of Rossini’s rival, the composer Giovanni Paisiello, but the subsequent performances went triumphantly well.   Rossini retired from composing at the age of 37.  He moved from Bologna to Florence and then Paris.  He became a gourmand, an excellent chef and a famous host.  Later in life he returned to composition, writing a number of pieces he called Sins of Old Age.  Rossini died in 1868.  He was reburied in Florence’s Basilica di Santa Croce several years later.  We’ll hear two of his pieces: one, the overture to the opera La Gazza Ladra, performed by The Texas Festival Orchestra, Michael Guttler conducting (here); another – the famous song La Danza (Tarantella), from Serate Musicali.  It’s sung here by the Canadian soprano Lucia Cesaroni.  Brent Funderburk is on the piano.

Frédéric Chopin was born 202 years ago, either on February 22 or March 1 of 1810 in Żelazowa Wola, Poland.  Here are several Polonaises: Op. 26 no 1; Op 40 no 1; Op 40 no 2; Op 26 no 2; Op 44; and Op 53.  They are performed by the extraordinary Russian piano virtuoso Lazar Berman (2/261930 – 2/6/2005).  This live recording was provided to us by Istituto Europeo di Musica.

And finally, Antonio Vivaldi, il Prete Rosso, was born on March 4, 1678 in the Most Serene Republic of Venice.  Vivaldi was without a doubt one of the greatest Baroque composers and influenced many composers, Johann Sebastian Bach among them.  Famous during his life, he lost popularity soon after his death (it was waning even during the last years of his life, while he was living in Vienna).  As hard as it is to imagine these days, with music from the Four Seasons playing in every shop, the revival of Vivaldi’s music happened only in the 20^th century.  Fritz Kreisler’s concerto in style of Vivaldi spurred the interest; later on the Italian composer Alfredo Casella published many of previously unknown manuscripts.  General interest in Baroque music, which started in the late 1950s, cemented Vivaldi’s fame.   Here’s Harpsichord Concerto in A Major.  It’s performed by David Schrader and Baroque Band.

February 20, 2012.  George Frideric Handel and Carl Czerny. We celebrate Handel’s birthday (he was born on February 23, 1685 in Halle) every year.  It would been odd not to: he’s one of the pillars of classical music.  This time we’ll be brief: here is his Concerto Grosso in a minor, op. 6, no. 4.  It is performed by Baroque Band, a Chicago-based ensemble.  David Schrader, who among other things is the ensemble’s harpsichordist writes, "Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel both made use of a synthesis of the French and the Italian styles – in fact, this synthesis is a characteristic of the Germans of the baroque era. Added to the native German musical language's innate richness of harmony and counterpoint, it literally defines the styles of these two giants of the late baroque.  While Handel used French dance types in his music for the theatre, in this concerto we hear mostly the legacy of Corelli, whom Handel had met and worked with when in Rome in the early years of the eighteenth century. The work was finished on the eighth of October of 1739 and was printed by subscription – the subscribers included members of the royal family and many prominent members of the English nobility. The concertos of op. 6 are considered to be among the finest of eighteenth-century ensemble music, on a par with the Brandenburg Concertos of Bach. Like the Brandenburgs, the concertos of op. 6 are so diverse in plan as to resist any pattern except that of extremely high quality."

We’d also like to mention a musician of much more modest talent – Carl Czerny.  He was born on February 21, 1791.  Probably not a single pianist, whether amateur or professional, has managed to avoid playing some of Czerny’s etudes.  This is his legacy, even though he wrote a huge amount of other music, including masses, symphonies, sonatas, and quartets.  Practically none of it can be heard these days.  Czerny had great teachers: Clementi, Hummel, Salieri and Beethoven and became a famous piano teacher himself.  His most celebrated pupil was Franz Liszt,  as well as Liszt’s rival Sigismond Thalberg, Theodor Leschetizky, and many others.  Through their own pupils they continued this celebrated musical linage till this day.  Here’s Etude no.16 in G major from Czerny’s Op. 299, the School of Velocity.  It’s performed by Canadian pianist David-Michael Dunbar.

February 13, 2012.  Corelli and Pergolesi.  Arcangelo Corelli, the Italian Baroque composer and violinist, was born on February 17, 1653.  During his lifetime Corelli was more famous as a violinist than composer.  He had many pupils, among them Geminiani and Locatelli, who became famous themselves as composers and violinists.  Corelli’s music for violin, while very melodic, was quite un-virtuosic and used only a limited range of the instrument.  It was widely circulated and favored as suitable pieces for students.  In a famous episode from 1708, it is said that Corelli refused to play a high altissimo A in a passage from the overture to Handel's oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth.  When Handel, at the time just 23 and 32 years younger than Corelli, played the note, Corelli took offence.

We’ll hear two pieces by the Corelli.  First, Sonata in C Major, Op. 5, No. 3 performed by Rachel Barton Pine, violin, and David Schrader, harpsichord.  Ms. Barton Pine plays a Nicola Gagliano violin from 1770, in original, unaltered condition.  You can listen to it here.   A very different recording was made by the Russian violinist Albert Markov in 1970.  It is La Folia, arranged by Fritz Kreisler.  Beautiful sound, rich and romantic, today may seem a bit dated.  Still, it’s a pleasure to listen to (here).  Dmitry Cogan is on the piano.  We should note that La Folia (or folly) is one of the oldest recorded tunes in the history of European music.  The first classical arrangement of it was written by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672.  In addition to Corelli, the theme was used by Marin Marais, Alessandro Scarlatti, Antonio Vivaldi and many other composers (the site folias.nl is dedicated just to this music).

Luigi Boccherini, an Italian Classical composer, was born on February 19, 1743 in Lucca, Italy.  Boccherini moved to Madrid around 1769 to become a music teacher to Infante Luis Antonio, younger brother of King Charles III.  He enjoyed great popularity till, as the story goes, one day the King expressed his disapproval for a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. Outraged, Boccherini doubled the passage instead, and was immediately dismissed.  He stayed in Spain and eventually found other patrons, but his life ended in hardship in 1805.

 Boccherini was a virtuoso cellist – it is said that he could play a violin repertoire on the cello in the original pitch.  Boccherini was a great admirer of Haydn (he used to be dismissively called "Haydn’s wife" in the 19^th century, when his music was all but forgotten) and wrote a number of trios, quartets and quintets following Haydn’s models. 

February 6, 2012.  Bell and Denk play French Violin Sonatas.  The brilliant American violinist Joshua Bell and his good friend and recital partner pianist Jeremy Denk issued a CD with three sonatas for violin and piano for Sony Classical, called French Impressions.  It’s their first album together, and after listening to it, one hopes it won’t be their last.

The three violin sonatas are by Saint-Saëns, Franck and Ravel.  The first two were written at the height of the Belle Époque, Saint-Saëns’ in 1885 and Franck’s just one year later, in 1886.  Ravel wrote his violin sonata late in his life, in 1927, and it belongs to a very different age.

Violin Sonata No. 1 in d minor by Camille Saint-Saëns, very French and very elegant, is essentially salon music.   Bell and Denk play it with great style.  The 3^rd movement, Allegretto Moderato, is especially attractive.  The dynamics are lively and Bell’s sound is beautiful.  You can listen to it here. 

César Franck, born in 1822 in what is now Belgium, spent his adult life in Paris.  He was an organist at Saint Clotilde in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for more than 30 years, a professor at the Paris Conservatory, and, as required for that position, became a French national.  Franck wrote the Violin Sonata in A Major when he was 63; it was a wedding present for Eugène Ysaÿe.  Ysaÿe became a great proponent of the sonata and played it regularly throughout his life, contributing to the public recognition of Franck as a major composer.  Joshua Bell has a very special connection to this piece: his teacher, Josef Gingold, was a pupil of Eugène Ysaÿe.  Maybe this connection to Franck affected the way Bell and Denk play the famous first movement of the Sonata: it’s slower, statelier than many well-known interpretations (Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein play it in less than five and a half minutes.  Bell and Denk take more than six).  But who knows - his approach might be closer to what Franck intended: he originally wrote it as a slow movement: it was Ysaÿe who wanted a quicker tempo and convinced Franck to mark it Allegretto.  Listen to it here.

It’s interesting that both sonatas figure prominently as possible prototypes of the violin sonata by the fictional composer Vinteuil in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  In the novel Swann is haunted by the “little phrase” from the sonata, which he associates with his obsessive love for Odette.  Of course we’ll never know for sure, but Proust scholars suspect that it could be the opening chords of Franck’s sonata, the beginning of the Adagio in Saint-Saëns’s sonata, or Faure’s Ballade in F-sharp Major op. 19.

January 30, 2012.  Franz Schubert.  Last week we celebrated Mozart’s anniversary and this week it’s Franz Schubert’s turn: he was born on January 31, 1797.  Mozart and Schubert had very few things in common, except that both were musical geniuses and both died tragically early, Mozart at the age of 35, and Schubert even earlier, at age 31.  Mozart was a child prodigy; he became famous at the age of seven, was employed by royalty and accepted in the finest salons of Europe.  Schubert, on the other hand, was not very popular during his lifetime (very little of his symphonic music was performed until it was rediscovered by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and other Romantic composers), he lived his whole life in Vienna and never visited another country, never married, and till the last three years of his life earned money mostly by teaching.  What they do have in common is one person who played a significant role in both of their lives - Antonio Salieri.  Mozart’s rival and nemesis at the court of Emperor Joseph II, Salieri became Schubert’s benefactor: when Schubert was seven, Salieri noticed his vocal talents and helped him to join Stadtkonvikt (Imperial seminary) on a choir scholarship.  Salieri later gave Schubert private lessons in composition.

But of course the real difference between the two is in their music.  Mozart’s was the pinnacle of classical Viennese style.  Schubert, while deeply affected by it (he was influenced by both Mozart and Beethoven) evolved in a different direction, which we now call Romanticism.  His song cycles, such as Winterreise, late piano sonatas (D. 958, 959 and 960), string quartets and symphonies, not just paved the way for Schumann, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and other Romantics – they ultimately represent some of the greatest achievements in all of 19^th century music.

Since our library has a large number of Schubert’s works, we’ll present some of the latest uploads, as we did last week.  Here is String Quartet No. 13 in a minor, D. 804, the so-called Rosamunde quartet (its second movement is based on the theme Schubert used in his incidental music to the play "Rosamunde").  It’s performed by the violinists Alexi Kenney and Kobi Malkin, Molly Carr, Viola and Jonathan Dormand , cello.  The pianist Yael Weiss  plays "Wanderer" Fantasy in C major, D. 760 (here).  The violinist Diana Cohen plays the early Sonatina No. 3 for Violin and Piano in g minor, D. 408.  Ron Regev is on the piano (here).  Finally, one of Schubert’s last works, String Quintet in C Major, D. 956 (it was written two months before his death).  Playing here are violinists Wonhyee Bae and Je Hye Le, Yoonji Kang, viola, Narek Hakhnazaryan and the great Laurence Lesser, cellos.

January 23, 2012.  Mozart.  Friday the 27^th of January marks the 256th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  This sublime piece of music, the terzettino, or short trio Soave sia il vento (“May the wind be gentle”) from the 1^st act of his opera Così fan tutte, was most likely written at the end of 1789, when Mozart was 33 – just two short years before his death (Così was first performed in Vienna on January 26, 1790, a day before Mozart turned 34).   One cannot but stop and contemplate in amazement how different the history of classical music would have been had he lived another 20 years.  This was not to be, but in the 30 years that he had been composing (his father Leopold wrote down some piece that Wolfgang composed – and played on the piano – at the age of five), he created a body of work unparallel in the history of music.

It’s rather pointless to try to select "the best of Mozart," so we’ll present several performances from recent uploads. The husband-and-wife piano duo Alessio Bax and Lucille Chung perform Sonata for Piano Four-Hands in C Major K. 521 is from 1787 (here).  Piano Trio in B-flat Major, K.502 was written a year earlier.  It’s performed by Yoon-Jung Yang , violin, Hiro Matsuo, cello, and Helen Huang, piano (here).  Sonata in C Major for Violin and Piano K. 303 is considered one of Mozart’s "mature" violin sonatas.  He was just 22 when he wrote it (in 1778), but by then he had already written 19 violin sonatas.  Here it’s performed by the violinists Ariana Kim with Ieva Jokubaviciute on the piano.  And finally, an old recording of Six Variations on "Salve Tu, Domine" K. 398 made by the great Russian pianist Emil Gilels.  It was brought to us by Istituto Europeo di Musica.   Listen to it here.

January 2, 2012.  Happy 2012!  Thanks to the tradition of the Vienna Philharmonic concerts, New Year’s music tends toward Johann Strauss Jr. and the 19^th century operetta.  As much as we enjoy Vienna, this is not the kind of music we love.  So we turn again to Bach’s magnificent Christmas Oratorio: Part IV was written for the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, which falls on New Year's day, and Part V – for the first Sunday of the New Year.  Here is the opening chorus from Part IV, Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben (Fall Down in Thanks, Fall Down in Praise).  And here is the first movement (Chorus) Ehre sei dir, Gott, gesungen (Let your glory be sung out, oh God) from Part V.  Both are performed by English Baroque Soloists the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner (courtesy of YouTube).

Pictured on the left is St. Nicholas church in Leipzig. It’s interesting that during Bach’s time the only complete performance of the Oratorio took place in St. Nicholas (it happened between December 25, 1734 and January 6, 1735).  Only four parts were performed in Bach’s own church of St. Thomas.  Two and a half centuries later, in 1989, St. Nicholas became the center of demonstrations against East Germany’s Communist regime, which in the end brought down Berlin Wall.

December 26, 2011.  Happy Holidays to all!

 Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, which this year almost coincided with Christmas, and Happy New Year to all musicians, and classical music lovers! Have a wonderful holiday season, and here to celebrate we have two pieces of great music.

First, from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, aria Schlafe, mein Liebster (Sleep now, my dearest).  It’s especially appropriate because it comes from the part that was written for the second day of Christmas, December 26.  Schlafe, mein Liebster is performed by the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir under the baton of John Eliot Gardiner.  Bernarda Fink is the mezzo-soprano.  To listen, click here.

We couldn’t find any appropriate classical music to celebrate Hanukkah.  In the 3^rd movement of his First Symphony, Mahler uses a Jewish folk tune, which he even orchestrated to sound like a klezmer band (it comes after the famous Frère Jacques quote). This is as close as we could come.  The complete 3^rd movement is here.  Lorin Maazel conducts the Wiener Philharmoniker.  Both musical excerpts are courtesy of YouTube.

November 21, 2011.  The pianist Lara Downes‘s ability to communicate with her public is especially evident in her projects such as 13 Ways of looking at the Goldberg.  13 Ways is the re-imagining of Bach’s famous Aria by 13 outstanding composers, among them Lukas Foss, David Del Tredici, William Bolcom, Bright Sheng, and others.  Lara Downes takes these stylistically diverse responses to Bach and creates a suite that has integrity all its own.   Another of Ms. Downes’s projects, Bodies in Motion, is a concert-length integrated multimedia piece.  In it, her performance of music by Kevin Puts, Adam Silverman, and Laurie San Martin is combined with choreography by David Grenke and imaginative video by Glenda Drew.  No less inspiring is The Americans, a retrospective of early 20^th century American concert music, accompanied by a projected landscape of early American documentary photography.

Not that Ms. Downes eschews more traditional venues.  Her 1988 concert debut took her to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Vienna Konzerthaus as soloist with the Wiener Kammerorchester, and at the Salle Gaveau in Paris.  Since then she has played at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the American Academy Rome, San Francisco Performances, the Montreal Chamber Music Festival among many others.  Her chamber music appearances include collaborations with violinists Rachel Barton Pine and Lara St. John, cellists Zuill Bailey and Denis Brott, the Miami and Alexander String Quartets, and the Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet.  Ms. Downes studied with Adolph Baller and Reah Sadowsky in San Francisco and later worked under Hans Graf at the Vienna Hochschule and Rudolph Buchbinder at the Musik Akademie Basel.

13 Ways of looking at the Goldberg was commissioned by the Gilmore Festival and premiered by the great new-music pianist Gilbert Kalish in 2004.  The title and the concept were inspired by the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens, but it’s also reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus.  While the music varies from atonal to neo-romantic, from jazzy to elegiac, Ms. Downes makes it work as a single whole.  We’ll hear several pieces; here’s the Aria, the cornerstone of both the original variations and 13 Ways.  Fred Lerdahl’s pointillist Chasing Goldberg follows (here).  Jennifer Higdon wrote the second piece, called The Gilmore Variation (here).  The 20^th century American classic, Lukas Foss, wrote an evocative fourth variation and called it Goldmore Variation (here).   The young American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel wrote a jazz-inspired, nervous variation number five, Kontraphunktus (here).  David Del Tredici’s piece, My Goldberg (variation number 11) is, as much of Del Tredici’s music, romantic without being mawkish (here).

We have a number of other recordings by Ms. Downes, from Weber and Liszt to Bolcom and Barber.  You can find them on her page.

November 7, 2011. Boyce Lancaster interviews Paul O'Dette.  Paul O’Dette is a Grammy-nominated American lutenist, conductor, and overall specialist in early music.  He plays the lute, the Baroque guitar and mandolin, the theorbo and other Renaissance and Baroque instruments.  Here he plays a Baroque guitar; the piece, Fandango, is by Santiago de Murcia (1673 – 1739), a Spanish composer and guitarist.  The wonderful Toccata Arpeggiata (here) is by the German-Italian Johann Hieronymus (Giovanni) Kapsberger (1580 –1651); it’s played on the theorbo, a long-necked lute.  You can hear that it’s a much more powerful instrument than the baroque guitar.  And here O’Dette plays a lute.  The piece is Piva, by the early 16^th century Italian lutenist and composer Joan Ambrosio Dalza (all three pieces are courtesy of YouTube).  The complete interview is here, and below is Boyce’s introduction to his conversation with Paul O’Dette.

The Masterful Talent of Paul O’Dette. 

The Toronto Globe and Mail described Paul O’Dette as the clearest case of genius ever to touch his instrument.  No one I have spoken with regarding Paul and his playing has ever disputed that, but they are usually surprised when I mention that his acquaintance with the classical guitar and his eventual love for the lute family came about because he wanted to be a better rock guitarist.  The story he tells in part two of our conversation (which you can hear below) would sound like something a publicist created, had I not heard it straight from Paul himself.  It is a story, which has been corroborated by his family.

His quest is still to improve his playing continues, but it has been some 35 years since he last touched an electric guitar.  He did confess, however, to occasionally throwing a blues lick into something he is playing!  That is really not such an odd practice, however, as much improvisation was expected of musicians of the day.  He explains that, if you look at a piece of modern music next to a lute tablature, you’ll see two entirely different languages.  The tablature is much easier to understand, especially for a novice, as it simply tells you where your fingers go on the fretboard, rather than what note to play.  It also expects the player to be able to improvise and add ornamentation.

What that means is that understanding performance practices of the day and learning what composers meant in what they wrote can be the difference between being a good, or even great, player and being a masterful one.  I think most would agree that Paul O’Dette has attained master status.

October 17, 2011.  Franz Liszt.  Saturday October 22nd marks the 200^th anniversary of the birth of the great Hungarian composer and pianist Ferenc (Franz) Liszt.  He was born in the village of Doborján in the Kingdom of Hungary, now known as Raiding, Austria.  His father, Ádám Liszt, a musician, played cello in the Prince Eszterházy’s orchestra under the direction of Joseph Haydn (Ádám also knew Hummel, Cherubini and Beethoven).  When Ferenc was seven, Ádám started teaching him piano.  Two years later Ferenc was already giving concerts.  Thanks to some wealthy sponsors, he went to Vienna to study with Carl Czerny, his one and only piano teacher.  (For the first several months Czerny had Liszt play nothing but scales and exercises to strengthen his technique; yet, Liszt would later go on to dedicate his Transcendental Etudes to Czerny).  While in Vienna, he also studied composition with Antonio Salieri.

Following his father's death in 1827, Liszt moved to Paris. Penniless, he gave endless piano and composition lessons.  He also read widely, fell in love, took up smoking and drinking, decided to join the church (but was dissuaded by his mother) and eventually met a number of artistic and literary figures: Chopin, Berlioz; Victor Hugo; Heinrich Heine; Eugène Delacroix; and, most importantly, the great violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini.  Impressed by Paganini’s phenomenal technique, Liszt decided to become as great a virtuoso on the piano.

In 1833 Liszt began an affair with Marie d'Agoult, then married to Count d'Agoult.  She was five years his elder and a noted writer.  They moved to Geneva and had three children (their daughter Cosima later became a wife of Richard Wagner).  At about that time Liszt started touring Europe.  Soon he became acknowledged as the greatest pianist of his generation, if not of the history of piano. By 1842 Lisztomania was in full swing: some described the atmosphere at his concerts as hysterical, others – as that of mystical ecstasy.   Longhaired and handsome, he would toss his handkerchief and gloves into the audience – and women fought for them.

In 1847, in Kiev, Liszt met the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.  They began a relationship that lasted the remaining 40 years of his life.  Caroline persuaded him to concentrate on composition; Liszt acceded and retired from the concert scene at the age of 36 and at the height of his fame.  He settled in Weimar, where he stayed for the next 11 years.  During that time he composed his most famous pieces: symphonic poems Tasso and Les Préludes, Faust Symphony, Transcendental Etudes, Piano Sonata in b minor, and many more.

In 1861, Liszt settled in Rome and retreated from public life.  He had joined the Franciscan order, in 1865 received the tonsure and became known as Abbé Liszt.  Still, he traveled extensively between Rome, Weimar and Budapest giving master classes in piano playing.  He died in Bayreuth, Germany during the Bayreuth Festival hosted by his daughter Cosima, on July 31, 1886.

We prepared a playlist for the occasion.  We’ll start with Orage, from Book I of Années de Pèlerinage: Suisse played by the British pianist Ashley Wass. Then Lucille Chung will play Hungarian Rhapsody No.13. A pianist from Kosovo, Yllka Istrefi, will perform Après une Lecture de Dante.  Then the Italian pianist Sandro Russo will play Paraphrase on Quartet from Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”  The recent Tchaikovsky winner Daniil Trifonov will play Liszt’s arrangement of the Schubert’s Die Forelle.  We’ll finish with The Texas Festival Orchestra under the baton of Gregory Vajda performing the symphonic poem Les Preludes.  To listen, click here.

October 10, 2011.  The pianist Evgeny Kissin needs no introduction.  He has firmly established himself as one of the greatest musicians of his generation.  Born in Moscow in 1971, he began playing piano by ear at the age of two.  At the age of six he entered the Gnesssin School of Music where he became a student of Anna Kantor.  Ms. Kantor remained his only teacher, a highly unusual case in the music world.  At the age of ten Evgeny made his concert debut playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 and just one year later he gave his first piano recital.  At the age of 12 he played his first concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, at 14 started touring Eastern Europe, two years later – the West, and in 1988 he famously played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.  In 1991 Kissin debuted in the US, playing Chopin piano concertos with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta.  Kissin moved to the West in 1991, living in New York and London.  These days he resides in Paris.  Kissin’s discography is large and well known.  Here’s just one sample of his amazing virtuosity and musicianship, a live performance of Liszt’s La Campanella (courtesy of Youtube).   Since Mr. Kissin is a very private man, we hope that Ilona Oltuski’s account of his tour of Australia will be of interest to our listeners.

Evgeny Kissin conquers down under

After an invigorating summer, filled with concerts at the Verbier Music Festival, some preparations  for his London apartment’s renovation, and of course some intense practicing in his flat in Paris and on his stopover in Los Angeles, Kissin expands his musical reach to Australia.

Rather distraught by constant schedule changes due to hurricane Irene and extracurricular distractions, he was getting antsy to return to the piano and prepare for this undertaking. Only once was he willing to converse light heartedly with me about his upcoming trip, and only after he had practiced a good, uninterrupted seven hours at the Los Angeles Disney Hall, located in immediate proximity to his hotel.

Kissin was looking forward to this trip, but not everything was advancing as planned. And nothing is left to chance with this artist. A lot of considerations, like the weather conditions – Kissin does not like extreme heat – practice possibilities, distance to travel without breaks, etc., enter the planning stages of a concert tour around two years before the actual tour begins. A lot of things can change between the planning and the outcome, and his former manager at IMG Artists, Edna Landau, who still keeps in touch with Kissin, always understood the importance of his particularities. She expressed her excitement about the news of his Australia tour to me: “I am quite fascinated to know that Zhenya is going to Australia. When I worked with him he refused to even contemplate such a tour… I wonder what the deciding factor was.”

Whatever the reasons for his initial hesitations, they seem all but forgotten. Most of all, this speaks of a more open and easy going disposition, a change within Kissin himself. It’s a sure sign of his developing some elasticity, an eagerness to stretch and expand the cocoon that has so tightly enveloped this performer, since his early prodigal years.

October 3, 2011.  Boyce Lancaster interviews the guitarist Sharon Isbin.  Ms. Isbin is a widely recorded American guitarist and the founder of the Guitar Department at the Juilliard.  She began her guitar studies at age nine.  Sharon was a student of the Italian guitarist Aldo Minella, the famed Andrés Segovia, and the pianist Rosalyn Tureck, among others.  Her wide repertoire ranges from the Renaissance to the 20^th century.  Ms. Isbin commissioned a number of compositions for the guitar from such composers as John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, Lukas Foss, and Christopher Rouse.  David Diamond, Ned Rorem, Leo Brouwer, and others wrote music for her.

You can listen to several recordings of Sharon Isbin, courtesy of Youtube:  Valse Op. 8 no. 4, by the Paraguayan composer and guitarist Agustin Barrios (here), Asturias by Isaac Albéniz (here), Sentimental Melody, from Forests of the Amazon by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos (here), and Francisco Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra (here).  The complete interview is here, and below is Boyce’s introduction to his conversation with Ms. Isbin. 

As I watch guitarist Sharon Isbin play Asturias by Isaac Albeniz, I marvel at the lightness and fluidity of her touch on the guitar.  I have seen other guitarists play this piece and they almost always make it look like an extreme amount of work, as though they almost need to force the instrument to respond.  With Isbin, the music is lovingly and gently coaxed from her instrument in a way that keeps the music in the foreground and the artist simply the composer’s musical conduit.

My conversation with Ms. Isbin found us covering a wide range of subjects, some artistic, some technical, but all with the focus on what allows her the greatest artistic expression.

At a time when many Classical artists and broadcasters wrinkled their noses when saying the word crossover, Isbin embraced it.  She relishes the opportunity to explore new collaborations, new combinations, and new styles.   One such collaboration is her recording Journey to the New World, for which she won a 2010 Grammy.  John Duarte wrote the Joan Baez Suite, Op. 144 for this recording.  Mark O’Connor  joined her in the world premiere recording of his Strings and Threads Suite for Violin and Guitar, and Joan Baez herself recorded two tracks with Isbin.

She was featured on Howard Shore’s soundtrack for the Academy Award winning film, The Departed, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, and Matt Damon…and she will soon release Guitar Passions: Sharon Isbin and Friends, on which she collaborates with With rock guitarists Steve Vai, Steve Morse, Nancy Wilson (Heart); jazz guitarists Stanley Jordan & Romero Lubambo; Brazilian singer/guitarist Rosa Passos, organic percussionist/composer Thiago de Mello, and saxophonist Paul Winter.

I hope you have time to listen to our brief conversation.  I also hope you take the time to acquaint yourself with Sharon Isbin’s artistry and musical exploration.  It’s well worth the trip!

August 29, 2011.  Boyce Lancaster interviews the pianist Simone Dinnerstein.  Simone Dinnerstein launched her career in the most unusual way: she raised funds and recorded Johann Sebastian Bach’s challenging Goldberg Variations, apiece that usually crowns a well-developed career, rather than lays its foundation.  She played the same piece at her New York recital debut in November 2005 at the Weill Recital Hal.  Her Goldberg recording became a sensation and in 2007 was picked up by Telarc and released worldwide in 2007. 

Boyce Lancaster talks to Simone as she prepares to release yet another CD, Bach: A Strange Beauty.  You can listen to snippets of Simone’s pianism: Variation XXV from the Goldberg recording here, and Sarabande, from Suite no. 5 in G Major, BWV 816 here.  The complete interview is here, and below is Boyce’s introduction to his conversation with Simone.

In the music world, much as in the world of sports, it’s the flashy ones who get most of the ink.  A case in point is Lang Lang.  He has made himself larger than life, plays the piano with flourishes and dramatic flair, and sells Rolexes, Adidas, and Audis.  His piano talent was nurtured from a very early age.  He won numerous piano competitions.  Over four billion people saw him perform before the 29^th Olympiad.  He has even accompanied world champion figure skaters, playing a piano positioned on the ice.  By contrast, Simone Dinnerstein begged for piano lessons at the age of four, but was given a recorder.  When she was 15, she wanted to travel to London to study piano, but was encouraged to go across the river to Juilliard, where she stayed for a few years, dropping out at eighteen.  (She did eventually return and finish her degree.)  She entered no competitions.  By the time she was thirty, she had a degree, lots of talent, but no manager, no recording contract, no bookings, and limited prospects for a concert career.  On top of that, she was going to have a child.

August 15, 2011.  Boyce Lancaster interviews the violinist Vadim Gluzman.  They sat down while Vadim was visiting Columbus, OH to play Mendelsshon’s Concerto in d minor for Violin and Strings with ProMusica (Mendelsshon was 13 when he composed this piece).  An Israeli violinist, Vadim was born in Russia and currently resides in Chicago (he teaches at the Roosevelt University).  Boyce and Vadim talked about Alfred Schnittke, Felix Mendelsshon’s, and the young composer Lera Auerbach.  We can offer you two samples of Vadim’s art.  Here's his performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto with the Symphony Orchestra of Saarbrücken Radio, Günther Herbig conduction and here – an excerpt from Lera Auerbach’s Double Concerto, which he plays with his wife, the pianist Angela Yoffe, and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, Andrei Boreyko conduction.  You can listen to the interview here, and below is Boyce’s introduction to his conversation with Vadim.

Vadim Gluzman: Music’s Fearless Champion

I recently read an interview Vadim Gluzman did with Laurie Niles for violinist.com in he told the story of how he came to play the violin.  Gluzman was six years old when he took examinations for entrance into a specialized school for musically gifted children in what was then the Soviet Union.  At one point, members of the panel examined his hands, which Gluzman said he thought was to make sure his fingernails were clean.  The following day, Vadim saw his name on a list of those accepted for study.  Next to his name, it said “Скрипка,” (roughly pronounced “Skripka”) which means violin.  Gluzman said he had a fit, because he and his father, Michael, had designs on him studying piano, which his father had described to him as the king of instruments, rather than the violin, which his father described as the queen.

Thirty years later, Gluzman concedes that, indeed, his hands are perfectly suited for the violin, though he still marvels at how they knew by examining the hands of a six-year-old boy that he was born to play the violin.

August 1, 2011.  Boyce Lancaster interviews the famous American lutenist and baroque guitarist Hopkinson Smith.  Since the early 1970s Mr. Smith has been living in Switzerland.  He was one of the founders of Hespèrion XX, an international early music ensemble.  Mr. Smith plays different plucked string instruments, including the vihuela (called viola da mano in Italy), Renaissance lute, theorbo, Renaissance and Baroque guitars and the baroque lute. During the interview he plays music of the Spanish Baroque composers Gaspar Sanz and Francisco Guerau.  Here’s Boyce:

A tall, slender gentleman with a regal bearing glides toward me, extends his hand, and says “Hello, I’m Hopkinson Smith.”  His voice is soft, not unlike the instrument he plays, but at the same time, he commands attention as he speaks.  He chooses his words carefully, describing his instruments and the music he plays as a painter describes what he sees with a brush.  His accent is unique and rests pleasantly on the ears…an amalgamation of his life in the Northeastern United States and his current home in Switzerland, where he teaches at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.

In my conversation with Hopkinson Smith, I learned that he played electric guitar, horn, saxophone, and trumpet, among many other instruments.  If there was an instrument missing in the band, he would simply pick it up and figure it out on his own.  He was about 17 when he discovered the classical guitar.  After a couple of years, the lute caught his attention.  He would soon move to Europe to study with Emilio Pujol, who had once been a student of Francisco Tarrega.

In the years since, he has expanded his expertise to include many instruments, renaissance lute, vihuela, theorbo, Renaissance and baroque guitars and the baroque lute among them.  He has release 20+ solo recordings on these various instruments, as well as collaborating with many of the world’s greatest musicians.  He was involved in the founding of the ensemble Hesperion XX and collaborated for some ten years with Jordi Savall, who also teaches at Schola Cantorum Basiliensis.

I could go on, but it is far more interesting to hear in Hopkinson Smith’s own words.  Here’s the interview.

July 25, 2011. 

Our friends at GetClassical recently wrote about the talented Israeli violinist and composer Ittai Shapira. His Concierto Latino, inspired by Latin dances and based on elements of Tango and Flamenco, premiered in 2008.  You can listen to the final movement ("The Party") here, it’s performed by Ittai with London Serenata, Krzysztof Chorzelski, conductor.  You can also listen to Frédéric Chopin’s Polonaise Brilliante arrange by Ittai for violin and piano, performed by him and the pianist Jeremy Denk (here).  And here you can listen to the 3^rd movement of the violin concerto by the brilliant Israeli composer Avner Dorman.  Here is what GetClassical wrote about Ittai.

Violinist Ittai Shapira: how everyone can relate, when personal events transpire into musical compositions

So far, 14 compositions by different contemporary composers have been dedicated to violinist Ittai Shapira. Belonging to the now thirty something generation of performers  of the New York classical music scene – he and pianist Jeremy Denk were roommates in college- he is now renowned as a versatile performer of an enormous classical violin repertoire, incorporating past and present, traditional as well as contemporary.

One of these premieres included the violin concerto written for him by Israeli compatriot and Pulitzer Prize winner, Shulamit Ran. It was performed at Shapira’s acclaimed Carnegie Hall debut in 2003 with the Orchestra of St.Luke’s.  In 2007, it was incorporated into Ran’s compilation of works performed by Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Shapira’s international performances as a fine soloist with many leading orchestras as well as chamber groups, coupled with his varied recordings, show his widespread interest in standard and unusual repertoire, explaining why so many composers dedicate  works for his performance.

Another Israeli compatriot, a composer who lately enjoys great international demand, Avner Dorman, wrote a violin concerto for Shapira as well, in 2006. It was performed with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Dorman was, as was Shapira, trained at Juilliard after leaving Israel for New York. While Dorman studied composition with John Corigliano, Shapira studied violin with Dorothy DeLay and Robert Mann and privately coached with Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman.

June 27, 2011

Our friend GetClassical recently published an article about the pianists Lucille Chung and Alessio Bax.  Our listeners are familiar with these wonderful musicians, who are represented individually (Lucille in Scriabin, Brahms and Ligeti, Alessio in Rachmaninov and Ravel), as well as a duo, playing Starvinsky and Piazzolla.  Here it is.

Pianists Lucille Chung and Alessio Bax: Sharing their lives at the piano

I am enjoying a cappuccino, that borders perfection, at pianists’ Lucille Chung’s and Alessio Bax’ tasteful, un- cluttered and brand new address on New York’s Upper-Upper West side. Lucille’s organizational skills translate into the modern streamlined, yet comfortable chic atmosphere, echoing Alessio’s Italian classy design heritage that takes a decisively leading voice when it comes to the kitchen as well as, to my delight, handling the professional grade cappuccino maker.

This generous space that the attractive young couple calls home, when in New York, holds two grand pianos. One in their study that for now doubles as a guestroom, for practicing and teaching; the other one in the living room, for practicing simultaneously or to entertain each other and guests who typically are music lovers or musicians as well.

Playing the piano is what both regard as central to their lives. That’s why they might as well spend time doing it together. Two young, successful musicians in their own right, they share the rest of their time together, between juggling the piano faculty at Dallas’ SMU and their increasingly busy performance and recording schedules. In great demand as soloists, they have found themselves increasingly performing as a duo as well.Not that they necessarily planned it that way. Even though it always seemed like a great idea and it had happened on occasion, their duo performances have only recently gained in volume, taking up about 20 percent of their time, which was previously engaged with their professional solo performances.  And, the truth is, they enjoy spending this 'quality time' at the piano together.

The (Glamorous) World of Jeremy Denk, by Boyce Lancaster

When you do as many interviews as professional musicians do, you tend to get many of the same questions, (Who's your favorite composer?), and your answers begin to be recited, rather than extemporaneous.  It's unavoidable for those who travel to hundreds of cities, each with an eager Arts columnist, Public Radio announcer, or both waiting to speak with you.  I expected much the same as I prepared for my interview with him, at least until I read some of his blog entries.  Anyone whose blog is subtitled “the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist” tells me his tongue is planted firmly in cheek. (That, and a blog post entitled “Joshua Bell Tour Trauma: Meatball Edition”).

Jeremy Denk is thoughtful and reflective, both in his interviews and his performance.  It would be very simple to “phone it in” when you do multiple performances of the same pieces…but as our conversation progressed, it quickly became evident that Denk is not one to play a piece of music just to earn a paycheck.  He recently subbed for an ailing Maurizio Pollini at Carnegie Hall (his debut in that venue), just a couple of weeks after filling in for an ailing Martha Argerich with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1.  When asked about that performance, he said if he had been asked to play something with which he was not very familiar or had not played in a long time, he would most likely have turned down the gig, rather than go into such high-profile venues less than fully prepared.

In the Carnegie Hall performance, he coupled the Bach Goldberg Variations with the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives.  At first, they seemed to be two pieces which did not really fit together, but Denk’s thoughtful, reflective description of how he decided to pair Bach and Ives in recital left me wondering why I had never thought to present them together on the radio.  During that part of our conversation, I also began to see Charles Ives from Denk’s perspective, which gave me an entirely new appreciation for that oft-ignored composer.

I hope you’ll take the time to listen to our conversation...and that it’s as much fun for you as it was for me.

Part I of the interview is here, Part II -- here.