May 6, 2019.  Neither Brahms nor Tchaikovsky.  By an unfortunate coincidence for us, two great 19^th century composers were born on the same date, March 7^th: Johannes Brahms in 1833 and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1840.  Both are important and influential: Brahms as the key developer of the Beethoven symphonic tradition, Tchaikovsky as the central figure in the new Russian music.  Every year we contrive to write about both in one short entry, fully recognizing how different their music is, even if there are some curious formal similarities.  This year we’ll skip both and write about (or at least mention) composers and performers admittedly not as consequential but who deserve our attention.  And this is a large and colorful group.  Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré, two well-known French composers were born on May 12^th, the former in 1842, the latter three years later.  Massenet, a conservative composer of the Belle Époque, is famous for two of his operas, Manon and Werther; a much more adventuresome Fauré influenced generations of French composers, from the Impressionists to Les Six.  Another Frenchman, from an earlier era, Jean-Marie Leclair, is known as the father of the French violin school; he was also born this week, on May 10^th of 1697.  There are two Italians -- Giovanni Battista Viotti, who like Leclair, was famous for his violin concertos (he was born on May 12^th of 1755) and Giovanni Paisiello, now almost forgotten but in the late 18^th century famous for his operas that were staged all across Europe (he was born on May 9^th of 1740).  Then there was another early-Classical composer, the German Carl Stamitz of the Stamitz family which also gave us Anton and Johan Stamitzs (Carl was born on May 8^th of 1745).  Jan Václav Voříšek was a very fine composer: born in Bohemia on May 11^th of 1791, he spent the most productive years of his life in Vienna, where he met Beethoven and befriended Schubert.  Voříšek died of tuberculosis in 1825, at just 34 years old.  Here’s his Symphony in D Major, performed by the Chicago Sinfonietta, Paul Freeman conducting.  Anatol Liadov was a minor but pleasant composer of short piano pieces.  Were it not for his laziness and lack for self-assurance, he might’ve developed into a major talent (Liadov was born on May 12^th of 1855).  And let’s not forget Milton Babbitt, one of the most important American composers and teachers of the second half of the 20^th century, influential not only in the US but in Europe as well; he was born on May 10^th of 1916.

Several noted interpreters were also born this week, for example Vladimir Sofronitsky, on May 8^th of 1901, a socially awkward but greatly talented Russian-Soviet pianist.  He’s not well known in the West but was considered the supreme interpreter of the music of Scriabin and Chopin in the Soviet Union.  Scriabin was his favorite composer; Sofronitsky’s first wife was Scriabin’s daughter, and by the end of his life he stopped giving concerts at the large Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, and performed instead in one of the rooms of the Scriabin museum (the composer lived the three last years of his life, from 1921 to 1915 on the first floor of this lovely mansion on one of the side streets in the center of Moscow).  Here’s Scriabin’s Poeme Op. 36 (Satanique), recorded live in 1960. 

Two very important conductors also have their anniversaries this week: Jascha Horenstein, who was born in Kiev on May 6^th of 1898, lived and performed in Vienna and Berlin, but in 1933, because of the growing antisemitism, left for Paris and then for the US.  Horenstein was a renowned Mahlerian.   Also, Carlo Maria Giulini, an Italian conductor with a major career both in Europe and the US; he was born on May 9^th of 1914.

April 29, 2019.  Alessandro Scarlatti, the father of the by now more famous Domenico , was born on May 2^nd of 1660 in Palermo.  One of the greatest opera composers of the late 17^th century, he’s not very popular these days, mostly because the specific art form to which he was devoted – the Baroque opera – isn’t very popular.  Baroque operas are often long, expensive to stage, and there are not that many voices around that could do justice to their music.  No opera can withstand bad singing, neither a Verdi nor a Mozart, but a bad production of a Baroque opera can bore one to tears.  On the other hand, listen to the aria Mentr'io godo in dolce oblio, from Il Giardino di Rose: La Santissima Vergine del Rosario, performed by Cecilia Bartoli and Les Musiciens du Louvre.  Isn’t it absolutely exquisite?  We’ve written about Alessandro on a number of occasions (for example, here and here), so let’s just listen to one of his sacred compositions, the Stabat Mater.  Scaraltti wrote three versions of Stabat Mater, this is the latest, from 1724, composed one year before Scarlatti’s death on October 22^nd of 1725 (Concerto Italiano is conducted by Rinaldo Alessandrini).  An interesting historical note: Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater was written for the noble fraternity of the church of S Maria dei Sette Dolori in Naples.  Eleven years later, the fraternity ordered a replacement from the 26-year-old but already very ill Giovanni Battista Pergolesi; it turned out to be Pergolesi’s last work.  We don’t doubt the quality of Pergolesi’s work, but also think that Alessandro Scarlatti’s Stabat mater is a work of first order.

April 22, 2019.  Prokofiev and Menuhin.  Sergei Prokofiev  was born on April 27^th of 1891.  He’s one of our favorites, and we’ve written about him year after year (and, of course, on his 125^th anniversary).  His short Piano sonata no. 3, op. 28, an early masterpiece, was premiered by Prokofiev himself on April 15^th of 1918 in St. Petersburg (then, Petrograd).  By then, Prokofiev had already made the decision to leave for America.  He applied to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Culture, for permission to leave, and received it shortly after.  Just three weeks after the concert, on May 7^th of 1918, Prokofiev left Petrograd and travelled through Siberia to Vladivostok and then on to Tokyo.  He gave several concerts in Japan, boarded a ship and arrived in New York in September of 1918.  Here’s what our own Joseph DuBose wrote in the notes to the Sonata: “Sergei Prokofiev composed his Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas in 1917. Both sonatas bore the subtitle “D'après de vieux cahiers,” or “From Old Notebooks,” and were wrought from sketches the composer had made a decade earlier during his student years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The Third Sonata, in A minor, marked a significant departure for the composer, its demeanor being far more serious than its predecessor... Like his First Piano Sonata composed in 1909, the Third is comprised of a single movement in sonata form. Where the First Sonata was segmented in its form and even derivative, the Third is evidently the work of a more mature mind, one that has learned to follow the natural course of its ideas and allows the form to proceed organically from them. It juxtaposes two diverse themes—an angular theme in Prokofiev’s “motoric” style, and a lyrical second theme. Both themes are then worked extensively in the Sonata’s development…  The Third Piano Sonata is regarded as one of Prokofiev’s best compositions for piano, and, interestingly, was one of his few works to receive similar praise from critics.”  Here it is in the performance by the pianist Andrei Gavrilov.

April 15, 2019.  Three pianists and two conductors.  This week we’ll celebrate several interpreters, rather than creators, of music: pianists Schnabel, Sokolov and Perahia, and conductors Stokowski and John Eliot Gardiner.  Artur Schnabel, born on April 17^th of 1882, was one of the most important pianists of the first half of the 20^th century.  Schnabel was Jewish, born Aaron, in a small town in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.  His family moved to Vienna when he was seven.  His piano teacher was the famous Theodor Leschetizky, who said to Schnabel, “You will never be a pianist; you are a musician” and had him play Schubert’s sonatas rather than the popular bravura pieces by Liszt.   In 1898 Schnabel moved to Berlin, the place where his career flourished till Nazis took over in 1933.  He performed with all the greatest conductors of the time (Furtwängler, Walter and Klemperer among them) and toured the major concert halls in Europe and America.  Schnabel left Berlin in 1933, first for England, and then, in 1939, for the US.  While in England, he made the first ever recording of all the piano sonatas by Beethoven (they were made in the course of several years, from 1932 to 1935 at Abbey Road Studios in London).  In 1944 he became a US citizen.  Here’ is Beethoven’s Sonata no. 25, op. 78 in that historic London recording.

Who would’ve thought, in 1966, that the 16-year-old Grigory Sokolov, the unexpected winner of the Third Tchaikovsky Piano competition, would turn into one of the most interesting and introspective pianists of the generation?  Back then the Moscow public was rooting for Misha Dichter and suspected that Sokolov’s win was a result of the Soviet cultural officialdom manipulations.  For the following 25-something years Sokolov’s career went nowhere, till his concerts in Europe and the US in 1990.  These days Sokolov is a cult figure.  He doesn’t record in the studio but allows his live concerts to be recorded (in that he’s the exact opposite of Glenn Gould).  Sokolov has a huge repertoire; he’s famous as a great interpreter of Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Rameau and other classics.  Here’s Haydn’s piano sonata no.47 in B minor, Hob.XVI:32, recorded live in Munich in 2018.

April 8, 2019. Giuseppe Tartini was born on this day in 1692 in Pirano, Republic of Venice (now Piran, Slovenia).  He studied at the university of Padua, where it seems he spent most of his time on fencing.  In 1710, he married one Elisabetta Premazore, a woman two years his elder who, unfortunately for Tartini, was a favorite of the local bishop, Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro.  The Cardinal accused Tartini of abducting Elisabetta, and, to avoid prosecution, Tartini fled to the monastery of San Francesco in Assisi.  There he started playing the violin, amazingly late for a future virtuoso.  He left the monastery around 1714, played for a while with the Ancona opera orchestra, and heard the famous Francesco Veracini perform in Venice.  That episode affected him greatly, as he felt that his playing was inferior.  He spent the next two years practicing, greatly improving his skills.  In 1721 he was made Maestro di Cappella at the famous Basilica di Sant'Antonio in Padua.  In 1723, in a midst of another scandal (Tartini was accused of fathering an illegitimate child) he left for Prague, where he stayed for three years under the auspices of the Kinskys, a noble Czech family.  He returned to Padua in 1726 and organized a violin school, probably the most famous one of its time.  Students came to the “school of the nations” from all of Europe.  Around the same time Tartini published his first volume of compositions containing violin sonatas and concertos.  He continued to compose through the years, although later in his life he concentrated more on theoretical works.  He continued to live in Padua and died there on February 26^th of 1770.

April 1, 2019.  Three pianists were born on this day.  We usually talk about Sergei Rachmaninov as a composer, but he was also one of the greatest pianists of the 20^th century.  Josef Hofmann, himself a superlative pianist to whom Rachmaninov dedicated his Third Piano Concerto, joked that he would gladly swap his fingers for Rachmaninov’s and would add his toes to boot (there’s some truth to the joke: Hofmann’s hands were of average size, while Rachmaninov had huge hands that allowed him to easily play the most difficult chords).  Contemporaries compared Rachmaninov to Liszt and Anton Rubinstein.  He was a supreme virtuoso who never showed off, being concerned with the structure and the overall line of a composition.  Rachmaninov was an expressive pianist with a beautiful sound (Arthur Rubinstein raved about his tone), and his rhythm was freer than what we’re used to these days, but when we listen to his recordings, the playing sounds felicitous to the composer’s intent.  Rachmaninov often played his own compositions, both his numerous piano miniatures and concertos.  Rachmaninov made many recordings, the earliest – in 1919, for Edison Records.  He also made a number of recording rolls, many of them for the American Piano Company (Ampico).  Rachmaninov, initially skeptical of the quality of the recordings, said, after listening to a reproduced piano roll: "Gentlemen – I, Sergei Rachmaninov, have just heard myself play!"  Here is an example, Rachmaninov “performing” his own Prelude in G minor, op. 23, no. 5.  The piano roll was digitized and then played on a Bösendorfer 290 SE Reproducing Piano.

A very different pianist, Dinu Lipatti, was born on this day in 1917 in Bucharest.  He studied at the local conservatory where he was awarded prizes as a pianist and composer.  In 1934 he participated in the Vienna piano competition and was awarded the second prize.  Alfred Cortot, who felt that Lipatti deserved to win, resigned from the jury and invited the young pianist to study with him in Paris.  Lipatti joined Cortot’s piano class and also studied the composition with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger.  Lipatti’s performance career didn’t start till 1939 but soon after was interrupted with the beginning of WWII.