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Luigi Dallapiccola
Ulisse, Suite A
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Alban Berg
Lulu Suite, Part 2
II. Lied der Lulu [Lulu's song] (Comodo) V. Variationen [Variations]...
Alban Berg
Lulu Suite, Part 1
I. Rondo (Andante & hymn) II. Ostinato (Allegro)Recorded in 1989...
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Lulu Suite
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Clarinet concerto in A Major, K. 62
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Waltz Op 34 / 2
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Frédéric Chopin
Mazurka Op 63 / 2
Chopin – Mazurka in F minorThe three mazurkas of opus 63, composed...
Robert Schumann
Fabel (Fantasiestücke Op 12)
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July 23, 2018.  Cilea, Granados, Dohnanyi, Fleisher.   This week is full of anniversaries: composers, conductors, pianists and a singer.  We’d like to mention (for the first time) Francesco Andrea Solario, The Lute PlayerCilea, the Italian opera composer who was born on this day in 1866.  He’s remembered for his opera Adriana Lecouvreur, written in 1902.  Even back then it probably sounded rather dated, and clearly sounds so these days, but the young Enrico Caruso sung at the premier to great acclaim, and some of the arias are very beautiful.  All great sopranos of the last half century have sung Adriana: Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas.  Here’s the incomparable Renata Tebaldi in the aria Io son l'umile ancella with the Orchestra of the Accademia de Santa Cecilia under the direction of Alberto Erede (Mario del Monaco and Giulietta Simionato are also in this fabulous 1962 recording).

We celebrate the Spanish composer Enrique Granados, who was born on July 27th of 1876, practically every year (here, for example is the entry from a year ago).  So today we’ll just play his Los Requiebros, the first piece from Granados’s piano suite Goyescas.  It’s performed by  Jie Chen, a young Chinese-American pianist.

Ernst von Dohnányi was not as popular these pages as Granados.  One reason is that as a composer he was not as interesting as some of his contemporaries.  Dohnányi was, though, and under very difficult historical circumstances, a highly moral and principled person.  Dohnányi, famous first as a pianist and conductor, was born on July 27th of 1877 in Bratislava, then called Pressburg in German and Pozsony in Hungarian.  (His last name probably sounds familiar to many readers: he was the grandfather of the distinguished German conductor Christoph von Dohnányi).  In the late 1890s he played piano concerts across Europe and the US.  In the 1920s, he was appointed the head of the Budapest Academy of Music, and in that position he promoted Hungarian composers, Béla Bartók or Zoltán Kodály among them. 

A staunch liberal, he opposed the fascist tendencies of the Horthy aurocratic government.  During WWII, he did much to save Jewish musicians, for which he was later called a “forgotten hero of the Holocaust resistance.”  Dohnányi was also a noted teacher; among his pupils were the conductor Georg Solti and the pianists Annie Fischer and Georges Cziffra.  Here’s a live recording of Dohnányi’s Rhapsody in C Op.11 No.3.  Annie Fischer is at the piano.

Several great performers were born this week, and all we can do today is just mention them by name.  The pianist Leon Fleisher was born 90 years ago today in San Francisco.  His mother wanted him to become a pianist and Leon started studying the instrument at the ago of four.  At the ago of 16 he played with the New York Philharmonic under Pierre Monteux, who called him “a find of the century.”  Fleisher later studied with Artur Schnabel.  In 1952 Fleisher won the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition; by the late1950s he was widely recording (his recording of all five Piano Concertos by Beethoven, with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell, was highly praised) and he was generally considered the brightest start among the new generation of American pianists.  Then, in 1964, disaster struck: Fleisher lost the use of his right hand due to focal dystonia.  He switched to left-hand repertory, playing, for example, left-hand concertos by Ravel and Prokofiev.  After a surgery and other treatments, around 1997 Fleisher returned to two-hand repertory even thought his technique, spectacular prior to the disease, did not completely recover.   Here’s Leon Fleisher playing Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major, K.330 (1960 recording).

Riccardo Muti and Giuseppe Di Stefano were also born this week.  We’ll write about them soon.

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July 16, 2018.  Flagstad and Stern. We missed two anniversaries last week.  One was the birthday of Carl Orff, a somewhat controversial German composer, who was born on July 10th of 1895.  He deserves a full entry, and that’s what we’ll do next year.  Also last week was the Kirsten Flagstadbirthday of Kirsten Flagstad: she was just two days younger than Orff, born on July 12th of 1895.  The Norwegian soprano was regarded as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Wagner singers of all time.  She had a voice of phenomenal beauty, clarity and power. For the first 10 years or so of her operatic career Flagstad sang mostly lyric roles in the opera houses of Sweden and Norway.  She then took on the heavier roles in Verdi’s Aida and Tosca, and, in 1932, sang the role of Isolde in Tristan und Isolde.  She successfully auditioned for Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s pro-Nazi daughter-in-law who ran the Bayreuth Festival, and in 1934 sang Sieglinde in Die Walküre and Gutrune in Götterdämmerung at the Bayreuth.  The next year she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, first as Sieglinde, then in the role of Isolde.  Her Brünnhilde, later that same year, was a phenomenal success.  An invitation from the Covent Garden followed, and there she was also received with great enthusiasm.  By the end of 1936 she was world-famous.  In 1941 she returned to the Nazi-occupied Norway; that chagrined some of her American listeners (her husband was accused of collaborating with the Nazis but died before his trial ended).  The British were more forgiving, and Flagstad resumed her after-war career in London.  She sang the difficult Wagner roles, plus Strauss and more till about 1952. 

By that time her tone became darker and it was harder for her to reach the top notes.  She retired from the opera in 1952; fr a while she continued giving concerts, but her health began deteriorating.  Flagstad died on December 7th of 1962, she was only 67 years old.  Here is Kirsten Flagstad in Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.  Wilhelm Furtwangler conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.  Even though in 1952, when this recording was made, Flagstad was beyond her prime, this is a superlative live performance, both by her and by the conductor.  We cannot have enough of her Isolde, so here is another live performance of Liebestod, from 1936.  The recording is technically far from perfect, but Flagstad is absolutely glorious.  Fritz Reiner leads the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

The great America violinist Isaac Stern was born in Kremenetz, Ukraine, on 21 July 21st of 1920.  He was 14 months old when his family emigrated to the United States.  One of the greatest violinist of the 20th century and one of the most important cultural figures of his time, he deserves a full entry, and we’ll do it on an occasion.  For now, here Isaac Stern and Eugene Istomin are playing Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 7 Op. 30, no. 2.

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July 9, 2018.  Respighi, Diamond, Cliburn.  Ottorino Respighi, an important Italian composer of the 20th century, was born on this day in 1879.  We’ve written about him on a number of occasions, for example here and here.  While his best-known compositions are the so-called “tone poems,” the Fountains of Rome and the Pines of Rome in particular, Respighi also wrote quite a bit of chamber music.  Here, for example, is the Violin sonata in B minor, which Respighi completed in 1917.  Ottorino RespighiA three-movement work in a late-Romantic style, it’s performed by the distinguished American violinist Aaron Rosand, with the pianist John Covelli.

While Respighi was featured in several of our posts, we’ve never written about the American composer David Diamond.  Diamond was born on July 9th of 2015 in Rochester, NY.  His Jewish parents immigrated from Austria and Poland.  Diamond studied the violin and music theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music before moving to New York to study with Roger Sessions at the New Music School.  He won a scholarship to go to Paris; there, he met Ravel, Milhaud and Roussel, and the writers André Gide and James Joyce.  While in Paris, he studied with Nadia Boulanger.  He returned to the States at the outbreak of WWII, in 1939.  The next 12 years were difficult, as Diamond didn’t have a permanent position, but productive: he wrote four symphonies and several other orchestral compositions, a violin concerto and a number of vocal pieces.  In 1951 Diamond returned to Europe, this time as a professor at the University of Rome.  A year later he moved to Florence, where he lived, more or less permanently, till 1965, avoiding the US of the McCarthy era. 

After returning to the US, Diamond served as the chair of the composition department at the Manhattan School of Music, and as professor of composition at Juilliard.  Diamond wrote mostly tonal music, well-orchestrated, dynamic, with a great sense of overall shape.  This style became quite unfashionable with the advent of the Darmstadt-influenced young composers, such as Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, who wrote in the atonal and 12-tonal mode and used serialism.  Diamond never recovered his popularity, even when tonal music made a partial comeback.  Still, he was a masterful composer, with many students, and his name will be remembered.  Here’s David Daimond’s joyous Rounds for String Orchestra.  It was commissioned in 1944 by Dimitri Mitropoulos who was then the principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.  Diamond composed it that same year and Metropoulos premiered it with his orchestra.  In our case, Gerard Schwarz, a champion of Diamond’s music, is conducting the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

Also this week, the American pianist Van Cliburn, mostly famous for winning the First Tchaikovsky piano competition in 1958, was born on July 12th of 1934.  Here he plays Un sospiro, the third of Three Concert Études by Franz Liszt.

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July 2, 2018.  Cluck and Mahler.  Christoph Gluck was born on this day in 2014.  We wrote about him a year ago, so for now here ’s the chorus Chaste fille de Latone’ from Act 4 of Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride.  Many noted the similarity between this chorus and March of the Priests from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (here).  This of course is not to compare the genius of the younger composer and the considerable but still limited talents of Christoph Willibald Gluck. 

Gustav MahlerGustav Mahler was born on July 7th of 1860.  For some time we’ve been tracing his life by his major works; last year we wrote about 1901-1902, the years surrounding the creation of the Fifth Symphony.  In 1903 he started working on Symphony no. 6.  This was one of the happiest periods in Mahler’s life.  He was newly wed to the dashing Alma, their first daughter, Maria, was born on November of 1902 (their second daughter, Anna, would be born in June of 1904).  Mahler was financially secure and firmly established in Vienna’s cultural scene.  Hofoper, of which he was the music director, was the most prestigious music institution of the Empire, but Mahler was also working with younger, more adventuresome musicians: he was elected the honorary president of the Association of Creative Musicians in Vienna, founded by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky (Berg and Webern were also members of the group).  At the Opera, he passed some of the day-to-day activities to his staff conductors, Franz Schalk and Bruno Walter.  Mahler invited Alfred Roller, a Secessionist painter, to Hofoper as the set designer.  Their 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde was a big success.  During that period Mahler started traveling more often.  In Amsterdam, he established a close relationship with Willem Mengelberg, the conductor of Concertgebouw Orchestra.  Mengelberg, together with Bruno Walter, would become major Mahlerian of the next generation.

Like the Fifth, the Sixth symphony was composed at Maiernigg, a small village near the resort town of Maria Wörth in Carinthia, in his “composing hut.”   Mahler conducted the premier in 1906.  The symphony is often subtitled “Tragic”; even though it’s not on the original score, one of the Vienna concerts which Mahler conducted had this sobriquet printed on the program, so clearly, he agreed with it.  This is rather paradoxical, considering that it was written when everything seemed to be going well in Mahler’s life, and many real tragedies that befell him were still to come.  The symphony consists of four movement: 1. Allegro energico, ma non troppo. Heftig, aber markig (Violent but succinct); 2. Scherzo: Wuchtig (powerful); 3. Andante moderato; and 4. Finale: Sostenuto – Allegro moderato – Allegro energico.  That was the sequence of the movement when the score was initially published.  Then, while rehearsing, Mahler decided to move around two inner sections, playing the slow Andante moderato first, followed by the Scherzo.  Apparently, that’s how he performed it on the premier and that’s how it was performed for a while.  Then, in 1919, Alma Mahler sent a telegram to Willem Mengelberg, with "First Scherzo then Andante" in it.   Even though Mengelberg had performed the symphony following Mahler’s later order, with the Andante preceding the Scherzo, he obeyed Alma’s direction.  This is the order in which most conductors perform the Symphony these days, and this’s how Leonard Bernstein plays it with the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra in the 1989 recording. Here are: Allegro, Scherzo, Andante, Finale.

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June 25, 2018.  Claudio Abbado.  We may be wrong about Gustave Charpentier, but it seems not a single significant composer was born this week.  As for Charpentier, who was born on this day in 1860, he’s known for just one composition, the opera Louise, which was premiered (to great success, we might add) in 1900.  One aria is still being performed quite often on the concert scene – Depuis le jour.  You can hear it nicely sung by Anna Netrebko.  The Prague Philharmonia is conducted by Emmanuel Villaume. 

As long as we’re lacking composers with known birth dates, let’s mention one from the older ages.  Alessandro Striggio, an Italian, was born around 1536 into an aristocratic Mantuan family.  In 1559 he moved to Florence, to the court of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  Apparently, he was close to the Duke, as in 1567 Cosimo sent him on a diplomatic mission to London.  Later Striggio traveled to Austria and Bavaria.  In 1584 Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, invited Striggio for a short visit.  At the time, Ferrara was known as one of the musical centers of Italy (and, by extension, of the world); one of the jewels of the court was a group of virtuoso female singers called concerto di donne.  Later, Striggio visited Ferrara several more times.  In 1587 he moved back to his native Mantua, were he served at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga.  Striggio died in Mantua of a fever on February 29th of 1592.  At the time the 25-year-old Claudio Monteverdi was a viola player at the court.  Here’s Striggio’s famous motet Ecce Claudio AbbadoBeatam Lucem.  It’s performed by Ensemble Huelgas under the direction of Paul van Nevel.

Claudio Abbado, one of the greatest conductors of the “post-Karajan” era, was born in Milan on June 26th of 1933.  As a youngster he went to Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini’s rehearsals (he found Toscanini’s dictatorial manner unpleasant).  Abbado attended the Milan Conservatory, where he studied piano and conducting.   Upon graduating, he spent some time in Vienna; there he befriended Zubin Mehta and listened to the rehearsals of Bruno Walter and Karajan.  He conducted his first public symphony concert in 1958, and one year later he led a performance of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges.  In 1960 he successfully debuted at La Scala (in 1969 he became the theater’s resident conductor).  Abbado’s career took off in the 1970s: he was invited to the major opera theaters, such as Covent Garden and the Vienna Staatsoper.  In 1984 he became the music director of the Vienna opera.  All along he was extensively performing with symphony orchestras, often programming the music of the 20th century.  He became the Principal conductor of the London Symphony and the principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony.  In 1990, upon the death of Herbert von Karajan, the Berlin Philharmonic selected Abbado as its next conductor. 

In 2000 Abbado had major surgery for stomach cancer, which severely affected his performance schedule.  After formally leaving the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002 he continued working with many orchestras, but especially with the European Union Youth Orchestra, which he co-founded in 1978, the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, which he founded in 1986, and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.

Abbado’s discography is vast and of extremely high quality, but he was especially well known as a superb interpreter of the music if Mahler.  Here he conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.  The mezzo is Federica von Stade.

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June 18, 2018.  Marcello, Rozhdestvensky, Levine.  Benedetto Marcello, a gifted Italian composer of the late Baroque, was born on June 24th of 1686 in Brescia.  We’d like to get to his interesting Requiem in the Venetian Manner, but for now we’ll direct you to our earlier entry about Benedetto and his brother Alessandro, as we have more urgent topics.

First, some sad news: Gennady Rozhdestvensky, one of the best Soviet conductors, died on June Gennady Rozhdestvensky16th in Moscow.  Rozhdestvensky was born on May 4th of 1931 into a musical family: his father was the noted conductor Nikolai Anosov, his mother – a singer, Natalia Rozhdestvenskaya.   Gennady studied the piano with Elena Gnesina and Lev Oborin and, later, conducting with his father.  He was only 20 when he found himself on the podium of the Bolshoi conducting Sleeping Beauty. From 1961 to 1974 Rozhdestvensky was the music director of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra.  He was also the music director of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra.  From 1974 to 1985 he was the music director of the experimental Moscow Chamber Music Theater, where he supervised performances of the old Baroque and Classical operas, and also productions of modern operas rarely if ever heard in Russia, like Stravinsky’s The Rake Progress and Shostakovich’s The Nose.  Contemporary composers were of special interest to Rozhdestvensky: he often performed works that, if not banned, then were clearly not favored by the Soviet music establishment: Stravinsky, Poulenc, Orff, and the Soviet nonconformist composers like Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.  Rozhdestvensky was also a raconteur: very often, before conducting a piece, he would turn toward the audience and deliver a witty introduction.  Nobody else did it back then, which probably was a good thing, as few had his knowledge, sense of humor and storytelling skills. 

In 1974 Rozhdestvensky was hired as the director of the Stockholm Royal Philharmonic, the first Soviet conductor to lead a European orchestra.  Later, he worked with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Symphony.  He was invited to conduct many major orchestras: the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Chicago Symphony.  Among his numerous recordings are all of Shostakovich and Prokofiev’s symphonies and also all of Bruckner’s, in different editions.  Gennady Rozhdestvensky is survived by his wife of many years, the pianist Victoria Postnikova. 

And now another date, that could’ve been joyful but isn’t.  On June 23 James Levine, who lead the Metropolitan Orchestra for 40 years, will turn 75.  A conductor of enormous talent, two years ago he was credibly accused of sexually abusing his students and younger colleagues.  This is terrible, and our perception of his art will never be the same.  Levine had a brilliant career, which started with his apprenticeship with George Sell at the Cleveland, whose assistant he soon became.  Guest-conducting major orchestras followed, as did a long association with the Chicago Symphony (he was the music director of the Ravinia Festival for 20 years).  In 1971, he was invited to conduct the Metropolitan Opera orchestra in Tosca; a year later he was offered the position of Principal conductor and in 1975 became the Music Director.  He built the orchestra into a world class ensemble, which, except for the Vienna Philharmonic, has no rivals among opera bands.  His 1990 Ring cycle, with James Morris, Christa Ludwig and Siegfried Jerusalem, telecast on PBS, was a cultural event.  All these achievements are now clouded.  For a while the Met itself engaged in a Soviet-style rewriting of history, eliminating any mention of Levine on their Our Story page, as was discovered by the NY Times; since then, his name has reappeared. 

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