March 16, 2015.  Bach and Mussorgsky.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21^st of 1685 in Eisenach.  We’ve writtenabout him so many times (last year, for example) that this time we’ll just go ahead with his music and write a bit about some other composers that were also born this week but are often overshadowed by the German master.  So here’s Part II of The St. John Passion.  Bach wrote it during his first years in Leipzig, where, in 1723, he was appointed the Thomaskantor.  It was first performed on April 7th of the following year, during the Good Friday Vespers, at the St. Nicholas Church.  In this recording theperformers are: Concentus Musicus Wien, the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.

Modest Mussorgsky, a composer of tremendous but only partly fulfilled talent, was born on March 21^st of 1839.  Mussorgsky was born in the village of Karevo in the Northwestern Pskov region of Russia.  He belonged to an old, noble and quite wealthy family.  He started piano lessons with his mother at the age of six.  When he was ten, he and his brother were sent to St.-Petersburg to study at a German-language school where he was able to continue his piano lessons.  At the age of 12 he published (with his father’s help) his first composition.  A year later he entered the Cadet School in order to continue the family’s military tradition.  The discipline at the school was lax, carousing encouraged, and that’s, apparently, where his drinking problems began.  Upon graduating, he joined the elite Preobrazhensky regiment.  He soon met Alexander Borodin, then a young military doctor and a budding composer, and Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who is practically forgotten outside of Russia but back then was considered the most important composer since Mikhail Glinka.  Dargomyzhsky introduced Mussorgsky to Balakirev and Cui, the future members of the “Mighty Five.”   Soon after Mussorgsky quit the military and devoted himself to music fulltime.  The several following years were not very productive: he wrote some piano music, an incidental music to a play; he started working on Salammbô, an opera after Flaubert’s novel, but never finished it.  In 1865, at the age of 26, he had his first real bout with alcoholism, but got out of it intact.  One year later he finished the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (Balakirev didn’t like it and it was never performed during Mussorgsky’s lifetime).  He started working on an opera based on a story by Gogol, The Marriage, but soon abandoned that as well.  Then, in 1868, an acquaintance, one Professor Nikolsky, an authority on Pushkin, suggested that Mussorgsky writes an opera based on Boris Godunov, Pushkin’s blank-verse play.  Mussorgsky responded with great enthusiasm: he wrote a libretto based on Pushkin’s play and available historical documents and completed the first version of what turned out to be a large opera in less than a year.  The opera, though, was rejected by major theaters, mostly because it lacked a leading female role.  Undeterred, Mussorgsky went on to create a revised and expanded version.  This version was accepted, and in 1872 parts of it were staged at the famed Mariinsky Theater in 1873.  A year later the complete opera was staged at the same theater.  Even though the public seemed to have liked it, it was poorly received by the critics and closed after just several performances.  Some years later it was taken out of the repertory completely.  In the meantime, Mussorgsy started working on Khovanshchina, a second large-scale opera project.   The opera, which, as so many of his projects, was never completed, was also based on an episode from Russian history, a rebellion of the Old Believers and the Streltsy guard against Peter the Great.  Around that time Mussorgsky’s descent into alcoholism started for real.  For a while he continued to compose: his famous piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, was written in 1874, but eventually his productive output practically came to a halt.  There were periods of sobriety, during which he could write – his tremendous Songs and Dances of Death were written during one such period, and he sporadically continued to work on the Khovanshchina and another opera, The Fair at Sorochintsy.  Neither of them were ever completed, Mussorgsky’s descend being inexorable.  He lost his job and lived off his friends’ charity.  Several days before his death, when Mussorgsky was already in a hospital, Ilya Repin painted the famous portrait, above.  Mussorgsky died one week after his 42^nd birthday, on March 27^th of 1881.  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a close friend, was one of the composers who worked on the scores left after Mussorgsky’s death.  Rimsky-Korsakov’s birthday is also this week: he was born on March 18^th of 1844.  We’ll write about him another time.

Here, in a scene from Boris Godunov worthy of the best of Verdi, we’ll hear the great Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky singing the role of yurodivy (the holy fool) who is accusing the Tsar of murdering a child, Tzarevich Dmitry.  Alexander Pirogov is Tzar Boris.  Nikolay Golovanov leads the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater.  The recording was made in 1948.

March 9, 2015.  Mysliveček and Telemann.  We’ve never written about Josef Mysliveček, even though this friend of Mozart’s was one of the most famous composers of his time.  Mysliveček was born in Prague on March 9th, 1737, and the Czechs consider him their national composer, even though he wrote in the Italianate style and spent most of his adult life in Italy.  Mysliveček was born into a wealthy miller’s family.  As a youngster he took music lessons in Prague but left for Venice in 1763 to study opera composition technique.  Two years later he wrote his first opera, Semiramide, which was staged in Bergamo.  In 1767 he wrote another opera, Il Bellerofonte, his most successful composition.  It was staged in Naples in Teatro San Carlo, at that time a preeminent opera theater in Italy, to great acclaim.  He moved from one Italian city to another, staging operas in major theaters.  In 1768 Mysliveček made a brief but triumphant visit to Prague.  In 1771 he was admitted to the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna.  One year later he traveled to Vienna, hoping to establish himself there, but it didn’t work out.  He returned to Italy, the country where he was quite famous.  Unfortunately, that didn’t last: in 1780 he staged two of his operas, Armida at La Scala in Milan, and Medonte in Rome, and both failed miserably.  His reputation never recovered, and he died in poverty in Rome a year later, on February 4^th of 1781.  He was just 43 years old. 

Mysliveček met Leopold Mozart and his fourteen year-old son Wolfgang in Bologna in 1770.  He became good friends with both (Mysliveček’s name is often mentioned in the correspondence between the father and the son).  It all came to an end when Mysliveček failed to deliver on his promise to arrange a commission for Wolfgang at the Teatro San Carlo for the Carnival season of 1779.   Mysliveček, who wrote not just operas but also symphonies and concertos, had a significant influence on Mozart, who admired Mysliveček’s overtures (symphonies), and apparently used some of Mysliveček’s ideas in his own compositions.  Mozart’s concert aria Ridente la calma is based on a substitute aria from Mysliveček’s opera Armida.  Here’s his Violin concerto in A Major, performed by Shizuka Ishikawa, with the Dvořák Chamber Orchestra.

If Mysliveček was a friend of Mozarts, Georg Philipp Telemann, who also has his anniversary this week, was a good friend of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Telemann was born on March 14^th of 1681 in Magdeburg.  Even though very gifted, he never formally studied music.  He learned to play several instruments but did it on his own.  In 1701 he went to Leipzig to study law but soon dropped out to pursue music professionally.  He eventually established himself in the city’s musical circles; his compositions were regularly performed in the main churches, Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche.  In 1707 he went to Eisenach and entered the service of the Duke.  It’s there that he probably met Johann Sebastian Bach for the first time.  Seven years later he became the godfather to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel.

In the 18^th century Telemann was considered a very important composer.  His fame waned a century later, and it was not till the second half of the 20^th that it was somewhat revived.  Telemann did write too much, and many of his pieces were not of the highest quality, but some compositions are extremely good.   Here’s Telemann’s Christmas Cantata 1761 (he composed several, this one was written for the Hamburg Christmas season of 1761).  It’s performed by the Telemann-Kammerorchester Michaelstein, the chorus and soloists; Ludger Rémy conducting.

March 2, 2015.  Plentiful week.  This is one of those weeks when we feel somewhat overwhelmed: Bedřich Smetana, Antonio Vivaldi, Maurice Ravel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Carlo Gesualdo were all born this week.  Plus, Frédéric Chopin’s birthday was yesterday, March 1st.  We have about 400 recordings of Chopin’s works, so it’s almost impossible to pick just one.  Here’s the recording of Chopin’s Ballade no. 4 in f minor, Op. 52 that our listeners seem like.  It’s performed live, by the still young Russian-American pianist Elena Baksht.

The lives of these composers span four centuries; we’ve written about all five of them in the past, so we’ll just play some of their music.  Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, a late Renaissance composer, lutenist and murderer (he famously stabbed his wife and her lover after discovering them in bed), was born on March 8^th of 1560.  He wrote a large number of madrigals, many of which display amazing chromatic modulations that are centuries ahead of their time.  Here’s an example, Omnes amici mei dereliquerunt me (All my friends abandoned me), a section from his Tenebrae Responsoria on the text from the Passion.

Antonio Vivaldi was born on March 4^th of 1678, more than 100 years later.  If Gesualdo belonged to the late Renaissance period, Vivaldi is the epitome of the late Baroque.  Vivaldi is so popular these days that it’s hard to imagine that up till the 1930s he was practically unknown.  It took the diligent work of Olga Rudge, the violinist more known as the lover of Ezra Pound, and Pound himself, working under the auspices of the Mussolini regime, to uncover hundreds of Vivaldi’s manuscripts.  Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos.  Here’s his Concerto for Four Violinsin B minor RV 580.  It’s performed by the ensemble I Solisti Italiani.  Johann Sebastian Bach liked it so much that he arranged it for four clavichords.  We know it as Bach’s Concerto BWV1065.

One year ago we celebrated the tricentennial of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was born on March 8^th of 1714 in Weimar, the fifth child of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach, Johann Sebastian’s first wife.  Three of his older siblings died in infancy, so he became the second-oldest surviving son.  A major figure of the transitional period between the Baroque and what became known as the “Classical” period, he was influenced by the music of his father, his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel.  He wrote a number of symphonies, and many works for the keyboard, both concertos and sonatas.  Here’s CPE Bach’s Symphony in E minor, Wq. 178, written in Berlin in 1756, the year Mozart was born.  It’s performed by the Academy for Ancient Music Berlin.

Bedřich Smetana was born on March 2^nd of 1824.  Considered the father of Czech music, he was one of the first “nationalist” composers with aspirations and sensibilities shared by the Russian “Mighty Five” and his younger countryman Antonin Dvořák.  Here’s one of Smetana’s  most popular works, Vltava, from his set of symphonic poems Má vlast.

And lastly, chronologically but certainly not in terms of either talent or popularity, Maurice Ravel, who was born on March 7^th of 1875.  Here’s his Alborada del Cracioso, from Mirroirs. It’s performed by the Italian pianist Igor Cognolato.

February 23, 2015.  Handel.  George Frideric Handel was born on this day in 1685, in Halle.  Having spent most of his life in London, he’s considered a British composer, and is famous in our time for his oratorio Messiah, Water Music and other pieces that he wrote for the royalty, as well as his organ concertos.  During his lifetime, though, he was at least as famous for his Italian operas.  Handel wrote 42 operas altogether.  Not just a composer, but also a great manager, he established three opera companies to perform them.  One of these companies found a space at the Covent Garden Theater, which till then was a playhouse.  Now, of course, it’s Britain’s Royal Opera house.  Handel learned the art and craft of the Italian opera mostly while he stayed in the country.  He was 21 when he moved from Germany to Italy, first to Florence and shortly after to Rome.  By then he had already written at least two operas, Almira and Nero.  Very quickly Handel found several patrons, among them the same cardinals Colonna, Pamphili, and Ottoboni who also played important roles in the lives of many other composers, such as Francesco Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti and Arcangelo Corelli.  Handel wrote music for the cardinals’ private orchestras and performed with their musicians.  Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili was a noted librettist, and Handel used one of the cardinal’s works to write an oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Truth).  In the city of Rome the performance of operas was banned by a papal decree; to circumvent the prohibition, composers wrote oratorios, many of which are operas in all but the name.  Il trionfo was one of them.  The aria Lascia la spina (Leave the thorn) became famous.  Four years later Handel rewrote it into an even more famous aria Lascia ch'io pianga (Leave me to weep) for his opera Rinaldo.  Here it is, wonderfully sung by Cecilia Bartoli; Christopher Hogwood conducts the Academy of Ancient Music.  In 1707 Handel wrote his first fully Italian opera, Rodrigo. By the early 18^th century, opera was a highly developed art, even though it was “invented” just 100 years earlier.  Claudio Monteverdi can be considered the father of Italian opera, but many highly talented composers followed, Francesco Cavalli and Alessandro Scarlatti being among more significant practitioners of the genre.  Opera became very popular all over the country: by the end of the 17^th century, Venice, with the population of about 140,000, had 7 opera houses.  Of course most of them were small and they employed tiny orchestras but the number is still very impressive. 

In 1709 Handel wrote his second Italian opera, Agrippina; it was premiered in Venice, in Teatro San Giovanni, and was a great success.  The opera was revived late in the 20^th century, and it has since been staged in major opera houses.  The success of Agrippina made Handel famous all over Europe.  That eventually brought him to London, with Queen Anne providing him with a stipend.  Rinaldo was written in 1711, his first opera for the English stage.  Another 34 followed, all premiered in London.  Even though most of them were soon forgotten, several remained popular, and many more we resurrected with the revival of the Baroque opera and the ascent of the period instruments in the second half of the 20^th century.  Giulio Cesare is one of the operas that was staged regularly, and so is Orlando.  Here’s the aria Se Pieta, from Giulio Cesare, sung by the French soprano Sandrine Piau with the ensemble Les Talens Lyriques under the baton of Christophe Rousset.  And here’s the aria Vaghe pupille from Orlando. Written for a castrato, it’s sung by the Serbian contralto Marijana Mijanovic.

February 16, 2015.  Corelli and Kurtág.  Last week we celebrated an unusual pair, an Italian Baroque composer from the 17^th century, and a modernist Austrian one, born in the 20^th.  This week we have a similar and equally disparate pairing: another Italian, also working in the Baroques style and born in the 17^th century, and a Hungarian composer of the 20^th century, born in what till 1918 was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Arcangelo Corelli, a fine violinist and important composer, came from a small town of Fusignano, not far from Ravenna.  His birthday is February 17^th, 1653.  He studied in the nearby Faenza, and then in Bologna, at that time one of the centers of violin playing.  At the age of 17 he was admitted to the local Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna’s conservatory.  By 1675 Corelli was in Rome, playing in an orchestra, but very soon became well known as a virtuoso violinist.  He entered the service of Queen Christina of Sweden, the patron of many composers, from Giacomo Carissimi to Alessandro Stradella and Alessandro Scarlatti (Corelli dedicated his Op. 1, Twelve trio sonatas, to Queen Christina).  He continued to perform around Rome, playing solo and leading small string ensembles.  He played in churches and courts of  the Roman nobility and church hierarchs, such as Cardinal Pamphili, whose Palazzo Doria-Pamphili on Corso was one of the musical centers of Rome. Eventually Cardinal Pamphili hired Corelli, and for the following three years Corelli lived in the palace.  When Pamphili moved to Bologna, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, also a major patron of music and arts, became Corelli’s main benefactor.  Corelli moved to the cardinal’s palace, the enormous Cancelleria.  Corelli ran the cardinal’s private orchestra, and every Monday presented a concert in which he’d play, along with the most famous musicians in Rome.  He also continued to compose, if sparingly.  Famous not just in Rome but also in most of Europe, he was admitted to the prestigious literary and music society, Accademia degli Arcadi.  Being in the center of musical life of Rome, he met many composers, including the young Handel.  That didn’t go very well, as we wrote on an occasion.  Corelli retired in 1708 but continued to work, mostly editing his earlier compositions.  He died on January 8^th, 1713, quite rich and in possession of a fine collection of violins, which he left to his friend, the violinist Matteo Fornari.  Here’s Corelli’s Concerto Grosso op. 6, no 4 in D Major in the performance by I Musici.

The Hungarian composer György Kurtág was born February 19^th of 1926 in a small town of Lugoj, Banat.  As we mentioned above, prior to 1918 Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire; many inhabitants were Hungarian-speakers.  It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág was half-Jewish.  He spoke Hungarian at home and Romanian at school.  As a child, he studied the piano on and off, first with his mother, then with professional teachers.  After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano lessons, eventually entering the Franz Liszt Music Academy.  There he met György Ligeti and they became friends for life.  After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris (in some ways Hungary was the most liberal of all Soviet-block countries and allowed people to travel).  There he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.  He returned to Hungary in 1959 and stayed there for the duration of the Communist regime – the only Hungarian composer of international renown to do so (Ligeti, for example, fled to Vienna right after the failed revolution).  Kurtág resumed traveling after the fall of communism in 1989, staying in Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble intercontemporain.  These days Kurtág and his wife live in Bordeaux. 

In our library we have a number of piano pieces from his Kurtág’s Játékok (“Games” in Hungarian), an eight-volume collection of works for solo pianos or piano four hands; we hope you’ll listen to them.  Here, though, we’d like to present a symphonic work from 1994, Stele.  It was commission by Claudio Abbado for the Berlin Philharmonic and is performed by them, live.

February 9, 2015.  Berg, Cavalli.  Alban Berg was born on this day in 1885 in Vienna.  His father was a well-to-do merchant; in addition to a house in the very center of Vienna, next to the St. Stephen cathedral, the family owned an estate in Carinthia and other property.  Alban was taught piano by one of the governesses, started composing songs at the age of 16, but was just a music-loving amateur when in 1904 he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg.  Berg studied with Schoenberg for seven years.  He admired his teacher, while Schoenberg considered Berg “an extraordinarily gifted composer.”  Berg developed into one of the most influential composers of the 20^th century: he, his fellow pupil Anton Webern, and of course their teacher Schoenberg formed what is known as “the Second Viennese School.”   Together, they were enormously important in developing the atonal and later 12-note music.  Berg’s most significant compositions are two operas, Wozzeck and Lulu.  Wozzeck, the first atonal opera of the 20^th century, is based on a drama of the playwright Georg Büchner.  Berg composed it between 1914 and 1922.  The music is admittedly difficult but utterly fascinating (and short – it runs for about an hour and 20 minutes); one can still hear Mahlerian influences in much of it.  Here’s part of Act 3 of Wozzeck, in the 1987 live performance from Vienna.  Part of it takes place in a tavern, you can hear a clanking piano.  Franz Grundheber is Wozzeck, a soldier, Hildegard Behrens is Marie, the mother of his child, and Anna Gonda is Margret, their neighbor.  Claudio Abbado conducts the Vienna Philharmonic.

Francesco Cavalli was also an opera composer.  We suspect that neither he nor Berg would recognize each other as such.  Cavalli was born Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni in Crema, Lombardy, on February 14, 1602.  He adopted the name of his patron, Frederico Cavalli, later in his life.  The young Pietro had a wonderful voice, and Frederico, who was the Venetian Governor of Crema, noticed the boy.  In 1616 Cavalli brought him to Venice, where Pietro joined the choir of the San Marco. At that time, the great Claudio Monteverdi was the music director of the cathedral.  Documents show that Cavalli helped Monteverdi to edit some of the master’s work.  He left San Marco to become an organist at the church of SS Giovanni e Paolo and worked there till about 1630.  Around that time he adopted the name of his patron and started signing his work as Francesco Cavalli.  Monteverdi is acknowledged as the father of Italian opera but for a quarter of the century following Monteverdi’s death Cavalli was the leading, and most popular practitioner of the art.  Cavalli’s first opera, Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo, was premiered in 1639 in Teatro San Cassiano, the first public opera house in Venice, and by extension in the world (the theater was demolished in 1812).  His last operas were composed in the 1670s.  La Calisto was written in the middle of Cavalli’s career, in 1651.  Here’s the first scene of the second act, with Sara Mingardo, contralto, the Concerto Italiano under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini.  In the early 1660s Cavalli spent two years in Paris.  In 1661 Cardinal Mazarin commissioned him an opera to celebrate the marriage of King Luis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain.  This commission led to Ercole amante (Hercules in love), which had its premier in February of 1662.  Jean-Baptiste Lully was then the superintendent of royal music.  Either he was jealous of the competition or genuinely wanted to improve the opera, but he decided to add several ballet pieces to the opera.  The entire production became a six hours affair; the king, the queen and the court danced to the ballet music, and it received all the praise.  Cavalli left Paris soon after.  Ercole is a fine opera, as you can judge by this aria.  Anna Bonitatibus, an Italian mezzo-soprano, sings Giunone (Juno).  The production is by the Dutch National Opera with Concerto Köln, Ivor Bolton conducting.