This Week in Classical Music: March 24, 2025.  Naples.  Last week we promised to get back to the music-related impressions of our recent travels.  We should state upfront that they were somewhat disappointing.  Classical music is not being played in Italy as often as one would hope (and expect), either live in concerts or on the radio.  Of all the cities we visited, the one with the richest musical tradition was Naples.  Naples is a very old city, going back to the Greek settlement in the 6^th century BC, but the history of classical music is much shorter, so those two intersect in the Kingdom of Naples in the 15^th century when the King’s chapel had more musicians than any other court in Italy.  That was also the time when Tinctoris, a famous composer and music theoretician, stayed with the court.  Early in the 16^th century, the Aragonese Spanish took over Naples and made it a viceroyalty.  Carlo Gesualdo, Price of Venosa, stayed at the court and influenced generations of Neapolitan musicians.  The talented Giovanni de Macque was one of them.  The Royal Chapel and several major churches were important musical centers; then, in the mid-16^th century, the first Conservatory was created.  Initially, it was a shelter for orphans where music was one of the subjects taught to children.  Eventually, music became the most important subject, and conservatories (soon there were four) attracted talented teachers.  Alessandro Scarlatti taught there briefly, as, sometime later, did Nicola Porpora and Leonardo Vinci. 

Opera played a very important part in the musical life of Naples.  The genre was invented in the early 17^th century in northern Italy, Venice in particular, and by midcentury Naples had regular performances of operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli and others.  Till 1737, the main venue was the San Bartolomeo Theater, when the grand San Carlo Theater was inaugurated (San Bartolomeo was eventually converted into a church).  The main figure in the history of the Neapolitan opera was, without a doubt, Alessandro Scarlatti, who lived in the city from 1679 to 1721 and composed more than one hundred operas, of which 70 are extant.  With the construction of San Carlo, Naples turned into one of the most important opera centers in Italy, with the best companies presenting their shows.  Early in the 18^th century, a new style was invented in Naples, that of Opera Buffa, or comic opera.  The major composers writing in this genre were Vinci, Scarlatti, and the young Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, who was born in 1710 but lived only 26 years.  Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona is regularly staged these days.  Many of the operas were written on the libretti of the famous playwright Carlo Goldoni, the best of them by Baldassare Galuppi, Niccolò Piccinni, Giovanni Paisiello and Domenico Cimarosa.  Later in the 19^th century, Gaetano Donizetti, a Bergamasque by birth, lived in Naples for many years.  He was the director of the San Carlo from 1822 to 1838 and presented 17 premiers of his works there, including Lucia di Lammermoor.  

Some of the most famous castrati were born or trained in Naples and performed in the operas of Porpora and Scarlatti.  Among the best-known are Farinelli, whose real name was Carlo Broschi, and Caffarelli (Gaetano Majorano).  Metastasio, one of the greatest opera librettists of all time, had lived in Naples for years. 

As vigorous as the musical life of Naples was from the early 17^th to the late 19th century, it thinned out by the 20^th, at least in its “classical” form.  Nonetheless, it left a treasure trove of great music, of which we’ll present a couple of samples.  Here’s the achingly beautiful aria Sussurrando il venticello from Alessandro Scarlatti’s Tigrane, which premiered in Teatro San Bartolomeo, Naples, in February of 1715.  And here’s the aria Le faccio un inchino from Domenico Cimarosa’s  1792 opera Il matrimonio segreto. 

This Week in Classical Music: March 17, 2025.  Bach, abbreviated.  Our trip is over, but we’re not ready to resume our musical journeys.   Of all the places we visited, only one was musically notable – Naples.  Next week we’ll write about some composers who lived and worked in the city and made it famous.

All that said, there is one anniversary that is impossible to miss: Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21^st of 1685 in Eisenach.  What music are we to present to celebrate this event?  Out of Bach’s vast and magnificent output, we’ll opt (almost at random) for one clavier piece and an excerpt from one of his grandest creations.  The former is French Suite no. 1, performed here by Murray Perahia.  The latter, the aria Erbarme dich (Have mercy), from Part 2 of the St. Matthew Passion, is here.  The alto is Anne Sofie von Otter, Georg Solti conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

This Week in Classical Music: March 10, 2025.  Still on the road.  Georg Philipp Telemann was born on March 14^th of 1681 in Magdeburg.  He was the godfather of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose birthday was last week.  CPE Bach’s second name, Philipp, was given in honor of Telemann, Johann Sebastian’s close friend.  We hope to play some of Telemann’s music next week.  And Arthur Honegger, a member of Les Six, was born on this day in 1892.  He was Swiss but born in France, in Le Havre.

This Week in Classical Music: March 3, 2025.  Travel.  Three great composers were born this week: Antonio Vivaldi, on March 4^th of 1678, in Venice; Maurice Ravel, on March 7^th of 1875, in Ciboure, near Biarritz in France; and the notorious Carlo Gesualdo, on March 8^th of 1566, most likely in Venosa, where Gesualdos were the princes (Venosa is located in the southern Italian region of Basilicata).   To the list of the greats, some would add Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, born on March 8^th of 1714, in Weimar, where his father was the organist at the court of William Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Weimar.  Unfortunately, we cannot delve into the lives and art of these composers, as we are ready to embark on a trip that will bring us close to Venosa, among other places.  It seems there are no museums dedicated to Gesualdo in Venosa, the town’s most famous son.  Still, there are old churches and even Jewish catacombs from around the 5^th century AD: apparently, there was a Jewish community in Venosa, well integrated with the local population.

This Week in Classical Music: February 24, 2025.  Chopin interpretations.  Frédéric Chopin, one of the greatest composers of the 19^th century, was born on March 1^st of 1810.  We’ll celebrate him through the works of pianists whose anniversaries fall around this date: we’ve been neglecting the interpreters for quite a while, and this is a good time to catch up.  Most of these pianists are of the older generation when Chopin’s piano music was more popular and more often played than it is today.  Their lives coincide with the early era of the recording industry, so the technical quality of some of the pieces we’ll hear today is not high, while the musicianship is, even if their approach may seem very different than what we hear today.

We’ll start with Benno Moiseiwitsch, born February 22^nd of 1890 in Odessa (now Odesa), then in the Russian Empire and now in independent Ukraine.  He started his studies in Odessa, then moved to Vienna to study with Theodor Leschetizky and eventually settled in England.  Moiseiwitsch had a flourishing international career and for a while taught at the Curtis Institute of Music.  Here’s Benno Moiseiwitsch performing Chopin’s Barcarolle, Op. 60.  We like it a lot: the playing is elegant, the tone is singing.  We don’t know the exact recording date but think it was made around 1950.

Alexander Brailowsky was also born in Ukraine, then part of Russia, and like Moiseiwitsch, he was Jewish.  He was six years younger (his birthday is February 16^th of 1896) and born in Kiev (now Kyiv). After studying at the Kiev Conservatory, he also went to Vienna to take lessons from Leschetizky.  He then studied with Ferruccio Busoni in Switzerland and eventually settled in New York while getting French citizenship sometime later.  Brailowsky was known for his interpretation of Chopin; in 1924 in Paris, he played 160 of his compositions in six concerts; then in 1938, he repeated the same program in New York (no established pianist would even consider such a programming choice these days).  Here he is playing Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 1.  We believe the recording was made around 1957.

Nikita Magaloff was born in Saint Petersburg on February 21^st of 1912 into a noble Georgian family.  His family left Russia in 1918, following the Bolshevik Revolution.  He studied at the Paris Conservatory where he befriended Ravel.  Prokofiev also lived in Paris during that time and gave Magaloff composition lessons.  Like Brailowsky, Magaloff was a “Chopinist”: he also performed all the piano music of Chopin in six concerts, but if Brailowsky did it twice, Magaloff did it many times.  Magaloff was a noted teacher, starting in 1949 with a masterclass he picked up from his friend, the ailing Dinu Lipatti; Martha Argerich was one of his students.   He married the daughter of the violinist Joseph Szigeti and often performed with the great violinist.  Here’s Nikita Magaloff plays Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2.  The recording was made in 1974.

Our last pianist is the only one not born in the Russian Empire: it’s Myra Hess.  She’s also not famous for her Chopin, even though she played him a lot.  Hess was born in London on February 25^th of 1890.  She was known for her interpretation of Bach and the Viennese classics, and even more so, for the free concerts of classical music she organized during WWII at the National Gallery.  Here is her early recording of Chopin’s Nocturne in F sharp major, Op 15, No. 2.  It was made in 1928.

This Week in Classical Music: February 17, 2025.  Handel and Kurtág.  The great was born on February 23^rd of 1685.   In one year, between 1724 and 1725, while Handel was the “Master of the orchestra” at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he created three very successful operas, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Tamerlano.  Each of these operas had his favorite singers in leading roles: the castrato Senesino, and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni.  The aria Dove sei, amato bene? (Where are you, my dear?), from Act I of Rodelinda was written for Senesino and is performed here by the wonderful countertenor Andreas Scholl.  The supporting Accademia Bizantina is led by Ottavio Dantone.

Last week we celebrated the 98^th birthday of Leontyne Price; this week it’s György Kurtág’s turn: in two days he will be 99!  György Kurtág (his first name is pronounced closer to Dyerd rather than George) was born on February 19^th of 1926 in Lugoj, Banat.  Most of the historical Banat now belongs to Romania, but before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the majority of its inhabitants were Hungarian speakers.  It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág himself is 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 and 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 (Ligeti, who died in 2006, was also of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and also born in a part of Austria-Hungary that now lies in Romania; he rivals Kurtág as one of the most important classical composers of the second half of the 20^th century).  After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris.  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 and stayed in the West for the rest of his life). At that time Kurtág became influential as a teacher.  Surprisingly, he didn’t teach composition but rather interpretation: pianists Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, and the first Takács String Quartet were among his pupils.  Kurtág resumed traveling only after the fall of communism in 1989, moving first to Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), then Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain.  In 2002, the Kurtágs settled in Bordeaux but in 2015 he and his wife returned to Budapest (Kurtág’s wife Márta, a pianist, died in 2019).

Last week, when we played Luigi Nono’s Con Luigi Dallapiccola, we marveled at how a piece of interesting music could be created by limited means, in Nono’s case, an ensemble of percussion instruments.  Here is another example, a piece by Kurtág titled...quasi una fantasia... (Kurtág likes ellipses in his titles).  It was written in 1988.  Very different from Nono’s, it is also very economical in how Kurtág uses different instruments.  The piano, for example, works more as a percussion, rather than the Romantic instrument capable of creating a wall of sound.  In this recording, Bahar Dördüncü is the pianist.  We don’t know the name of the ensemble.

We should mention Arcangello Corelli, who was born on this day in 1653.  And Luigi Boccherini was also born this week, on February 19^th of 1743.