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October 24, 2011
This week we celebrate the music of Domenico Scarlatti who was born in Naples, Italy on October 26, 1685 (the same years as Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Frideric Handel). His father, Alessandro Scarlatti, was a composer famous for his numerous operas. He probably was Domenico's first music teacher. The early part of Scarlatti’s career was spent in Italy. In 1701, at the age of 16, he got the position of a composer and organist at the royal chapel in Naples. Later, in 1704, his father sent him to Venice, and by 1709 he was in Rome, employed in the service of the exiled Polish queen Marie Casimire. By that time, Scarlatti had attained a reputation as an exceptional harpsichordist. It is said that while in Rome, he and Handel competed in harpsichord and organ playing. Scarlatti was judged the better harpsichordist, yet inferior to Handel on the organ.
In the following years Scarlatti traveled to London and Portugal, where he remained for a number of years. In 1729, he moved to Seville and four years later to Madrid. He settled in Madrid for the rest of his life and, after the death of his first wife, an Italian, married a Spanish woman. He became music master to Princess (and future Queen of Spain) Maria Magdalena Barbara. It was during his time in Spain that he composed most of the 555 piano sonatas for which he is nearly exclusively known for today. He befriended Farinelli, the famous castrato singer and fellow Neapolitan; it’s mostly from Farinelli’s letters that historians learned about Scarlatti’s years in Spain. Scarlatti died in Madrid on July 23, 1757.
We’ll hear several of Scarlatti’s sonatas. First we’ll hear Heather Schmidt playing Sonata in E Major, K. 380. Then Jie Chen, the Chinese pianist now residing in New York, plays Sonata in G Major, K 547. The Italian pianist Davide Polovineo performs Sonata K. 39
L 391 in A Major. And finally, May Phang, a pianist from Singapore, plays the whimsical Etude Hommage à Scarlatti by the pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin. To listen, click here.
October 17, 2011. Franz Liszt. Saturday October 22nd marks the 200th 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.
PermalinkEvgeny 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.
PermalinkOctober 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 20th 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!Permalink
September 26, 2011
Recent uploads. The Italian pianist Davide Polovineo has an unusual and diverse background. Born in 1970, he graduated with honors in 1992 from Istituto Superiore di Musica "Gaetano Braga” in the city of Teramo both as a pianist specializing in Romantic repertoire and a chamber musician. He also received a degree in theology and psychology, specializing in cultural anthropology, from the Pontifical University “San Anselmo” in Rome and Lincoln University. He studied piano and chamber music with late Russian piano virtuoso Lazar Berman, the violinist Felix Ayo and other musicians. Since 1997 Davide has been performing as a piano soloist, playing most of the concert halls of Italy and giving recitals in Europe. He has recorded for the European Institute of Music, where he also teaches and is now the Director. We’ll hear him play Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in A Major, L. 391.
The young American cellist Nathan Vickery currently studies with Peter Wile at the Curtis Institute. He has won prizes at several competitions, appeared on NPR’s From the Top and has been a soloist with many orchestras across the US. As a chamber musician, he has toured with Curtis on Tour and has collaborated with Joshua Bell, Jonathan Biss, and the contemporary music ensemble Eight Blackbird. Here he performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1. Nathan is accompanied by pianist Kwan Yi.
Two young baritones, Michael Kelly and Jonathan Beyer, met this summer at the Steans Institute in Ravinia, where they studied (the singers’ faculty includes such luminaries as Sylvia McNair) and also performed. Michael Kelly, who holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, won this year’s Joy of Singing Competition and was featured in Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Boston Early Music Festival, in recital at New York’s Trinity Church, in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versaille in Aspen, and in Schubert’s Winterreise in Houston. We’ll hear him perform Le cygne (The swan), from the wonderful song cycle Histoires naturelles by Maurice Ravel (click here). Jonathan Ware is on the piano.
Jonathan Beyer performed internationally in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Hong Kong, as well as with numerous companies around the U.S. He was a national finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Competition and won first place at the Marian Anderson Prize for Emerging Classical Artists, among many other competition successes. He has a degree from the Curtis Institute and the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. He’s singing At the River, from Old American Songs. Listen to it here.
September 19, 2011
Shostakovich. The great Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906. Many books have been written about his life, his ambivalent and often tragic position in the Soviet society, and of course his music. One thing that has remained a bit of a puzzle is influence that Mahler had on the music of Shostakovich. That this influence was very strong, especially starting with his Symphony no. 4, goes without saying. Later in his career, responding to a journalist’ routine question about what he would take with him to a desert island, Shostakovich responded: “A Mahler score.” But how did it happen, since Mahler was practically unknown in the Soviet Union?
In the pre-Revolutionary Russia Mahler was famous as a conductor and derided as a composer. The first Soviet conductor to perform Mahler on a more or less regular basis was Kirill Kondrashin, and that didn’t happened till the late 1960s. On the other hand we know that one of the closest friends Shostakovich ever had was the prominent Soviet music and arts critic Ivan Sollertinsky (Shostakovich dedicated his Second Piano trio, op. 67, to him). Sollertinsky, who died in 1944 at the age of 42, was one of the very few enthusiasts of Mahler’s music in the Soviet Union. Nowadays his writings are almost impossible to read, dated and full of the communist jargon, (he calls Mahler, whom he obviously loved, a “petit bourgeois composer”), but they provide some very valuable information. In a footnote to his article on Gustav Mahler, Sollertinsky writes: “Of all the concert halls of the Soviet Union, only at the Leningrad Philharmonic is Mahler performed relatively often, and as a result, Mahler is quite popular in Leningrad. In the first 10 years of the Philharmonic’s existence, Mahler’s 1st Symphony was performed 4 times, his 2nd – 5 times, the3rd – twice, the 4th – twice, the 5th – 4 times, the 6th – not a single time, the 7th – once, the 8th – not a single time, the 9th – once, “Das Lied von der Erde” – three times. This success is due to conductors of the “Mahler School” – Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Fritz Stiedry.” (The St-Petersburg Philharmonic Society was reopened as Petrograd and later Leningrad Philharmonic in 1921. Sollertinsky was writing in 1932). So Shostakovich, who lived in St-Petersburg (Leningrad) most of his life, happened to develop as a musician in the only place in the Soviet Union where Mahler’s music could be heard (and authentically performed by great conductors) and be influenced by of one of the very few Soviet Mahlerites!
To celebrate Shostakovich’s birthday we’ve put together a brief playlist. First you’ll hear his Piano Quintet in g minor, opus 57, performed by the pianist James Dick and Eusia String Quartet. Then the pianist Roberto Russo plays Prelude no. 2, from Five preludes without opus number. And finally the recent winner of the Tchaikovsky competition Narek Hakhnazaryan, cello, plays Sonata for Cello and Piano in d minor, Op. 40. He’s accompanied by Roman Rabinovich. To listen, click here.