This Week in Classical Music: June 20, 2022.  A Horszowski encounter.  Langhe is an exceptionally beautiful part of Italy, a stretch of hilly land south of Turin famous for its Barolo and Barbaresco wines and white truffles.  It’s dotted with hilltop villages and castles and reminds one of much more popular (and crowded) Tuscany.  The area around the village of Barolo is particularly pretty, with 12^th-century castles facing each other across the vineyard-covered valleys.  Monforte d'Alba is about two and a half miles from Barolo as the crow flies and twice as much to drive (which is a pleasure to do, so delightful are the ever-changing vistas), it has the requisite castle and a church at the top of the hill.  It also has an unusual Roman-style open theater next to it, pictured here.  What is completely unexpected, though, is to see the name of the pianist Mieczysław Horszowski: it’s right there on a plaque which says: “Auditorium Miecio Horszowski “Nostro piccolo gran consolatore”(our little great comforter),” and dated 1986.  “Miecio” is probably the best Italians could do with the name Mieczysław, “Piccolo” clearly refers to Horszowski’s stature – he was about five feet tall, but Gran (short for Grande) indicates his status as a musician and cultural figure.

Mieczysław Horszowski, a wonderful Polish-Russian-Jewish-American pianist is famous for his art and his longevity, both artistic and physical: he played his last concert at the age of 99 and died one month short of his 101^st birthday.  We don’t know the details of his association with the auditorium, but Horszowski did live in Milan for 25 years, which is  less than a two-hour drive away.  Also, when Horszowski was 89, he married the Italian pianist Bice Costa, thirty plus his younger.  It’s our guess that this may’ve been the connection, but what we do know for sure is that Horszowski played at the inaugural concert and the venue was later named after him, Auditorium Horszowski.  A jazz festival takes place there every year.

Mieczysław Horszowski was born in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) on June 23^rd of 1892.  He became Theodor Leschetizky’s student at the age of seven and played Beethoven’s Piano concerto no. 1 in Warsaw at the age of eight.  In 1906 he made his American debut, playing at the Carnegie Hall.  Since 1914 till the outbreak of WWII he lived in Milan and then moved to the United States where he joined the staff of the Curtis Institute (among his students were Murray Perahia, and Richard Goode).  Despite his small hands, Horszowski had a fabulous technique, and his favorite repertoire – works by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin – didn’t require huge hands.  As many of Leschetizky’s pupils (we can think of Artur Schnabel, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Ignaz Friedman), Horszowski had a beautiful singing sound.  For 50 years he partnered with his friend Pablo Casals, who preferred Horszowski to any other pianist.

Here's Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor, recorded live in 1983.  This live recording was made in Italy, but not in Monforte d'Alba but in a church of a Tuscan village of Castagno d'Andrea.

This Week in Classical Music: June 13, 2022.  Stravinsky. On June 17^th we’ll celebrate Igor Stravinsky’s 140^th anniversary: he was born on that day in 1882 in Oranienbaum, a small town outside of Russia’s capital, Saint Petersburg.  After 1910 Stravinsky spent much of his time in France and Switzerland, and in 1918, soon after the Russian Revolution, he left the country for good.  We just visited Montreux, Switzerland; in 1910 Stravinsky lived in Clarens, which is one of Montreux’s neighborhoods, and that’s where his second son, Soulima, was born. (This area is rich in Russian cultural connections: in 1878 Tchaikovsky stayed in Clarens as he was recovering from depression after his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova; he wrote his Violin Concerto there.  Vladimir Nabokov lived the last 16 years of his life in Montreux and is buried in Clarens).  Stravinsky returned to Clarens in 1914 and a year later moved to Morges, another town on the shores of Lake Geneva.  Montreux remembers Stravinsky: there’s a statue of the composer in the city, and one of the major auditoriums is named after him.

This period was tremendously productive for Stravinsky: he wrote ballets Petruska and The Rite of Spring for Diagilev’s famous dance company, the Ballets Russes, and The Nightingale, an opera-ballet, also premiered by Diagilev’s Ballets Russes at the Palais Garnier in Paris in 1914.  For this production, the Russian painter Alexandre Benois designed the sets and costumes (one of Diagilev geniuses was his ability to bring together the best composers and painters to work on his productions).  In 1917, Stravinsky wrote The Song of the Nightingale, a symphonic poem based on the opera.  Here it is, performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz conducting.

This Week in Classical Music: June 6, 2022.  Schumann, Strauss, Albinoni. This is the sequence in a descending order of talent quality (or at least the way we perceive it): Schumann, one of the great geniuses of the 19^th century music, Strauss, who in a self-deprecating manner said: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer" (we disagree: we think he’s absolutely first rate – and the more we listen to his music, the more we think so); and Albinoni, popular for his tuneful, rather repetitive pieces of limited imagination.  Schumann was born in Zwickau on June 8^th of 1810, Richard Strauss – on June 11^th of 1864 in Munich, and Tomaso Albinoni – on June 8^th of 1671 in Venice.  Here’s Artur Rubinsten playing Schumann’s Carnaval op.9.

This Week in Classical Music: May 30, 2022.  Two Pianists.  Zoltán Kocsis and Marth Argerich were born this week: Kocsis in Budapest, Hungary, on May 30^th of 1952, Argerich in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 5^th of 1941.  Argerich is famous and widely considered one of the greatest pianists of her generation.  She doesn’t need any introductions, especially considering that we’ve written about her on many occasions (for example, here).  And, at the age of 81, she actively performs, often introducing new repertoire.  Kocsis, on the other hand, as talented as he was, isn’t that well known, which is a pity.  Kocsis studied at the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest (György Kurtág was one of his teachers).  At the age of 18 he caused a sensation, winning the Hungarian Radio Beethoven Competition.  He was recognized as one of the outstanding musicians and at the age of 21 was awarded the Ferenc Liszt Prize, the highest musical award in Hungary.  He soon developed an international career, touring the US in 1971 and playing in London and Salzburg a year later.  His repertory was broad, from Bach (one of his favorites – he recorded all of Bach’s concertos) to Bartok and on to his contemporaries (he made several premier performances of his teacher, Kurtág).  Kocsis was also a composer and worked with the avant-garde group the New Studio.  Kocsis had a life-saving heart surgery in 2012; the surgery prolonged his life by four years.  He died of heart decease in 2016.

We’ll present two very different samples of Kocsis’s art: first, recorded in December of 1984, his wonderful interpretation of Bela Bartók’s Piano Concerto no. 3 with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer conducting (here).  And 30 years later, in 2014, Kocsis conducted and played Bach’s Bach Keyboard Concerto no. 5, BWV 1056 (here).

A note: next two weeks we’ll be traveling, so our entries will be (mercifully) short.

This Week in Classical Music: May 23, 2022.  Four Composers and Teresa Stratas.  Jean Françaix, William Bolcom, Isaac Albéniz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold were all born this week – a Frenchman, an American, a Spaniard and an Austrian who emigrated to the US.  There is a similarity between Françaix (born on May 23^rd of 1912) and Bolcom (b. 5/26/1938), not necessarily in the style of their music but rather in the wonderful sense of humor and lightness (it may not be quite a coincidence, as Bolcom had studied with two French composer, Darius Milhaud at Mills College in California and with Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory).  Here’s Françaix’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano and here – one of Bolcom’s Twelve New Etudes, Hymne a l'amour.  The Trio is played by Julien Hardy (Bassoon), Frédéric Tardy (Oboe), Simon Zauoi (Piano).  The pianist in the Bolcom is Marc-André Hamelin.

The biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold is very unusual.  Born on May 29^th of 1897 in Vienna, he was a child prodigy, composing a piano sonata at the age of 11 (it was published and performed), a ballet Der Schneemann that same year and a large-form orchestral piece he called Sinfonietta (it runs for about 42 minutes) when he was 15.  Korngold was Jewish and emigrated to the US in 1934, where he became one of the most influential movie composers of the time.  We would have thought that Korngold had to change his compositional style to accommodate films, but this is not quite true: listen, for example, to the first movement of Sinfonietta and you’ll hear the echoes of the Korngold of The Adventures of Robin Hood. 

Teresa Stratas, the wonderful Canadian soprano of Greek descent, was born on May 26^th of 1938 in Toronto.  Stratas was famous for many contemporary roles, singing in the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti, Francis Poulenc, Kurt Weill, John Corigliano, and especially, the role of Lulu in the Berg eponymous opera’s first complete performance and recording (in 1979, with Pierre Boulez conducting).  But Stratas didn’t limit herself to the 20^th century repertoire, her range was actually very broad.  She was wonderful as Zerlina in Don Giovanni, Despina in Così fan tutte, and sung two roles, Cherubino and Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart.  She performed in several Puccini’s operas, in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, Strauss operas and also Verdi’s.  Here, from 1968, is her wonderful Susanna in the aria Deh vieni, non tarda, from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro.  This is a live recording with Zubin Mehta conducting the RAI Orchestra.

This Week in Classical Music: May 16, 2022.  Wagner, Berganza and Nilssen.  Richard Wagner was born this week, on May 22^nd of 1813, but we’d like to start with the passing of the wonderful Spanish mezzo-soprano Teresa Berganza three days ago at the age of 89.  Berganza was born in Madrid on March 16^th of 1933.  She made her operatic debut as Dorabella (it would become one of her signature roles) in Mozart's Così fan tutte in 1957 at the Aix-en-Provence and that same year made a La Scala debut.  Early in her career her voice was lighter, perfectly suited for Rossini’s bel canto operas: her Cenetrentola was unsurpassed.  Rosina in Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia was another famous role of hers.  Later in her career her voice darkened and Berganza took on the role of Carmen, in which she also excelled.  Berganza sang at all major opera houses around the world and was one of the most beloved singers of the second half of the 20^th century.  Here’s the final scene (about 6 minutes) from La Cenerentola in the live 1967 recording from Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.  We had to cut the unending ovation; the agility of Berganza’s voice in this recording is remarkable.

Berganza never sung in Wagner’s operas – her voice was not suited for his roles, even though Wagner wrote several of them for mezzo, for example, Waltraute, a Valkyrie and Brünnhilde’s sister in Götterdämmerung, or the goddess Frika, Wotan’s wife in Die Walküre.  On the other hand, the great Swedish Birgit Nilsson was one of the best interpreters of Wagner roles in the 20^th century.  Nilsson was born in a tiny village of Västra Karup on May 17^th of 1918.  Her operatic career started in Stockholm in 1946; early in her career she sung many roles in the Italian repertoire (Aida, Tosca), operas of Mozart, Richard Strauss and Tchaikovsky.  She first appeared in a Wagner role in the Stockholm Opera’s 1954-55 season and then sung Brünnhilde in the complete Ring cycle.  In 1957 she performed at Bayreuth for the first time; that was the beginning of a long association with the festival which lasted till 1970.  In 1959 she made her Metropolitan debut as Isolde and went on to sing in 200 performances and 16 roles.  Let us quote from Grove Music: “Nilsson was generally considered the finest Wagnerian soprano of her day. Her voice was even throughout its range, pure in sound and perfect in intonation with a free ringing top; its size was phenomenal.”

Here’s the incredible Immolation Scene, from 1965 and remastered in 2012.  Birgit Nilsson is Brünnhilde, Wiener Philharmoniker is conducted by Georg Solti.  You can hear that the quote from Grove is not an exaggeration but a literal description of every aspect of Nisson’s voice.  We also think that in this recording both the orchestra playing and conducting are excellent.