July 22, 2019.  Pianists and singers.  Three pianists were born this week: Americans Leon Fleisher and Alexis Weissenberg, and a Portuguese, Maria João Pires.  Leon Fleisher will turn 91 tomorrow, he was born on July 23^rd of 1928 in San Francisco, into a family of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  Fleisher started his piano studies at the age of four.  He had several piano teachers but eventually became a pupil of the great German pianist Artur Schnabel, who by then emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States.  In 1942, the 14-year-old Fleisher played Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 2 with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Pierre Monteux (Monteux called Fleisher “the pianistic find of the century”).  A year later they performed the Brahms D Minor piano concerto (no. 1).  The following year, now 16 years old, Fleisher played his first concert at Carnegie Hall; again, it was Monteux conducting and but this time the orchestra was the New York Philharmonic.  In 1952, Fleisher won the Queen Elisabeth competition, the first American to do so.  He was performing and recording extensively (for example, with the Cleveland orchestra under the direction of George Szell he made the famous recordings of all Beethoven and both Brahms’s piano concertos).  He was considered one of the greatest young pianists of his generation when a disaster struck: in 1965 Fleisher lost control of his right hand due to the focal dystonia, an illness which makes the muscles of the fingers contract involuntarily.  All he could do was play a very limited repertoire for the left-hand, its central pieces being piano concertos by Ravel and Prokofiev. In 1981 he had surgery which didn’t help much; further treatments followed, and Botox seemed to have helped the most - eventually Fleisher managed to return to the two-hand repertoire.  It wasn’t till 2004 that Fleisher released an album titled “Two Hands,” his first in almost 40 years, in which he played works by Bach, Scarlatti, Chopin, Debussy and Schubert.  He never recovered his former spectacular technique, and of course he was of a certain age when technique simply deteriorates - in 2004 he was already 76 years old.

July 15, 2019.  Mostly violinists.  The famous Belgian violinist and composer, Eugène Ysaÿe was born this week, on July 16^th of 1858 in Liège.  At the age of seven Eugène entered the Liège Conservatory, dropped out four years later but then returned to graduate with a silver medal.  After leaving the Conservatory, he took lessons with two of the greatest violinists of the time, with Henryk Wieniawski in Brussels and with Henry Vieuxtemps in Paris.  In 1879 he became the concertmaster of the Bilse orchestra in Berlin, that eventually evolved into the Berlin Philharmonic.  Anton Rubinstein, the famous Russian pianist and the founder of the Saint Petersburg conservatory, heard him play and helped Ysaÿe with his first contracts as a soloist.  After touring several countries, Ysaÿe returned to Paris, already an acclaimed virtuoso.  While in Paris, Ysaÿe met many contemporary composers, among them Saint-Saëns, Franck and Fauré.  He played at the prestigious Concert Colonne to great success.  In 1887 he returned to Brussels to teach violin class at the Conservatory.  He was also composing: a quartet and several violin sonatas were his first pieces.  Such was his fame that many newly-written compositions were dedicated to him, among them César Franck’s Violin Sonata, Ernest Chausson’s Concert and Poème, Vincent d'Indy's First String Quartet and Claude Debussy’s String Quartet.  In 1895 Ysaÿe formed a duo with the French pianist and composer Raoul Pugno which became world famous; he also played with Arton Rubinstein, Ferruccio Busoni, Alexander Siloti and other celebrated pianists of the time.  In 1914 Ysaÿe toured the US, again to great success; the time from 1900 to the beginning of WWI was the peak of his career.  Ysaÿe had health problems from the age of 50 (he had diabetes, his right foot would be eventually amputated), he also had problems with the right hand and bow control.  As his playing deteriorated (which happened rapidly), his performances became rare; he concentrated instead on conducting, composing and teaching.  As a teacher, he was extremely influential; among his students were Joseph Gingold, who himself became a famed violin teacher (Gil Shaham, Joshua Bell and Leonidas Kavakos are just three of Gingold’s students); one of the greatest viola players of the 20^th century William Primrose, as well as Nathan Milstein, and Jascha Brodsky.  Ysaÿe’s influence on the development of the modern style of violin playing is hard to overestimate.  Here’s Ysaÿe’s Sonata no. 2, op. 27 for violin solo, dedicated to Jacques Thibaud, Ysaÿe’s friend.  It’s performed by Frank Peter Zimmermann

July 8, 2019.  Carl Orff.  It’s quite strange, but we’ve never written about a popular, if somewhat controversial, 20^th century composer, Carl Orff.  Orff was born in Munich on July 10^th of 1895; his father came from a line of Bavarian military officers.  At the age of five Carl started music lessons, playing piano, cello and organ.  In his youth he became fascinated with two very different composers, Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg; one wouldn’t discern their influence on his mature works but apparently it was more obvious with his early operas, which Orff later dismissed.  In 1914 he became the conductor of the Munich Kammerspiele, the state theater.  During the Great War Orff was drafted, sent to the front and wounded, after which he spent the rest of the war working at the theaters of Mannheim and Darmstadt.  He returned to Munich in 1919 and immersed himself in the music of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  In 1924 Orff staged Monteverdi’s L'Orfeo; the German text was written by Dorothée Günther, who also did the choreography.  Günther, an artist and pedagogue, became Orff’s collaborator in many endeavors.  It was the first such production in modern German history.  Around that time Orff got interested in the concept of elementare Musik, or elemental music, understood as the synthesis of music, gesture/dance and spoken poetry.  In 1924 these ideas led Orff and Günther to establish the Güntherschule, a school for gymnastics, music and dance.  Orff composed a number of short simple pieces for the school, which in 1932-35 were published as Schulwerk: elementare Musikübung.  Here’s the easily recognizable Gassenhauer (it was used in many movies, including Terrence Malick’s Badlands). 

July 1, 2019.  Gluck and more.  We should’ve written about Gustav Mahler as his birthday falls on next Sunday, July 7^th: we are good internationalists and start our week on Monday, so it would be still this week for us; however, we’ll do it in our next entry.  In the meantime, we’ll remember Christoph Willibald Gluck, who was born on July 2^nd of 1714 in Erasbach, a small town in Upper Palatinate, now in Bavaria.  Here’s what we wrote about Gluck on his 203^rd birthday anniversary; we ended our entry with Gluck settling in Vienna in 1751: “The most productive, but also the most disappointing period of his life was still ahead of him.”  Gluck’s early years in Vienna were quite promising: he became the Kapellmeister to Prince Joseph of Saxe-Hildburghausen.  He also taught music to Maria Antonia Habsburg, the younger daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and, as Marie Antoinette, the future queen of France.  Gluck was also composing; some of his operas were performed at the Prince’s palace theater for the Emperor’s family.  In 1761 Prince Joseph disbanded his orchestra and Gluck’s permanent employment was gone.  This was the period during which Gluck was thinking about changing the opera.  He wanted it to develop more naturally, without convoluted plots of the Italian opera seria.  He didn’t like repetitions, so numerous in the baroque opera, its “da capo” arias, in which the third part duplicates the first.  He wanted to get rid of the improvisations, the staple of the famous castrati.  Overall, to think of it, what Gluck wanted to accomplish around 1760 was very much what Richard Wagner would do a century later.  Gluck didn’t just muse about these things, he put them in writing (together with his librettist, Ranieri de' Calzabigi) in the published dedication and the preface to his opera Alceste.  In that he also reminds us of Wagner who wrote extensively about the opera.

June 24, 2019.  Two Italians, Marcello and Abbado.  Benedetto Marcello was born in Venice, on June 24^th (but maybe onJuly 24^th, or, according to other sources, on July 31^st or August 1^st of 1686) in Venice.  Born into a noble family, he was the younger brother of Alessandro Marcello, also a composer (read more here about the brothers).  Benedetto occupied major administrative positions within the Venetian bureaucracy and wasn’t considered a professional composer; he was casual in numbering and dating his compositions, so often the dates may be derived only circumstantially.  Marcello wrote a considerable number of sacred works, including nine masses (one of them a Funeral mass, or Requiem).  He also wrote what he called “parafrasi” (paraphrases) on 25 psalms, published around 1724-1726 under the heading of L’Estro poetico-armonico, or Poetic and harmonic inspirations.  Here is Psalm X, in the performance by the ensemble Cantus Cölln, Konrad Junghänel conducting.  It’s a delightful example of late Italian baroque.

Claudio Abbado would’ve been 86 this Wednesday: he was born in Milan on June 26^th of 1933.  We celebrated him last year with the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 4.  Abbado was indeed a superb Mahlerian (he recorded his symphonies several times),  but his repertory was vast (in 2013 Deutsche Grammophon released their Claudio Abbado: The Symphony Edition, which consisted of 41 CDs) and there were very few things that he hadn’t done at the highest level.  Here, for example, Mozart’s Symphony no. 35 (“Haffner”), recorded in 2008.  Abbado said about Mozart that he had only approached him “cautiously, once in a while,” but his interpretation of the symphony is brilliant.  In this recording Abbado conducts Orchestra Mozart, Bologna, which he helped to found in 2004; that was after he was diagnosed with stomach cancer and had to leave the Berlin Philharmonic.  Abbado served as the artistic director of the orchestra for many years.  This is a live recording made in 2008.

June 17, 2019.  Gounod, Stavinsky and more.  Charles Gounod was born on this day in 1818.  Last year we celebrated his 200^th birthday, so this time we’ll skip his anniversary.  We’ll also skip Stravinsky who is linked with Gounod the same unfortunate way Tchaikovsky is with Brahms: both were born on June 17^th, in 1882.  Stravinsky is one of the most significant composers of the 20^th century, and we write about him practically every year (see for example, here).  Of Johann Stamitz we do not.  Stamitz, a German composer of Czech descent, and a leading figure of the Mannheim School, was born on June 19^th of 1717.  He lived during that musically uncompelling period when Baroque was more or less over but Classical had not yet developed.  Historically, his birthday follows that of Bach’s two older sons: Wilhelm Friedemann was born on November 22^nd of 1710 and Carl Philipp Emanuel – on March 8, 1714.  Not that they weren’t talented, all three clearly were; it just seems that there are times that are more fecund or just luckier, and others that aren’t.  Gluck was also born in 1714, but Gluck doesn’t seem to belong to any period.  Here’s one of Stamitz’s last symphonies, op.11 no. 3 in E flat Major, composed in 1754 or 1755 (Stamitz died on March 27^th of 1757).  It’s nice, dynamics are vivid, it requires a virtuosic orchestra to play (the Mannheim court orchestra was one of the finest in Europe).  But listen to Haydn’s early symphony, Le Matin, no. 6, composed in 1761 – we’re in a different world!  It’s so much more sophisticated, melodically, tonally, the way it develops, and just as a whole compelling piece of music, it’s hard to compare them.  Of course, it’s a matter of talent, but also of that something undefinable, something in the air, the esthetics that have congealed in a short period and allowed the geniuses of Haydn and Mozart to flourish.  The Stamitz is performed by the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Donald Armstrong; the Haydn – by the Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood conducting.