November 14, 2016.  Paul Hindemith.  One of the most important composers of the 20^th century, Paul Hindemith was born on November 16^th of 1895 in Hanau, near Frankfurt.  Paul’s father, a painter, was a music lover and insisted that his children study music: Paul played violin, his sister studied the piano and their younger brother – the cello.  Some year later they would play in public as the “Frankfurt Children’s Trio,” with their father sometimes accompanying them on the zither.  Paul attended the Frankfurt Conservatory, concentrating in violin and later, in 1912, adding classes in composition (his first composition teacher was Arnold Mendelssohn, a great-nephew of Felix Mendelssohn).  While at the conservatory, Hindemith wrote his first compositions, which were technically strong, very romantic (just the opposite of what would become his later style) but not terribly inventive.  In 1914 he joined the orchestra of the Frankfurt Opera and soon became the concertmaster.  Three years into the war he was conscripted; he served mostly in a military band but at the end of the war spent some time in the trenches.  He remembered how in March of 1918 he and his fellow musicians were playing Debussy’s String Quartet when it was announced on the radio (sic!) that Debussy had died.   When after the war he returned to Frankfurt, he switched from the violin to the viola; he continued playing in the opera orchestra and with the Rebner Quartet.

November 7, 2016.   Couperin le Grand.  François Couperin, one of the most important French composers of the end of the 17^th – early 18^th century, was born on November 10^th of 1668.  He’s one of the three great composers who defined the French Baroque, born 32 years after Jean-Baptiste Lully and 15 years ahead of Jean-Philippe Rameau.  Couperin came from a famous musical family: his uncle, Louis Couperin, was a noted composer and the organist at the church of St-Gervais in central Paris.  After Louis’s death, François’s father Charles assumed the post.  François’s father died in in 1679; the young François was so promising and obviously talented that the church agreed to hire him as the organist on his 18^th birthday.  In the interim, François played there often and was practically a full-time organist at St-Gervais even before his official appointment.  At the age of 20 François married a girl from a wealthy bourgeois family; her connections helped him to acquire the royal privilege to print and sell his music.  A year later Couperin published a collection of organ works, but it was his fame as an organist that brought him to the attention of the court.  In 1693, at the age of 25, he received a fabulous appointment as the organist to the court of Louis XIV.  Around that time, he wrote a set of trio sonatas, which were later incorporated into a larger selection published under the title of Les nations.  The sonatas were clearly modelled after asimilar set of trio sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli, who was Couperin’s favorite composer.  As Couperin himself related later on in a preface to the publication, he indulged in a bit of subterfuge in order to promote his work.  Knowing that the French were still enamored with all things Italian while looking down at local composers, he concocted a story about an Italian origin of the first sonata.  He even made up an Italianate name of the “composer” by rearranging letters of his own name.  The sonata was received very favorably, which encouraged Couperin to continue composing.

October 31, 2016.  Bellini and Sweelinck.  Vincenzo Bellini was born on October 3^rd of 1801 in Catania, Sicily.  We don’t write about opera composers very often, opera being a stepchild at Classical Connect; the reasons are purely technical, we do love a good opera.  Even though Bellini lived for just 33 years he managed to create several masterpieces that belong to the pantheon of operatic art and have been continuously performed throughout the past 200 years.  It’s interesting to note that at the beginning of the 19^th century, before Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti produced their major works, Italian opera and composing in general, were not doing well.  Opera was born in Italy, and for a century (the 17^th, to be exact) Italians were by far the major innovators, even if we consider the talents of Lully, an Italian working in France, and Rameau, the first truly French opera composer.  Things changed with George Frideric Handel, a German who absorbed the Italian tradition of Opera Seria and became (in England, of all the places) the major opera composer of his generation.  Things shifted to Germany completely by the mid-18^th century, with Gluck and especially, Mozart, producing masterpieces above anything else written in the genre.  So, when in 1813, Rossini came up with his first major success, L'italiana in Algeri, and then, three years later, created Il barbiere di Siviglia, that ended a drought that lasted for almost 100 years.   And in the following 20 years, between the three of them, Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini changed opera completely, producing works that sustain it even today.  Bellini was the youngest of the three and his life was the shortest but his contributions were great: Il pirate in 1827, I Capuleti e i Montecchi in1830, La sonnambula a year later, then, in the same 1831, the great Norma and finally I puritani, written in 1835 and premiered in Paris just months before Bellini’s death.  In our library we have several Bellini samples but none from Il Pirata.  It was written while Bellini was living Milan; the La Scala premier was a great success.  Here’s the final scene.  Maria Callas is Imogene; the recoding was made in 1958 when Callas was past her absolute prime.  Still this is better than anything we can hear being performed these days.  The Philharmonia orchestra is led by Nicola Rescigno.

October 24, 2016.  From Scarlatti to Berio.  Four wonderful composers were born this week, three Italians and one Frenchman.  Domenico Scarlatti, one of our all-time favorites, was born on October 26^th of 1685 in Naples.  He probably studied music with his father, Alessandro Scarlatti, a famous opera composer.  These days we know Domenico as the author of 555 clavier sonatas, most written while Scarlatti was serving at the courts of Spain and Portugal, but very few of them were published during his lifetime.  His first publication, 30 Essercizi didn’t happen till 1738.  The “exercises” are actually sonatas, which were later catalogued under different numbers, first by Alessandro Longo at the beginning of the 20^th century, then later, by Ralph Kirkpatrick and others.  Here’s the very first sonata in this cycle, Sonata in d Minor, K 1/L 366.  It’s performed by Vladimir Bakk, a talented pianist, forgotten in his homeland, whose career never took off in his adopted country.  Bakk was born in Moscow in 1944.  He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Yakov Zak, a famous pianist and pedagogue.  In 1972 he won the Montevideo piano competition, and made several recordings with Melodia.  It’s not clear what happened but at some point he fell into disfavor with Philharmonia, the main concert organization: he was banned from playing abroad and even in the larger cities of the Soviet Union (the retelling of his concert in a small town of Uralsk is hilarious and sad at the same time).  The circumstances are not clear, but he was imprisoned twice.  Bakk emigrated to Israel in 1990 and moved to the United States two years later.  Even though his playing was lauded by the likes of Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Argerich and Vladimir Feltsman, his career never took off.  He died in 2007.  You can judge the quality of Bakk’s playing for yourself with this little jewel of Scarlatti.

Niccolò Paganini, the great Italian violinist, was born on October 27^th of 1782 in Genoa.  His best known composition is a cycle of 24 Caprices, which were written between 1802 and 1817.  Each Caprice is a devilishly difficult etude, emphasizing certain technical aspect of violin playing.  Here is Salvatore Accardo, one of the greatest interpreters of Paganini’s music, playing Caprice no. 3 in e minor, “Octaves.”

October 17, 2016.  Liszt and Marenzio.  Several composers were born this week.  The most famous of them is Franz Liszt, born on October 22^nd of 1811.  We love him, despite his somewhat diminished reputation (these days he’s performed less frequently than, for example, in the mid-20th century).  We’ve written about him many times, even publishing several short articles on his piano cycle, Années de Pèlerinage.  So this time we’ll just play some of his music – Piano concerto no. 1, for example.  It’s said that Liszt composed the theme of the first movement in 1830, when he was 19, but completed the concerto almost 20 years later, in 1849.  He premiered it six years later, in 1855, in Weimar, with an orchestra conducted by his good friend, Hector Berlioz.  (Liszt, the greatest piano virtuoso of his – and probably of any – time, stopped concertizing around 1847, settling in Weimar, but still gave occasional performances).   Here it is, in a brilliant, exhilarating performance by Sviatoslav Richter, with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the London Symphony orchestra.  The recording was made in 1961.

Liszt is not the only composer born this week.  We’ve never written about Luca Marenzio, an Italian Renaissance composer famous for his madrigals.  Marenzio was born on October 18^th of 1553, or at least that’s what the musicologists surmise.  To place him within the timeline of Italian music, Marenzio was one year older than Giovanni Gabrieli and about eight years younger than Luzzasco Luzzaschi about whom we wrote just last week. 

October 10, 2016.  An Italian composer with an unusually sounding name, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, was born in Ferrara around 1545; he lived there practically all his life.  Luzzaschi is probably more famous as a teacher and a keyboard player, but he was also a fine composer.  He studied music and the organ, playing at an early age and became an organist at the court of the Duke Alfonso II d’Este at 16; he was promoted to the first organist at 19.  During the second half of the 16^th century, the court was a glorious place, Duke Alfonso being a major patron of arts.  Luzzaschi remained the first organist for the rest of his career, but his duties were broadened: he composed, took charge of the court orchestra and trained young musicians (Ippolito Fiorini was formally the maestro di cappella at the court, but his duties seem to have been more administrative).  Sometime around 1570 Luzzaschi took over the Duke’s chamber music concerts.  The concerts were organized as “musica secreta” (secret music) for a small and very exclusive audience; the repertory of these concerts was kept secret, but it’s assumed that some of it was written by Luzzaschi himself.  During these concerts, Luzzaschi usually played on a keyboard (by that time he was considered one of the finest keyboard players around); some instrumental music was performed as well, but the main attraction was a group of highly skilled women singers, called Concerto delle Donne.  An ensemble of female voices was highly unusual for that time.  The initial Concerto consisted of several very talented but amateur singers, but eventually professional ones were hired as well.  By the 1580s Concerto started performing in public and their fame spread all over Italy.  Apparently, every singer in the ensemble was a virtuoso, and there was no group of equal quality in all of the country; Luzzaschi has to be given credit as their music director.  Much of the music performed by the Concerto was written by Luzzaschi, but they also performed madrigals written for them by Carlo Gesualdo, Lodovico Agostini and many other noted composers.