March 30 2015.  Cabezón, Haydn, Rachmaninov and Stradella.  This is another week that brings together, even if fleetingly and tenuously, several major composers from very different eras.  The oldest in this group is Antonio de Cabezon, one of the most important keyboard composers of the Spanish Renaissance.  Cabezón was born on March 30^th of 1510, which makes him five years younger than Cristóbal de Morales and one generation older than Tomás Luis de Victoria, two greatest composers of the Spanish Renaissance.   Little is known about Cabezón: he was born in a small town in northern Spain not far from Burgos, and was blind from childhood.  In 1526 he entered the service of Queen Isabella, wife of Charles I, king of Spain, as an organist and clavichord player.  In 1538 he was appointed the chamber musician to Charles himself, who, as Charles V was the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire and the most powerful monarch in all of Europe.  Later on Cabezón was appointed the music teacher to Prince Felipe, the future king of Spain, and accompanied him on his travels to Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and London.   Cabezón’s music influenced many composers, especially the English ones, such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.  Here’s is a short piece by Cabezón called La dama le demanda, from his Works of keyboard music, harp and vihuela.  Fahmi Alqhai plays viola da gamba, Alberto Martínez Molina is on the organ.

Alessandro Stradella belonged to the next period, the Baroque.  He had quite an amazing life, full of mayhem and intrigue; of the composers of the time, only Carlo Gesualdo might have had a more adventurous life.  Stradella was born on April 3^rd of 1639 into an aristocratic Tuscan family.  During his short life (he was stabbed to death at the age of 42 in a plaza right in the middle of Genoa) he managed to create more than 300 works.  Here’s his Cantata per il santissimo natale, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis is conducted by August Wenzinger.

Franz Joseph Haydn, born on March 31^st of 1732, was one of the greatest, if sometimes underappreciated, composers ever.  We’ve written about him many times, and will write more.  Haydn was extremely prolific, writing in every musical genre known in his time.  He composed 104 symphonies, more than 60 quartets, trio, concertos, wonderful cantatas and even operas.   He also wrote 62 piano sonatas.  On the surface most of them are deceptively simple, but in reality they are highly sophisticated and carry a tremendous amount of material.  Some of them are as good as Mozart’s, if not better, and would not be surpassed till Beethoven’s mature years.  Murray Perahia, the American pianist of a great range and talent, has recently embarked on a tour playing a program that includes Haydn’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 46.  Perahia’s interpretation is immensely satisfying on all levels: technically flawless, it is musically probing, the sound is beautiful but without any exaggerations, the tempos are nimble and move the sonata along its way.  It’s probably one of the best interpretations we’ve heard in ages.  Unfortunately, there are no publicly available Perahia recordings of this sonata, so in its stead, we have one made by the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich early in his uneven career, here.  Different and highly idiosyncratic, it’s still very interesting in its own right. 

The great Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov was born on April 1^st of 1873.  We’ve written about him before, so today we’ll combine his commemoration with the recent 100^th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter.   We’ll hear several preludes, recorded live during the concert he gave in Manchester in 1969:  op. 32 no. 10, op.23 no.4 and op.23 no.5.

March 23, 2015.  Pierre Boulez.  On March 26^th we’ll celebrate the 90^th birthday of Pierre Boulez, one of the most distinguished musical figures of the 20^th century, a composer, conductor, writer, music entrepreneur and organizer, lecturer, professor – in short, a veritable one-man cultural phenomenon.  It’s difficult to overestimate his influence on the development of classical music during the last 70 years.  Boulez was born in 1925 in a small town of Montbrison in central France.  As a boy he was equally interested in music and mathematics.  He took courses in higher math in Lyon (his father, an industrialist, wanted Pierre to become an engineer) but a year later moved to the German-occupied Paris and, instead of going to Ecole Polytechnique, entered the Conservatory.  His teacher in the harmony class was Olivier Messiaen, who helped Boulez to discover the new world of 12-tone music.  Boulez’s first compositions, like Douze notations, which he wrote at the age of 20, were very much in the style of Anton Webern, though in the following years he developed a distinct, personal style.  Boulez’s large Second piano sonata (1948) made him known internationally; one of the champions of Boulez’s music was the pianist Yvonne Loriod, the second wife of Messiaen; she premiered the Second Sonata in Darmstadt, Germany.  After the war, the New Music Summer School in Darmstadt was a major center for innovative music.  Boulez taught there, and that’s where he met his peers: Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, György Ligeti and many other leading modernists.  With all this talent, Darmstadt served as an incubator for a new music style.  Some of the ideas that influenced this style were not esthetic but rather ideological; in the aftermath of the war, young composers abhorred all “romantic,” nationalist aspects of music that could be co-opted by the state, as the Nazis did with Wagner and Beethoven.  Instead, they developed a non-ideological, detached but not un-emotional, method called serialism, which expanded on the twelve-tone system created by Schoenberg and his pupils in Vienna some decades earlier.  A major serialist work by Boulez was Structures, Book I, written in 1952.  In 1961 he rewrote some of the material of the composition, creating Book II.  Another idea that could be traced to Darmstadt of the early 1950s was aleatoric, or chance music.  Boulez wrote several aleatoric pieces in the 60s and the 70s, one of them – Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna composed in memory of his friend, the Italian composer Bruno Maderna, also a regular visitor to Darmstadt, who died there at the age of 53 while rehearsing his opera, Satyricon.

In 1970, uponsuggestion by George Pompidou, the President of France, Boulez created IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a major institution dedicated to research in electro-acoustical and modern music. Later, Boulez founded Ensemble InterContemporain, which is associated with IRCAM.  The ensemble is a foremost advocate of modernist music.

Boulez started conducting in the late 1950s.  Even though he never had formal training, he developed into one of the major conductors of the late-20^th century.  He served as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony, the Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony; he conducted all major orchestras of Europe and the US.  He’s especially well known for his interpretation of modernist composers; at the same time, he’s one of the foremost Mahlerians of our days.  He also conducted practically all of Wagner’s operas at Bayreuth, both of Berg’s operas – Wozzeck was one of his early triumphs, and Lulu, and many other operas.

Boulez’s music is often difficult, so we’ll confine ourselves to just two pieces, one for the piano, another – orchestral.  Here’s Multiple (1965) from Boulez’s “project” Eclat/Multiple (he revised the original pieces several times).  The composer conducts Ensemble InterContemporain.  And here’s Chapter I of Book II of Structures.  Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Florent Boffard are playing two pianos.

March 16, 2015.  Bach and Mussorgsky.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21^st of 1685 in Eisenach.  We’ve writtenabout him so many times (last year, for example) that this time we’ll just go ahead with his music and write a bit about some other composers that were also born this week but are often overshadowed by the German master.  So here’s Part II of The St. John Passion.  Bach wrote it during his first years in Leipzig, where, in 1723, he was appointed the Thomaskantor.  It was first performed on April 7th of the following year, during the Good Friday Vespers, at the St. Nicholas Church.  In this recording theperformers are: Concentus Musicus Wien, the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.

Modest Mussorgsky, a composer of tremendous but only partly fulfilled talent, was born on March 21^st of 1839.  Mussorgsky was born in the village of Karevo in the Northwestern Pskov region of Russia.  He belonged to an old, noble and quite wealthy family.  He started piano lessons with his mother at the age of six.  When he was ten, he and his brother were sent to St.-Petersburg to study at a German-language school where he was able to continue his piano lessons.  At the age of 12 he published (with his father’s help) his first composition.  A year later he entered the Cadet School in order to continue the family’s military tradition.  The discipline at the school was lax, carousing encouraged, and that’s, apparently, where his drinking problems began.  Upon graduating, he joined the elite Preobrazhensky regiment.  He soon met Alexander Borodin, then a young military doctor and a budding composer, and Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who is practically forgotten outside of Russia but back then was considered the most important composer since Mikhail Glinka.  Dargomyzhsky introduced Mussorgsky to Balakirev and Cui, the future members of the “Mighty Five.”   Soon after Mussorgsky quit the military and devoted himself to music fulltime.  The several following years were not very productive: he wrote some piano music, an incidental music to a play; he started working on Salammbô, an opera after Flaubert’s novel, but never finished it.  In 1865, at the age of 26, he had his first real bout with alcoholism, but got out of it intact.  One year later he finished the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (Balakirev didn’t like it and it was never performed during Mussorgsky’s lifetime).  He started working on an opera based on a story by Gogol, The Marriage, but soon abandoned that as well.  Then, in 1868, an acquaintance, one Professor Nikolsky, an authority on Pushkin, suggested that Mussorgsky writes an opera based on Boris Godunov, Pushkin’s blank-verse play.  Mussorgsky responded with great enthusiasm: he wrote a libretto based on Pushkin’s play and available historical documents and completed the first version of what turned out to be a large opera in less than a year.  The opera, though, was rejected by major theaters, mostly because it lacked a leading female role.  Undeterred, Mussorgsky went on to create a revised and expanded version.  This version was accepted, and in 1872 parts of it were staged at the famed Mariinsky Theater in 1873.  A year later the complete opera was staged at the same theater.  Even though the public seemed to have liked it, it was poorly received by the critics and closed after just several performances.  Some years later it was taken out of the repertory completely.  In the meantime, Mussorgsy started working on Khovanshchina, a second large-scale opera project.   The opera, which, as so many of his projects, was never completed, was also based on an episode from Russian history, a rebellion of the Old Believers and the Streltsy guard against Peter the Great.  Around that time Mussorgsky’s descent into alcoholism started for real.  For a while he continued to compose: his famous piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, was written in 1874, but eventually his productive output practically came to a halt.  There were periods of sobriety, during which he could write – his tremendous Songs and Dances of Death were written during one such period, and he sporadically continued to work on the Khovanshchina and another opera, The Fair at Sorochintsy.  Neither of them were ever completed, Mussorgsky’s descend being inexorable.  He lost his job and lived off his friends’ charity.  Several days before his death, when Mussorgsky was already in a hospital, Ilya Repin painted the famous portrait, above.  Mussorgsky died one week after his 42^nd birthday, on March 27^th of 1881.  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a close friend, was one of the composers who worked on the scores left after Mussorgsky’s death.  Rimsky-Korsakov’s birthday is also this week: he was born on March 18^th of 1844.  We’ll write about him another time.

Here, in a scene from Boris Godunov worthy of the best of Verdi, we’ll hear the great Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky singing the role of yurodivy (the holy fool) who is accusing the Tsar of murdering a child, Tzarevich Dmitry.  Alexander Pirogov is Tzar Boris.  Nikolay Golovanov leads the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater.  The recording was made in 1948.

March 9, 2015.  Mysliveček and Telemann.  We’ve never written about Josef Mysliveček, even though this friend of Mozart’s was one of the most famous composers of his time.  Mysliveček was born in Prague on March 9th, 1737, and the Czechs consider him their national composer, even though he wrote in the Italianate style and spent most of his adult life in Italy.  Mysliveček was born into a wealthy miller’s family.  As a youngster he took music lessons in Prague but left for Venice in 1763 to study opera composition technique.  Two years later he wrote his first opera, Semiramide, which was staged in Bergamo.  In 1767 he wrote another opera, Il Bellerofonte, his most successful composition.  It was staged in Naples in Teatro San Carlo, at that time a preeminent opera theater in Italy, to great acclaim.  He moved from one Italian city to another, staging operas in major theaters.  In 1768 Mysliveček made a brief but triumphant visit to Prague.  In 1771 he was admitted to the prestigious Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna.  One year later he traveled to Vienna, hoping to establish himself there, but it didn’t work out.  He returned to Italy, the country where he was quite famous.  Unfortunately, that didn’t last: in 1780 he staged two of his operas, Armida at La Scala in Milan, and Medonte in Rome, and both failed miserably.  His reputation never recovered, and he died in poverty in Rome a year later, on February 4^th of 1781.  He was just 43 years old. 

Mysliveček met Leopold Mozart and his fourteen year-old son Wolfgang in Bologna in 1770.  He became good friends with both (Mysliveček’s name is often mentioned in the correspondence between the father and the son).  It all came to an end when Mysliveček failed to deliver on his promise to arrange a commission for Wolfgang at the Teatro San Carlo for the Carnival season of 1779.   Mysliveček, who wrote not just operas but also symphonies and concertos, had a significant influence on Mozart, who admired Mysliveček’s overtures (symphonies), and apparently used some of Mysliveček’s ideas in his own compositions.  Mozart’s concert aria Ridente la calma is based on a substitute aria from Mysliveček’s opera Armida.  Here’s his Violin concerto in A Major, performed by Shizuka Ishikawa, with the Dvořák Chamber Orchestra.

If Mysliveček was a friend of Mozarts, Georg Philipp Telemann, who also has his anniversary this week, was a good friend of Johann Sebastian Bach.  Telemann was born on March 14^th of 1681 in Magdeburg.  Even though very gifted, he never formally studied music.  He learned to play several instruments but did it on his own.  In 1701 he went to Leipzig to study law but soon dropped out to pursue music professionally.  He eventually established himself in the city’s musical circles; his compositions were regularly performed in the main churches, Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche.  In 1707 he went to Eisenach and entered the service of the Duke.  It’s there that he probably met Johann Sebastian Bach for the first time.  Seven years later he became the godfather to Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel.

In the 18^th century Telemann was considered a very important composer.  His fame waned a century later, and it was not till the second half of the 20^th that it was somewhat revived.  Telemann did write too much, and many of his pieces were not of the highest quality, but some compositions are extremely good.   Here’s Telemann’s Christmas Cantata 1761 (he composed several, this one was written for the Hamburg Christmas season of 1761).  It’s performed by the Telemann-Kammerorchester Michaelstein, the chorus and soloists; Ludger Rémy conducting.

March 2, 2015.  Plentiful week.  This is one of those weeks when we feel somewhat overwhelmed: Bedřich Smetana, Antonio Vivaldi, Maurice Ravel, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Carlo Gesualdo were all born this week.  Plus, Frédéric Chopin’s birthday was yesterday, March 1st.  We have about 400 recordings of Chopin’s works, so it’s almost impossible to pick just one.  Here’s the recording of Chopin’s Ballade no. 4 in f minor, Op. 52 that our listeners seem like.  It’s performed live, by the still young Russian-American pianist Elena Baksht.

The lives of these composers span four centuries; we’ve written about all five of them in the past, so we’ll just play some of their music.  Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, a late Renaissance composer, lutenist and murderer (he famously stabbed his wife and her lover after discovering them in bed), was born on March 8^th of 1560.  He wrote a large number of madrigals, many of which display amazing chromatic modulations that are centuries ahead of their time.  Here’s an example, Omnes amici mei dereliquerunt me (All my friends abandoned me), a section from his Tenebrae Responsoria on the text from the Passion.

Antonio Vivaldi was born on March 4^th of 1678, more than 100 years later.  If Gesualdo belonged to the late Renaissance period, Vivaldi is the epitome of the late Baroque.  Vivaldi is so popular these days that it’s hard to imagine that up till the 1930s he was practically unknown.  It took the diligent work of Olga Rudge, the violinist more known as the lover of Ezra Pound, and Pound himself, working under the auspices of the Mussolini regime, to uncover hundreds of Vivaldi’s manuscripts.  Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos.  Here’s his Concerto for Four Violinsin B minor RV 580.  It’s performed by the ensemble I Solisti Italiani.  Johann Sebastian Bach liked it so much that he arranged it for four clavichords.  We know it as Bach’s Concerto BWV1065.

One year ago we celebrated the tricentennial of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who was born on March 8^th of 1714 in Weimar, the fifth child of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach, Johann Sebastian’s first wife.  Three of his older siblings died in infancy, so he became the second-oldest surviving son.  A major figure of the transitional period between the Baroque and what became known as the “Classical” period, he was influenced by the music of his father, his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel.  He wrote a number of symphonies, and many works for the keyboard, both concertos and sonatas.  Here’s CPE Bach’s Symphony in E minor, Wq. 178, written in Berlin in 1756, the year Mozart was born.  It’s performed by the Academy for Ancient Music Berlin.

Bedřich Smetana was born on March 2^nd of 1824.  Considered the father of Czech music, he was one of the first “nationalist” composers with aspirations and sensibilities shared by the Russian “Mighty Five” and his younger countryman Antonin Dvořák.  Here’s one of Smetana’s  most popular works, Vltava, from his set of symphonic poems Má vlast.

And lastly, chronologically but certainly not in terms of either talent or popularity, Maurice Ravel, who was born on March 7^th of 1875.  Here’s his Alborada del Cracioso, from Mirroirs. It’s performed by the Italian pianist Igor Cognolato.