January 8, 2014.  Messiaen, Berlioz.   Two great French composers, Olivier Messiaen and Hector Berlioz (and several others, see below) were born this week.  Messiaen was born on December 10^th, 1908 in Avignon.  His mother was a poet and his father – an English teacher and translator of Shakespeare into French.  Olivier entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11 and while there he was awarded several prizes, in harmony and in fugue writing among them.   He studied the organ, first with the composer and organist Marcel Dupré and later with Charles-Marie Widor, also a composer and one of the most famous organists of his time.   In 1931 Messiaen became the organist of the church de la Sainte-Trinité in the 9^th arrondissement, and remained in that position for the following 61 years.  Messiaen accepted the Catholic faith at an early age, and many of his compositions were overtly religious.  Early in his life (in 1932) he wrote an orchestral piece L'ascension ("The Ascension") and three years later, an organ work titled La Nativité du Seigneur (The Nativity of the Lord).  Later in his career, in the 1960s, he wrote La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ ("The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ"), a huge work of about one and a half hour’s duration which is scored for the piano, cello and other instrumental solos, a large choir and the orchestra.  Later in his life he wrote his only opera, Saint François d'Assise, based on the life of the saint (Messiaen wrote the libretto himself, studying historical sources in the process).  One of most interesting pieces in this genre is his piano work Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus (usually translated as “Twenty contemplations on the infant Jesus”).  It consists of 20 movements, and we have several in our library.  Here is the first movement, Regard du Père ("Contemplation of the Father"), a beautiful, deeply meditative piece, and here – Regard de l'étoile ("Contemplation of the star"), the second movement with its brief celestial motif.  Both are performed by the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who studied with Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s second wife.  (Aimard is one of the most interesting, highly regarded interpreters of modern music; he recently embarked on a tour playing Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  That, in our opinion, was less successful).

Hector Berlioz was born on December 11th, 1803 in a small town of La Côte-Saint-André in thesoutheast of France.  One hundred years apart and completely different in styles, Berlioz and Messiaen have one thing in common: both were absolutely unique, outside of the mainstream music of their time.  If you look at the timeline of Berlioz as a composer, it starts in 1830 with the publication of Symphonie fantastique and lasts for the following 30 years, the first half dedicated mostly to symphonic pieces, and the second half – to opera.  It coincides with the most creative years of Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn in the first half, Wagner and Verdi in the second.  Berlioz is unlike any of them.  Franz Liszt, who was strongly influenced by Berlioz, is probably the closest to him in all of music literature.  In France, Berlioz struggled to be recognized as a composer (Giacomo Meyerbeer was much more popular), even while being praised as a conductor (half a century later, in Vienna, that would also be Mahler’s fate).  Symphonie fantastique was premier in December of 1830, and remained in the orchestral repertory ever since.  is the second movement, Un Bal, in the performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Sir Colin Davis conducting.

We need to mention two more birthdays, that of Jean Sibelius (December 8^th, 1865) and César Franck’s, on December 10^th of 1822.

December 1, 2014.  More of Brahms’s late piano music.  In recent months we’ve written about Johannes Brahms’s two sets of piano music, Seven fantasies, op. 116 and Six Piano Pieces, op.  118.  Today we continue with the middle opus, Three Intermezzos op.117, which Brahms, in a letter to a friend, called “lullabies of my sorrow.”  Intermezzos were written in 1892, during the period of great personal loss.  As always, we illustrate the pieces with  music from our library.  The pianist in these recordings is Yael Kareth.  Yael was born in Jerusalem in 1986.  She studied at the Tel Aviv Music Academy and then continued in London with Murray Perahia.  She participated in the Itzhak Perlman Project in Israel and the US, the Aspen and Ravinia Festivals, and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim.  She also performed as a soloist with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta.  Currently Yael lives in Berlin where she studies with Dmitri Bashkirov and Daniel Barenboim.  The article follows.

In contrast to the neighboring opp. 116 and 118, Brahms comprised op. 117 of only three intermezzi.  However, these three works are of an unmistakably greater import than the similar works of those two collections (except, of course, the grim E-flat minor Intermezzo).  Despite their subdued tone, they carry a weight that could hardly be found within either op. 116 or op. 118, yet together form a fulfilling whole.  Continue here.

November 24, 2014.  Alfred Schnittke.  We have to admit to having a problem with the term “Soviet,” as in “Soviet composer.”  There is just so much negativity associated with the term, with all the totalitarian connotations and the evil that was perpetrated under its name during a large part of the 20^th century.  But what would you call a composer born on November 24^th of 1934 in a city on river Volga, who then moved to Moscow, studied and later taught at the Moscow Conservatory, and was for a while a member of the Soviet Composer’s Union?  On the other hand, what would you call a composer whose music was so non-conformist and “anti-Soviet” that it was banned by the same Composer’s Union?  The life of Alfred Schnittke, one of the most interesting composers of the last half of the 20^th century, was very unusual.  He was born into a German-Jewish family.  His Jewish father Harry was born in Frankfurt but brought to the Soviet Union in 1927 by his parents who, like so many Western intellectuals at that time, went to Russia to build a new, just society.  Most of them perished in the Gulag, but not the Schnittkes.  Harry became a well-known German translator and a journalist.  During the Great Patriotic War, as WWII was called in the Soviet Union, Harry worked as a wartime correspondent.  Once the war was over, he was stationed in Soviet-occupied Vienna to work in a newspaper established by the Soviet authorities.  Harry brought his family with him, including the 12-year-old Alfred.  It was in Vienna, the city of Mozart and Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler, that Alfred started his musical education.  Even though the family stayed in Vienna for just two years, the exposure to the Austrian-German tradition deeply influenced young Schnittke.  They returned to the Soviet Union in 1948 and settled in the suburbs of Moscow.  Alfred attended a music school and in 1953 entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying composition with Evgeny Golubev, a pupil of Myaskovsky, and eventually doing graduate work.  In 1962 he assumed an assistant teaching position at the Conservatory but earned his living writing film scores.   His relationship with the Soviet musical establishment was difficult from the beginning.  Some of his work was banned and most of it rarely performed.  He became officially accepted only in the late 1980s, during Gorbachev’s Perestroika.

Schnittke was a very prolific composer, writing several operas, 10 symphonies, four violin concertos, several piano concertos, and many chamber and instrumental pieces.  His early music was deeply influenced by Shostakovich, but eventually Schnittke evolved into a highly original composer.  In 1971 he wrote an essay titled “Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music.”  In it Schnittke pointed to composers he called “polystylistic,” who mixed and matched various styles into a coherent composition; those, in Schnittke’s opinion, included Luciano Berio, Edison Denisov, Krzysztof Penderecki and other.  But it was Schnittke himself who became a major proponent of this style.

In 1985 Schnittke suffered a terrible stroke (doctors believed they had lost him several times) but recovered and continued composing, though his style became more introverted.  In 1990 Schnittke left Russia and settled in Hamburg.  He had another stroke in 1995, which paralyzed him; after that he stopped composing.  Schnittke died in Hamburg on August 5th, 1998.  His body was returned to Moscow and buried with state honors.

We have a number of Schnittke’s works in our library.  Here’s his "polystylistic" and very representative piece from 1977 called Concerto Grosso No. 1.  It’s performed by the dedicatees of the piece, the violinists Gidon Kremer and his then wife Tatiana Grindenko and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Heinrich Schiff conducting.

Jean-Baptiste Lully, the father of French Baroque, was born on 28th of November 1632.  We’ll commemorate his birthday at a later date.

November 17, 2014.  This week across centuries.  Wilhelm Friedemann, a talented but rather unhappy eldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was born on November 22^nd of 1710.  Friedemann had a difficult character, later in his life he drank heavily, but it seems that his main problem was his rivalry – probably unconscious – with his father.  As Grove Music Dictionary puts it, “… [W.F.] Bach clearly concentrated more on virtuoso performance than on his career as a composer, perhaps in the depressing realization that he could never attain his father’s perfection in all musical genres. His creative energies were therefore expressed more readily in free improvisation, and particularly in his late years the improvisation of fantasies on the organ and harpsichord was very important to him.”  Still, in that rather barren period of the 18^th century between the deaths of J.S. Bach and Handel and the time when Haydn and Mozart brought the new classical style to its pinnacle, Wilhelm Friedemann was clearly one of the very best.  To prove it, here’s his Harpsichord Concerto in F minor, written around1767.  Claudio Astronio conducts the Italian ensemble Harmonices Mundi from the harpsichord.

Firdemann died in 1784.  Two years later, on November 18^th of 1786 Carl Maria von Weber was born in Eutin, the Duchy of Holstein.  Weber is mostly known for his operas, especially Der Freischütz, considered the first German “Romantic” opera.  The operas are indeed the most important part of his body of work, but being a wonderful pianist Weber also wrote a number of pieces for the instrument.  He composed two piano concertos, four sonatas, and the Konzertstück (concert piece) in F minor for piano and orchestra.  He completed the piece the morning of June 18^th of 1821, the day Der Freischütz had its premier in Berlin.  While the Konzertstück has just one movement (that’s why Weber decided not to call it a concerto), it has four sections and Weber provided a detailed – and highly romantic – program for each.  The first one, according to the composer, describes a knight’s wife on a balcony, gazing into the distance, thinking about her husband who went on a Crusade to the Holy Land.  In the second section, the excited wife, thinking of her possibly wounded husband, falls unconscious, but do we hear the trumpets in the distance?  Yes we do, and in the third section, written in the gay C Major, the knights are returning from the Crusade to the delight of the crowds, and the couple is reunited.  The forth, final episode depicts happiness without end.  Felix Mendelssohn attended the premier, loved it and later played it many times.  We don’t know whether Weber’s extravagant program helps the listener to appreciate the music but it’s a superb piece and is brilliantly played here by Alfred Brendel with the London Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado conducting.

Weber suffered from tuberculosis and was just 39 when he died in 1826.  Manuel de Falla, one of the most important Spanish composers of the early 20^th century, was born fifty years later, on December 23^rd of 1876 in the port city of Cádiz in Andalusia.  Falla was the youngest of the three composers who revolutionized Spanish music at the end of the 19^th century: Isaac Albéniz was born in 1860 and Enrique Granados – in 1867.  While promoting the national roots of Spanish music, the three of them opened up a rather close-minded and xenophobic musical culture of the country to broader musical ideas, many of them emanating from France.  Falla studied in Madrid as a young man, and then, in 1907, moved to Paris, where he met and befriended many composers, including Ravel, Debussy, and Stravinsky.  Falla returned to Spain in 1914; by then he was recognized as one of the leading composers of the time.  His opera La vida breve was successfully staged in France and Spain; he had a written a number of zarzuelas, songs, and chamber pieces.  An even more productive period followed.  One of the pieces Falla wrote shortly after returning from France was Nights in the Gardens of Spain for piano and orchestra, which he completed in 1915.  Here it is, in the performance by the great champion of Spanish music, the late pianist Alicia de Larrocha; L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is conducted by Sergiu Comissiona.

Alfred Schnittke, one of the most important Russian composers of the second half of the 20^th century, was also born this week, on November 24^th of 1934.  We commemorate his birthday every year and hope to do it in 2014 as well, albeit at a later date.

November 10, 2014.  Couperin, Borodin, Hindemith.  François Couperin, one of the greatest French Baroque composers, was born on this day in 1668.  He came from a large family of musicians, some of them very talented (you can read more about the Couperins in our earlier post).  He was incomparable as a composer for the harpsichord (clavecin, as it is called in French).  Couperin wrote four Books for the harpsichord, each containing several “orders,” 27 orders altogether.   One of the pieces in Order 6 (Book 2) is called Les Barricades Mistérieuses (The mysterious barricades); it was written in 1717.  Nobody knows for sure why Couperin used this unusual title, although many suggestions have been made, from rather risqué to outlandish.  In any event, here it is, performed by Scott Ross.  (A talented American harpsichordist who spent most of his life in Canada and France, Ross had a tragically short life: he died in 1989 at the age of 38.  Ross recorded all keyboard compositions by Couperin, all 555 sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, and many other works by the Baroque composers).

The chemist, doctor and accidental composer of great talent, Alexander Borodin was born on November 12^th of 1833.  All his life Borodin was mostly interested in sciences, studying in St.-Petersburg and universities abroad and eventually obtaining a teaching position at the prestigious Medical-Surgical Academy.  Music was a love, and composing – a pleasant hobby.  In 1862, at the home of his colleague, the famous doctor Sergey Botkin, Borodin met Mily Balakirev and then through Balakirev, he made friends with Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and the young Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.  Five years later the music critic Vladimir Stasov would call them the Mighty Five.  The 1862 meeting strongly affected Borodin, and almost immediately he started working on his 1^st Symphony.  Even though he wrote three of them, some chamber music, and most of Prince Igor, a truly great opera (it fell upon Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov to finish it after Borodin’s death), he never made composing his main profession.  In 1880 Borodin wrote a symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia (the original Russian title was just “Central Asia”).  In 1908, a Frenchman by the name of Joseph-Louis Mundwiller shot a documentary called Moscow Clad in Snow (and it really was that year).  It’s a fascinating film that shows Moscow at the beginning of the 20^th century, much of which doesn’t exist any longer.  When the movie was restored, the editors decided that Borodin’s In the Steppes would go well as an accompaniment.  Even though there are thousands of miles between Moscow and Central Asia, somehow it worked.  Here is In the Steppes of Central Asia as performed by Kurt Sanderling and Dresden Staatskapelle.  And here is the movie on YouTube.  It’s worth watching even if you’ve have never been to Moscow.

One of the most important German composers of the 20^th century, Paul Hindemith was born on November 16th, 1895.  We need to dedicate an entry to him alone, but right now we’ll present one of his most famous compositions, the symphony Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter).  “Mathis” in the title is Matthias Grünewald, a German Renaissance painter who lived from 1470 to 1528.  His greatest work was the so-called Isenheim Altarpiece, which consists of a large central panel depicting the Crucifixion and several side panels with the Annunciation, several saints, the visit of Saint Anthony to Saint Paul the Hermit and other biblical and apocryphal stories.  The side panels can be opened and closed, creating different views of the altar.  The altarpiece is an absolute pinnacle of German art; the power of it is as overwhelming today as it was 500 years ago.  Located in a museum in the Alsatian city of Colmar it is very much worth the trip, as the Michelin guide would put it, even though Colmar itself is not a very interesting place (but of course if you’re there, you’ve already made it to Strasbourg).  If the trip to Alsace isn’t in your plans, then  you can go to the Web Gallery of Art and view it there.  Mathis der Maler consists of three movements, each corresponding to a separate panel: Angelic Concert, Entombment, and The Temptation of Saint Anthony.  Here it is, in the performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, Jascha Horenstein conducting.

November 3, 2014.  Années de Pèlerinage, Deuxième Année: Italie.  Even though today is the birthday of Vincenzo Bellini (he was born in 1801 in Catania, Sicily, and we’ve written about him extensively in the past, here and here), we’ll continue the traversal of Franz Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage.  This time it’s the second year of the pilgrimage, and we’re in Italy.  As always, we’ll illustrate every piece with performances by pianists young and renowned: the Canadian Jason Cutmore plays Sposalizio and Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa, the great Alfred Brendel plays Penseroso, Lazar Berman plays the first two of the three Sonetto del Petrarca, Sonetto.47 and Sonetto 104, and the legendary Russian pianist Vladimir Sofronitsky – Sonetto 123, in a 1952 recording.  Finally, the young Swiss pianist Beatrice Berrut plays what Liszt called “Fantasia Quasi Sonata” Après une Lecture de Dante.  Here’s the article by Joseph DuBose.

The second volume of Années de Pèlerinage is a catalogue of Liszt’s travels through Italy. Unlike its predecessor, however, it does convey depictions of Italy’s landscapes and cities, but instead impressions of its rich artistic heritage. As Liszt traveled the Italian Peninsula, he traversed its centuries of artistic excellence, from the immortal writings of Dante and Petrarch, to the paintings of Raphael, the sculptures of Michelangelo, and even the music of Bononcini, whose death preceded Liszt’s travels by roughly only a century. Like the preceding volume, the pieces of Deuxième Année are revisions of those Liszt originally composed during the time of his pilgrimage, some quite extensively and amounting, in essence, to full-fledged rewritings, such as with the three Petrarch sonnets. The volume was published 1858, three years after the first.

Deuxième Année opens with Liszt’s musical portrayal of Raphael’s The Marriage of the Virgin in “Sposalizio” (here). The innocence and reverence of the subject matter is displayed in the simple pentatonic melody of the opening measures, stated without any further adornment, and answered by an expectant motif tucked within the inner tones of contrasting chords. Repeated incessantly, the pentatonic theme drives the first section of the piece, through wide-ranging harmonies, to a fortissimo conclusion in E major. A brief passage, combining the fragments of the theme with the answering motif, then leads the listener into the piece’s second main theme. A pious wedding march in G major, this new theme, given in a rich, chordal texture, is accompanied by the pentatonic theme. At first, its appearance is only occasional. However, following a modulation back into the tonic key of E major and the recommencement of the wedding march, the pentatonic theme becomes a permanent fixture of the accompaniment. Against the wedding march, it creates a glistening accompaniment of almost Impressionistic colors, and an continuous flow of energy that climaxes in the expectant motif of the beginning. From thence, the music recedes, with the pentatonic theme still heard above echoes of the wedding march, into the final, quiet tonic chords. (Continue).