Miscellanea, October 2025

This Week in Classical Music: October 6, 2025.  Miscellanea.  Giuseppe Verdi was born on October 9^th of 1813, in Le Roncole, a village between Piacenza and Parma, a part of Italy that at the time belonged to Napoleon’s French Empire.  Today, it’s known as Roncole Verdi.  Giuseppe, as we well know, went on to become one of the greatest opera composers ever and Italy’s national hero.  We talked about Verdi’s music when we celebrated his 200^th anniversary here, so this week we’ll discuss another important aspect of his life, his politics.  Some episodes have been mythologized.  For example, the famous chorus Va, Pensiero, from Nabucco, when written in 1842, was not intended as a nationalistic hymn, but has become one since then: it was proposed as the national anthem of Italy several times and has been adopted as the official song by one of the Italian parties. Nonetheless, from the late 1840s on, Verdi was very active in the Risorgimento (literally, resurgence, the unification movement).  He was friends with Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the key figures in the unification movement, and even wrote a patriotic hymn on Mazzini’s request.  His 1848 opera La battaglia di Legnano, with its opening chorus, Viva Italia, was greeted with enormous enthusiasm.  Even the popular slogan Viva Verdi was used as an acronym for Viva Vittorio Emanuele Re D'Italia, Vittorio Emanuele being the King of Piedmont-Sardinia and future king of the unified Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II.  In 1859, Verdi openly entered politics, getting elected to a provincial council.  He then headed a group that met with the king in Turin and later with Count Cavour, then the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia and one of the key people of the Risorgimento.  It was Cavour who persuaded Verdi to continue on as a politician and become a member of the Piedmont-Sardinia Parliament, though Verdi resigned soon after Cavour’s death in 1861, less than three months after Vittorio Emanuele II declared the Kingdom of Italy (and made Cavour the Prime Minister of the unified country).  Here’s Va Pensiero with James Levine conducting the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and chorus. 

Heinrich Schütz, the greatest German composer before Bach, was born on October 8^th of 1585.  He studied in Venice with Giovanni Gabrieli and brought Italian music back to Germany, which, of course, doesn’t diminish his originality and talent.  We have a detailed entry on Heinrich Schütz here. 

Camille Saint-Saëns was also born this week, on October 9^th of 1835, in Paris.  Not one of our favorites, he deserves a separate entry, which we promise to write.  We’re even less in love with Ralph Vaughan Williams, very popular in England.  Williams was born on October 12^th of 1872. 

Three pianists were born this week: the Swiss Edwin Fischer, in Basel on October 6^th of 1886, the wonderful Shura Cherkassky, an American pianist of Russian-Jewish descent, in Odessa, the Russian Empire, now Odesa, Ukraine, on October 7^th of 1909.  Cherkassky performed till the end of his life; he died at the age of 86.  And then there’s another Russian-Jewish pianist, Evgeny Kissin, who was born on October 10^th of 1971.  In 2024, for his support of Ukraine in its fight against the Russian aggression, Kissin was declared a “foreign agent” by the insane and malignant Russian government.  Kissin lives in Prague and is a British and Israeli citizen.  In addition to playing the piano, he writes poetry and music. 

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Pianists, September 2025

This Week in Classical Music: September 29, 2025.  Three pianists.  We’ve been ignoring the pianists for quite a while, so this week we’ll cover both the current and previous ones.  Glenn Gould was born on September 25^th of 1932.  He was born Glenn Gold in Toronto, but his family wasn’t Jewish: Gold was anglicized from Grieg, and Glenn’s father was a distant relative of the great Norwegian.  In 1939, the Golds changed their name to Gould precisely because Gold sounded too Jewish, not a good thing in the antisemitic atmosphere of Toronto at the time.  (One might say that things haven’t changed much since then, given the country’s strident pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli stance).  Glenn Gould is rightfully famous for his interpretations of Bach, but his repertoire was much broader than that.  There’s an interesting 1962 recording of him playing Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 1 with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting.  Gould wanted to take very slow tempos, with Bernstein disliking his approach so much that before the performance, he made an unexpected four-minute speech pointing out the disagreements and raising a rhetorical question of “who’s the boss, the soloist or the conductor?”  We should point out that Gould’s tempos, though very slow, are, overall, within the traditional bounds.  For example, the first movement of a classic recording made by Emil Gilels and Eugen Jochum takes 24 minutes; Gould and Bernstein play it in 25 minutes and 50 seconds.  The whole concerto with Gould-Bernstein lasts 53 minutes and several seconds, less than two minutes longer than Gilels-Johum’s.  That said, we admit that Gould’s interpretation is not without eccentricities.  The quality of this live recording is poor; you’ll also notice that back then, people coughed during the performance as much as they do now.  Still, we think it’s very much worth a try (here).

The French pianist Alfred Cortot was born on September 26^th of 1877, in Nyon, Switzerland, to a French father and Swiss mother.  A central figure in French music of the first half of the 20^th century, he was also a conductor, a teacher, a founder of a music school, and a member of the famous trio with Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals.  Cortot’s repertoire was very large, from early Baroque to his contemporaries, such as Stravinsky and the young French composers.  He was especially known for his interpretations of Romantic music, Chopin’s in particular.  Compared to the virtuosos of today, Cortot’s technique was far from perfect, but the lyricism and nobility of his interpretations are unquestionable.  What is questionable, though, is Cortot’s behavior during the German occupation of France.  He served in the Vichy government and was close to Maréchal Pétain, the head of the collaborationist government.  In 1942, he went to Berlin and played with the Berlin Philharmonic.  There were other episodes of this kind, large and small.  After the liberation of France, Cortot was arrested as a collaborator.  After a trial, which ended with a slap on the wrist, prohibiting him from performing in France for one year, he moved to Switzerland, but returned to France, rehabilitated, in 1949.  He was enthusiastically accepted by the French and continued a very successful career for several more years.  Cortot died in 1962.

And last, but not least, is Vladimir Horowitz.  He was born on October 1^st of 1903.  Horowitz heard Cortot play in 1919 and was so impressed that he asked Cortot to give him lessons.  Cortot demurred, but later, in the 1930s, he met a by then famous Horowitz many times and even conducted his performances of Beethoven’s Fifth and Rachmaninov’s Third piano concertos.

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Rameau, Shostakovich, minor stars 2025

This Week in Classical Music: September 22, 2025.  Rameau, Shostakovich and more.  Several anniversaries of very important composers happen this week, and also those of composers who may not be as famous internationally but are important in their respective countries.  The big names are Jean-Philippe Rameau and Dmitri Shostakovich, the former, one of the most significant French Baroque composers of the 18^th century, the latter, together with Prokofiev, the most celebrated Soviet one.  We’ve written about both of them many times, for example, here about Rameau, or here about Shostakovich, so today, we will present some of their music and move on to the lesser stars.  We’ll hear excerpts from Rameau’s opera Les fêtes d'Hébé, an opera-ballet that premiered in 1739 in the theater of the Palais-Royal.  His second opera-ballet, after Les Indes galantes, Les fêtes was very successful.  The best singers and dancers were engaged, and it became Rameau’s most successful opera, with 80 stagings in the first year.  Here are the first three numbers from the ballet music for Les fêtes.  The English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard.

As for Shostakovich, here’s one of his quartets, no 6, from 1956.  Shostakovich’s quartets are less “political” than his symphonies, and this one is mostly lighthearted, a rarity for the composer.  It’s performed by the Fitzwilliam Quartet.

One of our “lesser stars” is the Lithuanian composer and painter, Mikalojus Čiurlionis, and September 22 marks his 150^th anniversary.  Čiurlionis is a Lithuanian national composer, a central figure in Lithuanian culture; he occupies a place that Sibelius holds in Finland or Grieg in Norway.  His paintings are as important as his music (and probably better known).  For centuries, Lithuania was in a union with Poland, till the Russian Empire captured it in the 1790s, and Čiurlionis wrote in Polish.  We have his detailed biography here.  Čiurlionis died at the age of 35, so most of his music is “early.”  Here, from 1901, is Nocturne Op.6, no.2.  Nikolaus Lahusen is at the piano.

As much as Čiurlionis was Lithuania’s national composer, Komitas was Armenia’s.  Komitas was born Sogomon Sogomonian on September 26^th of 1869 in the city of Kütahya, the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).  Orphaned at the age of 12, he was sent to Etchmiadzin, Armenia's religious center, educated in a seminary there, and became an ordained priest.  He started collecting Armenian folk music soon after (the first collection was published in 1895) and then continued his musical studies in Berlin.  He stayed there for three years and then returned to Etchmiadzin, where he continued collecting folk music and publishing songs and organized a quired, with which he gave concerts in Yerevan and Tbilisi.  He later traveled to Europe and, in 1910, moved to Constantinople, Etchmiadzin being too conservative for him.  Constantinople, with the then large Armenian population, was a center of Armenian culture.  Komitas thrived there, organizing choirs, lecturing, teaching and writing music.  It all ended in 1915 with the Ottoman government-sponsored Armenian massacres.  Millions were killed.  Komitas was arrested and deported to the interior of the country.  He survived but had a mental breakdown, from which he never recovered.  He was moved to a French hospital in Constantinople and then to a mental clinic in the suburbs of Paris.  He died on October 22^nd of 1935.  Here are excerpts from Patarag, the Divine Armenian Liturgy by Komitas.  The Russian Chamber Chorus of New York (sic!) is conducted by Nikolai Kachanov.

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