October 15, 2012.  Ives and Flynn.  The first internationally acclaimed American composer, Charles Ives was born on October 20, 1974 in Danbury, Connecticut.  His father, George, was an Army bandleader, and when Charles was young he listened to the bands practicing in the town square and later played drums in his father’s band.  He also learned to play piano and the organ, which apparently he did very well.  One might not expect a bandleader to encourage musical experimenting, but that’s just what George Ives did when he taught music to his son.  At the age of 14 Charles became a church organist, then moved to New Haven, and eventually entered Yale University.  There he wrote his 1^st Symphony, although he probably spent as much time playing sports as studying music – he was an excellent athlete.  Upon graduating from Yale, Ives joined an insurance company.  When it went broke, he and his friend started their own, Ives & Myrick.  A successful executive, Ives became well known within the industry and even wrote articles on aspects of the insurance business.  Composing music was what he did in his spare time.  In 1906 Ives wrote the first of his acknowledged masterpieces, The Unanswered Question, scored for trumpet, four flutes, and string orchestra, a very unusual but highly effective combination of instruments; Ives indicated that the strings should be positioned behind the stage, the flute on the stage, and the trumpet, the one “asking the questions,” in hall itself.  In 1908 Ives and his newly wed wife moved to New York; he lived there for the rest of his life.  The period from about 1908 to 1927 was very productive: Ives wrote the Concord Sonata, his most popular piano solo composition, several symphonies, including the one titled New England Holidays and the very successful Fourth.  He also wrote string quartets, violin sonatas, and songs.  Then, abruptly, one day in 1927 he told his wife that he could not compose any longer.  From that moment on he didn’t composed another single original tune, though he continued revising his older compositions.  He lived another 27 years and died at the age of 80.

We have two piano pieces by Ives, Song Without (Good) Words (here) and Some South-Paw Pitching (here), performed by Heather O'Donnell, an American pianist living in Berlin.  Heather O’Donnell is a big proponent of contemporary music.  To some extent she is a link to our next composer, George Flynn: in 2004 she organized a project, "Responses to Charles Ives," which commissioned seven composers to write piano works.  Each composition was supposed to reflect Ives’ influence; one of the contributors was George Flynn with Remembering.  Flynn says that in his youth he was greatly influenced by Charles Ives’s Concord piano sonata.  Recently, Southport Records issued a CD titled String Fever with three compositions by Flynn.  One of them is Together, a 27-minute continuous work for violin and piano.  Flynn describes it as developing through a series textures and moods, from quiet to more "aggressive," "jubilant," then moving to "floating serenity" and on.  The final sounds of Together return to the opening statement and "can thus serve to restart the piece."  This composition was originally written for the violinist Eugene Gratovich, a student of Jascha Heifetz and a big supporter of contemporary music.  In this recording Together is performed by the violinist Stefan Hersh with the composer at the piano.  You can listen to it here.

October 8, 2012.  Verdi and Saint-Saëns.  Giuseppe Verdi was born on October 9 (or on the 10th, we don’t know for sure) of 1813 in a village near Busetto, in the province of Parma, Emilia-Romagnia.  Through an accident of history, the great Italian composer who was to become the patriotic symbol of unified Italy was actually born on a French territory: Parma, after the Napoleonic wars, was a French Department (it continued to be ruled as a duchy by Marie Louise, the second wife of Napoleon, even after the Congress of Vienna reversed most of Napoleonic conquests).  Verdi studied composition in Milan, and wrote his first opera, Oberto, in 1839.  It was in 1842 that he achieved the first real success with Nabucco (you can listen to the famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Va, Pensiero, from the Metropolitan Opera 2001 production, James Levine conducting, here, courtesy of YouTube).   Verdi wrote a large number of operas in succession (he called this period “galley years”), none of great significance, till Rigoletto in 1851, a masterpiece and an immediate triumph.  He followed up with two more stupendous operas: Il Trovatore and La traviata.  The following years he produced one masterpiece after another: Un ballo in maschera in1859, La forza del destino in 1861, Don Carlos in1867.  Aida was written in in1871.  On our site we don’t have much of Verdi’s music and the reason is obvious: opera theaters are not in the habit of uploading their productions to independent music sites.  Still, we have an interesting historical performance of the Judgment scene, from Aida.  It was recorded at the Bolshoi Theater in 1969. Radamès is the brilliant Georgian-Russian tenor Zurab Andjaparidze, Amneris is Irina Arkhipova, one of the best Soviet mezzo-sopranos.  Mark Ermler leads the Bolshoi orchestra (here).  In Russia operas were often sung in Russian, so the Italian of this recording, however imperfect, is rather unusual.  This recoding was given to us by Mr. Andjaparidze’s daughter, the pianist and a friend of this site, Eteri Andjaparidze.

Camille Saint-Saëns was also born on October 9, in 1835 in Paris (we seem to know his birth date with more certainty than Verdi’s, Paris of the time being one of the most civilized and well organized cities in the world).  He lived a long life: when he wrote his first compositions around 1850, Berlioz. Liszt, and Wagner were at the peak of their careers.  When he wrote his last pieces, in 1921, the year of his death, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Schoenberg were at their most creative.  Even if Saint-Saëns wasn’t the greatest French Romantic, he wrote a lot of enjoyable music.  Here, for example, is one of his most popular pieces, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28.  It’s performed by the violinist Yang Xu and Janet Kao, piano.

October 1, 2012.  Kurtág at the Steans.  On several previous occasions we’ve written  about the Steans Music Institute, Ravinia Festival’s summer conservatory.  The Steans brings together talented young musicians from many countries; they study with great teachers, play music together and perform.  Public performances are an important part of the Steans, and their programming very often is creative and adventuresome.  This year it prominently featured the works of György Kurtág, one of the most interesting composers of the 20^th century.  Kurtág was born in 1926 in the city of Lugoj, in the Banat region, which after the WWI became part of Romania but had previously belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary.  Kurtág was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family.  He moved to Budapest in 1946 and enrolled in the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music.  There he met György Ligeti, also a Hungarian Jew from Romania, and also an aspiring composer.  They became good friends.  Following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris, where he studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.  During that time he also discovered the music of Anton Webern, which greatly influenced his own work.  He later returned to Hungary but retained some freedom of movement: in 1971 he was allowed to go to West Berlin for a year.  He left Hungary for good in 1986, and since then has lived in Germany, Austria, and France.

Kurtág wrote a relatively small number of works, many of them rather late in his career; the 1980s were probably his most productive years, although he continues to write even these days: his “Short Messages” Op.47 were published in 2011.  One of the works that were programmed by the Steans, Signs, Games and Messages for solo viola, is a series of short episodes, each in a distinct style and mood.  The work was formally started in 1989, even though some of the pieces were sketched earlier, and remains a work in progress, as some pieces are revised and other are being added to the growing collection.  Most of the movements are two-three minutes long; the shortest, Beating, is a Webernian 24 seconds long (To the exhibition of Sári Gerlóczy is all of four seconds longer), while the longest, In Nomine –  all’ ongherese, is the whopping four minutes and 40 seconds.

At the Steans, different violists performed selections from the work.  Molly Carr played Signs I, Signs II, and Hommage á John Cage (here).   Shuangshuang Liu continued with In Nomine—all’ ongherese and Virág – Zsigmondy Dénesnek (A Flower for Dénes Zsigmondy, one of the more unusual pieces), here.  Then Wenting Kang played Perpetuum mobile, Klagendes Lied (Plaintive Song) and Kromatikus feleselős (here).  Steven Laraia followed with Gerlóczy Sári Kiállitására (To the exhibition of Sári Gerlóczy), In memoriam Aczél György, and In memoriam Tamás Blum (here).   Finally, the French vioist Adrien La Marca plays Beating, J. H. Song,and The Carenza Jig (here).

September 24, 2012.  Rameau, Shostakovich.  Jean-Philippe Rameau was born on September 25, 1683 in Dijon.  Together with François Couperin, Rameau was the first truly French composer of the Baroque era: though Jean-Baptiste Lully was the pioneer of the French Baroque, he was born in Florence and moved to France as a teenager.  Most of Rameau’s early compositions were instrumental: he didn’t write an opera till he was 50, but once he had, they became a major event in France, not just musically but culturally.  Some people still preferred the operas of Lully, while others thought that Rameau was a much better composer.  In  17^th century France these were important matters: the “culture wars” erupted within the country, or at least among its literate part, dividing it into two camps, the "Lullyistes" and the "Rameauneurs"; the partisan pamphlets continued to be written for many years.  Rameau lived during the time of remarkable flourishing of the French culture in general.  He wrote operas to librettos by Voltaire.  He became a character in Diderot’s famous dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew).  And he earned the enmity of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered himself a composer, not just a writer and philosopher.  The 1730s and ’40s were the most productive period of Rameau’s life.  He wrote a number of "musical tragedies," such as Castor et Pollux, and the newly restored Les Boréades, which were never performed during Rameau’s lifetime; and many opera-ballets - Les Indes galantes being probably the most famous.  He received the title of "Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi" and a nice pension.  In his later years he wrote less, and by then his operas lost some of their freshness: the "Italian" operas came into vogue, their major proponent being Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose Orfeo ed Euridice was premiered in October of 1762.  Rameau died on September 12, 1764, two weeks before his 81^st birthday.  Here is Rameau’s Gavotte and Doubles, performed by the Israeli pianist Matan Porat.  Rameau wrote the Nouvelles Suites de Pièces de Clavecin in 1726-27.  This collection forms two large suites, in A Minor and in G Major.  Gavotte and Doubles is from the former.

Dmitry Shostakovich was born on the same day in 1906.  We duly celebrate his birthday each year (for example, here).  This time we’ll just present one piece, the first movement of Symphony no. 7 in C Major, Op. 60 - the so-called Leningrad Symphony.  It was completed in December of 1941 and premiered in Kuibyshev on March 5, 1942.  (Kuibyshev, now restored to its historical name of Samara, was the city where the Soviet government evacuated its most important institutions to fearing that Moscow may fall to the advancing German armies.  The government relocated there, a never-used bunker for Stalin was built, and the prestigious Bolshoi Theater was moved to Kuibyshev as well).  Samuil Samosud conducted the orchestra of the Bolshoi, and the performance was broadcast all over the world.  The Soviets considered the symphony the musical epitome of the resistance to the Nazi invasion.  These days it’s much less clear whether that was the case: Rostislav Dubinsky, the first violinist of the Borodin Quartet, who knew Shtostakovich very well, maintained that the first movement was completed a year before the war started.  We’re not going to resolve this controversy, but you can listen to this movement (here), performed by the orchestra with an awkward Soviet name of The USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra.  At the time of this recording (1984), the music director of the orchestra was one of the most interesting Russian conductors of that era, Gennady Rozhdestvensky.  He is on the podium.

September 17, 2012. We have some unfinished business from the two previous weeks.  With the explosion of anniversaries we had very little time to write about Arnold Schoenberg and Antonin Dvořák.  With Schoenberg we traced his career to the point when he abandoned tonality in pieces such as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, written in 1912. Though very radical in its completeness, Schoenberg’s atonal music was not truly revolutionary: even Wagner extensively used shifting tonalities in his operas, sometimes to such extent that the major tonal center would seem to completely disappear (many of you may have heard it last week on public television during the rebroadcast of the wonderful Ring Cycle from the Metropolitan Opera).  Some works of Debussy had the same quality, but of course not to the degree as used by Schoenberg.  As unusual as it sounds, the atonal music still maintains the traditional tonal relationships, except that they are dispersed in small droplets within the composition.  Schoenberg didn't stop there: he evolved his style to eliminate all traces of tonality, making all 12 tones of the scale equal throughout a piece of music.  This style became known as dodecaphone, or the twelve tone technique. Schoenberg "invented" it around 1921.  By then he had already established a group of followers and pupils who became known as the Second Viennese School.  The key participants in this group were the tremendously talented Alban Berg and Anton Webern.  Among other noted members were Hanns Eisler and Viktor Ullmann.  All of them continued composing in the twelve tone style, which became extremely influential by the middle of the century.  Composers such as Milton Babbitt in the US, the Frenchman Pierre Boulez, the Italians Luciano Berio and Luigi Dallapiccola, and the Austrian-American Ernst Krenek were major proponents of the system. Even Stravinsky experimented with it.

In 1924 Schoenberg moved to Berlin, accepting the position of Director of the Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts.  He held this position till 1933, when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.  Fearing for his safety, Schoenberg moved to the United States and eventually settled in Los Angeles.  He taught at UCLA and the University of Southern California (John Cage and Lou Harrison were among his students).  He also continued composing; among the music written during this period are two concertos, one for the violin and another for the piano, and (the unfinished) opera Moses und Aron.  We'll hear the first movement of the Piano concerto, performed by Mitsuko Uchida and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Jeffrey Tate conducting (here, courtesy of YouTube). Schoenberg was also a serious amateur painter. The picture above is a self-portrait, painted in 1910.

It's hard to imagine a composer more different than Schoenberg, but here we are, celebrating Antonin Dvořák.  His anniversary was two weeks ago, but at that time we were too busy with Bruckner.  It's interesting that on a superficial but factual level, one can find a lot of similarities between Schoenberg and Dvořák.  A generation apart (Dvořák was born in 1841, Schoenberg in 1874) both were children of the Austrian Empire: Dvořák was born near Prague, the capital of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), which back then was an important part of the empire, Schoenberg in Vienna.  Both spent some time in the US: Schoenberg, the last 18 years of his life, Dvořák - three very productive years at the end of his.  Musically, both were influenced by Brahms, which, while unnoticeable in Schoenberg's later compositions, is very clear in all of Dvořák's oeuvre.  And during different periods of their respective careers, both were supported by Gustav Mahler.  But as far as their compositions are concerned, while Schoenberg was a revolutionary, Dvořák was everything but.  Which of course doesn't mean that he didn't write some wonderful music: his "New World" symphony, the cello concerto, the opera "Rusalka," some songs, quartets, and piano music are first class.  Here is his Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81. It's performed by Tessa Lark and Yoon-Jung Yang, violins, Yiyin Li, viola, Sébastien Gingras, cello and Helen Huang, piano.

September 10, 2012.  This week, very much like the last one, is abundant in anniversaries.  The only person we wrote about last week was Anton Bruckner, but several other composers are also worth mentioning..  Darius Milhaud, a wonderful French composer and a member of Les Six, was born on September 4, 1892.  Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sons and an influential composer of the Classical era, was born on September 5, 1735 (Mozart loved his music and wrote three piano concertos based on J.C. Bach’s keyboard sonatas). Anton Diabelli was also born on September 5, but half a century later, in 1781.  Diabelli, a music publisher, wasn’t a good composer, but his ditzy waltz inspired Beethoven to write one of the most profound pieces in all of piano literature, the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, boring if played poorly, sublime if played well.  On the same day, but in 1867, Amy Beach, the first American woman to establish herself a classical composer, was born in Henniker, New Hampshire.  September 8th is the anniversary of the great Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, who was born in 1841.  We’ll write about Dvořák another time, but here’s his Romance, Op. 11. It’s performed by the violinist Natasha Korsakova, Charles Olivieri-Munroe conducting the North Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.  And on September 9 of 1583, Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the most interesting composers of the later Renaissance, was born in Ferrara.  All of this in one week!

This week is almost as rich with birthdays.  William Boyce, one of the most important English composers of the 18^th century was born around September 11, 1711 (he was baptized that day).  Friedrich Kuhlau, a Danish composer, was born on September 11, 1786.  These days he may not be performed very often in concert halls, but anybody who ever studied piano has most likely played one of his pieces.  September 11th is also the birthday of the one of most interesting living composer, the Estonian Arvo Pärt.  He was born in 1935.  We’ll definitely write more about him at a later time.  Clara Schumann, the wife of Robert Schumann, a pianist and composer and close friend of Johannes Brahms, was born on September 13, 1819.  But the person we’d like to commemorate today at least to some degree is Arnold Schoenberg.  He was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874 into a middle-class Jewish family.  The only musical lessons he ever took were from the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, his future brother-in-law.  Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were early supporters of Schoenberg, even though initially Schoenberg didn’t like Mahler’s music (he was "converted" after hearing Mahler’s Third Symphony).  His first significant work was the string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1899.  Clearly a late-Romantic piece, it’s still a tonal composition.  But in 1908 he wrote his Second Quartet, the fourth movement of which is Schoenberg’s first real atonal work (during that time his wife, Mathilde Zemlinsky, left him and started an affair with the young painter Richard Gerstl.  One wonders if there is a connection).  In 1912 he followed up with a hugely influential Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21, a setting of 21 poems by the Belgian-French poet Albert Giraud.  It’s scored for a narrator (usually a soprano) and a chamber ensemble usually containing a clarinet, a flute, piano, and string instruments.  This is also an atonal work, but it’s still not a 12-tone composition: he would develop the 12-tone system several years later.

We’ll continue with Schoenberg and probably some other composers next week.  In the mean time, you can listen to Verklärte Nacht here.  It’s performed by Angelo Xiang Yu, violin, Yuuki Wong, violin, Hanna Lee, viola, Minkyung Sung, viola, and Karen Ouzounian, cello, Se-Doo Park, cello.