September 26, 2011

Recent uploads.  The Italian pianist Davide Polovineo has an unusual and diverse background.  Born in 1970, he graduated with honors in 1992 from Istituto Superiore di Musica "Gaetano Braga” in the city of Teramo both as a pianist specializing in Romantic repertoire and a chamber musician. He also received a degree in theology and psychology, specializing in cultural anthropology, from the Pontifical University “San Anselmo” in Rome and Lincoln University.  He studied piano and chamber music with late Russian piano virtuoso Lazar Berman, the violinist Felix Ayo and other musicians. Since 1997 Davide has been performing as a piano soloist, playing most of the concert halls of Italy and giving recitals in Europe.  He has recorded for the European Institute of Music, where he also teaches and is now the Director.  We’ll hear him play Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in A Major, L. 391.

The young American cellist Nathan Vickery currently studies with Peter Wile at the Curtis Institute.  He has won prizes at several competitions, appeared on NPR’s From the Top and has been a soloist with many orchestras across the US.  As a chamber musician, he has toured with Curtis on Tour and has collaborated with Joshua Bell, Jonathan Biss, and the contemporary music ensemble Eight Blackbird.  Here he performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 4 in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1.  Nathan is accompanied by pianist Kwan Yi.

Two young baritones, Michael Kelly and Jonathan Beyer, met this summer at the Steans Institute in Ravinia, where they studied (the singers’ faculty includes such luminaries as Sylvia McNair) and also performed.  Michael Kelly, who holds a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, won this year’s Joy of Singing Competition and was featured in Handel’s Acis and Galatea with Boston Early Music Festival, in recital at New York’s Trinity Church, in John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versaille in Aspen, and in Schubert’s Winterreise in Houston.  We’ll hear him perform Le cygne (The swan), from the wonderful song cycle Histoires naturelles by Maurice Ravel (click here). Jonathan Ware is on the piano. 

Jonathan Beyer performed internationally in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, and Hong Kong, as well as with numerous companies around the U.S. He was a national finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Competition and won first place at the Marian Anderson Prize for Emerging Classical Artists, among many other competition successes. He has a degree from the Curtis Institute and the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.  He’s singing At the River, from Old American Songs.  Listen to it here.

September 19, 2011

Shostakovich. The great Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906.  Many books have been written about his life, his ambivalent and often tragic position in the Soviet society, and of course his music.  One thing that has remained a bit of a puzzle is influence that Mahler had on the music of Shostakovich.  That this influence was very strong, especially starting with his Symphony no. 4, goes without saying.  Later in his career, responding to a journalist’ routine question about what he would take with him to a desert island, Shostakovich responded: “A Mahler score.” But how did it happen, since Mahler was practically unknown in the Soviet Union?

In the pre-Revolutionary Russia Mahler was famous as a conductor and derided as a composer.  The first Soviet conductor to perform Mahler on a more or less regular basis was Kirill Kondrashin, and that didn’t happened till the late 1960s. On the other hand we know that one of the closest friends Shostakovich ever had was the prominent Soviet music and arts critic Ivan Sollertinsky (Shostakovich dedicated his Second Piano trio, op. 67, to him).  Sollertinsky, who died in 1944 at the age of 42, was one of the very few enthusiasts of Mahler’s music in the Soviet Union.  Nowadays his writings are almost impossible to read, dated and full of the communist jargon, (he calls Mahler, whom he obviously loved, a “petit bourgeois composer”), but they provide some very valuable information.  In a footnote to his article on Gustav Mahler, Sollertinsky writes: “Of all the concert halls of the Soviet Union, only at the Leningrad Philharmonic is Mahler performed relatively often, and as a result, Mahler is quite popular in Leningrad.  In the first 10 years of the Philharmonic’s existence, Mahler’s 1^st Symphony was performed 4 times, his 2^nd – 5 times, the3^rd – twice, the 4^th – twice, the 5^th – 4 times, the 6^th – not a single time, the 7^th – once, the 8^th – not a single time, the 9^th – once, “Das Lied von der Erde” – three times.  This success is due to conductors of the “Mahler School” – Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Fritz Stiedry.” (The St-Petersburg Philharmonic Society was reopened as Petrograd and later Leningrad Philharmonic in 1921.  Sollertinsky was writing in 1932).   So Shostakovich, who lived in St-Petersburg (Leningrad) most of his life, happened to develop as a musician in the only place in the Soviet Union where Mahler’s music could be heard (and authentically performed by great conductors) and be influenced by of one of the very few Soviet Mahlerites!

To celebrate Shostakovich’s birthday we’ve put together a brief playlist.  First you’ll hear his Piano Quintet in g minor, opus 57, performed by the pianist James Dick and Eusia String Quartet. Then the pianist Roberto Russo plays Prelude no. 2, from Five preludes without opus number. And finally the recent winner of the Tchaikovsky competition Narek Hakhnazaryan, cello, plays Sonata for Cello and Piano in d minor, Op. 40.  He’s accompanied by Roman Rabinovich.  To listen, click here.

September 12, 2011

The Steans Institute. The Steans Music Institute is Ravinia Festival's summer conservatory.   Each summer it brings together talented young musicians from around the world.  On the faculty of the Steans Institute are internationally renowned musicians.  This year, for example, Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, Gilbert Kalish and Alon Glodstein joined the Piano faculty; Pamela Frank, Mihaela Martin, Ralph Kirshbaum and Sylvia Rosenberg are on the Strings faculty, to name just a few.  The Singers faculty, directed by Brian Zeiger and having Sylvia McNair among its members, is equally strong.  Young musicians not only study and attend master classes, they also give public concerts.  Making music together is part of the Steans tradition, so in addition to performing individual recitals students create informal ensembles and play trios and quartets, and even such pieces as Mendelssohn’s Octet.

We’re happy to report that the Steans Institute is now collaborating with Classical Connect and we’re going to feature a significant number of performances recorded during the Steans season.  We’ll start with several recordings from this year’s season.   First, the pianists Beatrice Berrut (Switzerland), and Henry Kramer (US) play Mozart’s Sonata for Piano Four-Hands in C Major (listen to it here).  Then, the Czech violinist Josef Špaček, British cellist Jonathan Dormand, and the South Korean native, Curtis Institute-trained pianist Kwan Yi play Johannes Brahms’s Piano Trio in C Major, Op. 87 (here). The 24-year old American pianist Henry Kramer comes back to perform Beethoven’s two-movement Piano Sonata no. 27 in E minor, Op. 90 (here). We follow with Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major, which is performed by the violinists Mari Lee (Japan) and Yuuki Wong (Singapore), Israeli-born American violist Atar Arad and the cellist Jonathan Dormand (here).  In conclusion, here is Sonata in C Major, Op. 102, No. 1 by Beethowen.  It’s played by the American cellist Nathan Vickery, and Kwan Yi, piano.

September 5, 2011

Arvo Pärt, September 11, and Giya Kancheli. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was born on September 11, 1935.  Pärt is rightly considered one of the most important contemporary composers.  His essentially minimalist style was deeply influenced by Gregorian chant and early European polyphony.  Not surprisingly, it works most effectively in his sacred pieces, such as Fratres or Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten.  Practically from the beginning of his career Pärt had problems with cultural authorities. Many of his compositions, written while he was living in Soviet Estonia, were banned by the local censors.  In 1980 Pärt emigrated to Austria and later moved to Germany.  Some years after Estonia gained independence Pärt returned to his native land.

Of course we are approaching not just Arvo Pärt’s birthday, but also the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001.  No music can express the horror of these events, but Pärt’s deeply contemplative piece, "Spiegel im Spiegel" (“mirror in the mirror") seems to be at least adequate in its tone.  It can be heard here in the performance by janus trio.

Another piece from our library, which we thought would be appropriate under the circumstances, is Giya Kancheli’s Valse-Boston for Piano and Strings (1996).  Kancheli is a tremendously talented composer, and he deserves to be better known in the US. Like Pärt, Kancheli was born in a former Soviet republic – Georgia,, and in the same year, 1935.  Like Pärt, he emigrated to the West in 1991, first to Berlin, and later to Antwerp, where he now lives.  While not a real “minimalist,” Kancheli’s style is ascetic in nature, to quote Rodion Shchedrin.  And, like Pärt, Kancheli often writes liturgical music.  The lighthearted name of the composition, Valse-Boston, is rather misleading: it’s a profound piece (of course there have been many precedents to that in the history of music, Ravel’s La Valse being probably the most famous example).  Valse-Boston is performed by the pianist Eteri Andjaparidze with Round Top Festival Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Jean-Marie Zeitouni.  To listen, click here.

August 22, 2011

Today is the anniversary of the great French composer Claude Debussy’s birthday: he was born on this date in 1862 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just outside of Paris.  His music, while highly original, was almost instantly accepted by the listening public, and for the last 90 years he has been and remains one of the most widely performed classical composers.   Debussy was eighteen when he started writing music.  The earliest composition in our library is the song cycle Quatre Chansons De Jeunesse, written in 1881-1882.  Here’s the song Claire de lune, performed by the soprano Tina Beverly with William Billingham on the piano.  Debussy used the same title for the third movement of his Suite Bergamasque, another early work (it was written in 1890).  You can listen to the complete Suite here as played by the young Chinese pianist Xiang Zou.  In 1884 Debussy won the Prix de Rome, an award which included a residence at the Villa Medici, the French Academy in Rome.  Debussy spent three years in Rome, from 1885 to 1887.  His return to Paris traditionally marks the beginning of his “middle period.”  Among many pieces written during those years is the piano cycle Estampes (1903).  Here’s Pagodes, from Estampes, played by the pianist Miyuki Otani.  The first book of Préludes is usually also attributed to this period, even though just three years separate it from the second volume, considered to be a late work.  Here’s the fourth prelude from Book I, with the evocative title The sounds and fragrances swirl through the evening air (Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir). It’s performed by the Italian pianist Roberto Russo.  Book II of Préludes was written in 1913.  Here’s prelude number four, Bruyères, played by the pre-eminent Mexican pianist Jorge Federico Osorio.  The last composition completed by Debussy was his Sonata for Violin and Piano, performed here by Nathan Cole, violin, and Kuang-Hao Huang, piano. He finished it in 1917.  Several months later, on March 25, 1918, during the German bombardment of Paris, Debussy died of cancer.  We look forward to the next year when we’ll join the world’s classical community in celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birthday.