This Week in Classical Music: April 18, 2022.  Microtonal Renaissance: Nicola Vicentino.  Sometime ago we presented an entry about Easley Blackwood, an American composer who wrote microtonal music, music for electronic instruments tuned to more than 12 half-tones to an octave – 13, for example, or 14.  Blackwood actually tried 12 more tunings, dividing the octave up to 24 equal intervals.  The results were interesting and the attempt pretty courageous, as not that many composers have tried to work in this field.  Well, it turns out that Blackwood had a predecessor.  Four centuries earlier there lived an audacious composer who also attempted to go beyond the usual 12 half-tone octave we are so used to hearing.  His name is Nicola Vicentino.  Vicentino was born, as his name suggests, in the city of Vicenza in 1511.  He probably studied with Adrian Willaert in nearby Venice.  Sometime between 1530 and 1540 he went to Ferrara, Italy’s major musical center.  Clearly, he made a career there, as he became the music tutor to the family of the Duke Ercole II and some of his music was performed at the court.  In 1546 a book of his madrigals was published in Venice.  Sometime later he followed Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, the second son of Duke Alfonso I d'Este, Ercole’s brother, and the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, to Rome.  There, in 1551, a famous debate took place between Vicentino and the Portuguese musician Vicente Lusitano.  The debate centered on different interpretations of historical tuning systems with references to the ancient Greek music.  It’s too esoteric for us to follow but the idea that such a musical debate could generate interest comparable to that of a Grammy pop-album winner of today is remarkable in itself.  Vicentino lost the debate, which was formally judged by several professional musicians, but that didn’t stop him from writing an influential musical treatise and practically experimenting with his ideas.  One thing he did was to invent a new musical instrument he called arcicembalo.  It was based on a standard harpsichord with two manual keyboards. All black keys were divided in two and there were additional black keys between B and C and between E and F.  The arcicembalo could be tuned differently; one way would divide the octave into 31 equal intervals.  Vicentino wrote music for his new instrument, and for a similarly tuned arciorgano.  He also wrote vocal music using quarter-tones (you can listen to some samples below).  Following Ippolito II, Vicentino returned to Ferrara; in 1563 he left the service of the cardinal and assumed the post of maestro di cappella in his hometown at the Vicenza Cathedral.  His later life isn’t clear: it seems that he spent some time in Milan, applied for a position in Bavaria but didn’t receive it and died during a plague in Milan in 1576.  One of Vicentino’s arcicembalos with 31 notes to the octave is extant, it’s now on display in the Bologna International music museum.

Ensemble Exaudi is one of the few ensembles that attempts to interpret the music of Vicentino.  It’s easier, at least in theory, to sing Vicentino’s quarter-tones and one-fifth-tones as you don’t have to have a very special keyboard instrument, but in practice you have to be a virtuoso performer with an excellent ear to follow composer’s directions.  Here is Vicentino’s Musica prisca caput.  Listen carefully!  And here is his Madonna, il poco dolce, another remarkable piece.  And finally, another madrigal, Dolce mio ben.  It’s invigorating to find new music that is really interesting while so much mediocrity is being promoted by our musical establishment.  We look forward to the (hopefully near) future when talented pieces take their deserved place, the place earned by the quality of compositions, not political expediency.

This Week in Classical Music: April 11, 2022.  Conductors, continued.  Last week we started with five famous conductors that were born that week: the Frenchman Pierre Monteux, the German Herbert von Karajan, the British Adrian Boult, the Hungarian-American Antal Doráti, and the Italian Victor de Sabata.  We spent much time with de Sabata, following his career till the end of WWII, and we did so because this wonderful conductor isn’t that well known in the US.  So, here’s a bit more on Sabata.  His previous association with Mussolini didn’t affect Sabata’s international standing, even though in 1950 he was briefly detained in the US under the soon-to-be abolished McCarran Act (his concert at Carnegie Hall ran on schedule and to great acclaim – the recording of the excerpts from Tristan un Isolde which we presented the last week came from that concert).  Sabata’s base was La Scala, with which he made several great recordings, including the one from 1953 of Puccini's Tosca with Maria Callas, Giuseppe Di Stefano and Tito Gobbi which many consider the best opera recording of all time.  Sabata toured all major European music centers and made recording with the London Philharmonic and the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia, in addition to his own orchestra of La Scala.  In 1953 Sabata had a heart attack which forced him into semi-retirement.  He died of heart decease in 1967.

Victor de Sabata had a phenomenal ear and musical memory.  It’s also said that he could play every instrument in the orchestra.  The music magazine, International Record Review, now unfortunately defunct, wrote the following notes about him: “The story is that de Sabata, rehearsing in London around 1930, was asked why he never conducted any English music; because there's nothing worth doing, he answered. Did he know the Enigma Variations? No. So they gave him a score to take home and he went through the work from memory at the next morning's rehearsal, which Elgar himself and Malcolm Sargent attended. De Sabata was apparently correcting mistakes in the parts that neither the composer nor the man who fancied himself its principal interpreter had noticed.”  The British music critic Felix Aprahamian recalls the following story (as per Wikipedia): “In the rehearsal interval, he asked the flicorni [the saxhorn, one of the instruments invented by Adolphe Sax] for the final movement to play their brass fanfares. They did. 'What are you playing?' he asked. 'It is an octave higher.' 'Can't be done, Maestro.' ... The Maestro borrowed one of their instruments and blew the correct notes in the right octave.”  These is just two of many legendary stories. 

Among De Sabata’s recordings is the first ever of Debussy’s Jeux, made in 1947 in Rome with the orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia.  Here it is.

Antal Doráti deserves a separate entry (as do Monteux and Boult – we’ve written about Karajan more than once) and we’ll try to do it soon.  With Philharmonia Hungarica orchestra Doráti recorded all 104 Haydn symphonies.  Here’s no. 100, “Military.”

This Week in Classical Music: April 4, 2022.  Conductors.  Five famous conductors were born this week: the Frenchman Pierre Monteux on April 4^th of 1875, the German Herbert von Karajan, on April 5^th of 1908, the British Adrian Boult on April 8^th of 1889, the Hungarian-American Antal Doráti on April 9^th of 1906, and the Italian Victor de Sabata on April 10^th of 1892.  Before we delve into their careers, let us make a non-musical comment: conductors seem to live a long life!  Of this group, Boult lived the longest, almost 94 years, de Sabata – the shortest, 75 years.  On average, they lived 84 years.  Do you know what the life expectancy at birth was around the time when our conductors were born?  An astonishingly short 41 years!  One could reasonably respond that at that time the child mortality rate was very high, and once one made it past the childhood, he (all our conductors are male) could expect to live a fairly long life.  In addition, we have a rather specific selection – conductors – and one doesn’t become a conductor until later in their life, as they all start as pianists, violinists, etc.  This is very true, so let’s see what the life expectancy was for a 30-year-old (by that age all our conductors had already chosen their careers) at around 1920.  The easily accessed demographics tables tell us it was 37 years, which makes the lifespan of an average person who was born around 1894 and lived at least into his 30s about 67 years.  That’s much less than the 84 years that our conductors lived on average.  And of course, this group is not exceptional: we recently wrote about Herbert Blomstedt who performs, magnificently, at the age of 94.  One of our favorite conductors, Bernard Haitink, died at 92 and worked almost to the end and there are many more examples.  We have no idea why it is so, and unfortunately, it’s no help to the rest of us.

Of the group, Karajan clearly is the most famous (we wrote a two-part entry about him a couple year ago, here and here) and Victor de Sabata the least so.  So, here’s his story, in brief.  De Sabata was born in Triest, an important city in Austria-Hungary, now Trieste in Italy.  He started playing the piano at the age of four, at the age of eight his family moved to Milan and he entered the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory there.  He studied the piano, the violin (he excelled in both instruments) and composition and graduated cum laude.  After graduating, he concentrated on composing (his opera Il macigno was staged in La Scala in 1917) but then, being influenced by Arturo Toscanini, Sabata turned to conducting.  He was appointed the conductor of the Monte Carlo Opera in 1918, and while there, got engaged with the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, playing the symphonic repertoire.  In 1930, Sabata succeeded Toscanini as the principal conductor of La Scala and stayed in that position for 20 years.  Toscanini and Sabata were friendly for years but then fell out, one of the reasons being that Sabata became rather close to Mussolini, even playing at Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s residence.  Toscanini, on the other hand, was a vehement opponent of the dictator and emigrated from Italy in 1939.  That same year de Sabata conducted Tristan und Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival.  He also conducted the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic orchestras, the premier orchestras of the Nazi regime, and befriended the young party member, Herbert von Karajan.  At the end of WWII, de Sabata helped Karajan move to Italy. 

We’ll continue with de Sabata and other conductors next week, in the meantime here’s Prelude to Act I and Isolde's Death from Tristan und Isolde, recorded live years later, in 1951.  Eileen Farrell is Isolde, Victor de Sabata conducts the New York Philharmonic.

This Week in Classical Music: March 21, 2022.  Catching Up: Haydn and more.  Last week  we celebrated Bach’s anniversary and didn’t have neither time nor space to even acknowledge several prominent composers and musicians; this week there are more, and the first one on our list is Franz Joseph Haydn, who was born on March 31^st of 1732 in Rohrau, Austria.  We love Haydn, have written about him on many occasions (here) and feel that he’s somewhat underappreciated these days.  Haydn wrote 104 symphonies, some of supreme quality, he is considered the father of the string quartet, and we’ll go on a limb and say that some of Haydn’s piano sonatas are better than any ever written by Mozart.  You can judge for yourself: here’s his sonata in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI:52, written in 1794, performed by Alfred Brendel.  And here is the same sonata but in Glenn Gould’s rather idiosyncratic interpretation.  It runs about 5 minutes faster than Brendel’s; you can also hear Gould singing.

Last week we missed anniversaries of Franz Schreker, who in the first quarter of the 20^th century was, together with Richard Strauss, the most popular opera composer in the German-speaking world (Schreker was born on March 23rd of 1878).  Another famous German-speaking opera composer, of a very different ear, Johann Adolph Hasse, was baptized on March 25^th of 1699 (we don’t know his exact birthday).  In the mid-18^th century, Hasse’s opera seria were widely admired not only by the public but also by composers like Handel.  The great Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was born on March 25^th of 1881.  And let’s not forget Pierre Boulez – the French composer, theoreticians, teacher, and conductor was born on March 26^th of 1925.

This week, in addition to Haydn, we have: Sergei Rachmaninov, born on April 1^st of 1873, the Spanish composer of the Renaissance Antonio de Cabezón, born March 30^th of 1510 (here is his Pavana Italiana, performed by the organist Sebastiano Bernocchi); Ferruccio Busoni, born on April 1^st of 1866 and another Italian of a very different era, Alessandro Stradella, on April 3^rd of 1639.  (Stradella’s life story was incredible, you may read about it here).

Among the conductors born this week (Willem Mengelberg, Pierre Monteux) there’s one with a particular interest to us, Christian Thielemann, who will turn 73 on April 1^st.  The reason is that he is rumored to become the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony, as 2023 is when the contract of the current Music Director, Riccardo Muti, expires.  Despite Muti’s great popularity, we think replacing Miti with Thielemann would be an improvement, as the latter is superb in the core German-Austrian repertoire.  Many political considerations come into play with such an important and visible position, and Thielemann has made a number of controversial statements (here’s an article in the Guardian on the subject).  Of course, there are many other candidates in addition to Thielemann; we’ll see how it all plays out.  So let’s conclude with Thielemann conducting Haydn.  Here’s Thielemann with the Staatskapelle Dresden and the choir in the final section of Franz Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, Singt dem Herren, alle Stimmen! (Sing the Lord ye voices all).

This Week in Classical Music: March 21, 2022.  Johann Sebastian Bach.  This is one birthday we cannot miss no matter what:Johann Sebastian Bach was born on this day in 1685.  Last year we played Bach’s Cantata BWV 1, Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern(How beautifully the morning star shines), composed soon after Bach was made the Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723.  Number 1 is a quirk of the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis) catalogue, which lists Bach’s works by the genre and not in a chronological order: Cantatas come first, with the numbers from 1 to 224, then Motets, which are assigned numbers from 225 to 231, and so on.  BWV 1, composed in 1725, was not Bach’s first cantata, it wasn’t even part of the first cycle of cantatas, which were composed in 1723-24.  Today we’ll turn to BWV 2, Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (Oh God, look down from heaven), composed for the second Sunday after Trinity and first performed on June 18^th of 1724.  Even though it has the second BWV number, it was preceded by more than 60 cantatas.  Isn’t it time to create a more reasonable catalogue of Bach’s work?  Whatever the number, it’s a wonderful piece which is performed here by Concentus Musicus Wien under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt. 

We’ll stay with Bach in three more interpretations, all three by pianists who were also born this week.  First, Egon Petri, a German of Dutch descent, he was born on March 23^rd of 1881 in Hannover.  A wonderful musician, he was a student and friend of Ferruccio Busoni, and helped his teacher in editing the 25-volume version of all Bach’s clavier compositions.  And like Busoni, Egon Petri wrote several piano arrangements of Bach’s music.  Here is one of them, the arrangement of Bach’s chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit (I Step Before Thy Throne), BWV 668.  Petri recorded it in 1958.

Another brilliant German pianist, Wilhelm Backhaus was three years younger than Petri, he was born on March 26^th of 1884 in Leipzig.  Backhaus’s career was very long: he went on his first concert tour of England in 1900 and recorded Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 2 with Karl Böhm in April of 1968, when he was 83, his formidable technique still quite in place.  The problem with Backhaus (as with Böhm) is that he was a supporter of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler in particular.  Because he had moved to Switzerland in 1930 (and became a Swiss citizen some years later) Backhaus escaped the denazification process and the stigma he had fully deserved.  In a way he was no better than many Russian musicians who are being “canceled” all over Europe and the US today.  Here’s Wilhelm Backhaus playing Bach’s French Suite No. 5 in G major, BWV 816.  This recording was also made in 1958.

Lastly, the American pianist Byron Janis was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania on March 24^th of 1928 into a family of Jewish refugees from Russia (their original name was Yankelevich).  As a kid, Janis studied with Josef and Rosina Lhévinne in New York and then became Vladimir Horowitz’s first pupil.  He debuted with Rachmaninov’s Second Piano concerto at the age of 15 and played his first Carnegie concert at 20.  In 1960, two years after Van Cliburn won the first Tchaikovsky competition, Janis toured the Soviet Union to tremendous success.  He was also the first American to win a Grand Prix du Disque.  Janis’s brilliant career was cut short by severe arthritis in both hands, which hit him in 1973.  Here’s Byron Janis playing Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Minor, BWV 643.  It’s an arrangement of an organ piece by Franz Liszt.  The recording was made in 1948.

This Week in Classical Music: March 14, 2022.  Telemann.  Just two weeks ago we complained that it’s difficult to find good music by Antonio Vivaldi other than the overexposed Four Seasons.  Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos, some of them brilliant (clearly Johann Sebastian Bach thought so, as he transcribed a number of them) but many quite mediocre.  The situation with Telemann is even more difficult.  Georg Philipp Telemann, who was born on March 14^th of 1681 in Magdeburg, was one of the most prolific composers in the history of Western music.  He wrote more than 3000 compositions, including 1700 cantatas, of which 1400 are extant.  Of course, much of the music was recycled, but Bach did the same on many occasions.  How does one go through 1400 cantatas?  How many of them have not been performed in the last 100 years?  This problem confounds us every time we write about Telemann, and we addressed it directly a couple years ago.  Though Telemann was very influential and highly regarded in the 18^th century, his fame faded in the 19^th, especially when musicologists like Spitta and Schweitzer started unfairly comparing him to Bach,  even though during Telemann’s lifetime, and in the following decades, his music was favorably compared to that of Bach and Handel’s.  Here is one of Telemann’s cantata’s, Du aber Daniel, gehe hin (Go thy way, Daniel).  It is performed by the ensemble Cantus Cölln under the direction of Konrad Junghänel.  We find the whole cantata very beautiful, the soprano aria Brecht, ihr müden Augenlieder especially so (it’s sung by Johanna Koslowsky).

A brief note on two recent concerts. Daniil Trifonov played last week in Chicago.  That he is a pianist of huge talent becomes apparent almost immediately.  He played a devilishly difficult, dense Szymanowski’s piano sonata no. 3, which seems to be influenced both by Schoenberg in his late tonal phase and Debussy.  In Trifonov’s interpretation it became live, floating and very pianistic.  Debussy (Pour le Piano) followed and then Prokofiev’s Sarcasms.  Ukraine is on our mind: both the Polish Szymanowski and the Russian Prokofiev were born there.  The second half of the concert was taken by Brahm’s enormous and somewhat unwieldy 3^rd piano sonata.  Brahms was just 20 when he wrote it and clearly it’s not his greatest composition but somehow Trifonov made it interesting to listen to.  Trifonov is one of the most remarkable pianists on stage today and the concert was exhilarating.  As one could’ve guessed, it has not been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune.  The good news is that there were many young people in the audience.

A very different concert series took place several days later when Herbert Blomstedt came to town.  Blomstedt is 94 and looks his age; he suffers from arthritis and walks slowly.  Blomstedt conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in three concerts, with Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 17 in the first half and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony in the second.  Martin Helmchen was the soloist in the Mozart, and he played well (we’d love to hear him in a recital); Blomstedt held everything together.  But of course, the important part came later.  The Fourth Symphony is one of Bruckner’s more popular pieces, it’s the one with the famous Scherzo for the third movement.  There were some issues in the brass section (is it still the best in the world?) but those were minor.  Blomstedt, with his small gestures, managed to propel the symphony forward, despite its many stops, turns and repetitions.  All climaxes were thrilling and overall it was a marvelous performance.  The score book rested in front of Blomstedt on the stand, its red cover visible.  It was never opened: Blomstedt conducted the whole 70-minute symphony from memory.  The man is 94!  The ovation was long, Blomstedt brought up different sections of the orchestra, all greeted with great applause.  At the end Blomstedt patted the score, indicating that it’s Bruckner who should be applauded.  How very true.  Once again, there were many young people in the hall.  Is there still hope for classical music?