This Week in Classical Music: November 30, 2020.  Kempff, Lupu, Callas.  Three composers were born this week: the late Baroque Spaniard, Padre Antonio Soler on December 3^rd of 1729, Francesco Geminiani, an Italian who was tremendously popular during his life but now is almost totally forgotten (on December 5^th of 1687),  and Henryk Górecki, a 20^th century Polish composer who became very popular with his sacred minimalist pieces (on December 6^th of 1933).  We’ve written about all three of them (here, about both Soler and Geminiani, and here about Górecki).  Today, though, we’d like to remember a name we’ve failed to mention in our recent posts.

Wilhelm Kempff’s 125^th anniversary was just five days ago.  Kempff was one of the most interesting pianists of the 20^th century.  He was born on November 25^th of 1895 in a small town of Jüterbog, not far from Berlin.  His first teacher was his father, a music director to the royal family.  Kempff studied the piano and composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (Conservatory) and later took classes in philosophy and music history.  Kempff gave his first recital in 1917, when he played, among other pieces, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Brahms’s Variations on a theme of Paganini.  For the next three decades he concertized all across Europe, South America and Japan, but it was only in 1954 that he played in London for the first time and his American début had to wait till 1964 when he was already 68.  Kempff recorded all piano sonatas by Schubert and Beethoven; he was also well known for his interpretation of the Romantic composers.  Kempff was famous for his singing tone and beautiful coloration.  He also didn’t like very fast tempos, preferring the more relaxed, “natural” speed.  Kempff lived a long life: he still performed in his eighties and died at the age of 95.  Here’s a rarely played Schubert piano sonata in E major, D 157; it’s an early piece, composed when Schubert was just 18.  Kempff recorded it in 1968. 

The Romanian pianist Radu Lupu, who is considered one of the greatest living musicians, will turn 75 on November 30^th.  He was born in 1945 in Galați.  He studied in Bucharest with Florica Musicescu who had taught another great Romanian pianist, Dinu Lipatti, and then at the Moscow Conservatory with, among other professors, Heinrich Neuhaus, but thinks that he had learned more by listening to other musicians, and not necessarily pianists: “I took some from Furtwängler, Toscanini, everywhere..” he says.  Lupu’s repertoire is broad, but like Kempff he excels in Schubert and Beethoven.  Here Radu Lupu plays Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A minor, D 845. The sonata was written ten years after D 157, in 1825.

And of course, we cannot forget Maria Callas.  She was born on December 2^nd of 1923. 

This Week in Classical Music: November 23, 2020.  Penderecki.  When three year ago we published an entry on , the great Polish composer was alive and, as we thought then, well.  Penderecki died earlier this year, on March 29^th, not of Covid-19, but after a long illness.  Our previous entry stopped at 1975 and we mentioned that around that time Penderecki’s music changed in many significant ways: before that he was an exponent of the avant-garde, exploring new sonorities, new instruments and textures, whereas after 1975 he moved to much more traditional, melodic 19-century idiom.  It’s interesting to note that the Grove article on Penderecki is divided into “Music up to 1974” and “Music after 1975.”  By the mid-1970s Penderecki was spending much of his time in the US, where he held a Yale University residence.  This was a life unknown to regular Polish citizens.  Despite all the censorship and general lack of freedom, the Polish government recognized the value of Penderecki as a representative of Polish culture (very much as the Nazis did in the 30s with some of their musicians, and as the Soviet Union did, even if not allowing them the same freedoms as the Poles).  Penderecki could travel and live abroad; he was even given a manor in Lusławice, outside of Krakow, where he created a beautiful garden and later a music festival.  It was during his tenure at Yale that he turned away from the 12-tone music back to the melodically based compositions.  The first significant work in this new style was the 1976 Violin Concerto no. 1, written for Isaac Stern (here it is, performed by the violinist Kim Chee-Yun with the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Katowice, conducted by Antoni Wit,)  Also, around that time the Lyric Opera of Chicago commissioned Penderecki an opera to commemorate the US Bicentennial.  Even though Penderecki delivered it two years late, Paradise Lost, as the opera became known, was successfully staged in Chicago and a year later, in 1979, in La Scala.  He also increasingly turned to arge-scale choral works: Te Deum, written in1978-80, and Polish Requiem, 1980-84.  The Lacrimosa part of the Requiem was the first to be composed; it was dedicated to Lech Wałęsa and written to commemorate those killed in the uprising of 1970.  Penderecki then expanded it into a full-length Requiem.    Here is Lacrimosa with Jadwiga Gadulanka, soprano, and Krzysztof Penderecki conducting the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Krakow.  Another choral piece, Credo, was written in 1998 and received a Grammy award.  Penderecki also wrote several symphonies, the last one, no. 8, subtitled "Lieder der Vergänglichkeit" (Songs of Transience) was completed in 2005 and then expanded in 2007.  A prolific composer, Penderecki wrote several operas, a large number of vocal and choral music and several violin sonatas and quartets.  Very little of his music was written for the piano.

Lest we forget: another prominent composer of the 20^th century, Alfred Schnittke was also born this week, on November 24^th of 1934.  And so was Jean-Baptiste Lully, on November 28^th of 1632. 

This Week in Classical Music: November 16, 2020.  Hindemith at 125.  Paul Hindemith was born on November 16^th of 1895 in Hanau, near Frankfurt.  We’ll pick up where we left off four years ago when we wrote about his life until about 1923.  He was then living in Frankfurt, already well known both as a composer and a violist (he organized the Amar Quartet where he played the viola), performing in Salzburg and working at the new music Donaueschingen Festival.  (A brief note about the festival: it was organized in 1921, it’s the oldest and probably the most prestigious festival of contemporary music in existence, and Hindemith’s music was played there during its first season).  Hindemith also got married to an actress and singer named Gertrud Rottenberg; Gertrud came from a prominent Frankfurt family (her grandfather was the mayor of Frankfurt) and was partly Jewish, which affected Hindemith’s life later in the 1930s.  In 1927 he was invited to teach at the Berlin Musikhochschule.  He soon decided that teaching composition is impossible, and that only the craft of handling music material could be taught.  Lacking suitable textbooks, he embarked on leaning Latin and mathematics in order to be able to read old musical manuals.  In 1929 Hindemith left the Amar Quartet and founded a string trio with Josef Wolfstahl, who a year later was replaced by Szymon Goldberg, then the concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the celebrated cellist Emanuel Feuermann; thus in the early thirties Hindemith was playing in a trio with two Jewish musicians.  Hindemith was not a man of the Left, he didn’t share political views of the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler or Kurt Weill, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they nonetheless declared most of Hindemith’s music “cultural Bolshevism.”  His trio could no longer perform in Germany, only abroad, and his Jewish colleagues at the Hochschule lost their jobs.  Initially, Hindemith thought that this descent into extreme radicalism i was temporary, that another cycle of elections would change everything back to normal – but there were no free elections to come.  Hindemith embarked on writing a major composition, the opera Mathis der Maler, for which he wrote his own libretto.  The protagonist of the opera is a historical figure, the painter Matthias Grünewald, famous for his incredible Isenheim Altarpiece.  In 1934, at Furtwängler’s request, he composed a symphony based on the opera.  The premier in Berlin was a huge success, but it only led to more attacks from the Nazis.  Hindemith started thinking about emigration; at the same time he asked Furtwängler to intervene with Hitler on his behalf: he wanted Furtwängler to invite Hitler to a composition class of his.  Furtwängler did write an open letter in support of Hindemith, it was published in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a major newspaper of the day, in November of 1934.  The letter was met with more derision from the Nazis, especially the Nazi “theoretician” Alfred Rosenberg and Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister.  In 1935 Hindemith was invited by the Turkish government to advise them on the musical life of the country.  Subsequently, he visited Turkey in 1936 and 1937.  The establishment of the Ankara State Conservatory owes much to Hindemith.  In 1936 the Nazis announced a total ban on Hindemith’s music.  A year later Hindemith resigned from the Berlin Hochschule and traveled to the US for the first time.  He emigrated to Switzerland in September of 1938 and in February of 1940 moved to the US.

Here’s Hindemith’s Symphony Mathis der Maler, performed by London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Jascha Horenstein.

This Week in Classical Music: November 9, 2020.  Couperin and Borodin.  François Couperin, the great French composer, harpsichordist and organist of the Baroque era, was born in Paris on November 10^th of 1668.  He was a member of an incredible musical dynasty, which flourished from the late 16^th century to the mid-19^th, or more than 250 years.  His  family came from Chaumes-en-Brie, a town in the Brie region famous for its cheese, and that’s where several generations of Couperins were born, even though all of them would then move to work in Paris; François was the first one to be born in Paris (there was at least one other, older, composer François Couperin, so to distinguish them, in France “our” Couperin is called Le Grand (the Great).  Probably the most famous of François’s ancestors was Louis Couperin, born in 1626, who was also a viol and keyboard player.  He was presented to the court of the young Louis XIV and was the first one to be appointed the organist at the church of St. Gervais; eight members of the Couperin family served as organists there, including François Le Grand, the last one serving till 1826.  You can read more about François Couperin here.

A fine Russian composer Alexander Borodin was born on November 12^th of 1833.   If he were less of a chemist and more of a composer, we might have enjoyed more of his music, but even as an occasional composer he created a masterpiece, the opera Prince Igor though he left it unfinished (Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov completed the orchestration).  His symphonies, especially Symphony no 2, and the symphonic piece In the Steppes of Central Asia are fine works and so are his many art songs and some piano pieces.  Here’s more about this unusual composer.  Also, Aaron Copland, one of the most significant American composers of the 20^th century was born 120 years ago, on November 14^th of 1900 in Brooklyn, New York.

Two Russian string players were born on November 14^th: the violinist Leonid Kogan in 1924 and the cellist Natalia Gutman in 1942.  Kogan is rightly considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20^th century.  He was born in Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro, Ukraine) into a Jewish family.  He moved to Moscow to study with the famed violin teacher Abram Yampolsky.  Kogan started widely performing at the age of 17.  In 1951 he won the Queen Elizabeth Competition.  In 1955 Leonid Kogan made his debuts in Paris and London and in 1957 – in the US.  He has taught at the Moscow Conservatory since 1952.  In the 1950s Kogan, Emil Gilels and Mstislav Rostropovich formed a very successful trio (Kogan and Gilels collaborated often, and Kogan married Emil’s sister, Elisaveta).  Here’s the recording of Bach’s Chaconne from Partita no.2 in D minor BWV 1004 made live in 1954.

Natalia Gutman was born in Kazan, Russia.  At the Moscow Conservatory she studied with Galina Kozolupova and Mstislav Rostropovich.  She and her husband, the violinist Oleg Kagan, were friends with Sviatoslav Richter; they played together in many concerts.

This Week in Classical Music: November 2, 2020.  Scheidt, Bellini and two Pianists.  Samuel Scheidt, one of the three German composers of the early Baroque (the other two being  the better known Heinrich Schütz and Johann Hermann Schein) was born in Halle on November 3^rd of 1587.  All three of them were born withing two years of each other and worked together; Scheidt was the godfather to one of Schein’s daughters, while Schütz and Schein were good friends.  Around 1607 Scheidt went to Amsterdam to study with the famous Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.  Upon his return to Halle, Scheidt was appointed the court organist to the Margrave of Brandenburg.  At that time Michael Praetorius was the official court Kapellmeister but he was mostly absent, working in Dresden; Scheidt would have an opportunity to work with him in 1616, and two years later, in 1618, with both Praetorius and Schütz.  In 1620 Scheidt himself was appointed Kapellmeister.  Around that time, he composed a collection of motets called Cantiones sacrae.  Here’s one of them, Das alte Jahr vergangen ist, performed by the ensemble Vox Luminis, directed by Lionel Meunier.  This was a very productive time for Scheidt but things changed soon.  The Thirty-Year War was raging and in 1625 it reached Halle.  The city suffered terribly, changing hands several time between the warrying parties.  By the end of the war half of the population was either dead or had left the city.  Scheidt, who through all these years had stayed in Halle, retained his position of Kapellmeister but wasn’t paid.  Practically penniless, he continued composing.  At some point the city created a position of director musices for him, but even that didn’t last long.  Another tragedy struck in 1636 when the plague killed all four of his surviving children within a month.  In 1638, as the war was over, August, the Duke Elector of Saxony, moved to Halle and thus revived the court.  Scheidt continued composing and publishing new music, much of it for the organ.  His final composition was a collection of 100 organ chorales, published in 1650.  Samuel Scheidt died in Halle on March 24^th of 1654.

Vincenzo Bellini was also born this week, on November 3^rd of 1801.  You can read more about him here, the entry also contains information about Samuel Scheidt’s teacher, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck.  And then there was a composer whose name, according to Stephen Fry, is a good contender for the “Best name not just in music but in all history”: Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf.  Hard to argue with Fry on this one.  Von Dittersdorf was born in Vienna on November 2^nd of 1739.  He was a prolific composer, knew both Haydn and Mozart, and some of his concertos are very pleasant.

Finally, two wonderful pianists were born on November 5^th: Walter Gieseking in 1895 and György Cziffra in 1921.

This Week in Classical Music: October 26, 2020.  Singers of the past.  Two Italian singers, Giuditta Pasta, possibly the greatest soprano of the first half of the 19^th century, and a legendary contralto castrato and Handel’s favorite, Senesino, were born this week.  Giuditta Pasta was born in Saronno, near Milan, on October 26^th of 1797.  She made her debut in Milan at the age of 19, and soon after appeared in Paris’s Théâtre Italien; she sung Donna Elvira in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and several contemporary Italian operas.  Her greatest Paris triumph was the role of Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello; she later repeated that success in London.  She was Rossini’s favorite singer, making his operas Tancredi and Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra famous around Europe.  Both Donizetti and Bellini wrote their greatest operas for Pasta: she premiered as Imogene in Il pirate, Amina in La sonnambula and Norma for Bellini; and for Donizetti she sung the title roles in Anna Bolena and Ugo, conte di Parigi.  Stendhal was mad about Pasta and encouraged other composers to write for her.  Pasta’s voice was what is known as soprano sfogato, naturally a mezzo-soprano which extends into the coloratura soprano range.  Maria Callas’s voice was also soprano sfogato, that’s one reason musicologists often compare the two.  The painting above was made by the 19^th century Russian artist Karl Bryullov, who lived for years in Italy and painted portraits of many famous singers of the time.

Senesino was born Francesco Bernardi on October 31^st of 1686 in Siena.  He was castrated late, at the age of 13.  Senesino started his career in Venice in 1707 and soon was singing in all major opera houses of Italy – in Bologna, Florence, Rome and Naples.  By 1717 he was internationally famous, commanding large fees.  In 1720 Handel hired him for his Royal Academy opera company for an enormous sum of 3,000 guineas a year (that’s £3,150; according to the Old Baily site, at that time “the First Lord of the Treasury enjoyed an annual salary of £4,000”).  Senesino’s first performance in London was Giovanni Bononcini’s opera Astarto; it was a great success.  Much success followed: he performed in all 32 operas produced by the company. These included 13 operas by Handel and eight by Bononcini.  Senesino stayed with the company till it closed in 1728.  He then left for Siena, where he built a fine house.  Even though Handel and Senseino quarreled quite often, in 1730 the composer hired Senesino again for the resurrected (Second) Academy, this time for “only” 1,400 guineas a year.  Apparently Senesino’s popularity didn’t diminish, though the relationship between him and Handel got worse and eventually Senesino quit the Royal Academy and, with the financial help of  wealthy music lovers, created a new company, the Opera of the Nobility.  Senesino, Farinelli and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni were the lead singers, while Nicola Porpora – their chief composer.  He stayed with the company till 1736.  Senesino then moved to Italy; his last performances were in Porpora’s Il trionfo di Camilla at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1740.  Senesino died on January 27^th of 1759.  According to contemporary music critics, his voice was powerful and clear, with great diction and intonation.  As a contralto he was unsurpassed; many Londoners preferred him to Farinelli.  Handel composed 17 roles for him.  But age wasn’t kind to Senesino: Horace Walpole, the English writer and art historian, met him late in his life, as Senesino was returning to Siena in a chaise: “We thought it a fat old woman; but it spoke in a shrill little pipe, and proved itself to be Senesini.”