This Week in Classical Music: November 13, 2023.  Transitioning.  Not in the sense of Classical Connect’s gender identity, but as a state of mind, which being in Rome largely is.  CC is back in the US, but already missing Rome.

Papa Mozart (Leopold) was born this week, in 1719.  He was a minor composer and music teacher but is remembered as the father of his genius son, whose career he managed (or exploited, as some would say) for many years. 

Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born on November 14^th of 1778 in Pressburg (now Bratislava).  When he was eight, the family moved to Vienna.  Like Mozart, he was a child prodigy: according to his father, he could read music at the age of four, and at the age of five he could play the piano and the violin very well.  In 1786, Hummel was offered music lessons by none other than Mozart, who also housed him for two years, all free of charge.  Even though Mozart was 22 years older than the boy, they played billiards and spent time together.  At the age of nine Hummel performed one of Mozart’s piano concertos.  Very much like Leopold Mozart, Hummel’s father took his child on a European tour.  They ended up in London and stayed there for four years, Hummel taking lessons from Muzio Clementi.  In 1791, Haydn, who knew the young Hummel from his visits to Mozart’s house in Vienna, was also staying in London; he dedicated a piano sonata to the boy, who performed it in public to great success.  The French Revolution, the Terror and the subsequent wars changed the Hummels’s plans, and in 1793 they returned to Vienna.  There Hummel continued taking music lessons, with Antonio Salieri and Joseph Haydn.  One of Haydn’s pupils was Beethoven; the young men became friends.  Hummel played at Beethoven’s memorial concert in 1827, and there he met Franz Schubert, who later dedicated his last three piano sonatas (some of the greatest piano music ever written) to Hummel.

In 1804 Hummel succeeded Haydn as the Kapellmeister to Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt.  He stayed there for seven years, returning to Vienna in 1811.  After successfully touring Europe with his singer-wife and working in Stuttgart, Hummel settled in Weimar, being offered the position of the Kapellmeister at the Grand Duke’s court.  He arrived there in 1819 and stayed for the rest of his life (Hummel died in 1837), making numerous touring trips in the meantime.  He became friends with Goethe and turned the city into a major music center.  At the court theater, he staged and conducted new operas by Weber, Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer, Halévy, and Bellini.  He also established one of the first pension plans for retired musicians, sometimes playing benefit concerts to replenish the funds.  In 1832, Goethe died, Hummel’s health was failing, and he semi-retired, formally retaining his position of the Kapellmeister.  Hummel died five years later.

During his lifetime, Hummel was one of the most celebrated pianists in the world and a very popular composer.  He was also an important cultural figure, a music entrepreneur, and a famous, sought-after, and very expensive piano teacher.  As a composer, he was a transitional figure between the Classical style and Romanticism.  Even though he heavily influenced many composers of his time, Chopin and Schumann among them, nowadays Hummel’s music is mostly forgotten.  He wrote operas, sacred music, many orchestral pieces, concertos, chamber music, and of course numerous piano pieces.  Very little of it is still performed.  Here’s Hummel’s Piano Sonata no. 4, Op.38.  It’s played by the Korean pianist Hae-Won Chang.

This Week in Classical Music: November 6, 2023.  Rome, II.  Classical Connect is still in Rome.  On Saturday we went to a Santa Cecilia concert with Antonio Pappano conducting the Accademia's Orchestra and Igor Levit playing Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto.  But we'd like to start with a decidedly non-musical detail.  The Santa Cecilia Hall, inaugurated in 2002, was designed by the famous Italian architect, Renzo Piano.  Many of Piano's pieces are airy and light, but not this one.  It has little ambiance, despite the use of wood, and looks uninviting.  The seating, which follows that of the Berliner Philharmonie, is placed all around the orchestra in shallow layers.  We're not sure about the acoustics of the hall, as this was our first visit and we've never heard the Accademia Orchestra live, so it's not clear if the numerous imbalances (shrill winds, for example) are the orchestra's fault or the hall's.

But the most fascinating part of the hall's design is the men's bathroom.  It has no urinals, only cabins.  Men stand in line, not sure which cabin is empty, and enter one that's just vacated.  When things get tough, they go around knocking on doors.  The question is, were the urinals eliminated as a gesture of support for some feminist causes, or was Signor Piano not aware of how most men's toilets are usually (and efficiently) constructed? 

But let’s get back to music.  The program consisted of Cherubini’s Anacréon overture, Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto, Sibelius’s En Saga, and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.

Pappano’s entrance was accompanied by thunderous applause.  The wind’s first entrance in the Cherubini was not a happy event.  Things got better as they moved along, but even though Beethoven rated Cherubini highly, it’s little surprise that his music is played rarely these days. 

Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto was a very different story.  Igor Levit was superb.  His technique seems to have improved since the last time we heard him in Chicago, and his command of the piece was total, even if one may disagree with some of his tempi.  The performance was greeted ecstatically, and he played, exquisitely, an encore, Brahms’s Intermezzo in A major, Op. 118.

After the intermission, Pappano presented Sibelius with a speech and made the audience sing a tune from what was to follow.  That was much more entertaining than the En Saga itself.  The choice of the final piece, Till Eulenspiegel, would seem rather unusual, as the winds are not this orchestra's strong suit, but it went well, better than one might have expected judging by the three previous pieces.

If you add a hair-raising ride in a Roman taxi to the concert and back, this was, overall, quite an exhilarating event.

This Week in Classical Music: October 30, 2023.  Rome, I.  Classical Connect is in Rome this week, so this entry is short.  Rome overwhelms visually: the sites, interiors of churches worthy of museums, and Roman museums, some of the best in the world.  And of course, the magical Roman light.  Aurally, things are very different: the usual cacophony of crowds and the ever-jammed traffic, the sirens of the police cars and ambulances trying to get through, and awful street musicians, strategically positioned where the largest crowds congregate but also wandering the streets, assailing the dining public with their renditions of the European schlagers of the 1980s.

Historically, Rome has always been one of the greatest musical centers of Europe, and there are dozens of places, from the Vatican to the palaces of the cardinals and nobility, that are linked to major musical events of the past, but sometimes these connections take a different shape, quite literally: the enormous Borghese palace, which is still the major residence of the family (part of the palazzo is occupied by the Spanish embassy) is nicknamed Il Cembalo, and its plan does look like a harpsichord, with the narrowest side facing the Tiber.

In the next couple of days, Antonio Pappano will be conducting the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in a program of Cherubini, Beethoven (Piano Concerto no. 3 with Igor Levit), Sibelius and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel.  The site classictic.com, which sells tickets online, decided that the composer of the last piece is Johann Strauss.

This Week in Classical Music: October 23, 2023.  Short notes, II.  Today is Ned Rorem’s 100^th anniversary.  Rorem died last year, just days short of his 99^th birthday.  He was a wonderful composer of songs and a whimsical writer.  He spent almost a decade in France, where for a while he studied with Arthur Honegger (rather than Nadia Boulanger, as many American composers and pianists had done).  In 1966 he published a book, Paris Diaries, based on his real diaries, full of gossip, gay stories, and a good read overall.  In addition to about 500 art songs, some exceptionally good, he wrote two full-length operas, one of which, Our Town, based on a play by Thornton Wilder, was successfully staged in the US and abroad (he also wrote several smaller, one-act operas).  In addition to that he composed three symphonies and a lot of piano music, including two concertos, but none of that music was as successful as his songs.  Here is Rorem’s Sonnet.  Susan Graham is accompanied by the pianist Malcolm Martineau and Ensemble Oriol.

If Rorem wrote about 500 art songs, Domenico Scarlatti, who was born on October 26^th of 1685, wrote more than 500 piano sonatas.  They are mostly short, about as long as Rorem’s songs.  Domenico was born in Naples, where his father, the renowned opera composer Alessandro Scarlatti, was working as maestro di capella at the court of the Spanish Viceroy of Naples.  Though a thoroughly Italian composer, his link with Spain lasted throughout his life.  He moved to Spain in 1729 and lived there for the remaining 25 years of his life.

Another Italian, Luciano Berio, was also born this week, on October 24^th of 1925.  He was one of the most influential composers of the 20^th century.  You can read more about him here.

Niccolo Paganini and Georges Bizet both had their anniversaries this week, as did a minor but talented Russian composer of liturgical music, Alexander Gretchaninov.  Next year is his 160^th anniversary, so we’ll dedicate a post to him.

This Week in Classical Music: October 16, 2023.  Short notes.  It could’ve been a pretty good week, considering the talent we could celebrate, but the horrendous events of October 7^th and their aftermath overwhelmed everything else.  So, we’ll go over our list very briefly.  The Italian composer Luca Marenzio was born on October 18^th, 1553 (or 1554) in Coccaglio, near Brescia.  Marenzio was one of the most prolific (and famous) composers of madrigals of the second half of the 16^th century.  Marenzio was lucky in finding great benefactors.  For many years he had served at the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, son of Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Ferrara.  After the cardinal’s death, Marenzio found employment with Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and later, with Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.  We can assume that while in Florence, he met the three Florentine composers whose lives we had followed closely in our recent posts – Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, and Emilio de' Cavalieri, but while he inhabited the same intellectual circles as the three, Marenzio never got interested in their ideas about monody and opera.  He did, nevertheless, write music for two out of six intermedi to the play La Pellegrina, composed for the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando to Christina of Lorraine in 1589 (Cavalieri oversaw the production and composed one of the intermedi, Caccini composed another one, Peri was both composer and a singer).  That same year Marenzio returned to Rome and went on an adventurous trip to Poland, to the court of King Sigismund III Vasa in Warsaw.  He stayed in Poland for a year, got seriously ill there, and returned to Rome, where he died in 1599.

Franz Liszt was also born this week, on October 22^nd of 1811 in a small Hungarian village next to the border with Austria.  One interesting snippet about Liszt that we were not aware of till recently: he didn’t speak Hungarian.  Two fine Soviet pianists, Emil Gilels and Yakov Flier, both excellent interpreters of Liszt’s music, also have their anniversaries this week: Gilels was born on October 19^th, 1916 in Odesa, Flier – on October 21^st, 1912 – in a small town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo not far from Moscow.

Baldassare Galuppi and Georg Solti were also born this week, but as with so much else, we’ll leave them for better days.

This Week in Classical Music: October 8, 2023.  Verdi, War.  Today is the 210^th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth, but we’re not in the mood to celebrate it: it seems inappropriate with the war raging in Israel and Gaza after the Hamas barbaric terrorist attack.  There are many trite sayings about the power of music to heal, to make peace, but they all seem shallow in comparison to the news of civilians being killed in cold blood or the horror of the Israeli kids being abducted by Hamas into Gaza.  If anything, throughout history music has been used to make war, from military bands leading troops into battle to Nazis using it in concentration camps.  (And no, the Ride of the Valkyries wasn’t used in Vietnam by the US helicopter pilots, it was Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant invention).

We thought of maybe using parts of Verdi’s Requiem or the famous chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, Va', pensiero (Fly, my thoughts), from his opera Nabucco, but that didn’t feel right either.  So we’ll leave it at that.

Two great pianists were also born this week, Evgeny Kissin, who’ll turn 52 tomorrow, and Gary Graffman, who will celebrate his 95^th birthday on the 14^th of October.  Both are Jewish; Kissin was born in Russia (then the Soviet Union), Graffman’s parents came from Russia.  Hamas, if they could, would like to kill all Jews, no matter where they live.  And they would definitely not spare musicians.