This Week in Classical Music: October 28, 2019.  Opera Composers.  Vincenzo Bellini, one of the greatest composers of the bel canto opera, was born on November 3^rd of 1801 in Catania.  The creator of such masterpieces as Norma, I Puritani, La sonnambula, he died at the age of 33.  We’ve written about him on a number of occasions, and just this past week we mentioned that Giuditta Pasta premiered two of his operas, singing Amina in La sonnambula and the title role in Norma.  But Bellini wasn’t the only opera composer to be born this week: quite an unexpected name shows up on the calendar, that of Ezra Pound.  Yes, that very Ezra Pound, one of the finest poets of the 20^th century, and, politically, a very controversial figure.  He was born onOctober 30th of 1885 in Hailey, ID, but spent much of his life in Europe.  Pound, who had no musical education, was a big lover of classical music.  In his youth, he wrote musical criticism for several publications; one of his articles was about a concert given by the violinist Olga Rudge; they became friends and eventually lovers.  They stayed together for the rest of Pound’s life (Rudge outlived him by 24 years – she died at the age of 100).  Pound and Rudge (and also the Italian composer Alfredo Casella) were key figures in the Vivaldi revival, discovering manuscripts in the Turin library: it’s hard to imagine but in the early 20^th century Vivaldi’s works were practically unknown to the general public.  In the early 1920s, while living in Paris, Pound became friends with the American composer George Antheil.  Pound was very interested in the music of troubadours, composers and performers from the medieval Occitan, – he felt that their art represented the ideal union of music and word.  The poetry of troubadours influenced his own, especially his Cantos.  Then, in 1923, he decided to write an opera which he called The Testament of François Villon, after a poem by the famous French 15^th century poet.  As Pound had no formal knowledge of compositional technique, he asked Antheil to consult him (on the front page of the score Pound mentioned Antheil as an “editor”).  The Testament is an unusual creation, not quite an opera but a curious piece of music with a very unorthodox rythm (here are the first five minutes of it, performed by the ASKO-Ensemble under the direction of Reinbert de Leeuw, recorded at the Holland Festival in 1980).  The Testament was performed in concert in 1926 and was praised by Virgil Thompson, the American composer of another unusual opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, on the libretto by Gertrude Stein.  In 1932 Pound wrote his second opera, Cavalcanti, based on the life of the famous Italian poet and troubadour Guido Cavalcanti, whose poems influenced his friend Dante.  That was his last known musical effort.

Two prominent conductors, the German Eugen Jochum and the Italian Giuseppe Sinopoli were also born this week, Jochum on November 1^st of 1902, Sinopoli – on November 2^nd of 1946. 

October 21, 2019.  Giuditta Pasta.  There are several anniversaries which we’d like to commemorate today: the birthdays of Franz Liszt, Luciano Berio, George Biset and Domenico Scarlatti.  And there is also a very special singer we’d also like to write about as well.  Franz Liszt was born on October 22^nd of 1811 in the Kingdom of Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  One of the most important composers of the 19^th century, he was also the first (and the greatest) in a long line of piano virtuosos.  We’ve written about his life and, separately, about his piano cycle Années de pèlerinage (for example, here and here).  Please browse our library, which has an extensive collection of his works.  Some of Liszt’s best works were written for the then newly-improved keyboard instrument, the piano, and so were most of Domenico Scarlatti’s numerous sonatas, though during his lifetime the main keyboard instrument was not the piano but the harpsichord.  Domenico, the son of the great composer Alessandro Scarlatti, was born on October 26^th of 1685 in Naples.  Like Liszt, he was an excellent keyboard player, he even beat Handel in a 1709 harpsichord competition organized by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (Handel was judged to be a better organ player).  Scarlatti wrote 555 sonatas; though we don’t have all of them, you could find several wonderful performances on our site. 

October 14, 2019.  Karl Richter.  A noted German composer Alexander von Zemlinsky was born on October 14^th of 1871.   Here’s our entry from six years ago.  We think that the brief aside at the end of it, about the painter who created Zemlinky’s portrait, is quite fascinating and characteristic of the pre-Great War Viennese society.    Luca Marenzio, the Italian composer of the late Renaissance active in Rome and Ferrara, was born on October 18^th of 1553.  Here’s a madrigal Solo et pensoso i più deserti campi, a setting of Petrarch’s poem, by Marenzio.  It’s performed by the ensemble La Venexiana, Claudio Cavina conducting.  And here is our previous entry on this wonderful composer.  Also, the great Soviet pianist Emil Gilels was born on October 19^th of 1916.  Here is his 1972 recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, Waldstein.  Read more about Gilels here.

Listening to Karl Richter’s recordings of Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions soon after they were released in 1960s was a revelation.  That was before the “historically-informer” and “authentic” performances became modish, and Richter’s taut, brisk tempos and the focused sound of both the chorus and the orchestra felt very fresh.  They still do, we think: just listen to how he propels the introductory chorus of Bach’s St. John’s Passion, Herr, unser Herrscher, dessen Ruhm in allen Landen herrlich ist! (Lord, our Lord, whose glory is magnificent in all the earth!).  Karl Richter, German organist, harpsichordist and conductor, was born on October 15^th of 1926 in Plauen, Saxony.  He studied in Dresden and in Leipzig, both cities associated with Johann Sebastian Bach.  His musical career started in the German Democratic Republic: in 1949 he was appointed organist in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.  He made a number of organ and harpsichord recordings; he was even awarded GDR prizes.  In 1951 he defected from the GDR to West Germany; soon after he was offered the position of organist and cantor at St. Mark's Church in Munich.  He accepted and also taught at the Musikhochschule, one of Germany’s best conservatories.  A couple of years later Richter formed the Heinrich-Schütz-Kreis (Heinrich-Schütz-Circle), a vocal ensemble which he eventually developed into the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra, one of the finest interpreters of German baroque music.  With the Bach Choir and Orchestra, he performed around the world; from 1965 till 1980 he regularly conducted and played in the US; in 1968 he came to the Soviet Union with a series of sensational concerts.  His recordings were numerous: most of Bach’s symphonic and choral works, including more than 100 cantatas were put on LPs.  Richter’s repertoire was broad: with his Bach ensemble he performed and recorded music of Heinrich Schütz, George Frideric Handel, Mozart and Beethoven.  Karl Richter died of a heart attack on February 15^th of 1981 in Munich.  He was 54.

October 7, 2019.  Verdi and Pavarotti.  Giuseppe Verdi was born this week (on October 10^th of 1813) and so was Luciano Pavarotti, a great interpreter of his music.  We’ve written about Verdi before (for example, here and here) but never about Pavarotti.  Luciano Pavarotti was born on October 12^th of 1935 in Modena, Italy into a poor family: his father, Fernando, was a baker and his mother a cigar factory worker.  Fernando was an amateur tenor (and, according to Luciano, a good one).  From an early age Luciano was listening to his father’s recordings of the great Italian tenors: Beniamino Gigli, Tito Schipa, Enrico Caruso, and later those of his hero, Giuseppe Di Stefano.  Luciano studied singing in Modena, where one of his teachers, Ettore Campogalliani, also taught his childhood friend, Mirella Freni (Campogalliani also worked with Renata Tebaldi, Renata Scotto, Ruggero Raimondi and Carlo Bergonzi).  Rumor has it that Pavarotti never learned to read music.  Pavarotti made his debut in 1961 in Reggio Emilia, singing the role of Rodolfo in La bohème.  In the next two years he sung in Yugoslavia, Vienna, Moscow and London.  While well-received, he wasn’t acclaimed as a future superstar.  His break came when Joan Sutherland asked him to join her on an Australian tour, the main reason being that he was tall enough to stand next to her (she was 6’2’’).  The grateful Pavarotti later said that he learned the breathing technique from Sutherland during that tour.  Pavarotti made his La Scala debut in 1965 in La bohème; Mirella Freni sung the role of Mimi.  In 1966 he sung Tonio in Donizetti's La fille du regiment at the Covent Garden, that was when music critics started calling him "King of the High Cs."  In 1967 he made his Metropolitan opera debut, again as Rodolfo against’ Freni’s Mimi. 

September 30, 2019.  Horowitz and Oistrakh.  Two supremely gifted musicians with very similar beginnings but vastly different career paths were born this week, the pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the violinist David Oistrakh.  Both Jewish, they were born in Ukraine, then a part of the Russian Empire: Horowitz in Kiev, on October 1^st of 1903, Oistrakh in Odessa, on September 30^th of 1908.  Rampant anti-Semitism notwithstanding, both were born into rather well-to-do families: Horowitz’s father was an electrical engineer, while Oistrakh’s – a merchant of the “second guild,” the reason both families were allowed to live in large cities outside of the Pale of Settlement.  Horowitz’s first pianos teacher was his mother, a pianist; he then attended the Kiev Conservatory where one of his professors was Felix Blumenfled, a brilliant pianist and teacher (Maria Yudina was one of his students).  Oistrakh’s talents were also obvious from a very early age; he became a pupil of the famous Pyotr Stolyarsky, the founder of the Odessa school of violin playing (among Stolyarsky’s students were Nathan Milstein, Boris “Busya” Goldstein, Elizabeth Gilels and other future stars; Milstein, Oistrakh’s good friend, was a link to Horowitz, as just several years later the two of them extensively toured the country together).  Oistrakh entered the Odessa Conservatory in 1923, graduating in 1926, at the age of 18.   By the mid-1920s both Horowitz and Oistrakh were already famous.  Horowitz played more than 150 different pieces during his “Leningrad series” in November 1924 – January 1925; the breadth of the repertoire and the quality of his playing were “stunning” – that’s how the Culture minister, Lunacharsky, characterized the concerts in one of his anonymous reviews.  The younger Oistrakh was also playing widely, but mostly in Ukraine.  The mid-20s is when their careers took very different turns.  In 1925, Horowitz received permission to go to Germany, ostensibly to study; he stayed in the West and returned to the Soviet Union only 60 years later, on a belated but triumphal tour.  For several years he performed all over Europe, with enormous success (in 1926, during his Paris Opera concert, the gendarmes were called in to pacify the overexcited crowd which started smashing the seats).  Horowitz’s calling card was Tchaikovsky’s First Piano concerto.  That was the piece he played during his debut concert with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Thomas Beecham.  Here’s what happened during that concert: “Horowitz broke from Beecham’s stately tempo and charged to the finale several measures before the orchestra. The result was, at once, vulgar and exhilarating, and Beecham fumed at the podium as the audience shouted their appreciation for Horowitz. Critics, too, overlooked his questionable taste and bestowed wild praise on his spellbinding technique” (from encyclopedia.com).  In 1933 Horowitz married Arturo Toscanini’s daughter Wanda; they settled in the US in 1939.  Horowitz’s phenomenal career continued but with interruptions: a neurotic, he did not play in public between 1936-38, 1953-65 and 1969-74.  Horowitz is remembered mostly for his superhuman technique, but we shouldn’t forget his singing sound, the unique color he could produce in any piece, no matter how technically challenging.  Here’s the 1930 recording of Liszt’s Etude no. 2in E-flat Major s 14/2 (after Paganini’s Caprice no. 17).

David Oistrakh’s career was indeed very different.  In 1927 he moved to Moscow; in 1935 he won the 2nd All-Soviet Performer’s competition, that same year he received the 2nd prize at the Wieniawski competition (after Ginette Neveu) and two years later won the Ysaÿe International competition.  He was acknowledged as the no. 1 Soviet violinist, a very special position in the country were arts were state-sponsored and politicized.  Oistrakh was allowed to tour the West (he went to the US in 1955 and performed to great success) and was given numerous awards.  Oistrakh’s technique was impeccable, the sound – powerful, and while he may not have been the warmest player, his sense of style was impeccable.  Here’s David Oistrakh performing live in 1954: La Campanella from Paganini’s Violin Concerto.

September 23, 2019.  Rameau and more.  We have a large group of celebrants this week, and we’ll try to address all of them, even if only cursorily.  Jean-Philippe Rameau is the oldest of them, he was born on September 25^th of 1683 in Dijon.  If Jean-Baptiste Lully created the grand French opera, it was Rameau, half a century later, who perfected it.  One of many great examples of his art is Castor and Pollux, his tragédie en musique, musical tragedy as it was called at the time, similar to the Italian opera seria.  Castor and Pollux was Rameau’s third opera (he started writing them only at age of 50 – before that he wrote mostly music for the harpsichord, much of it of the highest quality, and some choral music).  Castor was premiered on October 24^th of 1737 by the Académie Royale de Musique (the Royal Opera, founded in 1669 on the orders of Louis XIV and lead by Lully) at its theatre in the Palais-Royal (in our time the Opera performs at the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier).  Here’s Agnès Mellon in the aria Tristes Apprêts, with the ensemble Les Arts Florissants under the direction of William Christie.

Two composers, who worked under the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, were born this week: Dmitry Shostakovich in St.-Petersburg, Russia, on September 25^th of 1906, and Andrzej Panufnik, on September 24^th of 1914, in Warsaw.  The very talented Shostakovich became the national Soviet composer, even though during his long composing career he was threatened many times, and his music was occasionally banned; Panufnik, on the other hand, defected from Poland to the UK (you can read more about him here).