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April 29, 2019. Alessandro Scarlatti, the father of the by now more famous Domenico , was born on May 2nd of 1660 in Palermo. One of the greatest opera composers of the late 17th.jpg "Alessandro Scarlatti, by Lorenzo Vaccaro, c. 1770")
century, he’s not very popular these days, mostly because the specific art form to which he was devoted – the Baroque opera – isn’t very popular. Baroque operas are often long, expensive to stage, and there are not that many voices around that could do justice to their music. No opera can withstand bad singing, neither a Verdi nor a Mozart, but a bad production of a Baroque opera can bore one to tears. On the other hand, listen to the aria Mentr'io godo in dolce oblio, from Il Giardino di Rose: La Santissima Vergine del Rosario, performed by Cecilia Bartoli and Les Musiciens du Louvre. Isn’t it absolutely exquisite? We’ve written about Alessandro on a number of occasions (for example, here and here), so let’s just listen to one of his sacred compositions, the Stabat Mater. Scaraltti wrote three versions of Stabat Mater, this is the latest, from 1724, composed one year before Scarlatti’s death on October 22nd of 1725 (Concerto Italiano is conducted by Rinaldo Alessandrini). An interesting historical note: Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater was written for the noble fraternity of the church of S Maria dei Sette Dolori in Naples. Eleven years later, the fraternity ordered a replacement from the 26-year-old but already very ill Giovanni Battista Pergolesi; it turned out to be Pergolesi’s last work. We don’t doubt the quality of Pergolesi’s work, but also think that Alessandro Scarlatti’s Stabat mater is a work of first order.
For a long time, Stabat Mater, a 13th-centry hymn to the Virgin Mary, was almost a requisite composition. During the Renaissance it was set to music by such composers as Josquin des Prez, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso; during the Baroque, Domenico Scarlatti and Antonio Vivaldi wrote their versions. Haydn was one of the Classical composers to write a Stabat Mater, Schubert did it twice. Later in the 19th century, Rossini, Liszt, Gounod, Dvořák and Verdi did the same. In the 20th century it was Kodály, Szymanowski, Poulenc, Arvo Pärt and Krzysztof Penderecki’s turn. And there are many more: there is a site dedicated to different versions of Stabat Mater, https://www.stabatmater.info, they list 250 (!) different compositions. The site is very much worth a visit. Here’s Stabat Mater by Lasso, composed in 1585. It’s performed by The Hilliard Ensemble.
Two prominent conductors were born on this day: Thomas Beecham in 1879 and Zubin Mehta in 1936. Beecham was born into a wealthy family, which allowed him to stage operas and create orchestras. Self-taught as a conductor, he debuted in 1902. In 1906 he was invited to the New Symphony Orchestra, a chamber ensemble which he expanded to the size of a symphony orchestra. In 1909 he founded the Beecham Symphony Orchestra. He brought Diagilev’s Ballets Russes to London and premiered five of Richard Strauss’s operas. In 1932 he and his younger colleague Malcolm Sargent founded The London Philharmonic Orchestra, now one of the five permanent London orchestras. He didn’t stop there: in 1946, he founded The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, another of the London Big Five, and conducted it till the end of his life (Beecham died on March 8th of 1961). He was called Britain’s first internationally-renowned conductor; he made a large number of recordings, some excellent; his importance to British music cannot be overestimated. As for, Zubin Mehta, who turned 83 today, he’s still quite active as the music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.Permalink
April 22, 2019. Prokofiev and Menuhin. Sergei Prokofiev was born on April 27th of 1891. He’s one of our favorites, and we’ve written about him year after year (and, of course, on his 125th anniversary). His short Piano sonata no. 3, op. 28, an early masterpiece, was premiered by.jpg "Sergei Prokofiev, by Konchalovsky")
Prokofiev himself on April 15th of 1918 in St. Petersburg (then, Petrograd). By then, Prokofiev had already made the decision to leave for America. He applied to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Culture, for permission to leave, and received it shortly after. Just three weeks after the concert, on May 7th of 1918, Prokofiev left Petrograd and travelled through Siberia to Vladivostok and then on to Tokyo. He gave several concerts in Japan, boarded a ship and arrived in New York in September of 1918. Here’s what our own Joseph DuBose wrote in the notes to the Sonata: “Sergei Prokofiev composed his Third and Fourth Piano Sonatas in 1917. Both sonatas bore the subtitle “D'après de vieux cahiers,” or “From Old Notebooks,” and were wrought from sketches the composer had made a decade earlier during his student years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. The Third Sonata, in A minor, marked a significant departure for the composer, its demeanor being far more serious than its predecessor... Like his First Piano Sonata composed in 1909, the Third is comprised of a single movement in sonata form. Where the First Sonata was segmented in its form and even derivative, the Third is evidently the work of a more mature mind, one that has learned to follow the natural course of its ideas and allows the form to proceed organically from them. It juxtaposes two diverse themes—an angular theme in Prokofiev’s “motoric” style, and a lyrical second theme. Both themes are then worked extensively in the Sonata’s development… The Third Piano Sonata is regarded as one of Prokofiev’s best compositions for piano, and, interestingly, was one of his few works to receive similar praise from critics.” Here it is in the performance by the pianist Andrei Gavrilov.
One of the greatest violinists of the 20th century, Yehudi Menuhin, was also born this week, on April 22nd of 1916, in New York. He started his lessons at the age of five; by then he was living in San Francisco, where his family settled in 1918. At the age of seven he played in public for the first time, a year later he gave a full recital (both times in San Francisco), at nine he debuted in New York and the same year played his first concert with the San Francisco Symphony.
At the age of 12 he played violin concertos by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms with the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Bruno Walter and a week later he went to Dresden and repeated the program at Semperoper with the Dresden Staatscapelle. He studied with Adolf Busch in Basel and in the early 1930s moved to Paris where George Enescu became his teacher. In the late 30s he moved back to California but continued performing around the world. During WWII he gave 500 concerts for the US troops; he was the first to play at the Opéra of the just liberated Paris, to the survivors of the Belsen concentration camp; he was also the first Jewish musician to perform with the Berlin Philharmonic, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting. In mid-career, Menuhin experienced a crisis: his phenomenal technique abandoned him. “As a child, I never practiced scales and things like that either; and now that I find myself often playing every other night, I see my technical problems accumulating,” he said in his autobiography. To continue performing, he had to rethink his technique; his new approach and insights eventually led him to openi an international music school. Here is Yehudi Menuhin performing Bach’s Chaconne from Partita no. 2. The recording was made in 1956.Permalink
April 15, 2019. Three pianists and two conductors. This week we’ll celebrate several interpreters, rather than creators, of music: pianists Schnabel, Sokolov and Perahia, and
conductors Stokowski and John Eliot Gardiner. Artur Schnabel, born on April 17th of 1882, was one of the most important pianists of the first half of the 20th century. Schnabel was Jewish, born Aaron, in a small town in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His family moved to Vienna when he was seven. His piano teacher was the famous Theodor Leschetizky, who said to Schnabel, “You will never be a pianist; you are a musician” and had him play Schubert’s sonatas rather than the popular bravura pieces by Liszt. In 1898 Schnabel moved to Berlin, the place where his career flourished till Nazis took over in 1933. He performed with all the greatest conductors of the time (Furtwängler, Walter and Klemperer among them) and toured the major concert halls in Europe and America. Schnabel left Berlin in 1933, first for England, and then, in 1939, for the US. While in England, he made the first ever recording of all the piano sonatas by Beethoven (they were made in the course of several years, from 1932 to 1935 at Abbey Road Studios in London). In 1944 he became a US citizen. Here’ is Beethoven’s Sonata no. 25, op. 78 in that historic London recording.
Who would’ve thought, in 1966, that the 16-year-old Grigory Sokolov, the unexpected winner of the Third Tchaikovsky Piano competition, would turn into one of the most interesting and introspective pianists of the generation? Back then the Moscow public was rooting for Misha Dichter and suspected that Sokolov’s win was a result of the Soviet cultural officialdom manipulations. For the following 25-something years Sokolov’s career went nowhere, till his concerts in Europe and the US in 1990. These days Sokolov is a cult figure. He doesn’t record in the studio but allows his live concerts to be recorded (in that he’s the exact opposite of Glenn Gould). Sokolov has a huge repertoire; he’s famous as a great interpreter of Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Rameau and other classics. Here’s Haydn’s piano sonata no.47 in B minor, Hob.XVI:32, recorded live in Munich in 2018.
Somehow all the pianists we’re celebrating today have Jewish roots. Schnabel was Jewish, Sokolov – half Jewish (by his father, his mother was Russian). Not that it matters, but Murray Perahia, one of the most interesting pianists of the last quarter of the century, is also Jewish – a Sephardim, as opposed to the Ashkenazi Schnabel and Sokolov. Perahia has a broad repertoire, but his Bach is especially interesting – as far from Glenn Gould’s as one can imagine, but as exciting. In 1990 Perahia suffered an injury to his hand and his problems persisted for many years. He has recovered and records and plays concerts in the US and Europe. Here’s Bach’s English Suite no. 1 in Murray Perahia’s 1997 recording.
Two conductors, Leopold Stokowski and John Eliot Gardiner, were also born this week, Stokowski on April 18th of 1882, one day after Schnabel, Gardiner on April 20th of 1943. Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s music director from 1912 to 1938, reigned supreme in the first half of the 20th century, and even though his idiosyncratic performances seem dated these days, he clearly was a magnificent conductor. Gardiner, on the other hand, is one of the most interesting Bach interpreters, and is going close to the source. We’ll write more about both later.Permalink
April 8, 2019. Giuseppe Tartini was born on this day in 1692 in Pirano, Republic of Venice (now Piran, Slovenia). He studied at the university of Padua, where it seems he spent most of his time
on fencing. In 1710, he married one Elisabetta Premazore, a woman two years his elder who, unfortunately for Tartini, was a favorite of the local bishop, Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro. The Cardinal accused Tartini of abducting Elisabetta, and, to avoid prosecution, Tartini fled to the monastery of San Francesco in Assisi. There he started playing the violin, amazingly late for a future virtuoso. He left the monastery around 1714, played for a while with the Ancona opera orchestra, and heard the famous Francesco Veracini perform in Venice. That episode affected him greatly, as he felt that his playing was inferior. He spent the next two years practicing, greatly improving his skills. In 1721 he was made Maestro di Cappella at the famous Basilica di Sant'Antonio in Padua. In 1723, in a midst of another scandal (Tartini was accused of fathering an illegitimate child) he left for Prague, where he stayed for three years under the auspices of the Kinskys, a noble Czech family. He returned to Padua in 1726 and organized a violin school, probably the most famous one of its time. Students came to the “school of the nations” from all of Europe. Around the same time Tartini published his first volume of compositions containing violin sonatas and concertos. He continued to compose through the years, although later in his life he concentrated more on theoretical works. He continued to live in Padua and died there on February 26th of 1770.
Tartini owned several Stradivari violins, one of which he passed on to his student Salvini, who in turn gave it to the Polish virtuoso violinist Karol Lipiński. As the story goes, sometime around 1817, in Milan, the young Lipiński played for Salvini. After the performance was over, Salvini asked for Lipiński’s violin and, to Lipiński’s horror, smashed it to pieces. He then handed the dumbstruck Lipiński a different violin and said that it is “a gift from me, and, simultaneously, as a commemoration of Tartini.” That was one of Tartini’s Stradivari, one of the best violins the master ever made; it is now known as the “Lipinski Stradivari.” The story of the violin almost ended in tragedy: some time ago, an anonymous donor lent it to Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony orchestra; on January 27th of 2014, after a concert, Almond was attacked by a stun gun and the violin was stolen. An international recovery effort was immediately organized, and one week later, the suspects, a man and a woman, were arrested. The violin was recovered three days later.
Here’s Tartini’s best known piece, the famous Devil’s Trills sonata. Itzhak Perlman is at his best (in 1977); Samuel Sanders is on the piano.
One of the greatest tenors of the 20th century, Franco Corelli, was also born on this day in 1921 in Ancona, where Tartini played in an orchestra after leaving the Assisi monastery. Corelli had the voice of incomparable beauty, remarkable power and clarity. Even though Corelli had several voice teachers, he mostly taught himself, imitating great singers of the past. He made his operatic debut in 1951 in Spoleto, singing José in Carmen. From 1954 to 1965 he sang at La Scala. In 1957 he made a sensational debut in the Covent Garden as Cavaradossi. In 1961 he appeared at the Met for the first time, singing Manrico in Il Trovatore (Leonora was Leontine Price). For the following decade, he sung in New York every year, appearing 282 times in 18 different roles. Here is the thrilling aria A te, o cara from the first act of Bellini’s I puritani. Franco Ferraris conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.Permalink
April 1, 2019. Three pianists were born on this day. We usually talk about Sergei Rachmaninov as a composer, but he was also one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.
Josef Hofmann, himself a superlative pianist to whom Rachmaninov dedicated his Third Piano Concerto, joked that he would gladly swap his fingers for Rachmaninov’s and would add his toes to boot (there’s some truth to the joke: Hofmann’s hands were of average size, while Rachmaninov had huge hands that allowed him to easily play the most difficult chords). Contemporaries compared Rachmaninov to Liszt and Anton Rubinstein. He was a supreme virtuoso who never showed off, being concerned with the structure and the overall line of a composition. Rachmaninov was an expressive pianist with a beautiful sound (Arthur Rubinstein raved about his tone), and his rhythm was freer than what we’re used to these days, but when we listen to his recordings, the playing sounds felicitous to the composer’s intent. Rachmaninov often played his own compositions, both his numerous piano miniatures and concertos. Rachmaninov made many recordings, the earliest – in 1919, for Edison Records. He also made a number of recording rolls, many of them for the American Piano Company (Ampico). Rachmaninov, initially skeptical of the quality of the recordings, said, after listening to a reproduced piano roll: "Gentlemen – I, Sergei Rachmaninov, have just heard myself play!" Here is an example, Rachmaninov “performing” his own Prelude in G minor, op. 23, no. 5. The piano roll was digitized and then played on a Bösendorfer 290 SE Reproducing Piano.
A very different pianist, Dinu Lipatti, was born on this day in 1917 in Bucharest. He studied at the local conservatory where he was awarded prizes as a pianist and composer. In 1934 he participated in the Vienna piano competition and was awarded the second prize. Alfred Cortot, who felt that Lipatti deserved to win, resigned from the jury and invited the young pianist to study with him in Paris. Lipatti joined Cortot’s piano class and also studied the composition with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Lipatti’s performance career didn’t start till 1939 but soon after was interrupted with the beginning of WWII. In 1943, with the help of the Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer, Lipatti emigrated to Switzerland and joined the conservatory in Geneva. It was around that time that his illness showed itself for the first time. It took doctors four years to diagnose it as Hodgkin's disease. (By an incredibly tragic coincidence, around the same time another talented pianist, Rosa Tamarkina, was also diagnosed with the same disease. Both continued to perform, even as their health declined. Both gave their last concerts and died in 1950, Lipatti at the age of 33, Tamarkina – even younger, just 30.) In 1946 Lipatti signed a contract with Columbia Records and made several recordings at his home in Geneva. During his last concert, given in September 1950 in Besançon he played Bach’s First Partita, Mozart’s A minor Sonata, two Schubert impromptus and the complete Chopin waltzes, except no.2, in A Flat, op. 34, no. 1, which he was too exhausted to play. Instead he played Myra Hess’s transcription of Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring as a last-minute substitution. Here’s Jesu in a recording made in 1947 in London. And here is Chopin’s Waltz in A Flat, op. 34, no. 2, the one he was too tired to perform during his last concert.
We’d like to note that today is the 75th anniversary of a wonderful Soviet-Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish-German pianist, Vladimir Krainev. He studied with Heinrich Neuhaus, won the Tchaikovsky competition in 1970, performed all over the world, and created an international foundation in support of young pianists. Krainev died in Hannover, Germany, on April 29th of 2011.Permalink
The person whom we really wanted to write about this week is the conductor Willem Mengelberg. Of a Dutch-German artistic family (his father was a well-known sculptor), Mengelberg was born in Utrecht on March 28th of 1871. After studying the piano and organ in his native city, he went to the Cologne Conservatory, where he also studied composition. In 1895, at the age of 24, he was appointed the principal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and, during his tenure of 50 years, made it into one of the best European orchestras. Mengelberg met Gustav Mahler in Vienna in 1902 and invited the composer to Amsterdam to conduct one of his symphonies; Mahler did that in 1903, performing his Third Symphony. Then, in 1904, also at the Concertgebouw, and following Mengelberg’s suggestion, Mahler conducted his Fourth Symphony – twice during one concert, once before the break, and then again, in the second half! What a great idea, to play a complex composition, new to listeners’ ear, two times, so that it settles in one’s mind, becomes more understandable. This would’ve never happened in our time. Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw developed a tradition of playing Mahler, one of the strongest in Europe (the Austrians and the Germans weren’t big on Mahler at that time). In 1920, Mengelberg instituted a Mahler Festival. His tempos and rubatos sound a bit outdated, and the recording quality is not very good, but you may still enjoy his interpretations. Here, from 1939, is Mahler’s Symphony no. 4.Permalink
March 25, 2019. Composers, performers… This is another overabundant week. Franz Joseph Haydn was born on March 31st of 1732. And one of the most important composers of the first half of the 20th century, Béla Bartók, was born on this day, March 25th of 1881. The second half of the last century is also represented, by none other than Pierre Boulez, born on March 26th of 1925. And then there are two composers from previous eras: the 18th century Johann Adolph Hasse, born 320 years ago, on March 25th of 1699, whose opere serie were, for a while, some of the most popular in all of Europe – that, given that among his competitors were the young Handel and still very active Italians of the older generation, from Alessandro Scarlatti to Petri, Bononcini, Caldara, and Porpora. And from two centuries earlier, one of the most important composers of the Spanish Renaissance, Antonio de Cabezón, who was born on March 30th of 1510. (We’ve written about all them several times, for example here, here, here, and here).
And then there are two eminent pianists, Wilhelm Backhaus and Rudolf Serkin. Backhaus was born on March 26th of 1884 in Leipzig, Serkin – on March 28th of 1903 in Eger, a town in Bohemia now called Cheb. Both immensely talented, both great interpreters of the music of Beethoven, both native German speakers, both spent a lot of time in the US, but it’s hard to imagine more different biographies. Backhaus was close to the Nazis and knew Hitler personally, though eventually he emigrated from Nazi Germany to Switzerland. Serkin, of Russian-Jewish decent, lived in Vienna and then in Berlin, but after the rise of Nazism had to flee Germany first to Switzerland then to the US. We’ll write about both and compare some of their recordings.
That’s not all: Mstislav Rostropovich, one of the greatest cellists of the 20th century, was also born this week – on March 27th of 1927, in Baku, the capital of now-independent Azerbaijan. Not just a phenomenal cellist, he was also a conductor and, at the time when all civic activity was suppressed, an active supporter of the banned writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. For that the Soviets punished Rostropovich, canceling all his foreign tours. In 1974, thanks to Senator Edward Kennedy and active Western public opinion, Rostropovich and his wife, the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, were allowed to leave the Soviet Union; they returned only after the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. Rostropovich is another brilliant musician on our “to do” list. And as if that wasn’t enough, Arturo Toscanini, who needs no introduction, was born on this day in 1867 in Parma.