July 2, 2018.  Cluck and Mahler.  Christoph Gluck was born on this day in 2014.  We wrote about him a year ago, so for now here ’s the chorus Chaste fille de Latone’ from Act 4 of Gluck’s opera Iphigénie en Tauride.  Many noted the similarity between this chorus and March of the Priests from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (here).  This of course is not to compare the genius of the younger composer and the considerable but still limited talents of Christoph Willibald Gluck. 

Gustav Mahler was born on July 7^th of 1860.  For some time we’ve been tracing his life by his major works; last year we wrote about 1901-1902, the years surrounding the creation of the Fifth Symphony.  In 1903 he started working on Symphony no. 6.  This was one of the happiest periods in Mahler’s life.  He was newly wed to the dashing Alma, their first daughter, Maria, was born on November of 1902 (their second daughter, Anna, would be born in June of 1904).  Mahler was financially secure and firmly established in Vienna’s cultural scene.  Hofoper, of which he was the music director, was the most prestigious music institution of the Empire, but Mahler was also working with younger, more adventuresome musicians: he was elected the honorary president of the Association of Creative Musicians in Vienna, founded by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky (Berg and Webern were also members of the group).  At the Opera, he passed some of the day-to-day activities to his staff conductors, Franz Schalk and Bruno Walter.  Mahler invited Alfred Roller, a Secessionist painter, to Hofoper as the set designer.  Their 1903 production of Tristan und Isolde was a big success.  During that period Mahler started traveling more often.  In Amsterdam, he established a close relationship with Willem Mengelberg, the conductor of Concertgebouw Orchestra.  Mengelberg, together with Bruno Walter, would become major Mahlerian of the next generation.

June 25, 2018.  Claudio Abbado.  We may be wrong about Gustave Charpentier, but it seems not a single significant composer was born this week.  As for Charpentier, who was born on this day in 1860, he’s known for just one composition, the opera Louise, which was premiered (to great success, we might add) in 1900.  One aria is still being performed quite often on the concert scene – Depuis le jour.  You can hear it nicely sung by Anna Netrebko.  The Prague Philharmonia is conducted by Emmanuel Villaume. 

As long as we’re lacking composers with known birth dates, let’s mention one from the older ages.  Alessandro Striggio, an Italian, was born around 1536 into an aristocratic Mantuan family.  In 1559 he moved to Florence, to the court of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.  Apparently, he was close to the Duke, as in 1567 Cosimo sent him on a diplomatic mission to London.  Later Striggio traveled to Austria and Bavaria.  In 1584 Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, invited Striggio for a short visit.  At the time, Ferrara was known as one of the musical centers of Italy (and, by extension, of the world); one of the jewels of the court was a group of virtuoso female singers called concerto di donne.  Later, Striggio visited Ferrara several more times.  In 1587 he moved back to his native Mantua, were he served at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga.  Striggio died in Mantua of a fever on February 29^th of 1592.  At the time the 25-year-old Claudio Monteverdi was a viola player at the court.  Here’s Striggio’s famous motet Ecce Beatam Lucem.  It’s performed by Ensemble Huelgas under the direction of Paul van Nevel.

Claudio Abbado, one of the greatest conductors of the “post-Karajan” era, was born in Milan on June 26^th of 1933.  As a youngster he went to Wilhelm Furtwängler and Arturo Toscanini’s rehearsals (he found Toscanini’s dictatorial manner unpleasant).  Abbado attended the Milan Conservatory, where he studied piano and conducting.   Upon graduating, he spent some time in Vienna; there he befriended Zubin Mehta and listened to the rehearsals of Bruno Walter and Karajan.  He conducted his first public symphony concert in 1958, and one year later he led a performance of Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges.  In 1960 he successfully debuted at La Scala (in 1969 he became the theater’s resident conductor).  Abbado’s career took off in the 1970s: he was invited to the major opera theaters, such as Covent Garden and the Vienna Staatsoper.  In 1984 he became the music director of the Vienna opera.  All along he was extensively performing with symphony orchestras, often programming the music of the 20^th century.  He became the Principal conductor of the London Symphony and the principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony.  In 1990, upon the death of Herbert von Karajan, the Berlin Philharmonic selected Abbado as its next conductor. 

June 18, 2018.  Marcello, Rozhdestvensky, Levine.  Benedetto Marcello, a gifted Italian composer of the late Baroque, was born on June 24^th of 1686 in Brescia.  We’d like to get to his interesting Requiem in the Venetian Manner, but for now we’ll direct you to our earlier entry about Benedetto and his brother Alessandro, as we have more urgent topics.

First, some sad news: Gennady Rozhdestvensky, one of the best Soviet conductors, died on June 16^th in Moscow.  Rozhdestvensky was born on May 4^th of 1931 into a musical family: his father was the noted conductor Nikolai Anosov, his mother – a singer, Natalia Rozhdestvenskaya.   Gennady studied the piano with Elena Gnesina and Lev Oborin and, later, conducting with his father.  He was only 20 when he found himself on the podium of the Bolshoi conducting Sleeping Beauty. From 1961 to 1974 Rozhdestvensky was the music director of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra.  He was also the music director of the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra.  From 1974 to 1985 he was the music director of the experimental Moscow Chamber Music Theater, where he supervised performances of the old Baroque and Classical operas, and also productions of modern operas rarely if ever heard in Russia, like Stravinsky’s The Rake Progress and Shostakovich’s The Nose.  Contemporary composers were of special interest to Rozhdestvensky: he often performed works that, if not banned, then were clearly not favored by the Soviet music establishment: Stravinsky, Poulenc, Orff, and the Soviet nonconformist composers like Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.  Rozhdestvensky was also a raconteur: very often, before conducting a piece, he would turn toward the audience and deliver a witty introduction.  Nobody else did it back then, which probably was a good thing, as few had his knowledge, sense of humor and storytelling skills. 

June 11, 2018.  Gounod at 200.  Charles Gounod was born on June 18^th of 1818 in Paris.  Though we know him as an opera composer who influenced George Bizet, Jules Massenet and Camille Saint-Saëns, the young Gounod started with writing church music.  After graduating from the Paris Conservatory, where he took classes from Fromental Halévy and winning the Prix de Rome, he spent time in Italy studying the music of Palestrina.  There he composed a Mass and a Requiem; upon returning to Paris he enrolled in a seminary.  In 1848, though, he pivoted and got involved with opera.  He was friends with the famous mezzo Pauline Viardot, one of the most respected singers of her time; through her he got a commission from the Paris Opéra.  It was quite a coup for an unknown composer.  (Viardot lived a long life: she died in 1910 at the age of 88.  Very popular, she knew practically “everybody” worth knowing – composers, writers, painters.  She had famous lovers, including the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who eventually settled in the Viardo household.  Pauline had a sister, Maria Malibran, also a singer and one of the greatest mezzos of the 19^th century at that.  Malbran’s voice range stretched from contralto to high soprano.  She excelled in the operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.  Malibran’s life was much shorter: she fell from a horse and died at the age of 28).

June 4, 2018. Schumann, Albinoni, Argerich, Mravinsky.  Robert Schumann, one of the greatest Romantic composers, was born on June 8^th of 1810.  We celebrate him often, and we’ve published several longer articles about Schumann’s wonderful song cycles, such as Dichterliebe (here and here), and Frauenliebe und -leben (here).  So today we’ll just play some of his music.  Here’s Schumann’s Kinderszenen, recorded by Martha Argerich in 1983.  More about Ms. Argerich below.

Tomaso Albinoni is best remembered today for “Albinoni’s Adagio.”  The problem is that at best this music is based on some fragment composed by Albinoni, but it likely has nothing to do with him at all: that is, at least, what Remo Giazotto, an Italian musicologist who “discovered” the piece, was claiming at the end of his life.  But this controversy aside, Albinoni, who was born on June 8^th of 1671, was a fine, if not necessarily a major, Baroque composer.  A Venetian, Albinoni was, unlike so many of his colleagues, quite well-to-do: his father was a wealthy merchant.  During his lifetime, Albinoni was known for his operas.  He wrote at least 50 of them; Albinoni himself claimed that he composed more than 80.  His first opera, Zenobia, was produced in Venice in 1694; his last, Artamene, almost half a century later, in 1741.  Most of the scores were lost during the firebombing of Dresden at the end of WWI.  Practically none of his operas are staged these days.  His oboe concertos, on the other hand, are still very popular.  Here, for example, is Albinoni’s Concerto for oboe and strings in D minor Op. 9, no. 2.  Ensemble Il Fondamento is directed by the oboe soloist, Paul Dombrecht.  

May 28, 2018.  Six composer and two pianists.  Six composers were born this week: Isaac Albéniz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold on May 29^th, the former in 1860, the latter in 1897.  Marin Marais, the Frenchman – on May 31^st of 1656, Georg Muffat – on June 1^st of 1653.  We didn’t mention Muffat’s nationality, as it’s hard to determine: he was born to a Scottish father and French mother in the Dutchy of Savoy, which back then was an independent state with Turin as its capital but now is part of France.  He studied in Paris for six years and then moved to Alsace, which, formerly part of the Holy Roman Empire, was conquered by the French King Louis XIII in 1639.  Even though under the formal control of France, most of Alsace was independent, German-speaking and Lutheran.  Later in his life, Muffat lived in Vienna, Prague, Salzburg and Italy.   He spent the last 20 years of his life in Passau, Bavaria.  We could call Muffat a Savoyard, a Frenchman or even a German, as some encyclopedias do.  Here’s his Concerto Grosso in G minor “Dulce Somnium” (Sweet Sleep), written by Muffat in 1701.  While in Rome, Muffat studied with Arcangelo Corelli, one of the early developers of the Concerto Grosso form.  It was practically unknown in the German lands till Muffat’s time.  The performers in this recording are the ensemble Musica Aeterna Bratislava under the direction of Peter Zajíček.

Also on June 1^st we celebrate the birthday of Mikhail Glinka, the first truly original Russian composer.  Glinka was born in 1804; at that time the Russian music scene, quite lively in St-Petersburg, was dominated by the Italians and Italian-influenced composers.  Two operas by Glinka, A Life for the Tsar (called Ivan Susanin during the Soviet period) and Ruslan and Lyudmila, changed it all.  Here’s the famous Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila.  The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra is led by its principal conductor of 50 years, Evgeny Mravinsky.  And finally, Sir Edward Elgar was born on June 2^nd of 1857.  As we confessed some years ago, we’re not as much in love with Sir Edward’s music as the British public seems to be.  Still, without a doubt Jacqueline du Pré’s performance of Elgar’s Cello concerto is a masterpiece, both in terms of music itself and the interpretation.  We’ll write more about it on Elgar’s next birthday.