June 5, 2017.  The Cliburn and the IMF.  The 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is entering its final round: the six finalists will be announced later today.  Every lover of classical music in this country is aware of the Cliburn, the premier piano competition organized by the late Van Cliburn in 1962, four years after he won the first Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow.  Many of the Cliburn winner and even participants who didn’t get top prizes went on to develop great careers: Nikolai Petrov, Radu Lupu, Rudolf Buchbinder, Cristina Oriz, Vladimir Viardo, Barry Douglas, Olga Kern, Aleksey Sultanov, to name just a few.  While the Cliburn is known worldwide, the International Music Foundation, a Chicago organization that presents high-quality music performances by emerging artists and supports music education in the area, isn’t well known even in its home city.  And yet, Chicagoans can listen live to some of the best young pianists who are today performing in Fort Worth: the flagship program of the IMF is the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts, and many of its “alumni” went on to participate in and win major music competitions.  This year, three such musicians, Daniel Hsu, Georgy Tchaidze and Rachel Kudo played at the Cliburn.  All three made it to the quarterfinals, while Hsu and Tchaidze went a step further, to the semifinals.  Today we’ll find out if they make it into the final round.  The 19-year-old Daniel Hsu is a native of San-Francisco.  At the age of 10 he was accepted to the Curtis Institute of Music where he studied with Garry Graffman and Eleanor Sokoloff.  He was named a Gilmore Young Artist in 2016 and a year later played a concert at Carnegie Hall.  In the preliminary round of the Cliburn, Daniel played Beethoven’s 31^st piano sonata.  Earlier this year, he played the same sonata at the Dame Myra Hess concert; you can listen to it here.  In the quarterfinals, he played Bach’s Chaconne from the violin Partita in d minor, BWV 1004, arranged for the piano by Ferruccio Busoni.  You can listen to it in a live recording, here.

Georgy Tchaidze was born in Saint Petersburg and studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Sergey Dorensky.  He then moved to Berlin where he continued his studies with Klaus Hellwig at the Berlin University of the Arts.  Georgy is a winner of several international competitions and performed across Europe, North America and China.  Here he’s collaborating with the German-Korean violinist Clara-Jumi Kang in Johannes Brahms’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano, Op. 78 in G Major.

May 29, 2017.  A different Les Six.  No less than six noted composers were born this week.  None of them arrived at the pinnacle of their profession, but all six are very interesting in one way or another.  Chronologically, the composers are: Georg Muffat, Marin Marais, Mikhail Glinka, Edward Elgar, Isaac Albéniz and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.  Muffat and Marais were born just three years apart: Muffat on June 1^st of 1653 and Marais – on May 31^st of 1656.  They even had the same teacher, Jean-Baptiste Lully.  In all other respects, their lives and their music were very different.  Muffat, of Scottish and French descent, led a peripatetic life.  Born in the Duchy of Savoy, he studied in Paris, then worked in Alsace before settling in Vienna.  From there he traveled to Prague and, eventually, Salzburg.  There he worked for the archbishop, as Mozart would 100 years later.  After a ten year stay in Salzburg he went to Rome where he met Arcangelo Corelli and many other famous musicians of the day.  He returned to Salzburg two years later but didn’t stay long.  He moved to Augsburg, Bavaria, and later – to Passau, where he lived the remaining years of his life.  He died in Passau, 50 years of age, on February 23^rd of 1704.  Marais, on the other hand, was born in Paris and died in Paris.  He went to the choir school of St Germain-l'Auxerrois, one of the best music schools in Paris.  He studied the viol with several teachers, one of whom was the famous player Sainte-Colombe (it’s said that Marais surpassed him after six months of study).  He was invited to play at the orchestra of the Opera, where Lully was the music director. 

May 22, 2017.  Wagner and Francaix.  Richard Wagner was born on this day in 1813.  For some years we’ve been following Wagner’s life by the milestones of his operas; last year we arrived at the end of the “Romantic operas” period, with Lohengrin, written in 1848 and its premier in 1850, being the last one.  Wagner’s genius had matured, and during the next several years he would produce not simply “operas” but “music dramas,” the term Wagner himself used to describe what he considered to be a “total work of art,” art that combines music and theater into one unified whole.  He started working on Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) in 1848 and continued for almost 26 years, completing the composition of the last (fourth) opera of the cycle, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) in 1874.  During that period, he also wrote two other masterpieces, Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.  Wagner intended the Ring to be performed as a cycle, as it was at the premier, in the course of several days in August of 1876 in Bayreuth.  The premier took place in a specially built theater, the old opera house being too small for Wagner’s orchestra.  Wagner’s old patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, even though his relationship with Wagner had soured throughout the years, was instrumental in financing the theater.  The premier was attended by royalty (Kaiser Wilhelm was there, as well as Ludwig, and Don Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil).  The leading musicians of the day were also present: Anton Bruckner, Edvard Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and of course Franz Liszt, Wagner’s father in law.  And so was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the major influences and, for a while, a good friend.

May 15, 2017.  Monteverdi at 450.  Claudio Monteverdi, a pioneering figure and one of the most important composers in the history of European music, was baptized on this day in 1567, making it Monteverdi’s 450^th anniversary.  For the past two years, we’ve celebrated the genius of Monteverdi with detailed entries (here and here).  While Monteverdi is rightly famous as one of the very first composers of opera and the most significant one among the early adopters of this new genre, the bulk of his musical output was in madrigals.  He published his first book of madrigals in 1587, when he was twenty years old and still living in Cremona, his place of birth.  The last four, Books 6 through 9, were published when Monteverdi was in Venice, having left Mantua in 1612.  (The last, ninth book, appeared in print posthumously).  As an example, here’s a madrigal from his first book, Baci soavi e cari (it’s performed by The Consort of Musicke with the soprano Emma Kirkby, Anthony Rooley conducting).  It’s nice but rather conventional.  Considering that both Palestrina (d. 1594) and Orlando di Lasso, who died the same year, were still alive and writing great music, and that Gesualdo was at the peak of his creative power, this is not a very memorable achievement.  Compare it, for example, with Orlando’s amazing Carmina crhomatico from Prophetiae Sibyllarum, composed years earlier (here; Ensemble De Labyrintho is conducted by Walter Testolin).  Monteverdi’s later motets are very different.  Consider, for example, the second motet, Hor che 'l ciel e la terra (Now that the sky, earth and wind are silent, after a sonnet by Petrarch) from Book 8 (here, with Concerto Italiano directed by Rinaldo Alessandrini).  It’s operatic in style, with dramatic scenes following serene episodes.  Monteverdi himself called it Stile concitato (agitated style) and it certainly is. 

May 8, 2017.    A fascinating life of a little-known composer.  A Russian-French-American composer, an early Futurist, Arthur Lourié was born on May 14th of 1891 in a small town of Propoisk, now in Belarus.  Half of the population of the town was Jewish, as was Arthur’s family, though they were reasonably well off as his father was an engineer.  In 1899 they moved to Odessa.  In 1909 Arthur moved to St-Petersburg and entered the Conservatory where he studied composition with Alexander Glazunov (he never completed his studies and was mostly self-taught).  In 1914 Arthur converted to Catholicism and took the name of Arthur-Vincent Lourié, after his favorite painter, Vincent Van Gogh.  As part of the artistic elite, he became friends with the poet Anna Akhmatova and was the first to set her verse to music.  He also was an acquaintance of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Blok, and the writer Fyodor Sologub.  In 1914, following Marinetti’s example, Lourié, the painter Georgy Yakulov and the poet Benedikt Livshitz published the Russian version of the Futurist Manifesto, “We and the West.”  A year later he composed a “futurist” piece called Forms in the Air, which he dedicated to Picasso (you can listen to it here in the performance by the Italian pianist and composer Daniele Lombardi).  Extremely innovating, he also wrote several atonal and quarter-tone pieces, in some ways presaging Schoenberg.