This Week in Classical Music: January 1, 2024.  Happy New Year!

This Week in Classical Music: December 25, 2023.  Christmas.  We wish our listeners a Merry Christmas!  On this wonderful day, we won’t bother you with disquisitions and analyses but will present some Christmas music for your pleasure – and this joyful piece is perfect for the occasion.  It’s the first section of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, a cantata known for the initial words of the first chorus as Jauchzet, frohlocket! (Shout for joy, exult).  It was first performed on this day in 1734, in the morning, at St. Nicholas; and then in the afternoon, at St. Thomas in Leipzig: Bach, as Thomaskantor, was the music director of both churches and led both performances.  What we will hear is a recording made in January of 1987 by John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir and several prominent soloists, Anne-Sophie von Otter among them.  Enjoy and see you in 2024!

This Week in Classical Music: December 18, 2023.  Three Pianists.  During the last month, we were preoccupied with composers and completely ignored the performers, who bring their music to the public.  So today we bring you three wonderful pianists: Radu Lupu, a Romanian, Mitsuko Uchida, born in Japan, and András Schiff, a British-Hungarian.  All three belong to the same generation: Lupu was born in 1945 (on November 30th), Uchida in 1948 (on December 20th), and Schiff – in 1953, on December 21st.   Uchida and Schiff are still performing, Lupu died on April 17th of last year. 

Radu Lupu is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of his time.  He studied in Moscow with Heinrich Neuhaus, who also taught Richter and Gilels.  In the three years from 1966 to 1969, he won three major piano competitions, the Cliburn, the Enescu, and the Leeds, and embarked on an international career with successful concerts in London.  Though he played all major composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, he was most closely associated with the music of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms.  Here is Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat major, D. 935, no. 2 from a legendary 1982 Decca recording of Schubert’s Impromptus D. 899 and D.935. 

Lupu probably didn’t need any competition wins for his tremendous talent to be noticed by the public and the critics.  Mitsuko Uchida didn’t need them either: all she got from competing in the majors was second place in the 1975 Leeds (a solid Dmitry Alekseyev won, and Schiff shared the third prize).  Uchida’s family moved to Vienna when she was 12.  She studied there at the Academy of Music (Wilhelm Kempff was one of her teachers).  In the 1980s Uchida moved to London and has lived there since.  In 2009, she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the second-highest British award.  Uchida is rightfully famous for her Mozart, but her repertoire is very broad, from Haydn to Schoenberg.  Here’s Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in F major, K.332, and here – one of the 12 Etudes by Debussy, no. 3, Pour les Quartes. 

András Schiff fared even worse than Uchida in international competitions: in addition to third prize at the Leeds which we mentioned above, all he got was a shared fourth prize at the 1974 Tchaikovsky competition (the 18-year-old Andrei Gavrilov was the winner; a talented pianist, he had an interesting but brief career, which in its significance could not be compared to Schiff’s).  András Schiff was born into a Jewish family in Budapest.  He studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music there (György Kurtág was one of his professors and Zoltán Kocsis, who studied there at the same time, became a friend).  He also took summer classes with Tatiana Nikolayeva and Bella Davidovich.  Since the late 1980s he, like Uchida, has been living in London, and like her, was knighted (in 2014).  Schiff is one of the most admired pianists of his generation; he feels comfortable in many venues: he plays recitals and concertos, loves ensemble playing, and often accompanies singers.  His Bach is wonderful, but so are his Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and Schumann.  He often played the music of his fellow Hungarian Bela Bartók but is very critical of the current political situation in his country of birth and even said that he’ll never set foot there.  Here’s András Schiff playing Bach’s French Suite no. 4, recorded in 1991.  This recording was made in Reitstadel, a former animal feed storage barn built in the 14th century and in our time converted into a concert hall.  It’s located in the Bavarian town of Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz. 

This Week in Classical Music: December 11, 2023.  Beethoven and Berlioz.  On December 16^th we’ll celebrate Ludwig van Beethoven’s 253^rd anniversary.  As we thought of it, we remembered what happened on this date three years ago when the world was supposed to celebrate a monumental date, Beethoven’s 250^th.  It didn’t happen, as our musical organizations couldn’t bring themselves to honor a white male composer – that was the year of Critical Race Theory run amok, DEI ruling the world, and sanity running for cover  On the website Music Theory’s White Racial Frace, Philip Ewell, a black musicologist, published an article titled “Beethoven Was an Above Average Composer – Let’s Leave It at That” which contained a sentence: “But Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is no more a masterwork than Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells.”  Alex Ross, our most important public music critic, felt compelled to respond to this nonsense with an article of his own, publishing “Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music” in the New Yorker magazine.  The article's subtitle was: “The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.”  In the New York Times, Anthony Tomassini, the chief classical music critic who is no longer with the newspaper, wrote an article about the harm of the blind, behind-the-curtain orchestral auditions.  Those were widely accepted a quarter century ago to avoid any racial or gender biases, but Tomassini argued that it hinders the racial diversification of our orchestras: “The audition process should take into account race, gender and other factors.”  We wonder if he still thinks that way, or was that just intellectual cowardice, an attempt to cover his hide: after all, for decades he was toiling in a field that purportedly turned out to be racist through and through, and in all these years it never occurred to him to assess it in racial terms.  All of this was just three years ago.  This major burst of insanity seems to be behind us and hopefully will dissipate completely, sooner rather than later.  Do we need to add a disclaimer that we are totally against any racial and gender discrimination, whether in music or any other cultural or social sphere?  We hope not. 

Back to Beethoven.  We looked up our library, and it turns out that while we have most of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, we don’t have the sonata no. 19, a short and misnumbered piece, easy enough to be well known to practically all young pianists.  Beethoven composed it sometime in 1797, about the same time as his sonatas nos. 3 and 4, but it wasn’t published till 1805 and thus acquired its late opus and number. Here it is, performed by Alfred Brendel in a 1992 recording. 

Also, on this day 220 years ago Hector Berlioz was born in La Côte-Saint-André, a small town halfway between Lyon and Grenoble.  Berlioz was one of the greatest composers France ever produced, and a very unusual one at that: he didn’t follow any established schools and didn’t leave any behind.  We’ve written about Berlioz many times, and he requires a separate entry, so for now, here is his symphony cum viola concerto Harold in Italy (parts 1, Harold in the mountains,2, March of the pilgrims, 3, Serenade of an Abruzzo mountaineer, and 4, Orgy of bandits).  The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin is playing the viola, with Sir Colin Davis conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. 

This Week in Classical Music: December 4, 2023.  Ernst Toch and more.  Erns Toch, the Jewish-Austrian composer, was born on December 7^th of 1887 in Leopoldstadt, a poor, mostly Jewish area in Vienna.  Toch was one of a group of Austrian and German composers whose lives were upended by the rise of Nazism (Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Karl Weigl, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gál, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Berthold Goldschmidt, all Jewish, mostly forgotten except of course for Schoenberg, all talented if to a different degree, had their lives broken in 1933).  One thing we find interesting is the ease with which they moved from Austria to Germany.  These were two very different empires, one, declining, ruled by the peace-seeking Emperor Franz Joseph from Vienna, another – very much on the ascent, economically, politically and militarily, ruled by the arrogant and insecure Keiser Wilhelm II.  But musicians thought nothing of moving from one country to another, from Vienna to Berlin and back, conducting in Hamburg or Leipzig one year and then returning to Austria, teaching at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik and then at Universität für Musik in Vienna.  And they didn’t need permission to work as long as positions were available.  Musically, the pre-WWI Austria and Germany were one space, even more so than they are now.

Toch was at his most productive in the 1920s, when he wrote the Concerto for Cello and Chamber Orchestra, Bunte Suite, two short operas, many chamber pieces and piano music.  Here’s Bunte Suite, whose sophisticated humor reminds us of the music of another Austrian composer, Ernst Krenek.  The Suite is performed by the Karajan Academy of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Cornelius Meister conducting.  You can read about Toch’s life after Hitler assumed power in last year’s post.

Jean Sibelius was also born this week, on December 8^th of 1865.  We have to admit that we’re not big fans of the Finnish composer, but his one-movement Symphony no. 7, is a masterpiece.  Even though it’s his shortest, about 23 minutes long depending on performance, it took Sibelius 10 years (from 1914 to 1924) to complete.   During that time, he managed to complete two more symphonies, nos. 5 and 6.  Here’s the Seventh, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

While Sibelius may not be one of our favorites, Olivier Messiaen, born on December 10^th of 1908, clearly is.  We’ve written about him on several occasions and will get back to the great French master soon.  Also this week: Henryk Górecki, a Polish composer whose minimalist symphonies became very popular with audiences worldwide, born on December 6^th of 1933, and César Franck, the composer of one of the best violin sonatas, on December 10^th of 1822.  

This Week in Classical Music: November 27, 2023.  Maria Callas.  We’re a bit early, but next Sunday is the 100^th anniversary of Maria Callas, La Divina, as she was known worldwide: she was born on December 2^nd of 1923.  It feels very strange that’s already been a century since her birth, as her presence is felt as strongly today as on the day she died in 1977: her instantly recognizable voice could be heard on classical music radio stations, on streaming services, on YouTube and (still) on CDs.  The means have changed – back then it was LPs that people were buying and listening to – but she’s as adored as ever.  Her Casta Diva alone has been heard on YouTube about 35 million times.  Callas was so closely associated with Italian opera – Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini – that she seemed Italian, but in fact was American, of Greek descent.  She married an Italian, Giovanni Battista Meneghini, and, while they were married used his name with her own as Maria Meneghini Callas.  She moved to Greece in 1940 and studied voice at the Athen Conservatory.  There, she sang in the opera for the first time, appearing as Tosca in 1942.  She returned to the US in 1945 but soon left for Italy.  Tulio Serafin, the famous conductor who coached generations of singers, became her mentor.  In 1947, at the Arena of Verona, he conducted Callas in her first Italian role, as La Gioconda in Ponchielli’s eponymous opera.  Her appearance was tremendously successful and brought her career to a different level.  During that time she often sang in the rarely produced bel canto operas, mostly because she was the only one who could sing these very difficult roles.  She was exceptional as Donizetti’s Anna Boleyn, as Imogene and Norma in Bellini’s Il Pirata and Norma, Lucia in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Lady Macbeth and Violetta in Verdi's Macbeth and Traviata, and, of course, as Tosca.  For three years she sang in smaller theaters, then, in 1950, she appeared, as Aida in La Scala.  Even though her relationship with the management was troubled, in the 1950s La Scala became Callas’s home.  Neither did Callas have a rapport with Rudolph Bing, the manager of the Met, where she premiered only in 1956.  She had a reputation as a temperamental diva, but many of her colleagues thought that it was her exactness that made her difficult to work with.  Later in the 1950s, she started experiencing problems with her voice, which may have contributed to her sometimes-erratic behavior.  Some think that it was the loss of weight that affected her voice; in the early 1950s Callas was rather heavy, but then went on a diet and lost about 80 pounds.  By the late 1950s, her vibrato was too heavy, sometimes the voice was forced and one could hear pronounced harshness, even though other performances were still excellent.  Overall, Callas sang at the top of her form for just 10 years but what glorious years they were!  Even her detractors, and there are some, recognize that the interpretations of the roles she sang were incomparable, it’s her voice that some people have problems with.  We think that at its peak her voice was uniquely beautiful, and she created exceptional operatic characters that in other interpretations seem dull.  Even the often mediocre music (and Italian operas are full of it) sounded exciting when she sang.  There are none even close to La Divina on the opera stage today, and we don’t expect to hear anybody of that rank anytime soon.