October 24, 2016.  From Scarlatti to Berio.  Four wonderful composers were born this week, three Italians and one Frenchman.  Domenico Scarlatti, one of our all-time favorites, was born on October 26^th of 1685 in Naples.  He probably studied music with his father, Alessandro Scarlatti, a famous opera composer.  These days we know Domenico as the author of 555 clavier sonatas, most written while Scarlatti was serving at the courts of Spain and Portugal, but very few of them were published during his lifetime.  His first publication, 30 Essercizi didn’t happen till 1738.  The “exercises” are actually sonatas, which were later catalogued under different numbers, first by Alessandro Longo at the beginning of the 20^th century, then later, by Ralph Kirkpatrick and others.  Here’s the very first sonata in this cycle, Sonata in d Minor, K 1/L 366.  It’s performed by Vladimir Bakk, a talented pianist, forgotten in his homeland, whose career never took off in his adopted country.  Bakk was born in Moscow in 1944.  He studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Yakov Zak, a famous pianist and pedagogue.  In 1972 he won the Montevideo piano competition, and made several recordings with Melodia.  It’s not clear what happened but at some point he fell into disfavor with Philharmonia, the main concert organization: he was banned from playing abroad and even in the larger cities of the Soviet Union (the retelling of his concert in a small town of Uralsk is hilarious and sad at the same time).  The circumstances are not clear, but he was imprisoned twice.  Bakk emigrated to Israel in 1990 and moved to the United States two years later.  Even though his playing was lauded by the likes of Vladimir Horowitz, Martha Argerich and Vladimir Feltsman, his career never took off.  He died in 2007.  You can judge the quality of Bakk’s playing for yourself with this little jewel of Scarlatti.

Niccolò Paganini, the great Italian violinist, was born on October 27^th of 1782 in Genoa.  His best known composition is a cycle of 24 Caprices, which were written between 1802 and 1817.  Each Caprice is a devilishly difficult etude, emphasizing certain technical aspect of violin playing.  Here is Salvatore Accardo, one of the greatest interpreters of Paganini’s music, playing Caprice no. 3 in e minor, “Octaves.”

October 17, 2016.  Liszt and Marenzio.  Several composers were born this week.  The most famous of them is Franz Liszt, born on October 22^nd of 1811.  We love him, despite his somewhat diminished reputation (these days he’s performed less frequently than, for example, in the mid-20th century).  We’ve written about him many times, even publishing several short articles on his piano cycle, Années de Pèlerinage.  So this time we’ll just play some of his music – Piano concerto no. 1, for example.  It’s said that Liszt composed the theme of the first movement in 1830, when he was 19, but completed the concerto almost 20 years later, in 1849.  He premiered it six years later, in 1855, in Weimar, with an orchestra conducted by his good friend, Hector Berlioz.  (Liszt, the greatest piano virtuoso of his – and probably of any – time, stopped concertizing around 1847, settling in Weimar, but still gave occasional performances).   Here it is, in a brilliant, exhilarating performance by Sviatoslav Richter, with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the London Symphony orchestra.  The recording was made in 1961.

Liszt is not the only composer born this week.  We’ve never written about Luca Marenzio, an Italian Renaissance composer famous for his madrigals.  Marenzio was born on October 18^th of 1553, or at least that’s what the musicologists surmise.  To place him within the timeline of Italian music, Marenzio was one year older than Giovanni Gabrieli and about eight years younger than Luzzasco Luzzaschi about whom we wrote just last week. 

October 10, 2016.  An Italian composer with an unusually sounding name, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, was born in Ferrara around 1545; he lived there practically all his life.  Luzzaschi is probably more famous as a teacher and a keyboard player, but he was also a fine composer.  He studied music and the organ, playing at an early age and became an organist at the court of the Duke Alfonso II d’Este at 16; he was promoted to the first organist at 19.  During the second half of the 16^th century, the court was a glorious place, Duke Alfonso being a major patron of arts.  Luzzaschi remained the first organist for the rest of his career, but his duties were broadened: he composed, took charge of the court orchestra and trained young musicians (Ippolito Fiorini was formally the maestro di cappella at the court, but his duties seem to have been more administrative).  Sometime around 1570 Luzzaschi took over the Duke’s chamber music concerts.  The concerts were organized as “musica secreta” (secret music) for a small and very exclusive audience; the repertory of these concerts was kept secret, but it’s assumed that some of it was written by Luzzaschi himself.  During these concerts, Luzzaschi usually played on a keyboard (by that time he was considered one of the finest keyboard players around); some instrumental music was performed as well, but the main attraction was a group of highly skilled women singers, called Concerto delle Donne.  An ensemble of female voices was highly unusual for that time.  The initial Concerto consisted of several very talented but amateur singers, but eventually professional ones were hired as well.  By the 1580s Concerto started performing in public and their fame spread all over Italy.  Apparently, every singer in the ensemble was a virtuoso, and there was no group of equal quality in all of the country; Luzzaschi has to be given credit as their music director.  Much of the music performed by the Concerto was written by Luzzaschi, but they also performed madrigals written for them by Carlo Gesualdo, Lodovico Agostini and many other noted composers.

October 3, 2016.  Schütz et. al.  Three famous composers were born this week: Heinrich Schütz, probably the most important German composer of the “pre-Bach” era, on October 8^th of 1585; Giuseppe Verdi, the greatest Italian opera composer of the 19^th century, on October 9^th of 1813, and Camille Saint-Saëns, a very popular Frenchman, also born on October 9^th, but of 1835.  We've  written about all three many times, for example here, here and here, so today we’ll illustrate their lives through several compositions.  Schütz worked during a transitional period: he was born when the greatest Renaissance composers such a s Palestrina or Orlando di Lasso were still active; when he died in 1672, Baroque was all the rage.  Schütz was a traditionalist.  He was deeply influenced by Giovanni Gabrieli, with whom he studied in Venice from 1608 through 1612.  It so happened that the young Schütz became a choir-boy at the court of Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel, a generous patron of the arts.  At the time, Italy was the musical center of the world, and the Landgrave used to send some of his more gifted musicians to study there, providing them with a generous stipend.  Early in the 17^th century, Gabrieli was one of the most famous living composers in Europe, so Landgrave sent his talented young charge to study in Venice.  The plan was for Schütz to stay there for two years, but Gabrieli was so impressed with his pupil’s progress that he asked Moritz to allow Schütz to stay in Venice another year, “since he is doing so well not only in composition but also in organ playing,” as Gabrieli put it.  Even though Gabrieli was almost 30 years older than Schütz, it’s clear that the teacher and the pupil developed very close ties: in his will Gabrieli bequeathed his rings to Schütz.  Gabrieli died in 1612, and Schütz left Venice soon after.  Gabrieli was famous for his polichoral works, and here is Schütz’s glorious Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?, from Symphoniae sacrae (Book 3), written in a similar style.  Book 3 of his “Sacred symphonies” was published in Dresden in 1650.   English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir are led by John Eliot Gardiner.

September 26, 2016.  Brahms’s Klavierstücke, op. 76.  In the past we published a series of articles about Brahms’s late piano works: 7 Fantasien, op. 116 (here), 3 Intermezzi op. 117 (here), 6 Klavierstucke op. 118 (here), and 4 Klavierstucke op. 119 (here).  Today we’ll publish an article on a piano set he created earlier, sometime between 1871 and 1878, titled 8 Klavierstücke, op. 76.  We have two sets of recordings, one made by the English pianist Sam Armstrong, another – by the American, Maya Hartman.   ♫

The Eight Klavierstücke, op. 76 was a marked departure for Brahms in the realm of piano music—not since the composition of the Ballades in the mid-1850s had he composed a set of miniatures. The sonata had long since disappeared; the only three Brahms left to us were products of his youth. The piano music of his middle period was dominated by large-scale variation sets. The last of these sets, the Paganini Variations, was also his last work for solo piano before the composition of the 8 Klavierstücke in the late 1870s, a space of fifteen years. Viewed as a part of Brahms’s entire output for the piano, the Klavierstücke and the contemporaneous 2 Rhapsodies, op. 79 form the transition from those Classically-oriented pieces of his youth and middle period, to the deeply introspective Romanticism of his last works for piano, namely, opp. 116-19. With the Klavierstücke, lengthy discourses are abandoned in favor of a greater economy of means, a trend that pervaded most of Brahms’s late music, even in large-scale works, in which fewer and fewer notes were forced to bear an ever increasing portion of a piece’s emotional weight. Concomitantly, there is also a greater emphasis on motivic development, a feature really of all of Brahms’s music, but now driven to even more exacting and imaginative lengths.

September 19, 2016.  From the 18^th century to the 20^th.  One of the most important French composers of the baroque era and two major composers of the 20^th were born this week.  , who followed Lully to become the leading French opera composer, was born on September 25^th of 1683 in Dijon, the capital of Burgundy.  Little is known about Rameau’s early years: records are few, and he didn’t like to talk about it either.  His father was an organist, and Jean-Philippe was taught music from an early age.  When he was around 18, he was sent to Milan, to study music, but the visit was short.  In 1706, after working as an organist in several churches in the provinces, Rameau went to Paris, where he found a similar position at the Collège (now Lycée) Louis-le-Grand, a very prestigious institution (one of the pupils there was Voltaire, who would later collaborate with Rameau on several operatic and theatrical productions).  In 1709 he returned to Dijon to succeed his father as the organist at the church of Notre-Dame.  He didn’t stay there long, though: in a couple of years he moved to Lyon, and then to Clermont.  All this was transitory, until, in June of 1722, at the age of 38 but still practically unknown, he arrived in Paris, where he would live for the rest of his life.  What made him famous was not his music but theoretical treaties on harmony, which were published that year.  Four years later he wrote “New System of Music Theory” which established him as a major theorist not just in France, but in all of Europe.  Even though he had already published a book of harpsichord music, he was still unknown as a composer. Rameau’s first composition that Parisians ever heard was an inconspicuous incidental music, written for a play staged at a temporary theater during the annual fair in Saint-Germain.  The second book for the harpsichord appeared in 1725, and the third, Nouvelles suites de pieces de clavecin, two years later.  Nouvelles suites, which included a piece called Les sauvages (here), became popular.