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English: Ottorino Respighi, photography by Madeline Grimoldi at 1935 Deutsch: Ottorino Respighi, Fotografie von Madeline Grimoldi um 1935 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Ancient Airs and Dances (Italian: Antiche arie e danze) is a set of three orchestral suites by Italian composerOttorino Respighi. In addition to being a renowned composer and conductor, Respighi was also a notable musicologist. His interest in Italian music of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries led him to compose works inspired by the music of these periods.
Suite No. 3 (1932)
Suite No. 3 was composed in 1932. It differs from the previous two suites in that it is arranged for strings only and somewhat melancholy in overall mood. It is based on lute songs by Besard, a piece for baroque guitar by Ludovico Roncalli, and lute pieces by Santino Garsi da Parma and additional anonymous composers.
Italiana (Anonymous: Italiana (Fine sec.XVI) – Andantino)
Arie di corte (Jean-Baptiste Besard: Arie di corte (Sec.XVI) – Andante cantabile – Allegretto – Vivace – Slow with great expression – Allegro vivace – Vivacissimo – Andante cantabile)
Siciliana (Anonymous: Siciliana (Fine sec.XVI) – Andantino)
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, is a piano concerto composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1830. Chopin wrote the piece before he had finished his formal education, at around 20 years of age. It was first performed on 17 March 1830, in Warsaw, Poland, with the composer as soloist. It was the second of his piano concertos to be published (after the Piano Concerto No. 1), and so was designated as “No. 2”, even though it was written first.
In the finale, the violins and violas are at one point instructed to play col legno (with the wood of the bow).
Analysis
Kevin Bazzana states “Chopin’s concertos – indeed, all of his works in classical forms – have always suffered from comparisons with those of Mozart and Beethoven. It is an old cliché that the larger classical forms he had studied at the Warsaw Conservatory were incompatible with his imagination. As early as 1852, writers such as Liszt remarked that Chopin “did violence to his genius every time he sought to fetter it by rules.” But he was not trying to re-interpret the classical concerto. He was working in a different tradition called stile brillante, made fashionable by such virtuoso pianist-composers as Weber and Hummel. Chopin borrowed from their example a conception of the concerto as a loosely organized showcase for a virtuoso soloist, as opposed to a more balanced, cohesive and densely argued musical drama in the classical vein.
There is no denying that Chopin’s concertos betray a youthful want of formal sophistication but, as one observer wrote, they “linger in the memory for the poetry of their detail rather than the strength of their structures.” Those details are so bold and colourful, so imaginative and personal, that the concertos have become the only large-scale early works of Chopin to retain a place in the repertoire.
From Rimsky-Korsakov’s autobiography “My Musical Life“, pages 245-46:
“While making up the programs of the Russian Musical Society, [Eduard] Napravnik addressed an inquiry to me, as to which of my compositions I should like to hear performed at these concerts. I indicated the recently written “Skazka” (Fairy-tale) and gave the score to Napravnik. Shortly afterwards the latter proposed that I conduct the piece myself. I consented. At one of the earlier concerts of that season the “Fairy-tale” was placed on the program. I conducted. The performance would have been quite successful if the concert-master, Pikkel (then growing morbidly nervous) , had not jumped out, without any reason, at the entrance of the violins divisi towards the end of the piece and by so doing confused the other violinists. However, the violins speedily recovered, and the mistake had hardly been noticed by the audience. Save for this episode, I was pleased with the performance as well as with the piece itself, which sounded colourful and brilliant. In general “Skazka” undoubtedly recalls in style “Snyegoorochka”, as having been composed simultaneously with it. Strange to this day hearers grasp with difficulty the true meaning of the “Fairy-tale’s” program: they seek in it a chained up tom-cat walking around an oak tree, and all the fairy tale episodes which were jotted down by Pushkin in the prologue to his “Ruslan and Lyudmila” and which served as the starting point for my Fairy-tale. In his brief enumeration of the elements of the Russian fairy-tale epos that make up the stories of the miraculous tom-cat, Pushkin says
“One fairy tale I do recall, I’ll tell it now to one and all,”
and then narrates the fairy-tale of “Ruslan and Lyudmila.” But I narrate my own musical fairy-tale. By my very narrating the musical fairy-tale and quoting Pushkin’s prologue I show that my fairy-tale is, in the first place, Russian, and secondly, magical, as if it were one of the miraculous tom-cat’s fairy-tales that I had overheard and retained in my memory. Yet I had not at all set out to depict in it all that Pushkin had jotted down in the prologue, any more than he puts all of it into his fairy-tale of “Ruslan.” Let everyone seek in my fairy-tale only the episodes that may appear before his imagination, but let him not insist that I include everything enumerated in Pushkin’s prologue. The endeavor to discern in my fairy-tale the tom cat that had related this same fairy-tale is groundless, to say the least. The two above-quoted lines of Pushkin are printed in italics in the program of my “Fairy-tale”, to distinguish them from the other verses and direct thereby the auditor’s attention to them. But this has been understood neither by the audiences nor the critics, who have interpreted my “Skazka” in all ways crooked and awry and who, in my time, as usual, of course, did not approve of it. On the whole, however, the “Fairy-tale” won sufficient success with the public.”
Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky – Romeo and Juliet, fantasy-overture for orchestra in B minor, 1880. Maestro Valery Gergiev with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Numerous composers have responded to Shakespeare’s timeless drama of forbidden and youthful love, but Tchaikovsky’s response (along with Berlioz’s and Prokofiev’s) is at the top of the list. It is the only one of the three to be intended as a number in a symphony concert, and, hence is by default the most famous of the lot.
Tchaikovsky, a lawyer, was still developing as a composer at age 29 when Mily Balakirev (self-appointed father figure to Russian composers) persuaded him to write an orchestral work on the subject of the “star-cross’d lovers.” Balakirev outlined the form, planned the keys, and even suggested some of the actual music. After the 1870 premiere, he convinced Tchaikovsky to revise it. The work’s success in this form did much to transform the composer’s tendency toward crippling doubt into useful self-criticism. (Not that the transformation was ever total; Tchaikovsky suffered bouts of depression and self-doubt throughout his career.) The composer revised it again in 1880; this version is almost universally the one played. While the final version is probably the best one, the 1869 text is also a fine work and very much worth hearing. The earlier version begins with a charming tune that carries elements of the great love theme. In the first and second revisions Tchaikovsky eliminated this and replaced it with the benedictory theme representing Friar Laurence. The effect of this change on the overture’s structure is large. The first version seems to begin with Juliet still in a relatively childlike state, but with the potential for the great love present in the disguised premonitions of the love theme. The focus is, therefore, on the development of the drama as it unfolds. The later versions, beginning as it were with a prayer, seem to invite the hearer to look back on a tragedy that has already happened. Both versions proceed identically through depictions of the clashes between the houses of Montague and Capulet, and then unveil the great love music. After that, though, Tchaikovsky’s original idea seems to this writer to be superior: There is a great development, fugal-sounding and allowing for contrapuntal conflict based on the overture’s main rhythms and themes. It is tremendously exciting, more so than the music which replaced it. Justification for dropping it might be made along the lines that the original version has too much dramatic weight and overshadows the rest of the music. The main differences thereafter are in details of scoring, and in the finale, which in the original version is much too curt.
It is often instructive to see what a great composer has done at two different times with the same ideas and material. Whether or not it has greater musical merit, Tchaikovsky’s blessing of his final version served to ensure that it is the one that prevailed, and in that form it is accepted as one of the greatest programmatic pieces in the symphonic repertoire. The yearning love theme, in particular, is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest melodies ever written, while the exciting fight music and Tchaikovsky’s unfailingly clear and imaginative orchestration carry the listener through with hardly a misstep. But the original version is not far behind it in musical worth; it should be given more frequent revivals, if only for the sake of hearing the great fugato passage described above.
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (Op. 55): Berliner Philharmoniker
Symphony No. 3 in E flat major (Op. 55), is a landmark musical work marking the full arrival of the composer’s “middle-period,” a series of unprecedented large scale works of emotional depth and structural rigor. The symphony is widely regarded as a mature expression of the classical style of the late eighteenth century that also exhibits defining features of the romantic style that would hold sway in the nineteenth century. The Third was begun immediately after the Second, completed in August 1804, and first performed 7 April 1805. Instrumentation The symphony is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B flat, 2 bassoons, 3 horns in E flat, 2 trumpets in E flat and C, timpani in E flat and B flat, and strings. Form The piece consists of four movements: 1. Allegro con brio 2. Marcia funebre: Adagio assai in C minor 3. Scherzo: Allegro vivace 4. Finale: Allegro molto
Sayaka Shoji (庄司 紗矢香 Shōji Sayaka?, born 30 January 1983) is a Japanese classical violinist. She is the first Japanese and youngest winner (after Lenuta Ciulei) at the Paganini Competition in Genoa in 1999.
Zubin Mehta has been her strong supporter. When Shoji auditioned for him in 2000, he immediately changed his schedule in order to make her first recording with the Israel Philharmonic possible in the following month, then invited her to perform with Bavarian State Opera and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Sayaka Shoji records with Deutsche Grammophon and performs on the 1729 “Recamier” Stradivarius on loan from Ryuzo Ueno, Honorary Chairman, Ueno Fine Chemicals Industry, Ltd.
Portrait of Wilhelm Furtwängler by Emil Orlik (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Widely considered to be the greatest recording of Schumann’s 4th symphony ever made, it is quite fortunate then that the original audio was quite good to begin with. I focused on reducing the harsh edge on the violins, trying to make them sound more natural, and giving a more rounded sound to the orchestra. The result is fantastic.
Audio Restored and Remastered by Rudolf Ondrich, 12-13 October 2012.
The jewish coductor Daniel Barenboim aptly said: “The music is bigger than the man”. Anyone who dismisses Wagner’s music on the basis of his views as a man, is missing something truly wonderful.
I’ve chosen Karajan’s version because he gets the tempo and the feel just right. Not too much vibratro here, which other conductors sometimes bring to the piece, making it sound too overwrought. He gets it spot on. A touch of vibrato, but he let’s the notes speak for themselves, whilst the languid tempo evokes a mystical atmosphere to the piece.
Wagner was forced to abandon his position as conductor of the Dresden Opera in 1849, as there was a warrant posted for his arrest for his participation in the unsuccessfulMay Revolution. He left his wife, Minna, in Dresden, and fled to Zürich. There, in 1852, he met the wealthy silk trader Otto Wesendonck. Wesendonck became a supporter of Wagner and bankrolled the composer for several years. Wesendonck’s wife, Mathilde, became enamoured of the composer. Though Wagner was working on his epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, he found himself intrigued by the legend of Tristan and Iseult.
The re-discovery of mediæval Germanic poetry, including Gottfried von Strassburg‘s version of Tristan, the Nibelungenlied and Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival, left a large impact on the German Romantic movements during the mid-19th century. The story of Tristan and Isolde is a quintessential romance of the Middle Ages and theRenaissance. Several versions of the story exist, the earliest dating to the middle of the 12th century. Gottfried’s version, part of the “courtly” branch of the legend, had a huge influence on later German literature.[3]
Wilhelm Furtwängler (timbre Berlin-Ouest / Briefmarke Westberlin) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Widely considered to be the greatest recording of Schumann’s 4th symphony ever made, it is quite fortunate then that the original audio was quite good to begin with. I focused on reducing the harsh edge on the violins, trying to make them sound more natural, and giving a more rounded sound to the orchestra. The result is fantastic.
Audio Restored and Remastered by Rudolf Ondrich, 12-13 October 2012.”
Herbert von Karajan was an Austrian orchestra and opera conductor. To the wider world he was perhaps most famously associated with the Berlin Philharmonic, of which he was principal conductor for 35 years. Although his work was not universally admired, he is generally considered to have been one of the greatest conductors of all time, and he was a dominant figure in European classical music from the 1960s until his death. Part of the reason for this was the large number of recordings he made and their prominence during his lifetime. By one estimate he was the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million records.
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CIDSE - TOGETHER FOR GLOBAL JUSTICE (CHANGE FOR THE PLANET -CARE FOR THE PROPLE-ACCESS THIS NEW WEBSITE FROM EUZICASA)
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