It's all about the classical music composers and their works from the last 400 years and much more about music. Hier erfahren Sie alles über die klassischen Komponisten und ihre Meisterwerke der letzten vierhundert Jahre und vieles mehr über Klassische Musik.
Ivan Fischer improves 'Happy Birthday'. Picture: Medici TV/Verbier Festival
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM London
Iván Fischer masterfully rewrites the world’s most famous ditty. Behold, the new-and-improved ‘Happy Birthday’…
Whether your concert stage is an open-plan office space, a packed-out pub or even the now-dreaded mass Zoom call, likelihood is you’re more than familiar with the song ‘Happy Birthday’.
But did you ever think it could be improved like this?
Hungarian composer and conductor Iván Fischer decided he had truly had enough of what is, in his words, “a very poor melody”.
‘Happy Birthday’ is, according to Fischer, ripe for a rewrite. Sitting at a piano during the Verbier Festival, the founder and music director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra worked out an ‘improved’ version of the well-known tune.
“I want to do something about this melody, Happy Birthday,” the great maestro says. “Everybody sings it all over the world, it’s maybe the most well-known melody.”
But, Fischer argues, the melodic accents are all in the wrong place. Rather than the emphasis being on ‘you’, the recipient of the birthday wishes, the way the song is written means the accent lands on ‘to’.
The maestro’s next bit of beef is that the third line goes too high.
“Why does it go up?” Fischer asks. “Nobody can even sing it, it’s always out of tune. There’s no reason to go up.”
And so, he shows us how it’s really done (watch above).
“It would be so much more singable,” Fischer proclaims of his new version. “And the melody is better, it makes better turns. Everything would be better. So, I hope we can change it all over the world, and then people will sing it differently.”
If anyone fancies starting a petition, you’ve got our vote
Classical music lovers have been sharing their sheer joy at being back in front of live music as lock-down restrictions ease and venues open – here are the moments that sum it up best.
Classical music and opera lovers have described feelings of “pure joy” and being “ecstatic” to attend live music once again, as venues started opening their doors to audiences yesterday (Monday 17 May).
With many people able to enjoy classical music live and in-person for the first time since March 2020, venues around the country marked the easing of corona virus lock down restrictions by welcoming socially-distanced audiences tentatively back to COVID-safe seats.
And audiences that returned, expressed their gratitude and joy at being back in front of live performers and their beautiful music. At the Royal Opera House, impromptu applause erupted during the first tuning note, and at London’s Wigmore Hall cellist Guy Johnston, who was in audience, tweeted what an “absolute joy” it was to see so many people back in the hall.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Classic FM’s Orchestra in the Midlands, has shared joy at returning to Birmingham’s Symphony Hall tomorrow (Wednesday 19 May) and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Classic FM’s Orchestra in North-West England, excitedly follows suit the next day.
Read more: Wigmore Hall to reopen to audiences with special 120th anniversary festival... /
Cello prodigy Yo-Yo Ma plays for President J.F. Kennedy. Picture: The Kennedy Center/YouTube
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM London
In 1962, Yo-Yo Ma played for President J.F. Kennedy, and the world heard his playing for the first time.
Here’s the moment a late great of the music world introduced a young star onto the stage, with little idea of the beloved, cultural figurehead he would become.
In a video published by The Kennedy Center, American conductor and TV host for the evening, Leonard Bernstein introduces seven-year-old cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his 11-year-old sister Yeou-Cheng Ma, to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower during An American Pageant of the Arts in November 1962.
The purpose of the telecast was to raise funds for the National Cultural Center, which was founded under Eisenhower’s administration and nurtured under Kennedy’s.
A smattering of applause is heard as the young sibling duo walk to centre stage, bow and take their seats.
Remarkably playing the entire thing from memory, Ma performs the first movement of French composer Jean-Baptiste Bréval’s Concertino No. 3 in A Major, in a piano-cello duet with his sister. Even as a child, Ma’s performances were imbued with a sense of peace and togetherness (watch below).
Introducing Ma, Bernstein celebrates the “double stream of art… flowing into and out of America”.
The great Mahler champion and West Side Story composer uses his speech to highlight “the attraction of our country to foreign artists, and scientists and thinkers, who have come not only to visit us, but often to join us as Americans, to become citizens of what to some has historically been the land of opportunity and to others the land of freedom.
“And in this great tradition, there has come to us, this year, a young man aged seven, bearing the name Yo-Yo Ma,” Bernstein continues.
Born in Paris, Ma was bathed in music from a young age – his mother, Marina Lu, a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, a violinist and professor of music at Nanjing National Central University.
Ma took up the violin, piano and viola from very young, but settled on cello aged four. From the age of five, he was already performing before audiences in France.
Two years later, Ma and his family moved to the United States. And this, it appears, was the first time Ma was seen on television after cellist Pablo Casals – who was also on the bill that night – brought the young star to the organisers’ attention.
Leonard Bernstein introduces seven-year-old Yo-Yo Ma. Picture: The Kennedy Center/YouTube
“Now, here’s a cultural image for you to ponder as you listen,” Bernstein continues. “A seven-year-old Chinese cellist, playing old French music, for his new American compatriots.
“Welcome Yo-Yo Ma, and Yeou-Cheng Ma.”
And so, a cultural icon was born. With 18 Grammy Awards under his belt, Ma is arguably the world’s most celebrated classical cellist and has recorded music from American bluegrass to traditional Chinese melodies. A United Nations Messenger of Peace, Ma has also become a humanitarian icon and champion for the power of music in healing.
Yo-Yo’s sister, now Dr. Yeou-Cheng Ma, has often collaborated with her brother and had great success on the world stage as a child, playing with the Denver Symphony Orchestra at age 10. Now, she enriches young musical talent as the executive director of the Children’s Orchestra Society in New York.
Exactly a year after Ma and his sister’s performance, and two months after President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, new legislation was signed into law renaming the National Cultural Center as a “living memorial” to John F. Kennedy.
Now, let’s all take a moment to remember the time Ma wrote to Bernstein, aged 10, asking if he would like to hear him play again:
How could the answer have been anything but “yes”...
The time Rowan Atkinson forgot the words to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in hilarious skit. Picture: YouTube
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM London
When a fictitious baritone took on the work of a classical giant – and it all went terribly wrong.
Here’s the moment Rowan Atkinson hit a nerve with every choral singer on the face of the earth, with a hilarious skit in which he misplaces the lyrics to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Under the alias of “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington, Atkinson cues the glorious choral ‘Ode to Joy’ finale, Beethoven’s famous setting of German poet Friedrich Schiller’s text.
Atkinson’s baritone character launches into the anthem of the European Union, annunciating the triumphant poem with fervour. But at the end of the first verse, disaster strikes, and he realises he has forgotten the rest of his sheet music.
Left with no other option but to wing it, the baritone panics and begins to spout randomly combined German words.
And so, Beethoven and Schiller’s immortal vision of the human race becoming brothers, slowly descends into a shambolic melting pot of apple strudels and lederhosen (watch below).
This was far from Atkinson’s first rodeo in the world of musical comedy – or indeed, the music of Beethoven.
In 1981, Mr Bean’s creator acted out a brilliantly chaotic skit in which he conducted Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
There was also the time Atkinson exercised his extraordinary rubber limbs in an ‘air piano’ sketch of the third, exhausting, movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata (watch below).
And who could forget his cameo at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, in which he played the London Symphony Orchestra’s unruly keyboard player in a performance of the Chariots of Fire theme.
“Music and comedy sit extremely well together, but they have to blend,” Atkinson told Classic FM More Music Breakfast’s Tim Lihoreau in 2018. “They can’t fight each other – it is a dance.
“Music is many ways in the straight man to the comedy, that essential support mechanism against which you can play.”
Maple Leaf Rag was Scott Joplin’s biggest hit in his lifetime. Picture: Getty
By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM London
From piano rags to rich opera overtures, here’s a look at Scott Joplin’s greatest works.
Since the revival of his music in the 1970s, history has remembered Scott Joplin as “the King of Ragtime”. His collection of rags is utterly identifiable, their sound joyously distinctive, and their complex bass patterns and sporadic syncopation still imitated by composers today.
But what’s also true is that Scott Joplin was one of the landmark American composers of the 20th century.
From his Pulitzer-winning opera to a rag-inspired classical waltz, here’s the very best of one of music history’s most extraordinary Black voices.
The Entertainer (1902)
Scott Joplin’s death in April 1917 marked a lapsed interest in Ragtime and his music. And it wasn’t until over half a decade later that people started to turn their ears back to Joplin’s catchy rags. In the early 1970s, Joshua Rifkin released a hugely successful piano album of his works, and Academy Award-winning film The Sting used several of Joplin’s compositions including ‘The Entertainer’ and ‘Solace’ (see below), cueing a revival of the composer’s long-neglected musical catalogue.
‘The Entertainer’ was first published in the early 1900s as sheet music, in the form of piano rolls for player pianos. Now, it is one of the essential works in the piano canon. You’ll even hear it among the playlists of tempting music piped out of ice cream trucks in the US. Ragtime with your rum n’ raisin? Go on then…
Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer' played on a 1915 piano
Credit: Lord Vinheteiro
Maple Leaf Rag (1899)
Joplin was often plagued with financial woes and struggled to secure funding for many of his works. When his first rag, Original Rags, was published, he was forced to share credit with another arranger. For his second, Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin made sure he wasn’t going to get stung again. So, he hired a lawyer and made sure he would receive a one-cent royalty for every copy of sheet music sold (still, not exactly the big bucks).
Maple Leaf Rag became Joplin’s first big hit, and the piece that made his name synonymous with ragtime. But while a steady stream of earnings from Maple Leaf made their way into Joplin’s pocket throughout his short lifetime, it was unfortunately a success never to be repeated.
Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag – but it's played WAY too fast
Credit: Kristen Mosca
Maple Leaf Rag also inspired Joplin’s own elegant Gladiolus Rag – take a listen to their similarities below.
Solace (1909)
Solace elevated the rag into a more developed artform. Unusually complex for a rag, it is the only known Joplin piece to use tango form and highlights Joplin’s lifelong desire to be a “serious” (his words) classical composer. Today, its staying power is perfectly demonstrated in its use as the loading music for video game BioShock Infinite.
Stoptime Rag (1910)
Here is one of the first examples in music of stop-time – a device heard in jazz and blues, that is absolutely central to the rhythmic spirit of Ragtime. It grew popular around the turn of the century, and gives the impression in music that the tempo has changed.
Joplin included directions in the music for performers to stomp their feet to the beat. Indeed, gone were the days of a left-hand accompaniment – instead, the left joins the right to create a melody line with richer harmony, while the pianist’s foot provides a percussive accompaniment of stamps.
This relentlessly toe-tapping dance was originally published for solo piano, with foot stamps written into the original sheet music to achieve that stop-time effect.
In the 1980s, legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman came across The Ragtime Dance and fell in love with the piece. He rearranged it for violin, piano and finger snaps and brought pianist André Previn on board, giving Joplin’s piece the classical clout that it always deserved.
Bethena: A Concert Waltz (1905)
Bethena: A Concert Waltz was the first piece Joplin wrote after his wife, Freddie, tragically died of pneumonia in September 1904, 10 weeks after their wedding.
The piece was soon forgotten, but Joshua Rifkin’s 1970s album of piano rags helped revive this unique work that marries the classical waltz and the rag. It’s been described as “Joplin’s finest waltz”, one that shows his excellence as a classical composer.
Treemonisha (1911)
Not one of his best-known works, but an important one for which Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976, Treemonisha was one of Joplin’s two only operas (he also wrote one ballet).
Speaking about forgotten Black classical composers, Comedian Lenny Henry writes for The Times: “What is great about Treemonisha is that the heroine does not die like most classical leading ladies – by the knife, by poison or yearning for a man – but becomes a leader of the community.
“Joplin was way ahead of his time. He found it very difficult to get his work performed.”
Treemonisha, which combines the Romanticism of the early 20th century with Black folk song tradition, was never staged in his lifetime. When it was finally first performed in 1972 by the Houston Grand Opera, one music historian described it as a “semimiracle”.
The time a 13-year-old Julie Andrews sang the national anthem for King George VI. Picture: YouTube / British Pathé
By Sian Moore, ClassicFM London
Remembering Julie Andrews’ days as a child star, with the time she sang a typically elegant rendition of the national anthem as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth watched on.
Her grace and unique musicality are unmatched to this day. But did you know just how long Dame Julie Andrews has been performing under the spotlight?
In an unearthed video from British Pathé, an archive of newsreels and documentaries, we can see one of the singer’s earliest performances, at the age of just 13.
Standing on the great stage of the London Palladium, for the Royal Command Performance in 1948, the young soprano began to sing.
Her performance, which took place before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, made her the youngest solo performer ever to participate in a Royal Variety Performance.
Even at such a young age, it’s easy to see how Andrews blossomed into a legendary soprano.
Standing ahead of a choir and orchestra, while shoulder-to-shoulder with the evening’s other talents, TheSound of Music star confidently sings the first verse of ‘God Save the King’.
And with a crash of cymbals following a crescendo from the musicians at the back, her on-stage companions join in for a triumphant rendition of the nation’s song.
Julie Andrews singing on stage aged eleven in 1946. Picture: Getty
That evening, Andrews had performed alongside American actor and singer Danny Kaye, dancing duo the Nicholas Brothers and comedians George and Bert Bernard.
Decades on, the American Film Institute (AFI) is honouring Julie with a Life Achievement Award gala in 2021.
The event was originally scheduled to take place in April 2020, but had to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
President and CEO of AFI, Bob Gazzale, said: “Julie Andrews has lifted the spirits of the world for generations.
“Now, more than ever, AFI looks forward to gathering the globe to celebrate the many gifts and joy she has given us – proving her, of course, ‘practically perfect in every way’.”
