Nine of the world’s top 20 most performed living composers are women, new report finds

(L to R) Errollyn Wallen, Unsuk Chin, Kaija Saariaho. Picture: Wikimedia Commons / Getty / Alamy

By Sophia Alexandra Hall

@sophiassocials

 

New research finds that almost half of the world’s top 20 contemporary composers in 2022 were women. 

An annual classical music statistics report has found that in 2022, nine of the top 20 most performed living composers were women.

Some of the women composers named in the top 20 include Anna Clyne, Kaija Saariaho, Olga Neuwirth, Unsuk Chin, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Missy Mazzoli and Errollyn Wallen.

The report, carried out by online classical music magazine Bachtrack, is based on 27,124 listings for performances which took place in 2022.

On the report’s full list of 106 most performed living composers, of 24 the British composers featured on the list, 12 were women, and of the 27 Americans named, 10 were women.

Bachtrack’s 2022 statistics are starkly different from previous figures. In 2014, just one composer in the top 20 most performed living composers was a woman (Sofia Gubaidulina), while three John’s made the cut (John Williams, John Adams, John Rutter).

Just one year earlier in 2013, there wasn’t a single woman in the top 200 list.

Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina in a rare US appearance. Picture: Getty

Gubaidulina, now age 91, also appears in the top 20 list for 2022 (the highest woman listed, at number seven) a feat particularly impressive due to her struggle to have her music widely performed during the 20th century. 

Living in Soviet Russia, Gubaidulina fell out of favour with the authorities as part of the group, the Khrennikov Seven. These seven composers were condemned by the Soviet Composers Union for writing scores that were in their words, “pointlessness… noisy mud instead of real musical innovation”.

In a 2013 interview with The Guardian however, Gubaidulina explained that being blacklisted and “so unperformed” gave her a sense of “artistic freedom, even if I couldn’t earn much money.

“I could write what I wanted without compromise.”

There’s good news for women in the field of conducting, too. Out of the world’s 100 busiest conductors, Bachtrack names 12 women; another stark difference to previous reports, as in 2013, just one conductor on the same list was a woman (Marin Alsop at No.70).

36-year-old Elim Chan is the highest ranking woman at no.29, and she is joined by Karina Canellakis, Nathalie Stutzmann, Mirga Gražinytė–Tyla, Marin Alsop, Dalia Stasevska, Xian Zhang, Gemma New, Simone Young, Joana Mallwitz, Kristiina Poska and Barbara Hannigan. Conductors are also getting younger. 26-year-old Klaus Mäkelä, chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, is one of the world’s top ten busiest maestros according to Bachtrack.

The Finnish musician comes in at number four on the list, and is the youngest of the conductors named.

Despite Mäkelä being the youngest, the average age of this list – which features names such as Sir Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, and Andris Nelsons – is still a pretty spry 46 years old.

In 2010, Bachtrack’s list of the world’s top ten busiest conductors was 61 years old.

The average age of the top ten busiest conductors is now 46 – it had been 61 in 2010. Picture: Bachtrack

Over the last decade, a host of talented young conductors have experienced meteoric rises to fame.

In 2022, one of the pinnacle moments in classical music was the announced appointment of 29-year-old Jonathon Heyward as the new Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – a position previously held by trailblazing conductor, Marin Alsop. Taking over for the 2023/24 season, Heyward makes history as both the youngest, and as the first African-American music director for the orchestra.

“I think as a young conductor at the moment, everything that I’ve been doing is actually pretty much for the first time and it’s often with seasoned players and seasoned orchestras who have probably played the pieces hundreds of times,” Heyward told the Southbank Sinfonia in 2021.

“To work for ensembles also doing it for the first time, it’s nice because it feels like we’re exploring it together on a blank canvas, which is thrilling.”

Carl Czerny - Piano Concerto in a minor, Op. 214 (1829)

Dedicated to Méreaux, Czerny's Piano Concerto in a minor is perhaps one of the most virtuosic piano concerti composed in the classical style, Czerny's piano concerto in a minor features a compendium of pianistic techniques developed during the early Romantic era.

David Boldrini - piano

Rami Musicali Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Massimo Belli

(from the album "Czerny & Viotti: Piano Concertos" released under Brilliant Classics).

"The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 214, was composed in Vienna in 1829 and published the following year. It is dedicated to the French musicologist and composer Amédée Méreaux (1802–1874) who—like Czerny, and his present obscurity notwithstanding—is best known for his piano studies. (His time will come; many of his 60 Études, Op 63, are of great interest and even more difficult to play than those of Alkan.)

Some see the A minor concerto as one of the earliest Romantic concertos penned. To others it is a transitional work with elements of the many brilliant piano and orchestra works already celebrated in this Hyperion series but with many backward glances to the concertos of Hummel, Weber and Field. The first movement’s opening material is used in various guises throughout the work, its solo part described by one writer, Lorenzo Ancillotti, as ‘a true compendium of the technical difficulties that pianists of the time were likely to address’. The initial ideas, incorporating some surprising modulations, eventually subside into a second section (8'43") in A major and D minor. 

After a return to the original theme and key, Czerny introduces another subject (12'00"), presented at first in F major. Much of the delicate filigree writing is set an octave above the stave—and brilliant it is, too, as the soloist storms home after what must be one of the longest suspensions in any concerto before the inevitable release back into the tonic.

The adagio second movement is in the dominant key of E major and forms no more than a contrasting link to the finale, a 2/4 rondo marked allegro con anima—‘in a spirited manner’. ‘Spirited’ might be construed as an understatement given the demanding solo part, a relentless succession of semiquaver triplets, dancing arpeggios and scales in thirds designed to astonish and entertain in equal measure. A short chorale episode at 6'30" is the only let up for the pianist as the work bowls towards its conclusion leaving the listener in no doubt as to the key of the concerto."

Carl Czerny - his music and his life

Carl Czerny  was an Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist of Czech origin whose music spanned the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His vast musical production amounted to over a thousand works and his books of studies for the piano are still widely used in piano teaching. He was one of Ludwig van Beethoven's best-known pupils.

Carl Czerny was born in Vienna (Leopoldstadt) and was baptized in St. Leopold parish. His parents were of Czech origin; his mother was Moravian. His parents spoke Czech with him. Czerny came from a musical family: his grandfather was a violinist at Nymburk, near Prague, and his father, Wenzel, was an oboist, organist and pianist. When Czerny was six months old, his father took a job as a piano teacher at a Polish manor and the family moved to Poland, where they lived until the third partition of Poland prompted the family to return to Vienna in 1795.

As a child prodigy, Czerny began playing piano at age three and composing at age seven. His first piano teacher was his father, who taught him mainly Bach, Haydn and Mozart. He began performing piano recitals in his parents' home. Czerny made his first public performance in 1800 playing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor.

Studies with Beethoven

In 1801, Wenzel Krumpholz, a Czech composer and violinist, scheduled a presentation for Czerny at the home of Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven asked Czerny to play his Pathétique Sonata and Adelaide. Beethoven was impressed with the 10-year-old and accepted him as a pupil. Czerny remained under Beethoven's tutelage until 1804 and sporadically thereafter. He particularly admired Beethoven's facility at improvisation, his expertise at fingering, the rapidity of his scales and trills, and his restrained demeanour while performing.

Czerny's autobiography and letters give many important references and details of Beethoven during this period. Czerny was the first to report symptoms of Beethoven's deafness, several years before the matter became public. Of his first meeting with Beethoven, he wrote: "I also noticed with that visual quickness peculiar to children that he had cotton which seemed to have been steeped in a yellowish ointment, in his ears."

Beethoven selected Czerny as pianist for the premiere of the former's Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1806 and, at the age of 21, in February 1812, Czerny gave the Vienna premiere of Beethoven's "Emperor" Piano Concerto. Czerny wrote that his musical memory enabled him to play virtually all of Beethoven's piano works by heart without exception and, during the years 1804–1805, he used to play these works in this manner at Prince Lichnowsky's palace once or twice a week, with the Prince calling out only the desired opus numbers. Czerny maintained a friendship with Beethoven throughout his life, and also gave piano lessons to Beethoven's nephew Carl.

Later career

Teacher and composer

At the age of fifteen, Czerny began a very successful teaching career. Basing his method on the teaching of Beethoven and Muzio Clementi, Czerny taught up to twelve lessons a day in the homes of Viennese nobility. His 'star' pupils included Theodor Döhler, Stephen Heller, Anna Sick,Sigismond Thalberg, and Ninette de Belleville. In 1819, the father of Franz Liszt brought his son to Czerny, who recalled:

He was a pale, sickly-looking child, who, while playing, swayed about on the stool as if drunk...His playing was... irregular, untidy, confused, and...he threw his fingers quite arbitrarily all over the keyboard. But that notwithstanding, I was astonished at the talent Nature had bestowed upon him.

Liszt became Czerny's most famous pupil. He trained the child with the works of Beethoven, Clementi, Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Sebastian Bach. The Liszt family lived in the same street in Vienna as Czerny, who was so impressed by the boy that he taught him free of charge. Liszt was later to repay this confidence by introducing the music of Czerny at many of his Paris recitals. Shortly before Liszt's Vienna concert of 13 April 1823 (his final concert of that season), Czerny arranged, with some difficulty (as Beethoven increasingly disliked child prodigies) the introduction of Liszt to Beethoven. Beethoven was sufficiently impressed with the young Liszt to give him a kiss on the forehead. Liszt remained close to Czerny, and in 1852 his Études d'exécution transcendante were published with a dedication to Czerny.

Czerny left Vienna only to make trips to Italy, France (in 1837, when he was assisted by Liszt)[ and England. After 1840, Czerny devoted himself exclusively to composition. He wrote a large number of piano solo exercises for the development of the pianistic technique, designed to cover from the first lessons for children up to the needs of the most advanced virtuoso. (see List of compositions by Carl Czerny).

Death

Czerny died in Vienna at the age of 66. He never married and had no near relatives. His large fortune he willed to charities (including an institution for the deaf), his housekeeper and the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, after making provision for the performance of a Requiem mass in his memory.[20]

Ryan Cayabyab Classic Pop Hits Medley

Mozart: Symphony No. 35 Haffner

Multi-award-winning conductor Bernard Haitink leads the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. They perform Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Haffner Symphony. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed the Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, known as the Haffner Symphony, in 1782. As early as 1776 he had been commissioned to compose a serenade for the wedding of the Salzburg bridal couple Franz Xaver Späth and Maria Elisabeth Haffner, the daughter of Salzburg's mayor Sigmund Haffner. The Haffner Serenade is Mozart's most extensive serenade (KV 250) and has eight movements. Six years later, he was to compose another serenade on the occasion of the award of the title of nobility "Edler von Innbachhausen" to Sigmund Haffner Junior. Mozart arranged it as a symphony by omitting the movements 2 to 4 or 5 of the serenade composed for Haffner's wedding, thus creating an independent work. Bernard Haitink began his conducting career with Netherlands Radio: he became chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in 1957. Later he was principal conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and held this position for 27 years. Today he is patron of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and Honorary Conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Bernard Haitink has also been Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and Chief Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Dresden and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is an honorary member of the Berlin Philharmonic, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and since 2019, the Vienna Philharmonic. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Gramophone Lifetime Achievement Award. 00:00 Introduction 00:49 Allegro con spirito 09:25 Andante 15:33 Menuetto 18:33 Presto

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Jesus Christ Superstar Arr. Henry Mancini

Musical Double Takes: Bach, Bentzon, Czerny, Rekhin, Rheinberger, and Madsen

by Georg Predota, Interlude

Johann Sebastian Bach was one of the first composers to contemplate a collection of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. However, the concept of basing a musical collection on a theoretical system of scales/harmonies was not new. Prior to the codification of tonality, composers had long produced collections of pieces based on church or ecclesiastical modes. That basically meant eight different scalar arrangements of whole and half tones derived from early Christian vocal conventions. Notable composers include Pachelbel, Muffat, Gorzanis, and Vincenzo Galilei, brother of the famed astronomer Galileo Galilei. Bach seemingly also consulted some contemporary models, but essentially he composed a set for a 12-note well-tempered tuning system in which all keys sounded in tune. His first collection dates from 1722, and then he did a musical double take and produced another complete set some 20 years later.

Johann Sebastian Bach

Score of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier

The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, and the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II are rightfully considered among the most important works in the history of Western music. These works have been highly influential, and various composers have composed complete sets. However, I want to introduce you to composers, who like Bach, did a musical double take and composed multiple sets of preludes and/or fugues in all keys. 

Johann Sebastian Bach amazingly wrote two complete sets of preludes and fugues, but the Danish composer and pianist Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000) composed 14 separate sets of 24 preludes and fugues! By any stretch of the imagination, that is an astonishing number of works. They are collectively known as “The Tempered Piano,” and represent 20th-century examples of music written in all 24 major and minor keys.

Niels Viggo Bentzon

Niels Viggo Bentzon

In an interview, the composer referred to his “Tempered Piano as a series of aesthetic paradoxes. By this, I mean an almost complete transcription of the building blocks of classical music. If a Fugue from one of the tempered pianos is crammed with imitation, one can be dead sure that the phenomenon functions differently than in Bach or Handel. In The Tempered Piano, a theme may appear in its entirety at the beginning of the piece, only to change gradually, almost out of recognition, as that particular piece winds to an end.” The composer was once asked about the exact meaning of his compositions, and he responded, “I have to admit with shame that I am virtually seldom inspired. It is just a matter of getting hold of a pencil and firing away.” Bentzon has also composed 24 Symphonies—not ordered according to keys—operas, ballets, concertos, string quartets, and many additional piano works. 

Carl Czerny (1791-1857) came from a very musical family. His grandfather was a professional violinist, and his father an oboist, organist, and pianist. Little Carl was a child prodigy, and he started piano lessons with his father at the age of three. By the age of ten, he became a student of Beethoven, and he maintained a relationship with the composer throughout his life. At the core of Carl Czerny’s early piano studies stood Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. We know that he carefully studied this collection during his early lessons with his father. Likewise, the WTC had been fundamental to Beethoven as well.

Carl Czerny

Carl Czerny, 1833

Today we know that Czerny produced a collection of exercises and studies that might rightfully be described as “industrial.” He composed a number of fugues early on that became part of his performing repertoire as a concert pianist. Czerny composed at least three complete sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. The most impressive collection emerges in his Op. 856, in which he tried to update this archaic genre. It has been suggested that Czerny dedicated this set to Liszt, who had been Czerny’s most outstanding student. We don’t know how Liszt reacted to the dedication, but critics were generally dismissive. Robert Schumann “accused Czerny of insisting on an obsolete genre without renewing in any way the classical models established by Bach.” He even found fault with Czerny’s creativity, with the way he avoided the formal procedures that make the fugue interesting: transformations of the subject through augmentation, diminution, inversion, crab canons, and layering two or more themes or using subject and countersubject in the Handel fashion. Although homages to Bach and Handel are frequent, Czerny does attempt to dress his use of strict counterpoint in the characteristics of the emerging gallant style. 

Igor Rekhin

Igor Rekhin

Collections of preludes and fugues in all major and minor keys are not exclusively tied to keyboard instruments. Such is the case with Russian composer Igor Rekhin, born in 1941. Rekhin fashioned two complete sets: the 24 Caprices for solo cello, and 24 Preludes and Fugues for guitar. Rekhin composed over 100 works in various genres, but the 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar are unique. The initial idea emerged in 1985, on the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth. The composer writes, “At the beginning of the work on the prelude and fugue I imagined a musical idea that I subsequently wrote down. I tested that idea on the piano and then elaborated it on the guitar. I quickly found that many ideas that sounded good on the piano were difficult to transplant to the guitar. That path was ineffective, so I changed my approach and just picked up the guitar and began to look for polyphonic solutions.” Critics were enthusiastic, and suggested that the collection “opened the concert repertoire for guitar in a completely new way. Maintaining the tradition of the old polyphonic masters of the lute in a homogeneous connection with the latest styles and trends, including pop to avant-garde, this cycle gives guitarists the opportunity to be placed on par with other traditional concert instruments such as the piano.” 

Josef Rheinberger

Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger

Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901) was born in Liechtenstein, and he inherited his musical talents from his mother. He started lessons with the local organist at age five, and two years later he was appointed organist in Vaduz and was writing his first compositions. Against the wishes of his family, Rheinberger went to Munich to continue his studies, and he subsequently held a number of important posts in that city. Among them was the appointment as the instructor in counterpoint at the Royal Academy of Music, and his students included Engelbert Humperdinck, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Organ music formed the core of Rheinberger’s compositional efforts, and he espoused a conservative musical style influenced by Bach, Mozart, and Haydn. As such, it is hardly surprising to find two sets of compositions in all major and minor keys. His 24 Fughettas Op. 123 are essentially lyric miniatures in a highly contrapuntal style. Rheinberger was also looking to compose 24 organ sonatas in all major and minor keys but sadly died having completed only 20. 

Trygve Madsen

Trygve Madsen

The Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen was born in 1940. “I had the good fortune to be born into a family of musicians,” he explains, “my grandfather and his seven sons were all professional musicians. At six I began playing the piano and began composing at about the same age. As my piano playing developed I became increasingly involved in the daily music-making at home, joining in anything from popular songs to sonatas.” Madsen studied with the organist Johannes Almgren, who had been a student of the famous theoretician Hermann Grabner, who in turn had been a student of Max Reger. However, Madsen was not only interested in counterpoint but from an early age, he was also attracted by jazz. He listened to recordings by Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Oscar Peterson for hours on end. A clear formative musical influence was provided by Sergei Prokofiev, with Madsen writing ”That was what made me a composer. I realized that this was the way for me; everything came together in Prokofiev’s music. It was like coming home! Prokofiev shaped and molded his musical material in his own way with superb craftsmanship, without violating the rules of music – often infusing it with a liberating sense of humour.” Madsen composed two complete sets of music in all major and minor keys; 24 Preludes, Op. 20 and 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 101. He began work on the full cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues in 1995, with a clearly laid out play of the order in which the keys would be presented. Bach had ordered his set chromatically, while Shostakovich and Chopin preferred an order according to the cycle of fifths. Madsen, ingeniously, based his collection on the astrological treatise “The Harmony of the Spheres,” by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler suggested, “the relationship between the planets corresponds to the relationship between musical intervals.” Basing his set on an astrological point of view, Madsen’s system “consists of a row of descending minor thirds interrupted by an ascending tritone. In the next episode of musical double takes, we find music by Charles-Valentin Alkan, Lera Auerbach, Adolf von Henselt, Vsevolod Zaderatsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Louis Vierne, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, and Nikolai Kapustin.

Daniel Barenboim tritt als Generalmusikdirektor der Staatsoper zurück

Nach langer Krankheit dirigiert Daniel Barenboim zwar wieder. Doch seinen Posten als Generalmusikdirektor der Staatsoper Unter den Linden gibt es nun auf. „Leider hat sich mein Gesundheitszustand im letzten Jahr deutlich verschlechtert“, sagt er.

Der seit langem erkrankte Daniel Barenboim tritt als Generalmusikdirektor der Staatsoper Unter den Linden zurück. Das gab der 80-Jährige am Freitag in Berlin bekannt.

„Leider hat sich mein Gesundheitszustand im letzten Jahr deutlich verschlechtert. Ich kann die Leistung nicht mehr erbringen, die zu Recht von einem Generalmusikdirektor verlangt wird“, hieß es in einer Erklärung Barenboims. „Deshalb bitte ich um Verständnis, dass ich zum 31. Januar 2023 diese Tätigkeit aufgebe.“ Er bitte Kultursenator Klaus Lederer um Auflösung des Vertrages zum genannten Zeitpunkt.

Barenboim erklimmt mühsam das Podium

Lederer zeigte sich in einer Mitteilung „überzeugt, dass Daniel Barenboim die richtige Entscheidung getroffen hat“. Die Entscheidung stelle das Wohl der Staatsoper und der Staatskapelle in den Vordergrund. „Dies alles verdient größten Respekt.“

Zum Jahreswechsel zurück ans Dirigentenpult

Barenboim war erst zum Jahreswechsel ans Dirigentenpult zurückgekehrt. Er dirigierte am vergangenen Samstag in Berlin die neunte Sinfonie von Ludwig van Beethoven.

Barenboim hatte Anfang Oktober angekündigt, er müsse sich jetzt so weit wie möglich auf sein körperliches Wohlbefinden konzentrieren. „Mein Gesundheitszustand hat sich in den letzten Monaten verschlechtert und es wurde eine schwere neurologische Erkrankung bei mir diagnostiziert“, schrieb er dazu.

Die Staatsoper musste ein zum Geburtstag geplantes Konzert in der Berliner Philharmonie absagen, bei dem Barenboim Klavier spielen sollte. Zuvor musste Barenboim bereits das Dirigat für die zu seinem Geburtstag realisierte Neuinszenierung von Richard Wagners „Der Ring des Nibelungen“ an der Staatsoper abgeben. Für ihn sprangen Christian Thielemann und Thomas Guggeis am Pult ein. Thielemann vertrat Barenboim auch während der Asientour mit der Staatskapelle.

In jüngster Zeit war Barenboim mehrmals ausgefallen. Im Februar musste er sich einem chirurgischen Eingriff an der Wirbelsäule unterziehen.

dpa/tba

Dancing the Classics: Bach, Schubert, Debussy and Mozart

by Hermione Lai 

Bodily movement is such a natural and emotional response to music. I think that dance has been a part of human culture since the very beginning. It is a way of communicating, celebrating, and expressing an infinite number of feelings, moods, and emotions. And you don’t need to be a professional, as anyone can dance. When people dance, they express feelings and emotions, and if that particular dancing is happening on a stage, they communicate that message to the audience. For some professionals, choreography “is an art form intimately connected to the human form, and it will tell a human story regardless of whether you intend to create a story or not.” Dancing, at least to me, seems a much more direct and natural way of communicating emotions than language or writing.

Some classical music has been specifically written to accompany dance, such as the Baroque dance suite, but I am more interested in dance interpretations of classical music that originally had little or no connection to bodily movement. 

The story goes that Johann Sebastian Bach composed his Goldberg Variations for the Russian ambassador to Saxony. Count Kyerslingk suffered from extended bouts of insomnia, and to ease his torment, he instructed his private harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to play for him. Goldberg was a former student of J.S. Bach, and he approached him to compose a piece “which should be of such smooth and somewhat lively character that he might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights.” Bach went to work and composed a variations set that has been called “one of the most sophisticated works ever written for the keyboard.”

Tap dancing

The Goldberg Variations have been called “sublime and compassionate, graceful, warm and relentlessly intricate.” There is nothing sleepy whatsoever in the Goldberg Variations when the hands of composer Conrad Tao and the feet of tap dance Caleb Teicher get involved. The supposedly calming music becomes a celebration of being awake. There is nothing but pure happiness in the aria followed by an explosion of rhythmic vitality in the variations. There is no doubt in my mind that this particular version would have greatly cheered up Count Kyerslinn.

Franz Schubert based the concluding song of Winterreise on one of the most powerful poems by Wilhelm Müller. The “Hurdy-Gurdy player” presents a very disturbing picture of the alienation of humanity. As a barefoot man is standing on the ice, even music, “often considered a link with the divine, has become monotonous, automated and indifferent.” A contemporary critic wrote, “Schubert’s music is as naive as the poet’s expressions; the emotions contained in the poems are as deeply reflected in his own feelings, and these are so brought out in sound that no one can sing or hear them without being touched to the heart.”

To me, Schubert’s music presents a melancholic aura that creates a sense of ultimate desolation. This overbearing sense of anguish and despair becomes visible in the movements created by the featured Saarländisches Staatstheater Ballet production. There is a lot of focus on bare feet, and what a powerful and highly emotional way of expressing that the plate of the hurdy-gurdy player will remain empty forever. 

The French poet Paul Verlaine wrote his poem “Clair de lune” (Moonlight) in 1869. It is an ambiguous description of a moonlit masquerade ball, alternating moments of joy and sadness. The poet takes us on a journey of self-discovery as he gets in touch with his soul in hopes of finding himself. He is looking for all kinds of distractions to feed to his soul in the form of masks, singing, and dancing. The second stanza is devoted to ease his soul with the sound of melody, and in the concluding stanza the poet acknowledges the picturesque beauty of the moonlight. Claude Debussy composed two settings of “Clair de lune,” plus an instrumental version for his Suite bergamasque. Without doubt, it is the composer’s most famous piece for piano, and it further inspired the French dancer, choreographer, and artist Yoann Bourgeois. He has been called a “dramatist of physics,” and his gravity-defying performance transports us to a place and time “where time has no meaning.” Will he find what he is looking for? 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his cantata Davide penitente on commission from the benevolent society for musicians. The text expresses repentance during Lenten season, and it supposedly helps to recognize our sinfulness, express our sorrow and ask for God’s forgiveness. In the mind of the French horse trainer and film producer Bartabas, born Clément Marty, Mozart’s cantata was the perfect match for an equine ballet; that’s right, a ballet performed by the horses and riders of the National Equestrian Academy of Versailles.

Equestrian Ballet © Bruce Adams

He placed the performance into the “Felsenreitschule,” a 300- year old Salzburg venue that was originally built for equestrian performances. Once you place a period instrument ensemble and vocalists in the former audience arcade, you experience a “performance submerged in an atmospheric darkness, lending it something of the sacred.” It certainly is a fascinating interplay between horse and human, music and movement, and light and costumes. Personally, I love it!

Just For You (Concerto) - Ernesto Cortazar - his music and his life

Ernesto Cortázar (May 2, 1940 – August 2, 2004) was a Mexican composer, arranger, and pianist, born in Mexico City and who died in Tampico, Tamaulipas. He was the son of composer, Ernesto Cortázar, founder and president of the Society of Authors and Composers of Mexico.

At the age of 13, Ernesto Cortázar lost his parents in a car accident. He finished his musical studies, and at age 17, began his work as a film musician. In 1958, he won the Best Background Music Award for a Latin American film at the International Festival of Cartagena (Colombia), with the melody Rio de Sueños.

He scored more than 500 films and managed to become the #1 artist of mp3.com during the years 1999 and 2001, achieving more than 14 million downloads at that time.

After living in Los Angeles, California for most of his adult life, he returned to Mexico, settling in Tampico, where he died, the victim of cancer in 2004.

New Year's Concert 2023 - Wiener Philharmoniker - Welser-Möst PART (1/5)

César Franck - his music and his life

 

César Franck was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who worked in Paris during his adult life. In 1858 he became organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. His pupils included Vincent d'Indy, Ernest Chausson, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, Guillaume Lekeu and Henri Duparc. After acquiring the professorship Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works.

Many of Franck's works employ "cyclic form", a method aspiring to achieve unity across multiple movements. This may be achieved by reminiscence, or recall, of an earlier thematic material into a later movement, or as in Franck's output where all of the principal themes of the work are generated from a germinal motif. The main melodic subjects, thus interrelated, are then recapitulated in the final movement. Franck's use of "cyclic form" is best illustrated by his Symphony in D minor (1888).

His music is often contrapuntally complex, using a harmonic language that is prototypically late Romantic, showing a great deal of influence from Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. In his compositions, Franck showed a talent and a penchant for frequent, graceful modulations of key. Often these modulatory sequences, achieved through a pivot chord or through inflection of a melodic phrase, arrive at harmonically remote keys. Indeed, Franck's students report that his most frequent admonition was to always "modulate, modulate." Franck's modulatory style and his idiomatic method of inflecting melodic phrases are among his most recognizable traits.

Franck had huge hands, capable of spanning twelve white keys on the keyboard.[62] This allowed him unusual flexibility in voice-leading between internal parts in fugal composition, and in the size of the repeated chords which are a feature of much of his keyboard music. Of the Violin Sonata's writing it has been said: "Franck, blissfully apt to forget that not every musician's hands were as enormous as his own, littered the piano part (the last movement in particular) with major-tenth chords... most mere pianistic mortals ever since have been obligated to spread them in order to play them at all."

The key to his music may be found in his personality. His friends record that he was "a man of utmost humility, simplicity, reverence and industry." Louis Vierne, a pupil and later organist titulaire of Notre-Dame, wrote in his memoirs that Franck showed a "constant concern for the dignity of his art, for the nobility of his mission, and for the fervent sincerity of his sermon in sound... Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal: Franck was all those at Sainte-Clotilde.

When Luciano Pavarotti sang with his 88-year-old father in an emotional duet

Updated: 3 January 2023, 19:55

Luciano and Fernando Pavarotti. Picture: Facebook / The Tenor / Rai Uno

By Kyle Macdonald, ClassicFM London

 

The touching moment when a father joined his son for a very special performance of a beloved sacred song. 

When a former baker took to the stage with opera’s biggest star, it was a story about music spanning the generations.

Legendary tenor Luciano Pavarotti was born in 1935 in Modena, Northern Italy. His father, Fernando Pavarotti, was a baker, and his mother, Adele Venturi, a cigar factory worker.

Fernando Pavarotti was an amateur singer with a fine tenor voice. Years later, his son said Fernando had turned down the possibility of a singing career because of stage fright and nerves.

The family was poor in those early days, but his father’s passion for music opened a new world for his son. Luciano’s first encounters with singing and opera came through both his singing and listening to his father’s collection of albums from the great tenors of the day.

Luciano Pavarotti went on to study singing and began singing opera roles in the 1960s. Legendary breakthroughs at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden and New York’s Metropolitan Opera made a huge star of the opera world.

A few years later, thanks to the 1990 Football World Cup in Italy, The Three Tenors, and his always-glistening high notes, he became a true household name.

But he never forgot where he came from, or his musical roots.

In 2001, 88-year-old amateur tenor Fernando joined his son for a duet. Together they sang César Franck’s ‘Panis Angelicus’.  

Nearing 90 years of age, Fernando’s best singing voice may well have been behind him. But it’s the looks of love and pride between the two of them that make this a very special moment of music.

They have duetted in previous years. Here’s another performance of the same sacred song, recorded in the cathedral of their home town in 1978 (watch below).

A baker who loved his music, and a tenor who changed the course of classical music. Two Pavarottis, bravo to you both.