A portrait of French composer Félicien-César David (from 1876), celebrating his famous orchestral ode Le Désert.
Edmond Morin/Naive Records
A portrait of French composer Félicien-César David (from 1876), celebrating his famous orchestral ode Le Désert.
Orphaned at age five from a musical family, French composer Félicien-César David had a religious upbringing, and would go to study at the Paris Conservatory in 1830. But he left after eighteen months, later making his way to Egypt, where music of the East would make a lasting impression on him.
David wrote a significant body of work, including a highly acclaimed and innovative symphonic ode Le Désert in 1844. It established him as the first French romantic orientalist and gained him a reputation throughout the continent.
Chamber music figures significantly in his output, but curiously enough the influence here is European rather than Eastern. This is quite apparent in the three of his four string quartets included on this new album, which bear a few similarities to those of George Onslow, a French composer from a generation earlier.
The English contralto Kathleen Ferrier had a voice like no other. She was born 100 years ago.
One hundred years ago, a musical marvel was born. She grew up in a tiny hamlet in the North of England, but made a huge impression on the world of classical music.
"Unique" is an overused word, yet it truly fits the sound of Kathleen Ferrier's voice. If you've never heard it, prepare to be amazed — stop reading now and click on the link below.
Her voice was a true contralto, radiant and rich with velvety purple tones reaching deep into a manly range. In addition to the sheer beauty of her sound, there's a palpable sense of communication. All the greatest singers have it — from Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf to John McCormack and George Jones — and when you hear them, it sounds like they are singing to you and you alone. Ferrier had it in spades.
To mark the 100th anniversary of her birth on April 22, 1912, Decca has issued a 14-CD Ferrier box set that includes an hour-long documentary on her life and career. It's a treasure-trove of incredible singing, from a complete recording of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice to British folk tunes to riveting live broadcasts of songs by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms from the 1949 Edinburgh Festival.
Ferrier was an unlikely candidate to become one of classical music's most extraordinary singers. She had no upper level institutional musical training. She excelled at the piano as a kid, but her only singing took place in the bathroom of her Lancashire home. At age 14, her parents, worried by finances, took her out of school and she landed a job at the telephone exchange of the local post office.
Later she met and married a bank manager. In 1937, on a lark, she took him up on a bet that she wouldn't dare enter a regional singing competition. She took home first prize and along with it the confidence to start accepting singing engagements around Northern England.
In just a few short years, while World War II was ripping Europe apart, Ferrier's career bloomed. By war's end, she had moved to London, hired an agent, signed a recording contract and begun attracting leading figures in music, including conductors Bruno Walter and John Barbirolli and composer Benjamin Britten, who wrote for her the lead role in The Rape of Lucretia. She made her stage debut in Britten's opera at Glyndebourne in 1946.
Of all of these men Ferrier probably cherished most her time with Walter. "To learn with him the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler, is to feel that one is gaining knowledge and inspiration for the composer himself," she wrote in a letter. "It is very exciting and sometimes almost unbearably moving."
With Walter, Ferrier found herself on the forefront of a Gustav Mahler revival. The composer's music was banned during the war in countries occupied by Germany, and Walter, as a personal friend of the composer, was keen to bring it back.
Perhaps the greatest of the Ferrier-Walter-Mahler projects was the 1952 recording in Vienna of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). When Mahler wrote the work's final movement, "Der Abschied" (The Farewell), he showed it to Walter, who said, "I was profoundly moved by that uniquely passionate, bitter, yet resigned and benedictory sound of farewell and departure, that last confession of one upon whom rested the finger of death." Mahler, only in his 40s, had been recently diagnosed with a heart condition that would eventually lead to his early death.
What makes this particular recording special, beyond the riveting performance by Ferrier, is the fact that she was dying of breast cancer while singing Mahler's soaring, valedictory music. Ferrier died peacefully in her sleep Oct. 8, 1953 at just 41.
It was a huge loss for Britain. Ferrier had become almost as beloved as the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. It was an even bigger loss for music, as a voice like Ferrier's appears only very rarely. Her friends and colleagues remember her as a simple, warm person, radiant with life, obsessed with music and equipped with a bawdy sense of humor — all attributes that leap from these recordings.
On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.
Dániel Vass/ECM Records
On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.
Garth Knox was born to play the viola. As a youngster, he already had two sisters who played violin and a brother who played cello. "So for the family string quartet," Knox says, "it was very clear from the start which instrument I would play."
On his new album, Saltarello, Knox traverses almost 1,000 years of music history, playing not only the viola but also the medieval fiddle and the viola d'amore, a forgotten member of the viola family with an extra set of strings vibrating underneath the fingerboard. Knox says the instrument appeared and then disappeared in musical history.
"A lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water," he says in an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel. "And I thought the viola d'amore was a particularly big baby that had been thrown away by mistake. I and others are trying to bring it back and show just how beautiful it can be."
The instrument appears in the album's opening track — "Black Brittany," an arrangement of a traditional Irish song — and in a stripped-down version of a Vivaldi concerto. Instead of the standard orchestral accompaniment, Knox arranged the work for just two instruments: the viola d'amore and a cello.
"I noticed over the years that baroque players like to lighten things up and make it clearer by reducing the number of people playing," Knox says. "And I thought it would be nice just to see how far I could go, and in this Vivaldi piece I think we've reached the limit. I think it gains something. I think it's exciting to hear it played like this."
The oldest music on Saltarello is by the 12th century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen; Knox plays it on the medieval fiddle, an instrument that he says looks like what you see depicted in Renaissance paintings.
"You usually see angels playing them," Knox says. "They usually have five strings, and their bridge is flat and you can play all the strings all the time, which is the idea. It's a very beautiful instrument, and it has a very earthy sound."
Immediately following the ancient sounds, Knox jumps more than 900 years to a new piece, Vent Nocturne (Dark Mirrors), written for him by Kaija Saariaho. It's all part of Knox's musical journey.
"I thought it would be very interesting to put things together which normally you don't hear together," Knox says, "and see just what the differences are."
Born into a well-to-do Danish family in 1840, Christian Frederik Emil Horneman showed musical talent at an early age, then went on to study in Leipzig and later spent most of his life as a teacher. But he would also compose a limited amount of music, which one wishes had been greater in quantity judging from the fine orchestral works on this new release.
Horneman's daughter and son-in-law were both involved with the theater, which may explain what little music he wrote was mostly stage-related. Accordingly, three of the four selections on this album are suites from incidental music for plays, beginning with the 1899 romantic drama Gurre, which also inspired Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder.
The overture has arresting hunting horn calls and one particularly attractive amorous melody. The following preludes to the second, fourth and fifth acts reflect the melancholy, foreboding and playfully coquettish nature of the drama.
The next suite features four numbers from Kampen med Muserne (Battle with the Muses). Highlights include an atmospheric "Sunrise" and an orgiastic "Bacchantic Dance."
Then we get one of the composer's rare nontheatrical pieces, Ouverture Héroique from 1867. An engaging amalgam of Weber and Tchaikovsky in a cleverly modified version of sonata form, it makes one regret Horneman never composed any extended symphonic works.
The album concludes with a suite from music for the 1854 tragedy Kalanus, about an encounter between an Indian ascetic of that name and Alexander the Great. The "Introduction and Prayer" has a motif that recalls the Dies Irae. And the closing "Death of Kalanus" ends on a major chord, probably signifying the guru's belief that his death would be the gateway to eternal enlightenment.
The Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Vocal Ensemble — whose female singers provide choral support in the second suite — are under Sweden's Johannes Gustavsson, one of today's leading young conductors. They give exceptionally spirited performances, making a strong case for these symphonic curiosities. Horneman couldn't have better advocates.
The new album by The Knights, A Second of Silence, celebrates Schubert and more modern but like-minded composers.
Ancalagon Records
The new album by The Knights, A Second of Silence, celebrates Schubert and more modern but like-minded composers.
Although it always seems fashionable to forecast the downfall of classical music, enterprising musicians both young and not so young continue to make deeply satisfying recordings. For this visit to weekends on All Things Considered, I was delighted to uncover the little known (at least in this country) Jorge Luis Prats, a terrifically talented Cuban pianist whose once uncertain career appears to be resurging — at 55, he has signed a handsome record deal. Then there's The Knights, a young chamber orchestra with a postmodern take on Schubert. They cleverly juxtapose his music with kindred spirits from the 20th and 21st centuries — Erik Satie, Philip Glass and Morton Feldman. Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, now an elder statesman of the period instrument movement, takes his second shot at the Brahms German Requiem with extraordinary results. And on the lighter side, Israeli composer Ronn Yedidia writes sparkling music for a great clarinetist. Listen to excerpts from these new releases below.
Ever heard of Jorge Luis Prats? I didn't think so. Part of the reason is Prats hails from Cuba. He won an important European piano competition back in 1977, but since then he's had a tough time traveling freely and maintaining a top-level career. This album was recorded live in Spain in 2011 at a recital that was reportedly his first big European concert in many years. Now he's 55 years old, obviously a terrific pianist — you can hear his formidable yet easy technique — and he's landed a prestigious record deal with Decca. This is a sweet comeback in an age when big companies love signing handsome 20-somethings. The final movement from Heitor Villa-Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No.4 combines a vigorous dance with a tuneful song that seems to waft in from afar.
This smartly programmed album stitches together disparate composers. Did you know Schubert was a minimalist? He sounds like it when the churning rhythms of pieces like "Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel" and the "Unfinished" symphony are set beside the motoric repetitions of Philip Glass. And the spaces between the notes are quietly explored in pieces by Erik Satie (two Gymnopedies) and the late 20th-century master of nervous tranquility Morton Feldman. These are seamless juxtapositions played with verve from the fresh-faced New York chamber orchestra The Knights, a brother organization to the string quartet called Brooklyn Rider.
I love the conductor John Eliot Gardiner's approach to this marvelous music. It's transparent and colorful yet intimate and at times hauntingly urgent. And then there's the amazingly expressive, perfectly blended and disarmingly precise Monteverdi Choir. This is the second time Gardiner has recorded this piece with this chorus and orchestra, and again he tries very hard to uncover the sound Brahms might have heard when it premiered in 1868. That means using instruments (or copies of instruments) from Brahms' day, like the old Viennese brass — so full of character, with horns that glow with a warm, burnished tone (they can snarl, too) — plus shorter Viennese oboes and the period timpani, struck with hard sticks. This Requiem comforts the living instead of focusing on the dead, which is evident in the warm central movement, "How amiable are thy tabernacles."
Here's a lighthearted album that meanders across various classical and world music genres. There's a natural fluency to the way Israeli composer and pianist Ronn Yedidia writes for the terrific clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein, whether Yedidia is borrowing from Arab, Spanish, klezmer or jazz idioms. The tune "World Dance" for clarinet and piano is jaunty and irresistible. The more straightforwardly classical "Concertino" for clarinet, piano and strings is more serious, with an extraordinary cadenza that shows Fiterstein at the top of his game.
There's a new superstar pianist on the horizon: Behzod Abduraimov. Haven't heard of him yet? That's not surprising — at just 21, this native of Tashkent, Uzbekistan has kept a very low profile so far. He's spent the past five years in the U.S., but not at a big-name school like the Curtis Institute (like Lang Lang or Yuja Wang, for example) or at Juilliard, where he was accepted as a student. Instead, he went to study with Stanislav Ioudenitch Park University in Salt Lake City Parkville, Missouri, where he's still enrolled.
Abduraimov's first big break was in 2009, when he won grand prize at the relatively low-profile London International Piano Competition — and soon, the Telegraph was trilling that Abduraimov was "a gift from God" who "delivered about the most enthralling roller-coaster ride of a Prokofiev third concerto imaginable." And even though he was just 18 at the time of his win, his career has had a bit of a slow-burn start since then. He gave a recital at London's Wigmore Hall as part of his competition prize; in the 2011-12 season, he performed as a soloist with orchestras like the Tokyo Symphony and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
Now, however, things are starting to heat up fast: He played at London's Royal Albert Hall just a couple weeks ago, just before the release of his debut recital album for Decca — and the recording is a stunner.
A meditation on quietude amidst unceasing movement, a thick-walled cell of solitary contentment in the churn of daily life: That's the premise of this new video featuring the gifted pianist Michael Mizrahi.
The music Mizrahi is playing is the first movement of Mark Dancigers' The Bright Motion. The piece lends its title to Mizrahi's new album, which the New York indie label New Amsterdam is releasing next month. Co-founded by composers Sarah Kirkland Snider, William Brittelle and Judd Greenstein — who is becoming something of New York's next big new music impresario, between the label and the Ecstatic Music Festival he founded and curates — New Amsterdam highlights the work of a tight and often brilliant circle of younger composers, several of whose works are featured on this album: Patrick Burke, Ryan Brown, John Mayrose, Dancigers, Brittelle and Greenstein. Much of the music on this album was written specifically for Mizrahi, and he plays with both tenderness and fierce beauty.
Einojuhani Rautavaara, the elder statetsman of Finnish composers, has written a dynamic percussion concerto for Colin Currie.
Sakari Viika/Ondine Records
Einojuhani Rautavaara, the elder statetsman of Finnish composers, has written a dynamic percussion concerto for Colin Currie.
Pity the poor percussionist in Mozart's day. He didn't have much to do in the orchestra, save for the occasional punctuating roll of the kettledrum (usually supporting a burst of brass) or the rare ping of a triangle.
But today is a different story, especially considering the virtuosic percussion concerto that appears on this new album of (mostly) recent works by Einojuhani Rautavaara, the dean of Finnish composers. The concerto, called Incantations, was composed for Scottish percussionist Colin Currie, who has premiered works written for him by Elliott Carter and Jennifer Higdon, with more on the way from Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen. Currie premiered Incantations at London's Royal Festival Hall in 2009.
In a Gramophone interview, the percussionist recalls the beginning of the project, when he visited Rautavaara in Helsinki to talk about the concerto and discovered the composer had already written two-thirds of it. But Currie had plenty of artistic input in the end. For the concerto's third and final movement, Rautavaara made room for a cadenza, leaving all the ideas up to the soloist.
As for the percussion instruments themselves, Currie says Rautavaara manages to play individual sounds off each other and yet treat the entire percussion group as one big instrument.
"The set-up is centered around the marimba, with the other instruments layered like an organ manual, " Currie says. "The next layer is crotales [small tuned bronze discs], then a row of drums, then cymbals, to the side are tubular bells; five layers of sound."
The three-movement concerto is laid out in the tried and true fast-slow-fast formula, which plays into Currie's virtuosity in the outer movements. Rautavaara's opening gambit, a complex marimba line that stretches out as if to the horizon, eventually gives way to raucous passages for drums and cymbals. The heart of the work is the central "Espressivo," a calm oasis for vibraphone only where repeated chords get refracted over again in various keys.
The final movement (below), with its shifting pulsations, hints at Rautavaara's mystical side. In his notes to the piece, he says it "could be a shaman's dance in a jerky rhythm." And that shaman might as well be Currie armed with his mallets, his battery of instruments and his staggering technique.
But Incantations isn't the only compelling concerto on this album. Not long after completing it, Rautavaara wrote his Second Cello Concerto, subtitling it "Towards the Horizon." Written for Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk, who plays most expressively, the concerto unfolds as a long, romantic song, with barely a breath in the cello line. The nearly constant outpouring of lyricism includes achingly beautiful passages sung in the cello's very highest register in the finale.
Sandwiched between the two sublime concertos is the three-movement Modificata. As its title might suggest, it's a reworking of some of Rautavaara's very earliest music from the 1950s, written in a serialist style with atmospheric orchestration.
Throughout the disc, the Helsinki Philharmonic plays beautifully for conductor Jan Storgårds, and the recorded sound is transparent with a surprisingly wide dynamic. This is a good one for an excellent set of headphones or a whopping stereo system.
Mumbai's Chattrapathi Shivaji Terminus railway station, one of the most famous locales in the city and a site attacked by terrorists in May 2010.
Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images
Mumbai's Chattrapathi Shivaji Terminus railway station, one of the most famous locales in the city and a site attacked by terrorists in May 2010.
By whatever name you call it — Mumbai, Bombay, Bombaim — India's largest city is a culturally complicated and gloriously layered place. Despite its main train station being officially redubbed Chhatraptai Shivaji Terminus some years ago, I've never met a Mumbaikar (Mumbai resident) who calls it anything other than Victoria (as in the British queen) Terminus, or VT. In the Mumbai suburb of Bandra stands the Portuguese-era Castella de Aguada, aka the Bandra Fort. Mumbai isn't so much a melting pot as it is like chaat, the addictive snack sold all along its Chowpatty Beach: simultaneously spicy, sweet, savory and sour.
Those kinds of balances have long fascinated composer Evan Ziporyn. Along with teaching composition at MIT, Ziporyn is an expert in Balinese gamelan. He founded the wonderful Boston-based Gamelan Galak Tika and is a founding member of the ever eclectic New York-based new music collective Bang on a Can. Those cultural interchanges pervade Mumbai, a concerto for the expressive Indian percussion called the tabla.
In his written introduction to this recording, Ziporyn notes the upsetting circumstances that surrounded the composition of this work, which features tabla player Sandeep Das with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose. In 2008, just after Ziporyn began writing, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, including at VT, shook India and the rest of the world. As his response to those events, the piece's three movements became structured as Before, During and After. But Mumbai isn't a work that catalyzes grief. Instead, it's luminous and dreamlike, unfolding with a glow and a sense of wonder both intimate and soaring. This is music you climb inside as the tabla cuts through the gleaming strings.
Ziporyn's way of framing the excellent Das, a member of the Silk Road Ensemble, as soloist carries a deep satisfaction for lovers of Indian classical music. It wasn't all that long ago that this instrument (which is actually two drums, a right-handed drum that's the tabla proper and the left-handed, deeper-voiced drum called the bayan) weren't accepted within Indian classical music as worthy solo instruments. It was relegated instead as mere rhythmic accompaniment to singers or melodic instruments. It took the extraordinary talents of one virtuoso, Ustad Alla Rakha (the father of the very popular and gifted musician Zakir Hussain) to change that paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s. Given that tabla has been used for centuries, and that ancestral precursors like the double-headed pakhawaj have been around for even longer, the popularity of tabla in solo roles is, relatively speaking, brand new.
The companion piece, Big Grenadilla, is an amazing, virtuosic showpiece for bass clarinet, played by Ziporyn himself with Rose and the BMOP. And this brief 14-minute concerto is in itself worth a serious visit. A concerto for the hulking and awkward bass clarinet, you may ask? Yes, most assuredly and delightfully so — at least as long as it's in Ziporyn's hands. Here the terrain is more like a stage at an indie rock show than a meditative landscape. At the beginning, his clarinet growls and buzzes like an electric guitar — and by the end, Ziporyn is wailing away like a rock legend, bathed in the light of the orchestra's pumping, frenetic energy. It's a whole other side of Ziporyn, a composer as variegated as the cultures he celebrates.
An excerpt from J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic with stage direction by Peter Sellars.
Johann Sebastian Bach never wrote an opera, but his St. Matthew Passion comes close — especially in an extraordinary new DVD of a semi-staged performance featuring the Berlin Philharmonic.
Director Peter Sellars doesn't consider what he's done with Bach's version of the Passion story narrative theater. Instead, Sellars thinks of his "ritualization" as more of a prayer or a meditation. He had the chorus, vocal soloists and even some of the Berlin Philharmonic players memorize the piece, freeing them from their sheet music to become actors in the story.
The musicians "aren't performing out, but they're performing in — to each other," Sellars says in an video interview. "And what you're getting is a community engaging with itself, and you're watching a community work through issues together."
Composer Evencio Castellanos helped develop a national sound for classical music in Venezuela.
Pablo Zeccara/Naxos Records
Composer Evencio Castellanos helped develop a national sound for classical music in Venezuela.
Except for two years of piano studies in New York City in the late 1940s, Venezuelan Evencio Castellanos was a homegrown musician. And based on this sampling of his symphonic output, he'd seem to be his country's leading twentieth century composer. Having the melodic flow of Heitor Villa-lobos, and the rhythmic urgency of Alberto Ginastera (two fellow South Americans), these brilliantly scored works are impressive.
The album begins with a pair of tone poems. The first, Santa Cruz de Pacairigua, from 1954, was occasioned by the construction of a church near Caracas. The boisterous percussion-laced beginning paints a festive portrait of a religious celebration. A winsome South American waltz follows, and the piece concludes in the same high spirits in which it began. The world of Ginastera's Panambi and Estancia is not far away.
El Rio de las Siete Estrellas (The River of the Seven Stars), written in 1946, takes inspiration from a poem about Venezuela's precolonial Indian population. The chief's alluring daughter is represented by the pristine, relaxed opening.
Best classical album of 2012? Maybe we can call it as early as March.
OK, so the year's only a quarter over. But a totally brilliant new recording of orchestral music by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams, performed by the San Francisco Symphony and led by Michael Tilson Thomas, is going to be a strong contender.
Recorded live in December 2010 and last September at the SFS' home venue, Davies Symphony Hall, the album encompasses two very different facets of Adams' orchestral output: the dreamy, extended Harmonielehre and the aptly named fanfare Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
Harmonielehre represents these musicians' playing on their home turf on several levels. The orchestra premiered Harmonielehre in 1985 with Edo de Waart conducting, while John Adams served as the orchestra's first-ever composer-in-residence; until now, the SFS/de Waart recording was, with good reason, the go-to recording of this music. (What's more: Tilson Thomas commissioned and led the world premiere of Short Ride in 1986 with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.)
An amazing new documentary film is a must-see not just for music lovers, but for anyone who needs to see the nourishing power of the arts and human connections.
Kinshasa Symphony takes us into the everyday lives of the members of a most unlikely ensemble: the Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste, located in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a place ravaged by war, endemic poverty and corruption.
The constant hassles and logistical problems these amateur musicians face should give serious pause to those of us leading far more privileged lives in music. They tackle big pieces — like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Orff's Carmina Burana — out of sheer love, learning their instruments and craft as they go.
Conductor Armand Diangienda founded the orchestra in 1994 after losing his job as an airline pilot. Never conservatory trained, he calls himself "just inquisitive by nature." He named the ensemble after his grandfather, Simon Kimbangu, a political icon in Congolese history, who also founded a Christian sect that went on to become Africa's largest independent African church.
When Diangienda first gathered 12 young people who wanted to learn to play the violin, he had only five instruments: "One of them would play for 20 minutes, and then pass the violin on to the next one." When violin strings broke, they replaced them with brake cables from old bicycles. When they needed a C trumpet, they cut up another instrument. And when they needed a bell for another trumpet, they transformed the wheel rim from an old minibus.
Albert Nlandu Matubanza, the orchestra's manager, also makes many of the orchestra's instruments himself. Years ago, there were many more instruments available in Kinshasa, but as Matubanza ruefully notes, a lot of them were stolen. Out of necessity, Matubanza has become a self-taught luthier; he took apart his own bass to figure out how it was made, then started making stringed instruments to equip the orchestra.
The group's open-air rehearsals are frequently punctuated by the noise and noxious clouds of dust and diesel spewed by cars and trucks passing along Kinshasa's unpaved streets. Electrical outages are frequent — so much so that the orchestra has a routine to deal with the annoyance. One of the group's violists, Joseph Masunda Lutete, knows to step in immediately: "When there's a power cut," he says, "I just drop my instrument and go start the generator."
The film's narrative arc takes us to their performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in an empty, dirt-filled public square. But what is most revealing, and most gripping, is to see how these musicians deal with the impossible reality of Kinshasa, made possible every day by its hardworking, creative and tenacious people. One of the most wrenching segments follows Nathalie Bahati, a flutist and single mother, as she struggles to find a $40 per month apartment to keep little more than a roof over the head of the young son who accompanies her everywhere, including to her rehearsals.
The joy they take in their music-making is what gets them through. As the orchestra's concertmaster, Héritier Mayimbi Mbuangi says, "When we're working on the music, there are no limits. It's like a staircase: You go up, and up."
Pioneering Polish composer Witold Lutosławski struggled to find his musical voice.
L. Kowalski/Wikimedia Commons
Pioneering Polish composer Witold Lutosławski struggled to find his musical voice.
It wasn't always easy for Polish composer Witold Lutosławski to find his musical voice.
His Symphonic Variations, which opens this third disc in a series of Lutosławski's music, was shunned by a Warsaw Conservatory professor in the late 1930s. Not understanding the young student's score, the teacher, Witold Maliszewski, said, "For me your work is ugly."
The piece might have turned heads at the strait-laced conservatory, but listening to it now, in this sparkling new recording by the BBC Symphony and conductor Edward Gardner, you hear music solidly in the early 20th-century European tradition. Ironically, you can trace the whiffs of Stravinsky, sweeping post-Romantic gestures and bright bursts of color directly back to Maliszewski's own teacher, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
In 1939, Lutosławski was set to study in Paris, but the German invasion of Poland put an end to that, and he was asked to serve his country. Lutosławski was captured by the Germans but escaped after eight days, making his way 100 miles back to Warsaw. There he eked out a living playing piano in cafes and cabaret bands. He also wrote his Variations on a Theme by Paganini for two pianos, which appears on this album in a later version he created for piano and orchestra. Again, Lutosławski shows off his ability to make an orchestra shine. The jazzy rhythms, the score's few tender moments and a digitally crisp performance by pianist Louis Lortie make for an irresistible nine minutes of music.
In 1933, Florence B. Price was the first black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra.
University of Arkansas Libraries
In 1933, Florence B. Price was the first black woman to have a symphony performed by a major American orchestra.
Born in Arkansas in 1887, Florence B. Price (née Smith) moved to Boston at age 14 where she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, studying with Frederick Converse and privately with George Chadwick. After graduating in 1906, she returned to Arkansas and held several teaching positions until 1927 when her family moved to Chicago.
Continuing her composition studies there, she would go on to write some 300 works and become the first black woman in the U.S. to be recognized as a symphonic composer. The two works on this new album testify to her art.
The Concerto in One Movement for piano (composed around 1934) is in three sections, beginning with a moderato, which opens with a brief orchestral introduction followed by a piano cadenza. They both hint at the sweeping main idea which has traditional spiritual overtones and is the subject of a virtuosic and harmonically inventive developmental dialogue between soloist and orchestra.
Deceptive Cadence is NPR's classical music blog — an open space for discussion, discovery, music listening and news. We'll try to un-stuff the world of classical music, which is both fusty and ferociously alive. Read more.
