Box of frogs! (original) (raw)

| | It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!This week's selection might illustrate how music can ride on its composer's reputation. It was lost and rediscovered, became quite frequently performed in the early 20th century, and then fell out of the standard repertoire when its composer's identity was discovered.The “Jena Symphony” is so nicknamed because it was discovered in 1909, in the form of orchestral parts without a title page, in the archives of a defunct concert society in Jena. The discoverer, musicologist and organist Fritz Stein, believed that it was an unpublished early symphony by Beethoven. Several years before he completed his 1st Symphony, Beethoven had mentioned in letters that he was working on a C major symphony modeled on Haydn's 97th, and it was uncertain whether that symphony was his eventual 1st Symphony or a different, never-completed symphony. The discovery of the Jena Symphony seemed to resolve that debate: Stein spotted a number of musical parallels between it and Haydn's 97th Symphony, and suggested that the handling of the wind parts pointed to Beethoven as the most likely composer.For almost half a century the Jena Symphony was widely regarded as Beethoven's earliest symphony, which Beethoven had presumably not seen fit to publish or give a number. It was on the periphery of the standard orchestral repertoire, performed with some frequency as an early Beethoven work. Then, in 1957, a manuscript score was found at an Austrian monastery, bearing the signature of Friedrich Witt (1770-1836). Performances and recordings of the Jena Symphony vanished almost overnight. Prior to a second revival of interest in the 1990s, almost all the extant recordings of the piece were made before 1957.Witt, it turns out, was a fairly well-known composer during his life. Born the same year as Beethoven, he had a more settled career, working first as a court composer for the Prince of Würzburg and later as music director at the city theater in the same city. He made at least three highly successful concert tours with his employer's permission in the 1790s. He was most famous during his lifetime for several operas and oratorios he composed between 1800 and 1810. But he composed less and less in middle age because of poor health, and completely stopped composing by 1824, by which point he had been completely overshadowed by Beethoven.The Jena Symphony was most likely composed in 1793 for one of Witt's concert tours. This was when Haydn was in the midst of composing his London symphonies and three years before Beethoven's earliest mention of work on a symphony; this makes it a contemporary of Haydn rather than a later imitation. While very Haydnesque, the Jena Symphony indeed seems to foreshadow Beethoven's early symphonies, especially in its orchestration.Movements:I. Adagio - Allegro vivaceII. Adagio cantabile (8:45)III. Menuetto e Trio: Maestoso (14:56)IV. Finale: Allegro (18:22)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Not much is known about the life of Hélène Liebmann (1795-1869), and only a handful of her compositions are known to survive. She first appears in the historical record as a child prodigy pianist who performed in her hometown of Berlin at age 10 and had her first piece, a piano sonata, published when she was 15. She is believed to have studied with Beethoven's pupil Ferdinand Ries for some time. She married in 1814 and moved with her husband to Vienna, then was living in London by 1816. Virtually nothing about her life or musical activities after 1819 is known, except that Clara Wieck (later Clara Schumann) wrote in her diary about meeting Liebmann at a concert in Hamburg in 1835. It was not until recently that the date of her death was discovered in a Dresden church's archives.For a time, at least, she was somewhat well known in Europe. Her Opus 1 sonata received effusive praise in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the leading music periodical of the day: the same author who opened the review by declaring his dread in anticipation of hearing "ladies' music" immediately lauded the sonata as comparable to the early works of the great masters. The AMZ continued to champion her music for some years afterward, which is likely the reason a number of her pieces were published between 1810 and 1819 despite all having been composed for private performances by family and friends. Even so, her catalogue is unclear, with some of her pieces being listed with two or more composition dates and opus numbers.Liebmann's somewhat ostentatiously titled Grand Trio in A major was the first of two piano trios she is known to have composed. It was published in 1817, having probably been completed the previous year, and is dedicated to her teacher Ries, and shows the distinct influence of Mozart and Beethoven as might be expected from her background. The most notable personal touch of her own is the "Polonoise" (sic) that serves as the final movement; Liebmann used polonaises as finales in several other pieces and is clearly in her element building the movement around the characteristic rhythm.Movements:I. AllegroII. Andante (10:16)III. Polonoise (sic) (13:18)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) is not exactly a forgotten composer. At least half a dozen of his pieces are part of the standard orchestral repertoire, and his comic chamber suite Carnival of the Animals and his opera Samson and Delilah are also famous. But much of his music has also fallen into obscurity; while his greatest hits remain popular, virtually everything else is rarely performed today.This is especially true of his chamber music, some of which was composed for unusual combinations of instruments. One of these more obscure pieces is his Septet for trumpet, piano, and strings – the trumpet is certainly not an instrument we normally hear alongside strings in a chamber ensemble! The surprising and truly impressive thing about the Septet is that the trumpet does not dominate as one would expect but is integrated into the ensemble as an equal partner. Though it was an instant success when first performed, its unusual instrumentation made further performances few and far between.Much like Carnival of the Animals, this septet started out as a joke. Saint-Saëns frequently performed as a pianist with a Parisian amateur chamber music society known as “La Trompette.” The society's founder Émile Lemoine had suggested on a number of occasions, tongue firmly planted in cheek, that Saint-Saëns should compose a piece for them involving a trumpet. Saint-Saëns declined with equal humor, saying at one point that he would rather create a work for guitar and thirteen trombones. But eventually, on a whim, he decided that it would no longer be a joke. In 1879, around Christmas, Saint-Saëns surprised Lemoine by presenting him with a one-movement piece for trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and piano. Without hesitation, Lemoine put the piece on La Trompette's next concert program in January 1880, with the composer playing the piano part. The audience was so pleased that Saint-Saëns promised on the spot to compose three more movements. He kept his word, and La Trompette premiered the complete septet in December of the same year. The single movement he had composed a year earlier became the first movement of the four-movement septet.In some ways, the Septet could be considered far ahead of its time, foreshadowing the neoclassical movement that appeared in the early 20th century. Saint-Saëns was also a music historian and editor, and when he composed the Septet he was in the midst of preparing new editions of music by the French Baroque composers Lully and Rameau. Perhaps inspired by that work, he used Baroque dance forms in the second and fourth movements of the Septet and adopted a spare, restrained aesthetic for the piece as a whole. Indeed, parts of the Septet seem reminiscent of Stravinsky's Pulcinella, which of course would not be composed for another 40 years.Movements:I. PréambuleII. Menuet (4:21)III. Intermède (9:00)IV. Gavotte et Final (13:53)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Prior to the 20th century, Spain was seen as a country on the periphery of European music. While many composers from other countries wrote pieces inspired by Spain, and several Italian expatriates in Spain won great fame, Spanish composers were largely ignored despite several being quite accomplished. Miguel Marqués (1843-1918) was one of these. He was one of Berlioz's favorite students, and was a highly prolific composer with more than thirty stage works and five symphonies to his name, yet for his entire career made a living as a violinist and pedagogue rather than as a composer.Despite not being born into a musical family, Marqués showed unusual talent early in his life and quickly exhausted the musical opportunities in his hometown of Palma de Mallorca. After becoming one of the best violinists in the city by his early teens, he went to Paris at sixteen, and was admitted to the Conservatoire two years later, initially for violin performance but later changing his focus to composition. During his student years, he supported himself by playing violin in opera orchestras. After returning to Spain and completing his compulsory military service, he remained in Madrid, continuing to make his living as an opera violinist until he retired in 1894, returned to Mallorca, and spent much of the rest of his life writing on philosophy. During his time in Madrid, he became a respected violin teacher, published a leading Spanish-language violin method. He had some popularity as a musical theater composer for a time, but his music for the concert hall was largely ignored even at the height of his career. Of his five symphonies, only his first and third were performed in his lifetime. Only his third symphony was published in his lifetime; the other four had their first publications between 1993 and 2002.Marqués's Fourth Symphony is probably his most frequently performed piece today. It was composed in 1878, as he was beginning to transition from composing mainly for the concert hall to composing almost entirely for the theater. He was well-established as a pedagogue in Madrid at the time; he was appointed Inspector of the National Music Schools the same year. Perhaps not surprisingly given his career in the orchestra pit, this symphony has a certain operatic character, with both grand theatrical gestures and aria-like melodies.Movements:I. Allegro con motoII. Andante (10:29)III. Allegretto scherzando (21:09)IV. Allegro moderato (26:55)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Taiwanese composer Chiang Wen-Yeh (1910-1983), also referred to by the Japanese name Bunya Koh or the Mainland Chinese transliteration Jiang Wenye, was considered one of Asia's leading composers in the 1930s but was pushed aside by political turmoil and was all but forgotten by 1960.Chiang was born near Taipei during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and so held Japanese nationality. Though he was a talented singer in his childhood, he started his musical education late: while studying electrical engineering in Tokyo, he began to attend night classes at the Tokyo Music School (now part of the Tokyo University of the Arts) and sang in an amateur choir. He never worked as an engineer. After completing his engineering degree, on the recommendation of his choir director, he signed a recording contract with Columbia Record Company as a baritone singer, and in 1934 he became a founding member of Fujiwara Opera, Japan's first professional European-style opera company. Around the same time, he began to study composition with Kosaku Yamada and Kunihiko Hashimoto (both of whom have featured in past Forgotten Masterpiece Fridays) and, briefly, the visiting Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin. He got his first big break as a composer in 1936 when his Formosan Dance for orchestra was chosen for submission to the art competition at the Berlin Olympic Games; though the piece did not win a medal, it earned the notice of publishers in Europe and made Chiang, under the Japanese name Bunya Koh, one of the most-performed composers in wartime Japan.In 1938, Chiang moved to occupied Beijing where he was appointed professor of music at Beijing Normal University. The move suited both the Japanese authorities, who considered Chiang a useful propaganda tool as a prominent composer of Chinese ancestry, and Chiang himself, who sought to reconnect with his Chinese cultural background. Chiang apparently considered himself to be entirely apolitical, and chose to remain in Beijing after Japan's surrender in 1945 and through the Communist revolution of 1949. For a time, he was still important in the Chinese musical scene, and he was one of the founders of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. However, in 1957 he was accused of bourgeois sympathies because he refused to stop teaching European modernist music and had his salary reduced. When the Cultural Revolution began a decade later he was stripped of his position at the Central Conservatory and sent to a labor camp. Most of his scores were confiscated and destroyed; most of what he composed between 1945 and 1966 was lost to posterity, including all four of his symphonies. Eventually, when the Cultural Revolution ended, he was reinstated to his teaching position, began to compose again, and made plans to emigrate to Taiwan, but all this was cut short when he was paralyzed by a stroke and forced to retire. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Chiang was considered a traitor for having worked with both the Communists and the Japanese. With the exception of a Chinese-language choral setting of some of the Psalms that he completed between 1945 and 1949, his music was banned in Taiwan until 1987. A few performances of his Formosan Dance in the mid-1980s evaded censorship by listing him under his Japanese name, which led to his surviving works (mostly from the 1930s) being revived in both Taiwan and Japan in the 1990s.Chiang's Sketches of the Old Capital first appeared in his sixteen Bagatelles for piano in 1935, which were intended to evoke scenes of ancient Beijing. The following year, perhaps inspired by Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, he selected five of the Bagatelles and re-published them as "Five Sketches," adding a recurring "Ruins" theme that he interspersed between them much like Mussorgsky's "Promenade" theme, as if someone were walking through the ruins of the old city and reminiscing about times gone by. In 1939, he orchestrated the Five Sketches, and titled the resulting orchestral piece "Sketches of the Old Capital." The structure of the piece thus looks like this:[Ruins Theme]I. Suona (Street Scene)[Ruins Theme]II. The Atmosphere of the Theatre[Ruins Theme]III. In the Ruins[Ruins Theme]IV. Shepherd Boy and Weeping WillowV. Old Capital GateThe title "Suona" for the first movement refers to a Chinese double-reeded horn similar to (and mostly likely sharing a Central Asian origin with) the European shawm.Movements I-III (including Ruins theme between III and IV)Movements IV-VTags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Many concertgoers like to read program notes before hearing their local symphony orchestra; some of the more avid classical listeners like to listen to several recordings of a piece and think about the varying interpretations of it. But Jeanne Beyerman-Walraven (1878-1969) took her concert obsession to a totally different level. She and her equally obsessed husband, according to their daughter, would study scores and sometimes even read through the music on two pianos before attending concerts.Perhaps that was the kind of obsession it took to become a highly competent composer, given her musical isolation early on in her life. Jeanne Walraven was born in Semarang in the Dutch East Indies (for the first few years of her career she may have been the most significant composer born in Asia) in a banking family that moved back and forth between the East Indies and the Netherlands through her childhood. Because of long stretches in Asia, her only music training before adulthood consisted of piano lessons from her mother. She studied composition in The Hague for a time in her twenties, but was a mostly self-taught composer. Her style changed dramatically over the decades that she was active. Her compositions from before 1920 were late Romantic in style. In 1911 she married Theo Beyerman, a physician who was an avid concertgoer; attending concerts on a regular basis shifted her own compositions first toward French impressionism and then toward the serialism of the Second Viennese School. From the 1930s onward, she was regarded as a “revolutionary” composer at the extreme forefront of modernism.Though Beyerman-Walraven's compositions were played by world-renowned musicians during her lifetime, most were forgotten after only a handful of performances. She did little to promote her own music, as she was uncomfortable in the spotlight. Apart from attending concerts with her husband, her daughters described her as a “recluse.” Her Concert Overture, composed in 1910, is one of those pieces that were quickly forgotten. It was Beyerman-Walraven's first successful piece for orchestra, hailed as a masterpiece when first performed in Utrecht in 1910, but completely disappeared from concert halls after early 1911. It was not heard again until 1981, when it launched a revival of interest in the Romantic period in her career.Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Rudolph Johann Joseph Rainier, Archduke of Austria (1788-1831) is known today as the prince to whom Beethoven dedicated his “Archduke” Piano Trio. He was one of Beethoven's main patrons. In 1809, when Beethoven was contemplating leaving Vienna for a royal court position elsewhere, Rudolph, along with Prince Joseph von Lobkowitz and Count Ferdinand Kinsky, offered Beethoven an annual stipend to remain in Vienna for the rest of his life. After Kinsky died and Lobkowitz went bankrupt, Rudolph paid their shares of Beethoven's stipend until Beethoven's death.Rudolph was also a very competent pianist and composer. He had epilepsy and suffered from poor health for most of his life, so eschewed the military career that was traditional for young noblemen and instead opted for a less strenuous career in the church that also gave him time to dedicate to music. Rudolph gave the first performance of Beethoven's “Emperor” Piano Concerto in a private concert at the Lobkowitz palace months before the public premiere. Though Beethoven had many piano students, Rudolph was Beethoven's only composition student. Because it was considered unseemly at the time for a member of the royal family to profit from his musical compositions, he had his music published either anonymously or under the name “S.R.D.” The abbreviation stood for “Serenissimus Rudolfus Dux” but could easily be assumed to be a composer's initials. Several of his works were performed with some frequency during his life, but only connected with him many years after their composition. Other pieces were never published and probably never performed publicly, though some of them may have had private performances. Many of the unpublished pieces are chamber works featuring the clarinet, likely because Rudolph's chamberlain Ferdinand de Troyer was a conservatory-trained clarinetist.Rudolph's Clarinet Trio (for clarinet, cello, and piano) is one of these unpublished pieces. It was most likely composed in 1813, and only first published in 1969 after the discovery of a manuscript score in the Moravian Museum in Brno. It may not ever have been completed. The manuscript had four movements: Allegro moderato, Larghetto, Scherzo, and Rondo. But only a few measures of the Rondo appeared in the score; it is uncertain whether the Rondo was left unfinished, discarded entirely, or completed and lost. The modern editors chose to reverse the order of the last two surviving movements and end the piece with a slow movement rather than a scherzo. Thus, although it appears likely that Rudolph was influenced by Beethoven's “Gassenhauer” Trio for the same set of instruments, the fact that both pieces are three-movement works ending with a theme and variations is entirely the result of a 20th century editorial decision.Movements:I. Allegro moderatoII. Scherzo: Allegretto (8:57)III. Larghetto (13:49)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!This week's feature is a piano concerto by a man Sergei Rachmaninoff reportedly called "the Canadian Mozart," André Mathieu (1929-1968), whose score was lost and reconstructed from a recording. He was born into a musical family: his father Rodolphe was probably the first Canadian to make a living as a full-time composer of art music, and his mother was an accomplished amateur violinist. Despite his father's initial refusal to teach him music (Rodolphe often struggled to make ends meet and hoped his son would not follow in his footsteps), the young André was extremely precocious. He was talking and singing before his first birthday, and at one point as a toddler, entirely without his parents' prompting, he climbed up onto the piano bench and picked out "O Canada" by ear. Once his father reluctantly decided that a child so enthusiastic about music should have competent training, André learned remarkably quickly, performing his first solo recital at six with pieces by Schumann alongside some of his own compositions. At seven, he played his own Concertino for Piano and Orchestra in a concert broadcast nationally by the CBC.At some point, the parallels to Mozart began to extend to his family. It would have been difficult to live in Quebec at that time and not hear about Mathieu. One music critic suggested that André Mathieu might be even better than Mozart, noting that his music was more sophisticated than Mozart's juvenilia. And so, over several years, Rodolphe Mathieu transformed from a reluctant teacher to his son's most active promoter -- much like Leopold Mozart, he never turned down an opportunity to monetize his son's talent, and became prone to exaggerating André's precocity by claiming he was younger than he was or by claiming pieces were composed earlier than their actual dates. At the end of 1936, Rodolphe decided to uproot the entire family to advance his son's career and relocated to Paris, ostensibly to allow André to study there but not without a heavy dose of public promotion. The decline in Mathieu's fame began not long afterward. He continued to have some success even after the outbreak of war forced the family to return to Canada, and in 1941 he won first prize in the composition competition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. But as he entered his teens, he became harder and harder to sell as a "child prodigy," and impresarios began to tire of his father's increasingly obvious exaggerations. In addition, a relentless touring schedule between 1939 and 1943 gave him little time to compose or expand his piano repertoire, which made it difficult to get repeat engagements with orchestras.For a time, the collapse of Mathieu's performing career as a "child prodigy" seemed to revive his career as a composer. In adolescence, he rebelled against his father's heavy-handed control of his career and spent much of his time around musical colleagues, and in 1946 he went back to Paris on his own for a year to study composition with Arthur Honegger. (A historical footnote: for about five weeks, he lived in a dormitory for foreign students with future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau.) He produced most of his best compositions between 1947 and 1958, in a neo-Romantic style that was to some extent a rejection of his father's avant-garde, atonal music. But the brief revival was a veneer over personal problems that had never gone away. He may have had bipolar disorder; he was rumored to have attempted suicide at least four times in his life, and at other times was prone to grandiose outbursts. He drank heavily beginning when he was as young as fifteen. (Alcohol abuse may have begun even earlier, as family friends reported that his father had sometimes given him a shot of cognac before concerts.) He grossly mismanaged his own career, continuing to rely on his child prodigy persona by putting his own juvenilia on recital programs. He also suffered financially from his father's mismanagement of his early career: because of a contract his father had signed when he first composed the piece in 1943, he had to pay royalties every time he played his own Piano Concerto No. 3 (also known as the Concerto de Québec), even when he played the 1947 revision. His breakdown in the 1950s was spectacularly public. His frequent drunken outbursts, frequently the subject of gossip columns in Montreal papers, caused his concert engagements to dwindle. From 1955 onward his only public performances were in "pianothons" in which he attempted to break endurance records; he was briefly in the Guinness Book of World Records for a continuous piano performance of more than 21 hours. He moved back in with his parents, spent the 1950s and 1960s in and out of rehabilitation for alcoholism, and died suddenly, most likely of cardiovascular disease, in 1968.When Mathieu died, nothing he composed after 1948 had been published; though some had been performed, it existed only in hand-copied form. Some of his music returned to public awareness when his friend Vic Vogel was hired to compose music for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Vogel made the ceremonial music somewhat of a tribute to Mathieu, basing most of it on melodies found in Mathieu's later unpublished works. Several concerts of Mathieu's orchestral and chamber music followed. But one piece was missing from the revival: Mathieu's fourth and last piano concerto, composed in 1948. This concerto was considered his greatest masterpiece, and he performed it numerous times between 1948 and 1955, but the score and parts were lost and for many years no recording was known to exist. But it turned out that Mathieu himself had made a recording of a 1950 concert performance and given the discs to a friend. In 2005, as pianist Alain Lefevre was on a concert tour aimed at reviving Mathieu's work, that friend met Lefevre backstage and gave him the recording. Lefevre and composer Gilles Bellemare reconstructed the score from the concert recording, and in 2013 Mathieu's fourth piano concerto was heard for the first time in almost 60 years.I. AllegroII. AndanteIII. Allegro con fuocoTags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music José María Usandizaga (1887-1915) had a brilliant but short career and was acclaimed as the father of Basque opera within his lifetime, though he only had distant Basque ancestry. He was born in the Basque Country and had a Basque surname, but was actually the son of the Uruguayan consul general in San Sebastián.Usandizaga got his start in music through a bit of misfortune: he broke his hip at the age of five and his aunt bought him a toy piano with which he could entertain himself while he was immobile. It remained his favorite toy after he recovered, and he soon moved up to a full-size piano, on which he began lessons at age nine. He composed his first piece, a piano waltz, the same year. The famed French pianist Francis Planté heard him play in 1900 and convinced his parents to send him to Paris to study piano and composition the following year.It was in Paris that Usandizaga developed his identity as a Basque composer, through contacts with fellow countrymen who resided there. While in Paris, he became acquainted with Resurrección María de Azkue, a priest and academic who was wrote one of the first modern linguistic surveys of the Basque language, and Jesús Guridi, a fellow student who later became a major figure in both Spanish and Basque opera. In 1906, Usandizaga returned to San Sebastián, where he won acclaim for compositions heavily influenced by Basque folk music. He is best known for his three operas drawing on both Italian verismo and Basque musical themes, the Basque-language Mendi Mendiyan (High in the Mountains) and the Spanish-language Las Golondrinas (The Swallows) and La Llama (The Flame). He was constantly busy, and when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 28, he left numerous unfinished pieces, including La Llama which was completed by his brother. Considered Spain's first great composer since the “Spanish Mozart” Juan Arriaga at the time of his death, Usandizaga was given a triumphant funeral. The monument to him in San Sebastián is one of the city's major landmarks.Usandizaga composed his only string quartet (a second was unfinished at his death and never completed by any other person) in 1905, near the end of his studies in Paris, and it was first performed in San Sebastián in December 1906. He titled it “Cuarteto sobre temas populares vascos” (Quartet on Basque popular themes) and incorporated parts of three popular songs into the piece. The finale includes a zortziko, a Basque folk dance with a distinctive 5/8 meter. Interestingly, Usandizaga wrote tempo markings in both Spanish and French.I. Muy lento – Vivo – Muy lentoII. Scherzo: Muy vivoIII. ModeratoIV. Introducción, Zortziko y FinalTags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!This week's piece might not be so forgotten lately, seeing as I heard it twice in the last week, once in concert on Sunday and once on the radio earlier today. But when I attended the concert (Mozart to Mendelssohn Orchestra in San Francisco), the conductor asked the audience for a show of hands from everyone who had heard of the Swedish composer Franz Berwald (1796-1868), and my hand was one of only three that went up.Berwald was an amateur musician for most of his life, with a remarkably eclectic career, and only ever heard a few of his compositions performed. He struggled to make a living as a professional violinist in Stockholm and Berlin in his 20s, and when his father died and his family was no longer able to support him, Berwald was forced to seek other employment. He turned to orthopedics, and became highly accomplished in that field. His orthopedic and physiotherapy clinics in Berlin and Vienna brought him wealth and a certain degree of fame, and he invented several orthopedic devices that remained in widespread use into the 20th century. Eventually he returned to Sweden in 1849, when he was hired to manage a sawmill and a glass factory. He was not recognized as a composer until he was an old man. His opera Estrella de Soria -- which he had composed in Vienna two decades earlier -- had a successful run in Stockholm in 1862. He finally earned his first full-time musical job in 1867, when he was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Stockholm Conservatory at the age of 71. Commissions for new compositions began to roll in around that time, but most were left unfinished as Berwald contracted pneumonia and succumbed in early 1868.Berwald composed prolifically in the 1840s and 1850s, but only had a handful of pieces performed before the 1860s, with most of the performances involving members of his family: his brother was the soloist who premiered his violin concerto in 1821, and his cousin conducted the premiere of his first symphony in 1843 and two operettas in the mid-1840s. His music was not well received at the time, possibly because it was so far ahead of its time. Though the recently-passed Beethoven and Berwald's contemporary Mendelssohn were clear influences on his music, he tried radical experiments with the symphonic form in the 1840s that would not be widely accepted until near the turn of the 20th century, and his harmonies and atmospheric effects anticipated Late Romantic symphonists such as Bruckner and Sibelius. Even though Berwald did receive some recognition at the end of his life, most of his music would not be performed until the 20th century.Berwald's 3rd Symphony, which he titled "Sinfonie Singulière," was completed in 1845 but not heard until 1905. The title is an apt one. The symphony opens with a sort of tone painting that would have been right at home at the turn of the 20th century when it was first performed, but which audiences would have found extremely unsettling when it was composed 60 years earlier. The entire first movement, though composed in traditional sonata allegro form, seems to create a feeling of constant transition. The second movement is the most unique of the three. It begins as an adagio movement reminiscent of Schumann, then a startling timpani strike breaks the calm and launches the orchestra into a playful scherzo. Eventually the adagio returns just as suddenly, but with a noticeably different and distinctly more modern texture. The finale, equal parts dramatic and lyrical, features some of the robust orchestration and unusual harmonic progressions that listeners often associate with much later Scandinavian composers; this movement in particular has been described as a cross between Mendelssohn and Sibelius.I. Allegro fuocosoII. Adagio - Allegro assai - Adagio (11:37)III. Presto (20:33)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!In March 1945, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra made the extraordinary move of putting its second oboist in the spotlight for an entire concert. In the first half of the concert Ruth Gipps stepped out of the orchestra to play a concerto -- not an oboe or English horn concerto, but Glazunov's 1st piano concerto. After the intermission, Gipps took her usual seat in the orchestra, playing the English horn... in the premiere of her own First Symphony. (In doing so, she became one of the very few composers who have played in the orchestra for the premiere of their own composition.) The public reaction to her impressive triple-bill as piano soloist, orchestral oboist, and symphony composer was disastrous and ended her career as a professional oboist. The concert led to conductor George Weldon being accused of favoritism. Ugly rumors swirled around the orchestra that Gipps (whose husband was away at war) and Weldon were having an affair and that there was an impending divorce. At the end of the season Gipps resigned from the orchestra because of growing hostility toward her from other musicians.There was never evidence of such an affair. The truth was that Ruth Gipps was simply a highly versatile musician. She first became known as a piano prodigy, winning piano competitions against much older children when she was four years old, making her debut as a concerto soloist when she was ten, and winning a concerto competition in London against professional pianists when she was thirteen. Though she studied oboe performance at the Royal College of Music, she continued to perform occasionally as a concert pianist during her student years, and when she won her position at the CBSO she also became the standby pianist any time a piano concerto was programmed, actually stepping in for a soloist who was caught in traffic on one occasion. Her first symphony, which premiered in that disastrous concert, had been named the best student composition at the RCM several years earlier.Although she was no longer playing in the orchestra, Gipps did not go away. She resumed her career as a piano soloist and continued to compose. A year later, she returned with her second symphony. This time, though Weldon conducted the first performance as before, the symphony spoke for itself and there were no accusations of favoritism.Gipps was a fairly successful composer for about two decades from that point forward, but eventually fell out of favor because she continued to compose in a tonal idiom. Her impact on British music was mainly as a conductor. In 1954, she was forced to stop playing both the piano and the oboe after badly injuring her hand in a bicycle accident, and began to focus on conducting and composition. Though she was by then an experienced conductor of amateur orchestras, several professional orchestras refused to consider her for conducting positions expressly because of her gender, telling her directly that male musicians would not be be willing to work for a female conductor. As a result, she founded two orchestras herself, both professional training ensembles for recent conservatory graduates. With these orchestras, Gipps gained a reputation for promoting new music, including at least one living composer in every concert she conducted. She also handed numerous leading British musicians their solo debuts, most notably violinist (later conductor) Iona Brown and cellists Julian Lloyd Webber and Alexander Baillie.Gipp's 2nd symphony, composed in 1945 and premiered in 1946, was entered into a competition for a Victory Symphony that was sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper. Though she composed the symphony in a single continuous movement in an extended sonata form, Gipps conceived it in three sections: one representing her life before the war, one representing the war, and one representing the safe return of her husband from military service. Despite being a "Victory Symphony," it takes an introspective and melancholic cast rather than a bombastic one, though not lacking in colorful and sometimes cinematic writing! Somehow seeming both epic and compact at once, the entire symphony is dense with symbolism. The plaintive second theme, for example, is introduced by Gipps's own instrument, the English horn. An attentive listener might also notice some of the melodies from the exposition returning in reverse at the end, as if to represent life never being quite the same after the war.Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Philip Cipriani Hambly Potter (1792-1871), who went by the name Cipriani throughout his life, worked in what has been regarded as a "dark age" in British music. British music from between 1800 and 1880 has long been seen as staid and backward-looking, trailing trends on the European continent by two or three decades. Potter was one of the few exceptions among British composers, not only keeping up with his contemporaries on the continent but anticipating the late Romanticism of Wagner and Bruckner with some of his harmonic language. Though he was Britain's first great Romantic symphonist, he had the misfortune of working in Beethoven's shadow during his most productive years.During his life, Potter was known mainly as a virtuoso pianist. He lived in Vienna for a time, become friends with Beethoven during his years there, and after returning to England he played the English premieres of no fewer than three of Beethoven's piano concertos. He went on to champion the piano music of Schumann and Brahms in the British Isles. His performing career was a long one; his last appearance on a concert stage was in 1871, the last year of his life, aged 78. Potter's career as a composer, however, was strangely short. He composed almost his entire catalogue by his mid-40s. Though he continued to revise his past compositions until the end of his life, after 1837 the only new music to come from his pen was a handful of short piano pieces and one march for orchestra.Potter is believed to have completed 12 symphonies, all between 1819 and 1834, of which 9 survive. The numbering is rather confusing. Some modern sources number the surviving symphonies 1-9 in order of composition, while others use the numbers 1-12 with the lost symphonies inserted in presumed order of composition. Potter himself numbered some of his symphonies but not others, and seems to have used at least two different numbering systems. The symphony presented in this post, for example, is listed as his 6th symphony today, but Potter himself referred to it as "No. 2" and "No. 10" at different times. ("No. 2" may be because it was his second G-minor symphony; "No. 10" may be in order of last revision.)Potter's 6th (or 10th) Symphony was completed in 1832, five years after Beethoven's death, and was probably revised in the early 1850s. Not surprisingly for its original composition date, it is very much a successor to Beethoven, with the final movement even seeming to contain some echoes of Beethoven's 7th Symphony. Where Beethoven was known for surprise modulations into distant keys, Potter takes it a step farther, with ingenious rapid-fire sequences of key changes and long periods of tonal instability that critics of his time found unsettling. In this sense, Potter was part of the bridge from Beethoven to the late Romantic era. This symphony may even have influenced Wagner directly: Wagner is known to have admired Potter and conducted this symphony in 1855 during his brief period as a full-time orchestral conductor.Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Lucija Garuta (1902-1977) is regarded today as one of Latvia's two greatest composers, and during her lifetime was sometimes described as "the female Rachmaninoff," but her music is rarely performed outside the former Soviet Union. Garuta was one of the most prominent chamber musicians in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the rehearsal pianist for the Latvian National Opera and a professor of composition and music theory at the Latvian Conservatory for decades.Though she studied composition in Paris with Paul Dukas in the 1920s, she only focused on composition after 1940, when a serious illness forced her to cease her activities as a touring pianist. In 1944, she composed her best-known work, the cantata Dievs, Tava zeme deg! (God, your land is burning!), which is regarded as the most important of all Latvian musical pieces. Its premiere, at the Riga cathedral with Garuta herself playing the organ, took place amidst the liberation of Riga from Nazi German occupation, and the sounds of battle outside the cathedral could be heard on the audio recording. Ironically, it was the fame of Dievs, Tava zeme deg! that doomed Garuta to obscurity after her death. The cantata was eventually adopted as a symbol of the Latvian independence movement, which resulted in Garuta's Latvian-language vocal music as well as some of her music based on Latvian folk themes being banned by Soviet authorities from 1960 until 1990.Garuta's piano concerto, composed in 1952 and premiered in 1955, escaped censorship but nonetheless received far less attention than it deserves because of its composer's forced obscurity. The sparkling piano writing and grand orchestral gestures clearly mark this concerto as part of the late Romantic tradition running from Tchaikovsky through Rachmaninoff, but with a distinct voice of its own. Garuta dedicated the concerto to the memory of her niece, who had died of a heart condition in 1950, perhaps motivating the "from darkness to light" aesthetic of the entire work. The slow movement is subtitled "In memoriam" and incorporates two Latvian funeral hymns.Movements:I. Lento pesante - Allegro sostenutoII. In memoriam: Grave (14:43)III. Maestoso - Allegro scherzando (23:09)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!Carl Helsted (1818-1904) had an inexplicably short career as a composer, completing his last work at 33 and living another half-century without composing a single piece of music. The son of a military bandsman, he began his musical career as a flautist in military bands himself. But his passion seems to have been for opera, as he left the army band after three years, traveled to Paris to study singing, and worked mainly as a singer and voice teacher after he returned to Denmark. Helsted's composing career started promisingly: when he was still a student, his Concert Overture in D minor was runner-up in a prestigious competition and created a sensation at its Copenhagen premiere. Although several more pieces were similarly successful, Helsted abruptly stopped composing without explanation in 1851. Perhaps he felt he was being overshadowed by Niels Gade, one year his senior, who had recently returned to Denmark from a stint as music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus. But it also seems likely that Helsted had simply become too busy to compose between his increasing number of students and his own performing engagements. He was one of the most sought-after singing teachers of his time, and as a singer he remained an active performer well into his eighties.The years after Helsted returned from Paris were his most prolific. His First Symphony is a product of this period, composed in 1842. Like his contemporary Schumann, Helsted forms somewhat of a link between the nascent Romanticism of Beethoven and Schubert and the mature Romanticism of Brahms -- but unlike Schumann, who was responsible for unearthing Schubert's Ninth and later knew Brahms personally, Helsted worked in what was then a musical backwater. This symphony's resemblance to Schumann's later orchestral music is especially striking because Schumann only began to compose for orchestra in 1841.Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!In the 1930s, the New York press often referred to Dana Suesse (1909-1987) as the "girl Gershwin." Like George Gershwin, Suesse got her start as a Tin Pan Alley songwriter before a string of hit songs made her one of the wealthiest musicians in America by the time she was 25 years old. Like Gershwin, she was unsatisfied with success as a popular songwriter and aspired to a career as a "serious" composer. Unlike Gershwin, she lived long enough to actually pursue that career for the second half of her life.Born in Kansas City, Suesse was a prodigy at a young age, beginning to play the piano at two and touring on the Midwestern vaudeville circuit at the age of nine. As a teenager, she was especially impressive as an improviser; she would ask audiences to give her a theme, on which she would improvise an entire piano piece in classical form. In 1926, she moved with her mother to New York City, where she studied composition with Rubin Goldmark (who was also one of Gershwin's teachers) and formed a prolific songwriting partnership with lyricist Billy Rose. Though she wrote few complete musicals, her songs regularly featured in the Ziegfeld Follies and in Rose's own Diamond Horseshoe revues.Suesse's debut as a classical composer came through the same channels as Gershwin's: Paul Whiteman, who had previously commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, commissioned a piano concerto from Suesse in 1932. The result was Suesse's Piano Concerto in Three Rhythms, the piece that first drew comparisons with Gershwin. Her biggest popular hit, "You Oughta Be in Pictures," followed soon after and rapidly became the unofficial anthem of Hollywood. After the Second World War, no longer needing to earn money from music, Suesse traveled to France and studied composition under Nadia Boulanger. From then on, she focused on composing music for the concert hall, including two more piano concertos. She never entirely stopped writing music for the theater, however; she sporadically composed musicals and incidental music for plays, and was midway through composing a musical when she passed away in 1987.Suesse was never nearly as successful with her concert music as she was with her popular music. While many of her songs remain standards, her Piano Concerto in Three Rhythms is probably best described as the forgotten concerto of the Jazz Age, performed only a handful of times after the 1930s. As the title suggests, each movement is based on a different popular music style, though at the premiere the movements were listed in the program only by their Italian tempo markings. Programs at later performances included the titles of the movements: a bold, assertive Foxtrot in sonata-allegro form, a slow, mournful Blues movement, and a jaunty Rag that features the piano and orchestra constantly riffing off one another.I. Foxtrot: Allegro ma non troppoII. Blues: AdagioIII. Rag: PrestoTags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!The first three African-American composers to have symphonies performed by major orchestras emerged in surprisingly rapid succession. Just two years after William Grant Still's "Afro-American" Symphony No. 1 made its debut on the concert stage in 1930, Florence Price followed with her own 1st Symphony. The third composer was William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), whose Negro Folk Symphony was played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski in 1934. Dawson eventually gained a reputation as a choral composer and conductor, which largely overshadowed his own instrumental music.Dawson was born in 1899, the first of seven children in a poor family in rural Alabama. His father, a former slave, was an illiterate day laborer. At the age of 13, he ran away from home to study music as a pre-college student at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), paying his tuition in part by working as the school's music librarian and in part through farm work. He learned to play most of the instruments in the orchestra while in high school, and his job in the music library allowed him plenty of time to study scores. As a result, he began his conducting career early. While an undergraduate at Washburn College in Kansas, he supported himself by directing high school bands. While completing a master's degree in composition at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, he won several prestigious competitions as a band director. In 1930, he returned to the Tuskegee Institute as director of its School of Music, a position he held for 25 years. During that time, he personally directed the Tuskegee Institute Choir, making it one of the nation's best collegiate choral ensembles. Most of his compositions were written for the Tuskegee Institute Choir and many are still regularly performed today. After Dawson retired from the Tuskegee Institute in 1956, he continued to be a sought-after conductor for choral festivals and workshops around the world.The Negro Folk Symphony was one of his few important instrumental works. Following the Romantic nationalist music that had come into vogue first in Europe and increasingly in the Americas, Dawson composed with the late Romantic harmonic and orchestral palette, while weaving blues scales and melodies from African-American folk songs and spirituals throughout the symphony. It received great acclaim and was performed more than thirty times across the United States before the end of 1934; one newspaper review called it "the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has been so far achieved." But the Negro Folk Symphony's main effect on Dawson's career seems to have been to draw attention to his choral music. Though Dawson became famous, the symphony became an occasionally-performed footnote in his biography. In 1952, after returning from a tour of West Africa, Dawson revised the symphony to include more African rhythms, writing that he wanted to re-introduce "the missing elements that were lost when Africans came into bondage outside their homeland." The revision resulted in a handful of performances and recordings, but nothing resembling the sensation that greeted its premiere; it was only after 2010 that the symphony began to see a real revival.Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!On the first day of Black History Month, and with a government shutdown not far behind us, it seems appropriate to feature an African-American composer who wrote music as an amateur while working at civil service jobs for much of his life and did not become a full-time composer until he was 45 years old.Howard Swanson (1907-1978) was born into a family of educators in Atlanta; his parents and grandparents were all teachers, and unusually for an African-American family at the time, they were able to send both of his brothers to college. His musical talent was first noticed when the family relocated to Cleveland in 1916; as a boy he frequently sang or played the piano at his church. But his father died suddenly in 1925, when he was 17, immediately putting his family in precarious financial circumstances. Needing to provide for his mother and younger sister, Swanson took a job at the Cleveland post office after graduating from high school, derailing his plans for his own education. Eventually, the family's situation improved enough that he was able to resume taking piano lessons; his piano teacher was impressed enough to recommend him to the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he began to take evening classes in 1927. More than a decade later, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in music theory, having worked at the post office for the entire time. On graduating, he won a fellowship to study in France with famed composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. He arrived in Paris in 1939, only for his studies to be interrupted again less than a year later, this time by the German invasion. Swanson never resumed his formal musical training. On returning to the United States, he gave up on the prospect of a musical career, found a new job at the Internal Revenue Service, and continued composing only as a hobby.Swanson's big break came in 1950, when Marian Anderson came across one of his earliest art songs, a setting of the Langston Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and performed it at Carnegie Hall. At the recital, Swanson met New York Philharmonic music director Dimitri Mitropoulos, who inquired about his other compositions. Later that year, Mitropoulos conducted the premiere of Swanson's "Short Symphony," which he had composed two years earlier. The Short Symphony was an instant success, receiving more than thirty performances by major orchestras and multiple recordings within two years after its premiere. In 1952, Swanson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to leave his civil service job and become a full-time composer for the rest of his life. He moved back to Paris, where he stayed until 1966 before eventually returning to semi-retirement in New York. Because he was an amateur composer for much of his life, his overall reputation was limited by his relatively small body of work.Swanson was best known for his art songs, composing only a handful of major instrumental works. His Concerto for Orchestra is one of them. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, it was composed in 1956 and premiered in 1957, not long after Swanson turned to music as a full-time career. Though he made some use of jazz-inspired thematic material, Swanson was a neoclassicist, and the influence of both Stravinsky and Hindemith is evident in the Concerto for Orchestra. While the concerto is in just two movements, it loosely follows the Baroque concerto grosso form with each movement functioning somewhat as a pair of movements in the traditional slow-fast-slow-fast sequence. Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!In the 18th and early 19th centuries, Viennese society went crazy for all things Turkish. Music was no exception to the trend: all the leading composers of the day, including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, produced what they referred to as "Turkish music." This was, of course, ersatz Turkish music filtered through a Western classical lens. The European idea of Turkish music was a limited one. Austrian soldiers had heard Janissary military bands during the Ottoman invasions of Europe in the 17th century, and when the Treaty of Karlowicz ended the wars between the Austrian and Ottoman empires, the Ottoman diplomatic delegation brought a Janissary band to perform before civilian audiences in Vienna. From then on, it became fashionable for European monarchs to import Janissary bands. For European audiences, "Turkish music" had two connotations: Eastern and military. Therefore, the "Turkish music" of Viennese composers invariably meant little more than the use of heavy percussion instruments (or in the case of Mozart's piano music, percussive effects) to imitate the sound of Turkish military bands.The rest of Turkey's musical heritage took far longer to penetrate into Western art music. Western music began to take root in Turkey around the same time that Vienna became fascinated with Turkish music. Italian opera was popular in Istanbul by 1800, and by the middle of the 19th century, European symphonic music was regularly performed in the major cities of the Ottoman Empire. But throughout the 19th century Western and Turkish music remained stubbornly separate. The separation continued after the fall of the Ottoman Empire: Atatürk and his revolutionaries, in their effort to modernize Turkish society, required Turkish composers to follow the principles of Western tonal music. In Atatürk's view, the future of Turkish music was in combining Turkish folk melodies with Western music theory. He saw Ottoman music -- the music of the court and of urban popular entertainment -- as backward and unsuitable for the Turkish Republic's entry into Western civilization, and banned it from radio broadcasts for a time. Beginning in 1926, the Atatürk government began to send talented young composers to Western Europe for further education. The crowning achievement of this policy was the emergence of a group of composers known as the "Turkish Five," among whom was Hasan Ferid Alnar (1906-1978).That was the prevailing narrative of 20th century Turkish art music, anyway. Hasan Ferid Alnar, however, occupied an especially precarious position in the Turkish musical establishment because, alone among the "Turkish Five," he had been a composer and performer of Ottoman classical music prior to the revolution. While the others were trained exclusively in Western music and Western instruments, Alnar was a virtuoso on the kanun, a microtonal zither used in Ottoman court music. Ironically, having learned Western music theory to preserve his livelihood, Alnar went to Vienna and found encouragement to look to his roots in Ottoman music and challenge the suppression of his first musical idiom. Though he composed in Western forms like his colleagues, he unapologetically drew from Ottoman classical music, even composing a concerto for the kanun that premiered in Vienna in the 1950s. Because of his continued connection to a banned genre of music, Alnar was the least-performed of the Turkish Five in Turkey, but perhaps the second most successful abroad. Alnar's Cello Concerto, composed in 1942, was his first major work to integrate Ottoman ideas into Western music. With it, Alnar broke a seven-year silence as a composer. After receiving great critical acclaim for his Prelude and Two Dances for orchestra when it premiered in Vienna, Alnar had moved back to Turkey in 1935, accepting a teaching position at the newly founded Ankara State Conservatory and a conducting position at the Ankara State Opera. For several years, he was mainly known for several productions of Western operas in Turkish translation. During the years after Atatürk's death, attitudes toward Ottoman classical music had begun to soften. Commissioned to compose a concerto for the local symphony orchestra's principal cellist David Zirkin, Alnar saw the opportunity to act on his Viennese teachers' advice. He used several Ottoman scales in the concerto, and rather than the kinds of virtuosic figures and techniques typically found in cello repertoire, he deliberately tried to evoke the falsetto singing of the Ottoman vocal tradition. The concerto was highly successful with the public -- but with the exception of a handful of individuals who attributed the impact on the audience to the Ottoman stylistic features, most Turkish critics savaged the piece and emphasized the departures from Western tonality as proof of Alnar's inferiority. The concerto would be his only major work to premiere in Turkey. From 1945 onward, virtually all of his compositions premiered in Germany and Austria, and in 1961 he moved back to Vienna himself. His music remained rarely performed in Turkey until the turn of the 21st century.Movements:I. ModeratoII. Largo ma non troppo (13:55)III. Allegro con brio (23:52)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!For a brief moment, Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876-1909) stood alongside Mahler and Richard Strauss as one of the leading composers in the transition from Romanticism to modernism. It was, however, only a moment: Karłowicz's life was tragically cut short just as he was beginning to achieve recognition as a great composer.Karłowicz's career as a composer began relatively late. He was a promising violinist in his teens, but did not compose his first piece until he was 17 or 18. In 1895, he traveled to Berlin intending to study violin with Joseph Joachim, but after being turned down, he instead enrolled at the University of Berlin as a student of musical composition. He produced his two largest-scale pieces, a symphony and a violin concerto, at the end of his student years; these were his last pieces in traditional forms. Much like Richard Strauss, he came to favor the genre of the symphonic poem, and indeed composed in no other form after he completed his studies. After graduating from the University of Berlin in 1901, Karłowicz returned to Warsaw only to find audiences and critics vehemently opposed to his post-Romantic style. Within a few years, thoroughly frustrated, he moved to the resort town of Zakopane in the Tatra Mountains. He became an avid mountain climber and skier as well as a noted landscape photographer, while continuing to compose.Eventually he began to gain some recognition as a composer, and 1908 and 1909 saw a whole string of premieres of pieces he had composed over the past decade. He began to draw favorable comparisons to Strauss, Mahler, and Scriabin. He did not enjoy the recognition for long, however: he perished in an avalanche in early February 1909 while skiing just outside Zakopane.The symphonic tryptich Eternal Songs, though one of his earlier symphonic poems, was Karłowicz's last piece published during his lifetime, with the composer agreeing to terms with a publisher less than a month before his untimely death. Though the three "songs" are not expressly programmatic, the piece was intended as a synthesis of Karłowicz's pantheistic spirituality. The composer described his inspiration thus: "When I find myself alone on a precipitious summit ... then I begin to dissolve into the surrounding spaces, I cease to feel like a separate individual, and am covered by the powerful, everlasting breath of eternity. ... Hours experienced in this half-conscious state are, so to say, a momentary return to non-existence; they give peace in the face of life and death, they tell of the eternal hope of dissolution in the universe."Movements:I. Song of Everlasting YearningII. Song of Love and Death (10:45)III. Song of Eternal Being (21:26)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music It's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!The Polish pianist and composer Juliusz Zarębski (1854-1885) is a tragic what-if story: he was a late-bloomer who died young yet managed to leave a few masterful compositions to posterity. He was known throughout Europe as a virtuoso pianist and was said to be Franz Liszt's favorite pupil, but had a late start to composing (his earliest published composition being completed when he was 25) and composed only occasionally until the last two years of his life. It was only in 1883, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and became too ill to tour as a pianist, that he began to focus on composition, and as a result, fully two-thirds of his compositions date from his last two years.Zarębski's Piano Quintet, regarded in Poland as his finest work, was both his last composition and his only one that was not for either solo piano or piano four-hands. Zarębski knew even when he began composing it that it would be his last piece, and consciously aimed to make it the capstone of his musical career. Unfortunately it was not to be, at least not for over a century. Much of the music composed in the Russian-occupied part of Poland in the late 19th century was lost in the political turmoil of the era. Zarębski died shortly after completing his Piano Quintet, and it would not be published until 1931. Even after being published, the quintet was not publicly performed for decades. Its earliest known public performance was on Polish radio in 1989, more than a century after its composition. Most performances and recordings have occurred since 2011, the year the quintet was first performed outside Poland.Since its revival, critics have attempted to compare the Zarębski piano quintet to his contemporaries: Brahms or Liszt or even César Franck. But the piece speaks with Zarębski's own voice throughout, adventurous both in form and harmonic language, from its passionate-yet-subtle opening to its exhilarating finish. The opening movement, lyrical and slightly melancholic, pushes the sonata form almost to its breaking point. After a propulsive first-movement coda, the atmospheric introduction to the slow movement immediately wrong-foots the listener with an unexpected change of key. This material both begins and ends the second movement, as if setting apart the song-like main body as a sort of dream. The third movement is a scherzo in every sense, playing both rhythmically and texturally with a folk-like theme. The last movement starts with an imaginative twist, its opening measures sounding like a repeat of the scherzo that quickly loses momentum. From there, the finale brings the whole piece together, touching on themes from all three previous movements in a kaleidoscopic, exuberant style.Movements:I. AllegroII. Adagio (10:14)III. Scherzo: Presto (20:31)IV. Finale: Presto - Allegretto (26:21)Tags:forgotten masterpiece friday, music Previous 20 EntriesTop of Page | | 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