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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Birthdays

Portrait of Wayne Marshall, 201

Wayne Marshall

Happy 55th birthday Wayne Marshall, born on this day in 1961 in Oldham, England. Marshall was educated at Chetham’s School, Manchester and the Royal College of Music. He is a renowned interpreter of the works of George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and other twentieth-century American composers. He has recorded Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with the Aalborg Symfoniorkester, acting as conductor and piano soloist. He has appeared as a pianist with Kim Criswell, Tasmin Little, Natalie Clein, Ole Edvard Antonsen and Willard White. He has also performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker andPhilharmonia Orchestra. As organist he has appeared in many of the world’s top venues. Recent seasons have included recitals at Notre Dame, Paris; the Royal Festival Hall; Symphony Hall, Birmingham and Westminster Abbey. He is also organist in residence at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. He has also recorded Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony. In October 2004 he premiered James MacMillan’s organ concerto A Scotch Bestiary with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen. On December 6th, 2015 he conducted the European premiere of The Great Gatsby (opera) at Semperoper Dresden. 1

Juan Diego Flórez

Happy 43rd birthday Juan Diego Flórez, who was born on this day in Lima, Peru in 1973, where his father, Rubén Flórez, was a noted guitarist and singer of Peruvian popular and criolla music. In an interview in the Peruvian newspaper Ojo, Flórez recounted his early days when his mother managed a pub with live music and he worked as a replacement singer whenever the main attraction called in sick. “It was a tremendous experience for me, since most of those who were regulars at the pub were of a certain age, so I had to be ready to sing anything from huayños to Elvis Presley music and, in my mind, that served me a great deal because, in the final analysis, any music that is well structured—whether it is jazz, opera, or pop—is good music”. Initially intending to pursue a career in popular music, he entered the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Lima at the age of 17. His classical voice emerged in the course of his studies there. During this time, he became a member of the Coro Nacional of Peru and sang as a soloist in Mozart’s Coronation Mass and Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle. He received a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia where he studied from 1993 to 1996 and began singing in student opera productions in the repertory that is still his specialty today, Rossini and the bel canto operas of Bellini and Donizetti. During this period, he also studied with Marilyn Horne at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara. In 1994 the Peruvian tenor, Ernesto Palacio invited him to Italy to work on a recording of Vicente Martín y Soler’s opera Il Tutore Burlato. He subsequently became Flórez’s teacher, mentor and manager and has had a profound influence on his career. Flórez’s first breakthrough and professional debut came in 1996 at the Rossini Festival in the Italian city of Pesaro, Rossini’s birthplace. At the age of 23, he stepped in to take the leading tenor role in Matilde di Shabran when Bruce Ford became ill. He made his debut at La Scala in the same year as the Chevalier danois (Danish Knight) in Gluck’s Armide, and later in the year he sang the role of Georges in Meyerbeer’s L’étoile du nord with Wexford Festival Opera. His Covent Garden debut followed in 1997 where he sang the role of Count Potoski in a world premiere concert performance of Donizetti’s Elisabetta. Debuts followed at the Vienna State Opera in 1999 as Count Almaviva in Il barbiere di Siviglia and at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2002, again as Count Almaviva. On February 20, 2007, the opening night of Donizetti’s La fille du régiment at La Scala, Flórez broke the theater’s 74-year-old tradition of no encores when he reprised “Ah! mes amis” with its nine high C’s following an “overwhelming” ovation from the audience. He repeated this solo encore at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House on April 21, 2008, the first singer to do so there since 1994. Flórez is also active on the concert stages of Europe, North America, and South America. Amongst the many venues in which he has given concerts and recitals are the Wigmore Hall in London, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall in New York, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, the Teatro Segura in Lima, and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In a departure from his usual repertoire, he sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Broadway musical Carousel at the Berlin Live 8 concert in 2005. He was signed by Decca in 2001 and since then has released six solo recital CDs on the Decca label: Rossini Arias, which won the 2003 Cannes Classical Award; Una furtiva lagrima, which won the 2004 Cannes Classical Award; Great Tenor Arias which won the 2005 Echo Klassik award for the best arias and duets recital; Sentimiento Latino; Arias for Rubini and most recently, Bel Canto Spectacular. His latest recording is Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, recorded live in May 2008. In addition to his official discography, almost all his professionally performed roles have been preserved in radio broadcasts, and many also by television. 2

Premieres

In 1775 Mozart’s opera La finta girdiniera was premiered in Munich.

In 1890 Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty was premiered in St. Petersburg.

In 1944 Igor Stravinsky conducted the Boston Symphony in the premieres of his Circus Polka and Four Norwegian Moods.

In 1945 Prokofiev conducted the USSR State Symphony Orchestra in the premier of his Symphony No. 5, performed in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.

On This Day in Classical Music

In 1555 Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was given the position of maestro di cappella at St. John Lateran in Rome. What made this unusual was that the Vatican usually did not employ married men to work in such positions. However, an exception was made in this case, perhaps because Palestrina dedicated his first book of Masses to Pope Julius III, who also was the former Bishop Palestrina home town.

In 1817 Carl Maria von Weber arrived in the city of Dresden and promptly set up a new opera company that would produce operas strictly in German, to compliment – or compete – with the opera company that performed only Italian operas.

In 1860 Anton Bruckner received a letter from one of his teachers who complimented him on his efforts but warned him to balance his time more wisely. Bruckner was working full-time as a composer in addition to taking correspondences courses in music theory and counterpoint.

In 1880 Modest Mussorgsky lost his government position due to his struggles with alcoholism. Friends, even his former boss, tried to help him stay on the wagon, but to no avail and he would die about a year later due to alcohol related illness.

In 1882 Richard Wagner finally completed Parsifal, 25 years after he first conceived of the opera.

In 1931 Bela Bartok joined the rather lofty-sounding Permanent Committee for Literature and the Arts of the League of Nation’s Commission for Intellectual Co-operation.

In 1976 Sarah Caldwell becomes the first woman to conduct at the New York Metropolitan Opera, fronting the performance of La traviata.

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Wayne Marshall (classical musician),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Marshall_(classical_musician)&oldid=696067703(accessed January 12, 2016).
  2. Wikipedia contributors, “Juan Diego Flórez,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Juan_Diego_Fl%C3%B3rez&oldid=696825698 (accessed January 13, 2016).