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Tuesday, February 9, 2016

You can listen to the Classical Music Almanac Podcast Daily here.

Birthdays

Alban Berg

In 1885 Alban Berg was born in Vienna. He was more interested in literature than music as a child and did not begin to compose until he was fifteen, when he started to teach himself music. In late February or early March 1902 he fathered a child with Marie Scheuchl, a servant girl in the Berg family household. His daughter, Albine, was born on December 4, 1902. Berg had little formal music education before he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg in October 1904. With Schoenberg he studied counterpoint, music theory, and harmony. By 1906, he was studying music full-time; by 1907, he began composition lessons. His student compositions included five drafts for piano sonatas. He also wrote songs, including his Seven Early Songs (Sieben Frühe Lieder), three of which were Berg’s first publicly performed work in a concert that featured the music of Schoenberg’s pupils in Vienna that year. The early sonata sketches eventually culminated in Berg’s Piano Sonata, Op. 1 (1907–1908); it is one of the most formidable “first” works ever written. Berg studied with Schoenberg for six years until 1911. Berg admired him as a composer and mentor, and they remained close lifelong friends. Among Schoenberg’s teaching was the idea that the unity of a musical composition depends upon all its aspects being derived from a single basic idea; this idea was later known as developing variation. Berg passed this on to his students, one of whom, Theodor W. Adorno, stated: “The main principle he conveyed was that of variation: everything was supposed to develop out of something else and yet be intrinsically different”. The Piano Sonata is an example—the whole composition is derived from the work’s opening quartal gesture and its opening phrase. 1

Amanda Roocroft

Happy 50th birthday Amanda Roocroft! She was born in Coppull, a village in Lancashire, and was educated at Southlands High School and Runshaw College. She then attended the Royal Northern College of Music where she studied singing under Barbara Robotham. In 1988 while still a student, she won the Kathleen Ferrier Award. That same year she sang Fiordiligi in the college’s production of Così fan tutte and in 1989 the title role in the RNCM production of Handel’s Alcina—both to great praise from the British critic Michael Kennedy. He wrote of her performance in Alcina:

This was thrillingly beautiful singing, and she sustained it all evening. One has to write of it in terms of the young Seefried as the Composer and, a closer comparison, the young Baker in Handel. In 40 years of listening to young singers, I have never before heard, at this stage in development, a phenomenon to surpass Miss Roocroft.

Roocroft made her professional recital debut in September 1989 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and her professional operatic debut in 1990 as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier with Welsh National Opera. House debuts followed at London’s Royal Opera House (as Pamina) and Glyndebourne Festival Opera (as Fiordiligi) in 1991, and the Bavarian State Opera (as Fiordiligi) and the English National Opera (as Ginevra in Handel’s Ariodante) in 1993. In 1994 she was the subject of a Granada Television documentary Amanda Roocroft: Opera’s Rising Star. The film, directed by Colin Bell, chronicled the first seven years of her career, beginning with her days as a student and ending with her solo recording debut for EMI Records. In North America, Roocroft made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1997 as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and sang at Houston Grand Opera in 2010 as the Governess in Turn of the Screw. Roocroft’s other roles in the latter part of her career have included Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes, the Duchess in Powder Her Face, Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case, and the title roles in Janáček’s Jenůfa and Káťa Kabanová. In 2003 she was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music from the University of Manchester, and in 2007 she received the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera for her performance in the English National Opera’s production of Jenůfa. Since the mid-2000s, she has also been a professor of vocal studies at the Royal College of Music in London. 2

Premieres

In 1893 Guiseppe Verdi’s last opera Falstaff was premiered in Milan.

In 1909 Isaac Albeniz’s piano suite Iberia – Book IV (the final three movements) – was premiered in Paris. The suite has twelve movements but Albeniz premiered it three movements at a time in different locations starting in 1906.

In 1919 George Whitefield Chadwick’s symphonic poem Angel of Death was premiered by the New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch.

On This Day in Classical Music

In 1712 Georg Philipp Telemann was appointed director of music and Kapellmeister at the Barfüsserkirche in Frankfurt.

In 1810 Carl Maria von Weber and his father were arrested on the charge of embezzlement (his father was actually guilty, he was not).

In 1818 the Halifax Choral Society held its inaugural concert, a performance of Haydn’s Creation.

Recommended Listening

Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia Book IV, performed by Ichiro Keneko.

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Alban Berg,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Alban_Berg&oldid=701638328 (accessed February 8, 2016).
  2. Wikipedia contributors, “Aix-en-Provence Festival,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aix-en-Provence_Festival&oldid=675815496 (accessed February 8, 2016).