Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Saturday, March 26, 2016

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

Birthdays

Pierre Boulez

In 1925 Pierre Boulez was born in Montbrison. He was a French composer and conductor as well as a writer and pianist. He was the founder and director of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) based in Paris. In his early career, Boulez played an important role in the development of integral serialism, electronic and controlled chance music. The type of music which interested him, along with his highly polemical views on music evolution, gave him the reputation of enfant terrible. As a conductor, Boulez was known mainly for his performances of Béla Bartók, Alban Berg, Anton Bruckner, Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse and Anton Webern. He was chosen to conduct the Jahrhundertring, the performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle for the centenary of the Bayreuth Festival, and he conducted works by his contemporaries Elliott Carter and György Ligeti. He received a total of 26 Grammy Awards during his career. On 5 January 2016, Boulez died at his home in Baden-Baden, aged 90. 1

Kyung-Wha Chung

Happy birthday Kyung-Wha Chung! The middle of the 7 children in her family, Kyung-Wha Chung’s father was an exporter, and her mother a pianist and guitarist. She began piano studies at age 4, and violin studies at age 7, where she proved more sympathetic to the violin. She became recognized as a child prodigy, and by the age of nine she was already playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. As time progressed she steadily won most of the famous music competitions in Korea. With her siblings, Chung toured around the country, performing music both as soloist and as a part of an ensemble. As the children became famous in Korea, Chung’s mother felt that it was too small a country for her children to further their musical careers, and she decided to move to America. All of Chung’s siblings played classical instruments and three of them would become professional musicians. Her younger brother, Myung-whun Chung is a conductor and a pianist, and her older sister, Myung-wha Chung is a cellist and teacher at the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. The three of them have subsequently performed professionally in their later careers as the Chung Trio. At age thirteen, she arrived in the United States. She followed her older flautist sister Myung-Soh Chung in attending the Juilliard School in New York, where she studied with Ivan Galamian. In 1967, Chung and Pinchas Zukerman were the joint winners of the Edgar Leventritt Competition, the first time for such an outcome in the history of the competition. This prize led to several engagements in North America, such as with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. She substituted for Nathan Milstein for his White House Gala when he became indisposed. Her next big opportunity came in 1970 as a substitute for Itzhak Perlman, with the London Symphony Orchestra. The success of this engagement led to many other performances in the United Kingdom and a recording contract with Decca/London. Her debut album with André Previn and London Symphony Orchestra, which coupled Tchaikovsky and Sibelius concertos, brought her international attention, including the top recommendation in the BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library programme which compared the various recordings of the Sibelius. In Europe, Chung continued her musical studies with Joseph Szigeti. Her commercial recordings include core repertoire violin concerti, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Berg. She has recorded chamber works such as the Brahms violin sonatas, Franck & Debussy sonatas, and Respighi & Strauss sonatas (with Krystian Zimerman, a recording which earned her a Gramophone Award for Best Chamber Recording). Other recordings include Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, which was selected as Gramophone’s editorial choice, and the Brahms violin concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. In 1997, she celebrated the 30th anniversary of her international debut at Barbican Centre in London and in her hometown of Seoul, Korea. In 2008, illness and injury caused her to halt her performing career temporarily. Her most recent return to live performance was in London at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2014. 2

Premieres

In 1723 Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion was premiered as a Good Friday worship service in Leipzig.

In 1943 William Schuman’s cantata “A Free Song” (after Walt Whitman) was premiered by the Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. This work won the first Pulitzer Prize for Music.

On This Day in Classical Music

In 1778 Ludwig van Beethoven performed his first public concert. He was seven years old.

In 1791 The King’s Theater reopened (the previous building had been destroyed by fire). This was a private celebration with the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) was the honored guest. It would be several years before public performances would be held.

In 1811 Beethoven completed work on his Archduke Trio.

In 1821 the Philharmonic Society of London performed Mozart’s Symphony No. 41. This would mark the first time the symphony would be titled Jupiter.

In 1828 a concert entirely consisting of music composed by Franz Schubert was performed in Vienna as a commemoration of the 1st Anniversary of Beethoven’s death.

In 1848 the Opéra national was closed due to revolution breaking out in the streets of Paris.

In 1943 Sergei Rachmaninoff slipped into a coma. He had been diagnosed with melanoma a few months earlier. He would not recover, dying two days later.

In 1972 the last episode of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts was broadcast. It had a 53 episode run starting in 1958.

In 2000 John Corigliano won the Academy Award for his score for the film The Red Violin.

Recommended Listening

Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion performed by Zurich Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir Roger Norrington. 

 

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Pierre Boulez,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pierre_Boulez&oldid=711873937 (accessed March 25, 2016).
  2. Wikipedia contributors, “Kyung-wha Chung,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kyung-wha_Chung&oldid=704756638 (accessed March 25, 2016).