Tags
Beethoven, classical, classical music, composers, English composers, opera, orchestra, philharmonic
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
You can listen to the Classical Music Almanac Podcast Daily here.
Birthdays
In 1902 William Walton was born in Oldham. He was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera. His best-known works include Façade, the cantata Belshazzar’s Feast, the Viola Concerto and the First Symphony. Born in Oldham, Lancashire, the son of a musician, Walton was a chorister and then an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. On leaving the university, he was taken up by the literary Sitwell siblings, who provided him with a home and a cultural education. His earliest work of note was a collaboration with Edith Sitwell, Façade, which at first brought him notoriety as amodernist, but later became a popular ballet score. In middle age, Walton left Britain and set up home with his young wife Susana on the Italian island of Ischia. By this time, he had ceased to be regarded as a modernist, and some of his compositions of the 1950s were criticised as old-fashioned. His only full-length opera, Troilus and Cressida, was among the works to be so labelled and has made little impact in opera houses. In his last years, his works came back into critical fashion; his later compositions, dismissed by critics at the time of their premieres, were revalued and regarded alongside his earlier works. Walton was a slow worker, painstakingly perfectionist, and his complete body of work across his long career is not large. His most popular compositions continue to be frequently performed in the twenty-first century, and by 2010 almost all his works had been released on CD. 1
In 1936 Richard Rodney Bennett was born. He was known primarily as a jazz pianist and composer of film and TV shows including the original Dr. Who. His scores for Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), each earned him Academy Award nominations. He also wrote the scores for Enchanted April and Four Weddings and a Funeral. Bennett was born at Broadstairs, Kent, but was raised in Devon during World War II. His mother, Joan Esther (Spink), was a pianist who had trained with Gustav Holst and sang in the first professional performance of The Planets. His father, Rodney Bennett, (1890-1948) was a children’s book author and poet, who worked with Roger Quilter on his theatre works and provided new words for some of the numbers in the Arnold Book of Old Songs. Bennett was a pupil at Leighton Park School. He later studied at the Royal Academy of Music with Howard Ferguson, Lennox Berkeley and Cornelius Cardew. Ferguson regarded him as extraordinarily brilliant, having perhaps the greatest talent of any British composer in his generation, though lacking in a personal style. During this time, Bennett attended some of the Darmstadt summer courses in 1955, where he was exposed to serialism. He later spent two years in Paris as a student of the prominent serialist Pierre Boulez between 1957 and 1959. He always used both his first names after finding another Richard Bennett active in music. Bennett taught at the Royal Academy of Music between 1963 and 1965, at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, United States from 1970 to 1971, and was later International Chair of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music between 1994 and the year 2000. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1977, and was knighted in 1998. Bennett produced over two hundred works for the concert hall, and fifty scores for film and television. He was also a writer and performer of jazz songs for fifty years. Immersed in the techniques of the European avant-garde via his contact with Boulez, Bennett subsequently developed his own dramato-abstract style. In his later years, he adopted an increasingly tonal idiom. Bennett regularly performed as a jazz pianist, with such singers as Cleo Laine, Marion Montgomery (until her death in 2002), Mary Cleere Haran (until her death in 2011), and more recently with Claire Martin, performing theGreat American Songbook. Bennett and Martin performed at such venues as The Oak Room at The Algonquin in New York (which closed in 2012), and The Pheasantry and Ronnie Scott’s in London. In later years, in addition to his musical activities, Bennett became known as an artist working in the medium of collage. He exhibited these collages several times in England, including at the Holt Festival, Norfolk in 2011, and at the Swaledale Festival, Yorkshire, in 2012. The first ever exhibition of his collages was in London in 2010, at the South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre, curated by the Nightingale Project, a charity that takes music and art into hospitals. Bennett was a patron of this charity. Bennett is honoured with four photographic portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. Anthony Meredith’s biography of Bennett was published in November 2010. Bennett is survived by his sister Meg (born 1930), the poet M. R. Peacocke, with whom he collaborated on a number of vocal works. Bennett’s cremated remains are buried in section 112, plot 45456 at Green-wood Cemetery, Brooklyn. 2
Premieres
In 1795 Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Burgtheater in Vienna, marking his performance debut in Vienna as well.
In 1806 the first revised version of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio was premiered in Vienna. The first version had been premiered to an audience of French troops that had occupied Vienna the year before and was not well received. He ended up shorting the opera to two acts and wrote an entirely new overture (Leonore No. 3). It would be revised one more time in 1814.
In 1874 Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 3 was premiered by Prague Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bedřich Smetana.
In 1879 Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin was premiered at Maly Theatre in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein.
In 1882 Alexander Glazunov’s Symphony No. 1 was premiered in St., Petersburg. The audience was shocked to see 17-year-old Glazunov take his bows at the end of the premiere.
In 1892 Sergei Rachmaninoff premiered the first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Moscow Conservatory. This would be the only time he would play any part of the concerto in its original form. He would revise it quite a bit in 1917.
In 1911 George Whitefield Chadwick conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra in the premier of his Suite Symphonique.
On This Day in Classical Music
In 1792 Luigi Cherubini assumes the post of music director of the Opéra Comique in Paris.
In 1827 Beethoven was interred in Vienna as thousands line the streets of the funeral procession to pay their last respects.
In 1832 Muzio Clementi’s funeral is held in Westminster Abbey.
In 1871 the opening ceremonies of the Royal Albert Hall wereheld, with Queen Victoria as honored guest.
In 1891 Gustav Mahler made his debut as principal conductor of the Stadttheater in Hamburg.
In 1894 Mahler would take part in the funeral service of Hans von Bülow in Hamburg.
In 1896 Anton Bruckner made his last public appearance at a concert in Vienna. He would die later that year in October.
In 1913 Igor Stravinsky notes that he completed work on his Rite of Spring. Rehearsals began soon after and it would be premiered a month later in Paris.
Recommended Listening
- Wikipedia contributors, “William Walton,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=William_Walton&oldid=693769435 (accessed March 28, 2016).
- Wikipedia contributors, “Richard Rodney Bennett,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Richard_Rodney_Bennett&oldid=710908651 (accessed March 28, 2016).