…Here a new world is opened up to view, one is raised into a higher ideal region, one senses that the sublime life dreamed of by poets is becoming a reality. This is how Hector Berlioz described the dramatic potential of a bold new kind of symphonic music- a free-spirited Romanticism born out of the earth-shattering monumentality of Beethoven’s Ninth, which left behind classical balance and order to enter dark, new psychological …
Consider, for a moment, all of the possible ways a symphony can begin. Then, listen carefully to the opening of Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor. This opening statement, emerging out of the dark depths of D minor, is filled with mystery, tension, quiet anxiety, and restless, heroic energy. It’s a world away from the sunny majesty of Dvořák’s Eighth or the hushed, lamenting nostalgia of the introduction of the “New World” Ninth. Here, …
Every great conductor started out as an accomplished instrumentalist. Look at the biography of Sir Neville Marriner, who passed away yesterday at the age of 92, and you’ll be reminded of this truism. In the 1950s, Marriner performed as a violinist in two celebrated orchestras: the Philharmonia and the London Symphony. For 13 years, he served as second violinist of the Martin String Quartet. He first picked up a baton around age 40. …
It isn’t everyday that a piece of music is so fascinatingly inventive that it actually saves lives. But, apparently, that’s what happened when Franz Joseph Haydn conducted his newest symphony at London’s King’s Theatre on the evening of February 2, 1795. The German painter, composer and Haydn biographer Albert Christoph Dies (1755-1822) provided this account: When Haydn appeared in the orchestra and seated himself at the Pianoforte, to conduct a symphony personally, …
Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra released an exiting new album this past Friday. The recording, produced on the Swedish label BIS Records, features Jean Sibelius’ Third, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies. It concludes Vänskä’s celebrated, Grammy-Award-winning Sibelius cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra- a project launched in 2012 and temporarily halted by a fifteen-month-long management-imposed lockout. Recorded in June of 2015, this latest disk is a Super Audio CD with surround sound technology, which …
A new commission was the last thing the 26-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wanted in the summer of 1782. He had just moved to the musical mecca of Vienna, shaking off the provincialism of his native Salzburg and its “coarse, slovenly, dissolute court musicians.” In addition to a busy teaching and composition schedule, he was getting ready to move to a new house in preparation for his marriage to Constanze Weber. But in July, 1782, …
Listening to Anton Bruckner’s monumental, gradually unfolding symphonies has been compared to walking around a cathedral and experiencing the same massive, awe-inspiring structure from different vantage points. On June 19, conductor Christoph Eschenbach and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra took that literally with a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 at Kloster Eberbach, a monastery on the Rhein dating back to 1136 (video below). In terms of atmosphere, the Sixth is something of an outlier among Bruckner’s …