Sir Andrew Davis, the renowned English conductor, passed away on April 20 following a brief battle with leukemia. He was 80. Davis served as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1975 to 1988, and later as chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (2013–2019). From 1989 until 2000, he led the BBC Symphony Orchestra, becoming the longest-serving chief conductor of that ensemble since Adrian Boult. As an opera conductor, Davis …
The riot-inducing 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s primal ballet score, The Rite of Spring, changed the course of 20th century music. Yet, ultimately, it was an artistic one-off. The final, cacophonous notes of the Sacrificial Dance faded away, and soon, with the 1920 ballet score for Pulcinella, Stravinsky’s style took another sharp and unexpected turn. Austere, witty, and pared down, the new neoclassicism returned to the balance, form, and symmetry of Bach and …
Kalevi Kiviniemi, the renowned Finnish concert organist, passed away on April 3 at his home in Lahti after suffering a heart attack. He was 65. Kiviniemi’s international career blossomed in the late 1980s, with recitals throughout Europe, the United States, Asia, and Australia. He was at home among the world’s greatest organs, and performed frequently at Notre-Dame in Paris. Kiviniemi was the first to record the complete organ works of Jean Sibelius. …
The String Quartet in E minor, Op. 121 was the final work of Gabriel Fauré. Completed in September of 1924, a month before the composer’s death at age 79, it is a quiet musical farewell, solemn, intimate, and lamenting. It unfolds in three movements, all of which return to the same mystical space. In contrast with Fauré’s earlier works, this music is hazy, austere, and less firmly rooted in its tonal center. …
Maurizio Pollini, the acclaimed Italian pianist whose career spanned more than six decades, passed away on March 23 in a clinic in his native Milan. He was 82. La Scala, the opera house where Pollini frequently performed, hailed the Grammy-winning pianist as “one of the great musicians of our time and a fundamental reference in the artistic life of the theater for over 50 years.” Pollini began performing publicly at age 11, …
In the spring of 1928, George and Ira Gershwin traveled to Europe for a three-month sojourn. The brothers, among the most celebrated composer-lyricist teams on Broadway, had just finished work on the musical, Rosalie, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, and they relished the time off. It was during this trip that George Gershwin set to work on a commission he had received from the New York Philharmonic. The result was the vividly evocative …
The story, recounted by the Russian musicologist, Leonid Sabaneyev, is so incredible that it may have been apocryphal. One day, while in Alexander Scriabin’s Moscow flat, Sabaneyev sat down at the piano and began to play a theme from Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28. The composer called out from the next room, “Who wrote that? It sounds familiar.” “Your Fantasie,” was the response. “What Fantasie?” Composed in 1900 during Scriabin’s …