On a Sunday afternoon recital at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1976, the late André Watts placed the piano music of Gershwin and Schubert side by side. A reviewer at the time noted that it was the habit of both composers, when at parties, to take a seat at the piano and dazzle attendees with their most recent music. The music of George Gershwin remained a staple of Watts’ repertoire. An …
As with Franz Schubert, Antonín Dvořák was a composer awash in melody. In a letter to a friend, dated August 10, 1889, Dvořák expressed gratitude for this seemingly effortless melodic stream: Do you want to know what I’m doing? My head is full of it. If only one could write it immediately! But it’s no use, I have to go slowly, only what the hand can manage and the Lord God will …
In the 1922 autobiographical novel, The Enormous Room, the American author E.E. Cummings detailed his temporary imprisonment in a French detention camp during the First World War. Cummings, who in 1917 had recently graduated from Harvard College, volunteered as an ambulance driver during the war under the auspices of the International Red Cross. Irreverent anti-war letters written by Cummings and his friend, the fellow American, William Slater Brown, attracted the attention of censors, …
Tony Bennett, the American jazz singer, passed away late last week. He was 96, just two days shy of his birthday. A devotee to the Great American Songbook, Bennett was, perhaps, the last exponent of the mid-twentieth century crooner style of singing. Among his signature songs was, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. As styles changed with the rise of rock and roll, Bennett launched a spectacular comeback in the 1980s, …
Gustav Mahler was fifteen or sixteen years old and a student at the Vienna Conservatory when, in 1876, he composed the Piano Quartet in A minor. The work exists as a single movement, cast in sonata form and marked Nicht zu schnell (not too fast). Conceived as the opening movement of a larger abandoned project, it is followed by a thirty-two measure fragment of an unfinished scherzo. This is the only surviving …
The fifteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn already had thirteen string symphonies and a number of chamber works under his belt when, in March of 1824, he completed his first symphony for full orchestra. Mendelssohn was a classicist who built on traditions of the past. He studied, extensively, the works of Mozart and Haydn, as well as the counterpoint of J.S. Bach and Handel. Additionally, the teenage composer absorbed the influences of his contemporaries, most …
The atmospherically titled Sessions, 3 A.M. is the most recent project of American composer, Michael Torke. It is a collection of fifteen pieces for solo piano, performed by the composer. The first track, Nave, was released as a single earlier this month, and the full album will be available in November. In the nave of a cathedral, repeating structural columns rise to a vaulted ceiling and convey a sense of order and symmetry. …