Purcell’s Three Fantasias in Four Parts (Nos. 10-12): Jordi Savall, Hespèrion XX

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In the summer of 1680, five years before the birth of J.S. Bach, the twenty-one year old Henry Purcell composed a collection of fifteen Fantasias for the Viols. At the time, viol consort music was falling out of fashion. The Fantasias received little attention and remained unpublished until 1927. Now, these brief and sublime studies in polyphony, scored for between three and seven voices, are considered to be precursors to Bach’s Musical …

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Remembering Ahmad Jamal

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Ahmad Jamal, the American jazz pianist, composer, and band leader, passed away on April 16. He was 92. Known for a taut, minimalist style, Jamal broke new ground in modern jazz. Miles Davis once said, “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal…[He] knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages.” Born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, Jamal began playing …

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Martinů’s “La Revue de Cuisine”: A Zany, Jazz Age Ballet Suite

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The Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), was living in Paris when, in 1927, he composed the score for the zany ballet in one act, La Revue de Cuisine (“The Kitchen Review”). The plot of the ballet centers around the romantic entanglements of a menagerie of kitchen utensils which have come to life. The happy marriage of the Pot and the Lid is threatened by the seductive Twirling Stick. While the Pot is …

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Weber’s “Euryanthe”: Two Excerpts from a “Grand Heroic-Romantic Opera”

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Listen to the music of Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), and you will hear the seeds of Wagner. A contemporary of Beethoven and Schubert, Weber was one of the great innovators at the dawn of the Romantic period.  In contrast to the prevailing Italian bel canto operas of Donizetti and Rossini, he developed a style of opera which was distinctly German. As music director in the opera houses of Prague and Dresden, Weber was …

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Brahms’ Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major: A Conversation Between Opposites

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Following the completion of his Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, the often self-critical Johannes Brahms wrote to his publisher, “You have not yet had such a beautiful trio from me and very likely have not published its equal in the last ten years.” By the time Brahms started work on the Trio in 1880, he had become a well-established, mature composer. For two years, he set the score aside to …

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Bartók’s Allegro Barbaro: Zoltán Kocsis 

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In 1908, the young Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály, traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document the peasant folk music of the Magyars. This is the ethnic group which occupied the region between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. before migrating west to form present-day Hungary. The colorful inflections of this music, as well as the jagged, irregular …

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Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle”: Entering Terrifying Psychological Recesses

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Béla Bartók’s symbolist opera in one act, Bluebeard’s Castle, begins with a spoken prologue which asks, “Where is the stage, outside us or within us?” What follows is a chilling psychological horror story, based on an account of a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The Gothic drama, set in a gloomy castle with seven locked doors, involves only two characters, the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his young wife, Judith. Here is …

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