August 28, 1913
Richard Tucker, [Reuben Ticker], born in Brooklyn, New York, Tenor, New York Met Opera
Article about Richard Tucker on Wikipedia
Friday, August 28, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Review of Soles4Orphans benefit concert
The amazing Paulina Nguyen, 17, a senior at Santa Catalina School and a piano pupil of Carmel pianist Barbara Ruzicka, created a benefit concert at the Church of the Wayfarer in Carmel on August 23 featuring some of the finest young student musicians on the Monterey Peninsula.
We are lucky to have fine young people like Paulina in our community.
Follow this link to read Lyn Bronson's review of this great event.
http://www.peninsulareviews.com/
We are lucky to have fine young people like Paulina in our community.
Follow this link to read Lyn Bronson's review of this great event.
http://www.peninsulareviews.com/
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Even Better Booklist
Since its founding in 1935, the Carmel Bach Festival has always presented its music within a context of ideas and discussions. The development of all the arts in the 18th century mirrors and parallels the social, cultural and political developments of that century, and by placing the music into the continuum of human existence we can deepen our connection to it.
One of my happiest duties at the Carmel Bach Festival is researching and presenting the pre-concert lectures. In my informal talks I try to evoke a stronger sense of context and create a deeper understanding the human being who wrote the notes. What were the circumstances in which he lived and worked, who was he a person, and what brought about the creation of the music?
A few weeks ago I posted a short list of books that I used during the 2009 Bach Festival. Here is a longer list!
Download David's 3-Page Bibliography in pdf format
This downloadable 3-page pdf document lists 23 books that have been helpful to me in recent years and also books I’m currently using to prepare for the 2010 Festival. I must emphasize that this is a very personal list. It is by definition not broad in scope, and is primarily related to recent and upcoming repertoire at the Carmel Bach Festival. These are books which in recent years have helped me find a human connection to the personalities who created the music, and to the cultural, historical, and social context in which they lived and worked.
~ David Gordon
One of my happiest duties at the Carmel Bach Festival is researching and presenting the pre-concert lectures. In my informal talks I try to evoke a stronger sense of context and create a deeper understanding the human being who wrote the notes. What were the circumstances in which he lived and worked, who was he a person, and what brought about the creation of the music?
A few weeks ago I posted a short list of books that I used during the 2009 Bach Festival. Here is a longer list!
Download David's 3-Page Bibliography in pdf format
This downloadable 3-page pdf document lists 23 books that have been helpful to me in recent years and also books I’m currently using to prepare for the 2010 Festival. I must emphasize that this is a very personal list. It is by definition not broad in scope, and is primarily related to recent and upcoming repertoire at the Carmel Bach Festival. These are books which in recent years have helped me find a human connection to the personalities who created the music, and to the cultural, historical, and social context in which they lived and worked.
~ David Gordon
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
2009 Bach Festival Reading List
by David Gordon
The 2009 Carmel Bach Festival is over! It was an exhausting and deeply satisfying experience. Great audiences, responsive and appreciative. An ensemble working hard, and overtime.
I do lots of different things at the Carmel Bach Festival (most of us do), but this summer my principal activities included 1) twelve Festival lectures, 2) writing and narrating the “Haydn Seek!” concert, 3) translating and reading the Vivaldi sonnets on the Thursday concert, and 4) creating more than 600 new supertitle slides (for Haydn’s Creation, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’ Nänie, Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42, the “Haydn Seek!” concert, and Best of the Fest).
Lots of people asked me about a reading list. Here are some of the books that helped me this summer!
UPDATE AUGUST 18: since an expanded version of this list is now available for download as a pdf document, I have removed some of the details from this post.
Click this link to download the 3-page pdf bibliography.
IN PRINT Patronize your local bookseller!
The New Grove Haydn
by Jens Peter Larson
WW Norton, New York, 1983
Haydn: The Creation
by Nicholas Temperley
Cambridge University Press, 1991
Haydn Chronicle and Works
Volume III: Haydn in England 1791-1795
H. C. Robbins Landon
Indiana University Press, 1976
The Cambridge Companion to Haydn
by Caryl Clark (Editor)
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 340 pages
Four Seasons, The: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice
by Laurel Corona
Voice Press, 2008, 400 pages
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8
by Paul Everett
Cambridge University Press, 1996
OUT OF PRINT BUT AVAILABLE ONLINE
The Girl in Rose
Peter Hobday
Orion Books, London, 2004
A Social History of Music: Middle Ages to Beethoven
Music and Society: since 1815
Henry Raynor
Taplinger Publishing, New York, 1976
London Life in the Eighteenth Century
M. Dorothy George
Harper, New York, 1964
INTERNET RESOURCES
The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn
A selection of Haydn letters
200 Anniversary of Haydn’s Death
Blog and assorted Links
The Website of Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Coming soon: suggested reading for the 2010 Carmel Bach Festival!
The 2009 Carmel Bach Festival is over! It was an exhausting and deeply satisfying experience. Great audiences, responsive and appreciative. An ensemble working hard, and overtime.
I do lots of different things at the Carmel Bach Festival (most of us do), but this summer my principal activities included 1) twelve Festival lectures, 2) writing and narrating the “Haydn Seek!” concert, 3) translating and reading the Vivaldi sonnets on the Thursday concert, and 4) creating more than 600 new supertitle slides (for Haydn’s Creation, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’ Nänie, Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42, the “Haydn Seek!” concert, and Best of the Fest).
Lots of people asked me about a reading list. Here are some of the books that helped me this summer!
UPDATE AUGUST 18: since an expanded version of this list is now available for download as a pdf document, I have removed some of the details from this post.
Click this link to download the 3-page pdf bibliography.
IN PRINT Patronize your local bookseller!
The New Grove Haydn
by Jens Peter Larson
WW Norton, New York, 1983
Haydn: The Creation
by Nicholas Temperley
Cambridge University Press, 1991
Haydn Chronicle and Works
Volume III: Haydn in England 1791-1795
H. C. Robbins Landon
Indiana University Press, 1976
The Cambridge Companion to Haydn
by Caryl Clark (Editor)
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 340 pages
Four Seasons, The: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice
by Laurel Corona
Voice Press, 2008, 400 pages
Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8
by Paul Everett
Cambridge University Press, 1996
OUT OF PRINT BUT AVAILABLE ONLINE
The Girl in Rose
Peter Hobday
Orion Books, London, 2004
A Social History of Music: Middle Ages to Beethoven
Music and Society: since 1815
Henry Raynor
Taplinger Publishing, New York, 1976
London Life in the Eighteenth Century
M. Dorothy George
Harper, New York, 1964
INTERNET RESOURCES
The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn
A selection of Haydn letters
200 Anniversary of Haydn’s Death
Blog and assorted Links
The Website of Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Coming soon: suggested reading for the 2010 Carmel Bach Festival!
Sunday, August 2, 2009
New Mozart Works Discovered
by Barbara Rose Shuler
Yesterday’s Best of the Fest brought the festival to a dazzling close, as usual, with Bruno’s charming, humorous, knowledgeable and deep-spirited narrative. More about that in the next blog but here is a newsflash of interest that appeared in my e-box from my friend Ger under the title Not Quite Bach.
“No doubt these early Mozartean fragments will be presented as soon as possible in our musically eager and sophisticated region--perhaps even a Bach Festival offering with David Breitman performing. The article comes from the Associated Press:
Researchers unveil Mozart piano pieces in Austria
SALZBURG, Austria – Mozart's momentous legacy grew still larger Sunday as researchers unveiled two piano pieces recently identified as childhood creations by the revered composer.
The works — an extensive concerto movement and a fragmentary prelude — are part of "Nannerl's Music Book," a well-known manuscript that contains the Austrian master's earliest compositions, the International Mozarteum Foundation revealed while presenting the pieces in Mozart's native Salzburg.
"We have here the first orchestral movement by the young Mozart — even though the orchestral parts are missing — and therefore it's an extremely important missing link in our understanding of Mozart's development as a young composer," Mozarteum's research leader, Ulrich Leisinger, said.
Mozart, who was born in 1756, began playing the keyboard at age 3 and composing at 5. By the time he died of rheumatic fever on Dec. 5, 1791, he had written more than 600 pieces.
Leisinger said Mozart likely wrote the two newly attributed pieces when he was 7 or 8 years old, with his father, Leopold, transcribing the notes as his son played them at the keyboard.
A series of analyses confirmed the writing as Leopold's, and at the time Mozart was not yet versed in musical notation. But Leopold himself was ruled out as the author of the pieces based on stylistic scrutiny, the Mozarteum said in a statement.
"There are obvious discrepancies between the technical virtuosity and a certain lack of compositional experience," it said.
At Sunday's presentation at the Mozart residence, Austrian musician Florian Birsak, an expert on early keyboard music, played the two pieces on the maestro's own fortepiano for a throng of reporters, photographers and camera crews.
Both works were identified as part of a larger investigation of the foundation's Mozart-related materials, including letters, documents and more than 100 music manuscripts — some in the hand of the composer, others transcribed by contemporaries.
While "Nannerl's Music Book" has been in the foundation's hands for more than a century, the pieces were considered anonymous creations until Leisinger and his team took a closer look.
"These two pieces struck us because they were so extravagant," Leisinger said, adding that the two works share a number of similarities but that the prelude — believed to have been written after the concerto movement — was "much more refined."
"One could almost get the impression that Leopold said to his son, 'look, you've written this crazy concerto movement, try to do it better, a little bit more concise,' and as a result we ended up with this prelude-like movement," he said.
Posthumous discoveries of Mozart pieces are rare but not unheard of.
In September, Leisinger announced that a French library had found a previously unknown piece handwritten by Mozart.
That work, described as the preliminary draft of a musical composition, was found in Nantes, in western France, as library staff members went through its archives. Leisinger said the library contacted his foundation for help authenticating the work.
The latest finds add "important details" to what we know about the young Mozart's work, said Christoph Wolff, professor of music history at Harvard University, who is also director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany.
"The Salzburg discovery offers significant insight into the earliest accomplishments of Mozart," Wolff said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
The Salzburg-based foundation, established in 1880 and a prime source for Mozart-related matters, seeks to preserve the composer's heritage and find new approaches for analyzing him.”
--------------------------------------------------
Barbara Rose Shuler writes Intermezzo, which chronicles classical music, in the Monterey Herald's Go! Magazine each week. She can be contacted at wordways@comcast.net.
--------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Best of the Fest brought the festival to a dazzling close, as usual, with Bruno’s charming, humorous, knowledgeable and deep-spirited narrative. More about that in the next blog but here is a newsflash of interest that appeared in my e-box from my friend Ger under the title Not Quite Bach.
“No doubt these early Mozartean fragments will be presented as soon as possible in our musically eager and sophisticated region--perhaps even a Bach Festival offering with David Breitman performing. The article comes from the Associated Press:
Researchers unveil Mozart piano pieces in Austria
SALZBURG, Austria – Mozart's momentous legacy grew still larger Sunday as researchers unveiled two piano pieces recently identified as childhood creations by the revered composer.
The works — an extensive concerto movement and a fragmentary prelude — are part of "Nannerl's Music Book," a well-known manuscript that contains the Austrian master's earliest compositions, the International Mozarteum Foundation revealed while presenting the pieces in Mozart's native Salzburg.
"We have here the first orchestral movement by the young Mozart — even though the orchestral parts are missing — and therefore it's an extremely important missing link in our understanding of Mozart's development as a young composer," Mozarteum's research leader, Ulrich Leisinger, said.
Mozart, who was born in 1756, began playing the keyboard at age 3 and composing at 5. By the time he died of rheumatic fever on Dec. 5, 1791, he had written more than 600 pieces.
Leisinger said Mozart likely wrote the two newly attributed pieces when he was 7 or 8 years old, with his father, Leopold, transcribing the notes as his son played them at the keyboard.
A series of analyses confirmed the writing as Leopold's, and at the time Mozart was not yet versed in musical notation. But Leopold himself was ruled out as the author of the pieces based on stylistic scrutiny, the Mozarteum said in a statement.
"There are obvious discrepancies between the technical virtuosity and a certain lack of compositional experience," it said.
At Sunday's presentation at the Mozart residence, Austrian musician Florian Birsak, an expert on early keyboard music, played the two pieces on the maestro's own fortepiano for a throng of reporters, photographers and camera crews.
Both works were identified as part of a larger investigation of the foundation's Mozart-related materials, including letters, documents and more than 100 music manuscripts — some in the hand of the composer, others transcribed by contemporaries.
While "Nannerl's Music Book" has been in the foundation's hands for more than a century, the pieces were considered anonymous creations until Leisinger and his team took a closer look.
"These two pieces struck us because they were so extravagant," Leisinger said, adding that the two works share a number of similarities but that the prelude — believed to have been written after the concerto movement — was "much more refined."
"One could almost get the impression that Leopold said to his son, 'look, you've written this crazy concerto movement, try to do it better, a little bit more concise,' and as a result we ended up with this prelude-like movement," he said.
Posthumous discoveries of Mozart pieces are rare but not unheard of.
In September, Leisinger announced that a French library had found a previously unknown piece handwritten by Mozart.
That work, described as the preliminary draft of a musical composition, was found in Nantes, in western France, as library staff members went through its archives. Leisinger said the library contacted his foundation for help authenticating the work.
The latest finds add "important details" to what we know about the young Mozart's work, said Christoph Wolff, professor of music history at Harvard University, who is also director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany.
"The Salzburg discovery offers significant insight into the earliest accomplishments of Mozart," Wolff said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
The Salzburg-based foundation, established in 1880 and a prime source for Mozart-related matters, seeks to preserve the composer's heritage and find new approaches for analyzing him.”
--------------------------------------------------
Barbara Rose Shuler writes Intermezzo, which chronicles classical music, in the Monterey Herald's Go! Magazine each week. She can be contacted at wordways@comcast.net.
--------------------------------------------------
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