Classical Music News
The great Russian cellist, dies at age 80. Rostropovich entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1943, at the age of 16, where he studied not only the piano and the cello, but also conducting and composition. Among his teachers were Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. In 1945 he came to prominence as cellist when he won the gold medal in the first ever Soviet Union competition for young musicians. Rostropovich was a huge influence on the younger generation of cellists. His talent also inspired compositions from numerous composers such as Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Prokofiev, Britten, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Bernstein, and Penderecki. Rostropovich’s health declined in 2006 and was admitted to a Paris hospital at the end of January 2007, but then decided to fly to Moscow, where he had been frequently receiving care. Obituaries cited sources stating that the cellist suffered from intestinal cancer, while other sources report, he re-entered the Blokhin Cancer Institute on April 7, 2007, and died on April 27, 2007 (picture: Prokofiev and Rostropovich. Moscow circa 1950).

Classical Column. The Composer Speaks: Pablo Santiago Chin

Paraphrasing Berg’s article “Why is Schoenberg ‘s Music so Hard to Understand?”, it seems that this question is more relevant today than ever before if it is to be applied to “abstract” music. I use the term “abstract” after hearing a professor of composition of a prestigious American university expressing his regrettable opinions on avant-garde music. The mentioned professor (and composer) believes that Shostakovich’s music is more human and expressive than Boulez’s music, and supports his argument in the fact that Shostakovich is played all around the world while Boulez is only played in selective circles. [Read more…]

Classical Book Highlights:

During the academic year 1939-1940, when he was about 58 years old, Stravinsky delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. Speaking in French, (an English translation was published in 1947 by Arthur Knodel) he began by saying: “I cannot conceal from you how happy I am to be speaking for the first time to an audience that is willing to take the trouble of listening and learning before judging.” These lectures appeared with the name of Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, on which Stravinsky deals with different topics like: the phenomenon of music, the composition of music, musical typology, the avatars of Russian music, and the performance of music. The following paragraphs are a collection of a few reading highlights we gathered on Stravinky’s views on composition. They are presented here in a different order than they appear in the book, and we also added subtitles in order to make the reading more organized, as they are as we just mentioned, fragments of some of Stravinsky’s thoughts. [Read more…]

Classical Music News:
Vienna (AFP) – The complete printed NMA (New Mozart Edition) is now available to download from The Mozart Institute website: “The purpose of this website is to make Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s musical compositions widely and conveniently accessible to the public, for personal study and for educational and classroom use,” the Mozarteum said in a statement. The website draws from the original Neue Mozart Ausgabe paper version developed since 1954 by internationally renowned musicologists and comprising over 125 booklets of sheet music, whose origin has been painstakingly authenticated, the Salzburg foundation said.
The “Digital Mozart Edition” (DME) website (http://dme.mozarteum.at) features over 600 works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, separated into ten categories, from concertos for orchestra to chamber music and pieces for piano.

Interview / Classical Book Recommendation of the month:
This is a condensed version of an interview with British composer and conductor Oliver Knussen (b. 1952) by Paul Griffiths. It’s part of several interviews included in Griffith’s “New sounds, new personalities: British composers of the 1980’s” (the format of this interview is similar to the format we will be using at composersnewpencil.com for interviewing composers and performers).
Oliver Knussen’s music occupies a regularly revisited place in concert and opera programmes worldwide. His Third Symphony, his opera Where the Wild Things Are and Violin Concerto are among the most frequently performed British works of recent times.

Paul Griffiths: Do you keep regular hours for composing?

Oliver Knussen: I’m trying to learn how to. My regular hours used to be from 11 at night till 4 in the morning, largely because that’s when the phone doesn’t ring and there are less things to think about. [Read more…]

Performance / Video:
Pierre Boulez conducting the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with singer Anna Steiger, in a 1991 concert recorded at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, Germany. Born in Paris, 22 December 1883, Varèse referred to his basic ideas as “sound masses”, or elements of musical sound characterized mainly by their instrumentation, registration, rhythmic shape, intervallic relationship, and volume. Offrandes, for soprano and chamber orchestra was written in 1921, and was his first work to be performed in the US. It is divided into two sections, both of which are settings of poems in French. Varèse’s catalogue contains only a handful of surviving pieces (the pieces written before 1920 were all destroyed by him or lost in a fire), but he is now considered to be one of the principal innovators of the first half of the 20th century. He died in New York, 6 November 1965.