Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007)
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).
Why is “Ugly” Music so Hard to Understand?
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
Stravinsky on Music Composition
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
Free Wolfgang!
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.
