This afternoon I had the pleasure of attending, in the Madgwick Hall at the University of New England, a concert given by the members of the former New England Ensemble to mark the fortieth anniversary of the first concert they gave on campus in 1975.
The Ensemble (Andrew Lorenz, violin; Robert Harris, viola; Janis Laurs, cello; and Wendy Lorenz, piano) was ensemble-in-residence in the University's Music Department from 1975-82 and by all accounts made a lasting contribution to the musical life of the city and the region. In returning from studies abroad to take up their appointments they became the first full time professional ensemble based outside a capital city. They achieved national and international recognition.
At this afternoon's concert they played three works that had particular significance for them:
Beethoven's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major Opus 16 was their first commercial recording, with the Cherry Pie label in Sydney. It went to three pressings in the first twelve months of its release.
Peter Sculthorpe's Landscape II was commissioned by Musica Viva for the New England Ensemble.
Dvorak's Piano Quartet in E-flat Major Opus 87 was the first work they performed, in the same hall, almost forty years ago to the day.
It was a great occasion, well attended by an enthusiastic audience, and it is a great pity that it had to be a one-off.
Last Saturday
17 November I attended a wonderful violin and piano recital at the Melbourne
Recital Centre: the British violinist Anthony Marwood and the Belgrade-born
pianist Aleksandar Madžar playing a program that included two old favourites:
Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and Debussy’s wonderful Violin Sonata, both of
which I had in multiple versions by the time I left university.
I
first became familiar with the Kreutzer Sonata in my first year at university,
when my mother’s friend May Richardson (neé Drabsch) offered to lend me her
ten-inch vinyl record of David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin playing it, saying she
thought I would enjoy it, which of course I did.
By
the time I left the University of New England I had also acquired on vinyl:
-My own copy of
Oistrakh and Oborin
-Jascha Heifetz
and Brooks Smith
-Yehudi and
Hephzibah Menuhin
-Josef Szigeti and
Béla Bartók (famous recording of a 1940 concert in the Library of Congress)
-The wonderful
recording by Zino Francescatti and Robert Casadesus
Over
the years I have also acquired on CD, in no particular order:
-Yehudi Mehuhin and Louis Kentner
-David Oistrakh
and Frida Bauer
- Fritz Kreisler
and Franz Rupp
-Georg Kulenkampff
and Wilhelm Kempff
-Josef Szigeti and
Claudio Arrau
-Adolf Busch and
Rudolf Serkin
- Isaac Stern and Eugene
Istomin
-The
abovementioned recording of Josef Szigeti and Béla Bartók
With the
Debussy the story is pretty much the same. I first acquired a ten-inch vinyl of
Josef Suk and Jan Panenka, and by the time I left university I had also
acquired
-Isaac Stern and
Alexander Zakin
-Josef Szigeti and
Béla Bartók (another item on the 1940 Library of Congress program)
Subsequent
acquisitions on CD are:
-Ginette Neveu and
Jean Neveu
-Kyung Wha Chung
and Radu Lupu
-Arthur Grumiaux
and István Hajdu
-Yehudi Menuhin
and Jacques Février
-Christian Ferras
and Pierre Barbizet
- and of course Josef
Szigeti and Béla Bartók on the Library of Congress recording
I
digress, but all of this is by way of saying that I am not altogether
unfamiliar with these works: I have listened to them up hill and down dale over
many years, by a variety of great interpreters. It is therefore a great
pleasure to be able to say that Marwood and Madžar played them extraordinarily
well. I went to the concert with high expectations and was not disappointed.
These men have been playing together for years, and it shows – they come across
as two people playing together, almost a single instrument, rather than one
person accompanied by another. They played with great confidence (if you’ve
practiced enough you can take risks with crescendi etc), and Marwood’s phrasing
and intonation were superb.
I
might add that it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to go to a recital at
which some of the greatest pieces in the repertoire are performed really well.
Not every concert needs to be “challenging” or “confronting” or to “take us out
of our comfort zone”. There is a reason why the great works have staying power,
and for my money I would like to hear more of them in live performance.
In the course of his composing career Sergei Rachmaninov
wrote 24 Preludes in three sets: the famous Prelude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 3
No.2, then the ten Preludes Op. 23, written in 1901 and 1903, and finally the
thirteen Preludes Op. 32, written in 1910. Together they span all the major and
minor keys.
They are longer than the traditional musical fragment which
had hitherto been associated with the term Prelude – Chopin’s for example – and
tend to be musically complex and technically demanding. They are beautiful
pieces, and the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter was the master of
them.
As a sampler, try these examples from YouTube, all played by
Richter:
Both personally and as Chairman of Australia21, I am
disappointed to hear that there is to be a spill of full-time positions at the
Australian National University’s wonderful School of Music, so that the 32
full-time staff have to apply for positions in a reduced establishment of 20.
Disappointed because I think we as a society should be
moving in the other direction – more engagement with music as high art – and I
have begun considering how to frame an Australia21 project that could examine
the social wellbeing benefits of the Venezuelan program known as El Sistema (“the
system”) and how the lessons from that might be applied in an Australian
context.
El Sistema is a publicly financed music education program in
Venezuela, founded in 1975 by economist and musician José Antonio Abreu under the name of Social
Action for Music.
El Sistema is a state foundation which watches over
Venezuela's 102 youth orchestras, 55 children’s orchestras and 270 music
centres, and the instrumental training programmes which make them possible.
While the organisation has 31 symphony orchestras, its greatest achievement is
the 310,000 to 370,000 children who attend its music schools around the country
where it is estimated that 70 to 90 percent of them come from poor
socio-economic backgrounds.The program
is known for rescuing young people in extremely impoverished circumstances from
the environment of drug abuse and crime into which they would likely otherwise
be drawn.
Interestingly, it has always been located under the wing of social
services ministries, not the Ministry of Culture, a fact which has helped it to
survive several changes of government, and political persuasions of government,
over a period of more than 30 years.We
are talking about classical music as a positive force for personal development
and a benefit to society, not simply as recreation, important as the enjoyment
aspect is.As Abreu himself puts it:
Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the
highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony,
mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to
express sublime feelings.
A detailed account of El Sistema’s achievements and history,
including its spread to the United States and the United Kingdom, may be found
in the relevant Wikipedia entry.A video of Abreu talking about El Sistema on
the TED website on the occasion of being awarded the TED Prize may be accessed here,
and a June 2010 TED Blog post on the graduation in Boston of 10 young musicians
from the the El Sistema USA program at New
England Conservatory may be accessed here. These young
musicians were to spread out to seven centres across the United States and
establish “nucleos” – programs and centres that will “teach children to play music,
believe in themselves, and reach for their dreams”.
I would like to see Australia as one of the next to take up
El Sistema, but sadly, we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. To mix
the metaphors, we seem to see music as the icing on the cake, not as core
business.But for people “doing it tough”,
and especially their children, music offers great benefits and opportunities.
I am indebted to fellow blogger Andrew Catsaras (twitter
handle @AndrewCatsaras) for the link to this splendid YouTube item of Contralto
Eula Beal singing Ebarme Dich from
Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, conducted
by Antal Dorati, with Yehudi Menuhin playing the solo violin parts.
New Records from Overseas was the title of a Sunday morning ABC radio program hosted by Ralph Collins, a former ABC music librarian with an enormous knowledge of music, who hosted his own program for about thirty years from the 1960s. In the days that we were establishing a garden at our first house in Macquarie in the ACT, we listened to it without fail on the large portable radio that my parents had given me for my 21st birthday.
The title of this program comes into my head whenever a parcel arrives from my CD supplier of choice, Presto Classical.
A particularly content-rich package was awaiting me when I arrived home on Thursday evening. It contained three Sony boxed sets which are currently available at a discount and which seemed too good to pass up:
- The Budapest String Quartet plays Beethoven (8 CDs)
The complete cycle of Beethoven’s sixteen quartets
- Arthur Rubinstein Plays Brahms (9 CDs)
The two piano concerti (No. 1 with Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, No. 2 with Josef Krips and the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra)
The three piano sonatas
The three violin sonatas, with Henryk Szeryng
The two cello sonatas, with Gregor Piatagorsky
The three piano trios with Henryk Szeryng and Pierre Fournier
The three piano quartets and the marvellous Piano Quintet in F minor with the Guarneri Quartet
Shorter solo pieces – the ballades, intermezzi etc.
- Robert Casadesus plays Mozart (5 CDs)
Piano concerti nos. 15,17 and 21-27, all with Gerge Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra
Piano Sonata No. 12 in F Major K. 332
Concerto for Two Pianos in E-flat major K. 365 (with wife Gaby Casadesus)
Concerto for Three Pianos in F major K. 242 (with Gaby Casadesus and son Jean)
(both of the above with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra)
Quintet for Piano & Winds in E-flat major K. 452 (with the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet)
The above 22 CDs delivered to my doorstep for a mere $A75.59. It will take me a while to play through that lot.
Presto Classical’s discount offer on Sony boxed sets lasts until 4 May. See the full range here.
Some time in the summer of 1961-62, having completed my first year of undergraduate science at the University of New England, I went record hunting and was delighted to discover a recording, on the old Coronet label, of two of my favourite violinists, two of the greatest violinists of the time, Isaac Stern and David Oistrakh, playing four Vivaldi concerti for two violins.
For those who really care, the four concerti are:
- Concerto in D minor RV 514 (F.1, No. 100)
- Concerto in G minor RV 517 (F.1, No. 12)
- Concerto in C minor RV 509 (F.1, No. 98)
- Concerto in D major RV 512 (F.1, No. 41)
This is joyful music, and the two maestros are clearly enjoying themselves playing together – and I mean playing together, neither trying to dominate. Stern plays first violin in two of them, Oistrakh in the other.
The collaboration between these two artists, both Ukrainian born but Stern a resident of the United States from the age of one, and Oistrakh a citizen of the Soviet Union, was a bigger deal in the circumstances of the day than it might appear in 2011.
The two men had first met in Brussels in 1951, when Isaac Stern attended the Queen Elizabeth of Belgium violin competition. David Oistrakh was one of the judges.
The Cold War kept a tight grip on Oistrakh’s ability to travel to Western Europe and the United States. It was a tense time. The Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test in 1949 and its first thermonuclear test in 1953, the year that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed on charges of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. A nuclear arms race was in full swing, the United States was in the grip of the McCarthy era, and we all lived in the Strangelovian world of nuclear armed bombers being on permanent alert. Cultural exchanges were not high on the agenda of either side.
Nevertheless, in 1955 Oistrakh gained permission to travel to the United States, and gave a concert at Carnegie Hall that was lauded by American music celebrities not only for the quality of Oistrakh’s musicianship but for being one of the first breaches in the Iron Curtain. Isaac Stern, eleven years Oistrakh’s junior, attended the concert and described Oistrakh as “a musician who did great honour to the violin with his playing.”
It was during this 1955 Oistrakh visit to the United States that the two men collaborated on recording these four Vivaldi concerti, with Eugene Ormandy conducting members of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
My vinyl recording is now almost half a century old, and I have long wondered why it had never been re-released on CD.
Happy to report, this evening while browsing the Presto Classical website I discovered that in December 2010 these marvellous recordings were released on CD by Sony, the heir to the Coronet label. Also on the CD is a recording of The Four Seasons by Anshel Brusilow, who was concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy from 1959-66.
The recording may be accessed here on the Presto Classical website.
On 13 April 1940 a remarkable concert took place, a performance by two émigré Hungarian musicians, great musical figures of their day, the violinist Joseph Szigeti and the musicologist, composer and pianist Béla Bartók.
Both musicians had only recently arrived in America. They had been deeply concerned about the repressive regime of Admiral Horthy in their native Hungary and the advance of Nazism and Italian fascism. Bartók forbade the broadcast of his works from stations in, or beamed to, Germany and Italy in the 1930s, Szigeti refused to appear in Germany after 1932. As the situation in Europe grew worse, both of them decided to emigrate as a necessary protest. Szigeti left Europe at the end of 1939, and Bartók attended Szigeti’s final Budapest Concert, which included his Portrait, Op. 5.
Bartok, although determined to leave before Hungarian surrender to what he called “bandits and assassins”, proceeded at a somewhat less hurried pace. He sailed to America just in time for the April 1940 concert, and returned to Hungary in May to settle his affairs, giving his own farewell concert on 8 October.
The program for the Library of Congress “Sonata Recital” was a wonderful one:
- Beethoven: Sonata in A major, Op. 47, “Kreutzer”
- Bartok: Rhapsody No. 1 for Violin and Piano
- Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano
- Bartok: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano
We are fortunate that this historic concert was recorded and the sound quality is quite good. I acquired it on vinyl in 1965, but it has been released on CD. I acquired the version released on Vanguard Classics (ATM CD 1583) a few years ago. That edition seems to have lapsed, but a Hungaroton release (HCD 12330) is available from Presto Classical here.
Collected from the local post office agency first thing on Saturday morning: a 5-CD set of the Amadeus Quartet playing the complete Brahms String Quartets, Quintets and Sextets, and a 7-CD set of the Amadeus playing the complete cycle of sixteen Beethoven String Quartets plus the Grosse Fugue, both issued as part of the Deutsche Grammaphon Collectors Edition series.
I already had some of these recordings on vinyl, but not many, as I already had on vinyl the complete cycle of Beethoven Quartets, the wonderful recordings made by the Hungarian Quartet, and the Leon Fleischer-Juillard Quartet recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet. So I decided to see what the Amadeus had to say for themselves on this central chamber repertoire.
Having no interest whatsoever in the footy grand final I have managed to listen to all twelve CDs over the course of the weekend, and they are everything that one would expect and hope – wonderful, seamless ensemble playing of the kind that emerges only when people have been playing together for a lifetime and become completely attuned to one another so that the quartet seems to become a single musical organism rather than four individuals playing.
The Amadeus Quartet was born out of the hardships of Jewish displacement arising from the Anschluss and internment during the Second World War. The violinists Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof were driven out of Vienna by the 1938 Anschluss. On the outbreak of war all three of them were interned as enemy aliens. Brainin met Schidlof in an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Brainin was released after a few months, but Schidloff remained in the camp, where he subsequently met Nissel. Eventually Schidlof and Nissel were released, and the three of them studied under Max Rostal, who taught them free of charge.
Through Rostal they met cellist Martin Lovett, and in 1947 they formed the Brainin Quartet, with Schidlof playing the viola. They renamed themselves the Amadeus Quartet in 1948, and that year gave their first concert as the Amadeus Quartet at the Wigmore Hall, the performance being underwritten by Imogen Holst. The quartet disbanded in 1987 upon the death of Peter Schidlof. By this time they had made some 200 recordings.
For the Brahms Quintets and Sextets they have their regular collaborators Cecil Aronowitz on the second viola (Brahms wrote his quintets for a second viola rather than a second cello, which gives them their distinctive, more nasal sound) and William Pleeth on the second cello. Christoph Eschenbach is the pianist in the Quintet in F minor op. 34, and appears with Karl Leister (clarinet) and Georg Donderer (cello) in the Trio for Piano, Clarinet and Violoncello in A minor Op. 114.
Karl Leister joins the Amadeus Quartet for the Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet on B minor, op. 115.
A friend of mine recently sent me the link to a YouTube performance by the Azeri Iranian musician Hossein Alizadeh. It had been forwarded to him by an Iranian friend.
Alizadeh is a distinguished Iranian composer who was born in Tehran in 1951 to Azeri parents. He graduated from the music conservatorium in 1975 and entered the school of fine arts in the University of Tehran where he studied composition and Persian music. He continued his education at the University of Berlin in composition and musicology. He plays the Persian classical instruments the tar and the setar.
In 2007 he and the Armenian musician Djivan Gasparyan were nominated for the 2007 Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music for their collaboration album The Endless Vision.
This track, Sari Gelin (yellow bride), arranged by Alizadeh, is a folk song popular in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iran and Iraq. The origin of the song is uncertain, though it is believed to have an Armenian origin. It is a sad song, based upon a man being unable to marry the girl of his dreams – in its Turkish form it is considered to be the song of a Muslim Turkish man in love with a Christian Armenian girl. In the Armenian version there is a line “I could not have the one I loved”, in the Azerbaijani, “They would not let me marry you”, in the Persian, the maiden is “fleeing away, fleeing away”, leading to “the sorrow of yearning, the grief of parting”.
For more about the history and etymology of the song, access the Wikipedia entry, with the words in English for the different ethnic versions, here.
Access a 7-minute video from the Endless Vision concert in Tehran here.
In Mohamad Reza Shajarian to tour Australia I foreshadowed the Australian tour of the internationally renowned master of Persian classical music Mohamad Reza Shajarian, accompanied by the amazing Shahnaz Ensemble, led by Majid Derakhshani, membership of which includes Shajarian’s daughter Mojgan, who sings as well as playing the setaar.
On the evening of Saturday 1 May my wife, a friend and I had the pleasure of attending Shajarian’s Melbourne performance, at the Dallas Brooks Centre. It was a wonderful occasion, an opportunity to sample some of the rich musical heritage of Persia, played at a standard that has achieved international recognition; Shajarian received a UNESCO Picasso award in 1999 and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best World Music in 2004 and 2006.
Although Shajarian is a practitioner of Persian classical music, writing settings of lyrics by the great Persian poets, careful selection of words that suit the times enable him to tap into the feelings of, and give hope to, those who are not entirely at ease with the current Iranian regime. To put it into a context familiar to us, if I say
But if the cause be not good ... it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it ...
I am not criticising John Howard’s decision to invade Iraq, how could anyone think such a thing, I am simply quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V.
So when Shajarian sings poetry by the fourteenth century Persian lyric poet Hāfez, he has the opportunity to draw on poetry familiar to all, the major themes of which are not only love, the celebration of wine and intoxication, but also the hypocrisy of those who have set themselves up as guardians, judges and examples of moral rectitude. The regime mightn’t like it, but what can they say?
For those who like to measure a musician’s pulling power in coin of the realm, when I came to book our tickets I was surprised and disappointed to find that the best seats in the house clocked in at a little over $A300. We let those go by, and got good seats for considerably less than that. But we were close enough to the action to see that the $300 seats were all occupied.
The concert was well attended, but I as far as I could tell our party, plus a lone friend of our friend, were the only non-Iranians present; certainly the only English we heard spoken was our own conversation or when other attendees spoke to us, as they did. So it was not so much a multicultural event as a mono-cultural event in a great multicultural city, which is a bit of a pity because great music is great music and the opportunity to hear it at world-class standard is not to be missed.
At the interval some Iranian ladies sitting in front of us turned to chat. They asked us whether we spoke any Farsi, and when we said no, and that it was a pity because we would have liked to know more about the music and what was being sung. They explained the meaning of the various songs that we had heard in the first half – this song was a setting of a poem by Hāfez etc. Very gracious and courteous people, who seemed to welcome our presence and our willingness to appreciate music which they obviously loved.
The evening finished with a couple of encores, the last of which we were told is always heard. It is a song of freedom, which dates from the time of the movement which brought parliamentary democracy to Iran in 1906 - who could object to that? It was clear that Shajarian and friends were not going to be permitted to leave until this had been sung, and its reception was enormous.
For Sydney readers, it is not too late – Shajarian’s Australian tour ends with a performance at the Enmore Theatre on Saturday 16 May –bookings accessible from the Persian Information Hub here.
On completion of their Australian tour, Shajarian and the Shanhnaz Ensemble will travel to North America for performances in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Huston, Seattle, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Toronto.
A few weeks ago an old university friend of mine sent me a newspaper cutting from The Sunday Times, 3 January 2010. It is a retrospective on Vladimir Horowitz’s career, from the 1920s to the 1980s, triggered apparently by the release by Sony Music of all of Horowitz’s recordings for RCA and Columbia on 70 CDs, in its Original Jacket Collection series.
Our time at the University of New England came during the longest of Horowitz’s extended silences – no public performances from 1953-1965 – but we were fully paid up members of the Horowitz fan club, and I avidly collected any Horowitz LP I could get my hands on: Horowitz’s own rewrite of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Mussourgsky was not a pianist and did not realise the possibilities of the piano, you understand); Beethoven’s Appassionata and a wonderful performance of the Sonata no. 7; Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with Fritz Reiner; Homage to Liszt; Horowitz Plays Chopin; Scriabin’s Sonata No. 3 and a selection of preludes; Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata and other works; and a very elegant selection of Schumann (Kinderszenen), Scarlatti, Schubert and Scriabin, fortunately long ago released on CD.
The admiration was not universal, however. Sunday Times reviewer Hugh Canning writes:
Just over 20 years after his death, he remains a contentious figure, idolised for his technical wizardry and mercurial persona among his many devotees, but grudgingly acclaimed by the more fastidious, who argue that his flashy showmanship blinded — or rather deafened — his fans to a certain musical superficiality, especially in the central Austro-German repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann.
Yet, despite the critical caveats, he remains a towering figure.
In Horowitz’s favour, the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau is quoted as saying, after one of Horowitz’s first concerts outside Russia:
It was some of the most volcanic playing I had ever heard. I was sitting with my mother in the first row and I was amazed at the things he could do, despite the stiffness of the arms.
The great Polish Pianist Artur Rubinstein dismissed Horowitz after the third of his four periods of public silence with
[He] returned to the concert life as the great virtuoso he always was, but in my view does not contribute anything to the art of music.
My response to the proposition that Horowitz’s extraordinary technique blinds his fans to “a certain musical superficiality” would be that the technique blinds his critics to the musicality – they cannot see (hear) beyond the technique to the interpretive powers. Those who think he is just a “flashy showman” are really missing out on something. As far as the central Austro-German repertoire is concerned, what about his recording of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto (listen to the transition from the second to the third movement), or his Appassionata, or the Sonata No. 7 with its incredible largo movement. In the “other” repertoire, what about the musicianship in Pictures at an Exhibition – not just the virtuosity of The Hut of Baba Yaga or The Great Gate at Kiev, but the delicate playing in Catacombs. As for his first recording of the Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto with Sir Arthur Coates, dating from 1930 when Horowitz was 28 ...
Even Rubinstein was not always so dismissive of Horowitz. Having heard him at a concert in Paris in 1926, Rubinstein declared:
There was much more than brilliance and technique; there was an easy elegance – the magic of something that defies description.
That assessment will do me; my sympathies are firmly with the “towering figure” school.
I will soon have an opportunity to opine more authoritatively on Horowitz’s oeuvre. A couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and ordered the 70 CD set from Presto Classical in the UK – a bargain at £195.65, especially when the current AUD-GBP exchange rate is considered. The item itself is currently located on this page here. My copy was despatched from the UK on 9 April, so it should have been well clear before Eyjafjallajökull brought European aviation to a standstill; otherwise, who knows when it will turn up.
Until Rupert puts up his paywall on 1 July, you can read Canning’s review for yourself here.
Mohamad Reza Shajarian, born 23 September 1940, is recognised as a contemporary master of Persian classical music, nationally and internationally acclaimed for his singing and his composition. In 1999 he received a UNESCO Picasso award.
Shajarian studied singing at the age of five under the supervision of his father, and at the age of twelve, he began studying the traditional classical repertoire known as the Radif. He started his singing career in 1959 at Radio Khorasan, rising to prominence in the 1960s with his distinct style of singing. Since then his career has included teaching at Tehran University's Department of Fine Arts, working at National Radio and Television, researching Iranian music, and making numerous recordings.
He is also a man of considerable courage. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the protestors against his theft of the June 2009 election “dust and trash”, Shajarian said to the BBC Persian program in a telephone interview that he was the voice of dust and trash. He also told the State broadcaster to stop broadcasting his songs, saying that his famous song “Iran, the land of hope” had nothing to do with the current situation of his country.
The good news for Australian readers is that Shajarian is about to commence a tour here, accompanied by 16 musicians of the Shahnaz Ensemble, led by Magid Derakhshani. His Australian itinerary is:
- Perth (Octagon Theatre) 30 April
- Melbourne (Dallas Brooks Centre) 1 May
- Brisbane (Conservatorium Brisbane University) 9 May
- Sydney (Enmore Theatre) 16 May
Tickets may be purchased online from the tour website here.
There is plenty of his music available on iTunes – simply enter Shajarian in the search box. I took the plunge and bought Shajarian Golden Songs – about 3 ½ hours of music for $44.99. There are plenty of albums of standard length for prices ranging from $13.99 to $16.99, and as always single tracks can be purchased.
Sometimes when one waits long enough a hoped-for event takes place. Such is the case with the reissue of a wonderful recording of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E flat major KV 364, with Walter Barylli (violin), Paul Doktor (viola) and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra conducted by Felix Prohaska.
This recording was first issued by Westminster in 1951, which makes it one of the very early LPs, the format having been first released as an alternative to 78 rpm records in 1948. It was certainly one of the first LPs my mother ever owned, and I have loved it since the day I first heard it at the age of about eight or nine. I still have that original vynil record, and have transferred it to CD, but it has certainly seen better days and for years I have been searching the catalogues to see whether a cleaned up version had ever been re-released. A few weeks ago I checked the Presto Classical website and couldn’t believe my eyes – it has now been released by the Austrian label Preiser Records (www.preiserrecords.at).
I would be the first to admit that my love for this recording is a function of the fact that it is so much a part of my introduction to classical music, and that hearing it can transport me back to the 1950s. But objectively it is a remarkably fine performance by remarkably talented musicians:
- Walter Barylli was born in Vienna in 1921. He studied at the Vienna Music Academy with the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic, and at age 15 went to Munich to study with the prominent violinist Florizel von Reuter, who took Barylli into his own home so that he could continue his studies without excessive expense to his parents.
In 1936 he gave his first public performance as a soloist, in Munich, and made his first gramophone records in Berlin. Over the next two years he made a career as an international soloist, but in 1938, on a train journey form Stuttgart to Vienna to audition for a first violin desk with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he become aware of the preparations for the Anschluss – the German takeover of Austria. This confirmed for him that he needed to be a member of a symphony orchestra rather than a travelling soloist. Having successfully competed for the position he accepted it and became a member of this outstanding orchestra – aged 17.
During the war he first brought the Barylli Quartet together. He re-founded it in 1945, but most of its public performances were in the 1950s. My music collection contains an excellent recording of the Barylli Quartet playing Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 14 in A flat major, Op. 105, and pianist Edith Farnadi joining them in the Dvořák Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81.
- Paul Doktor was born in Vienna in 1917, the son of singer-pianist Georgine and violist Karl Doktor. At the age of five he began violin studies with his father, and by his teens he was touring with the Adolf Busch Chamber Orchestra. At a few days’ notice he was asked to take over from the ailing second violist in a performance of a Mendelssohn Quintet with the Busch Quartet. He was invited to join the Quartet in presenting a series of Mozart Quintets at Wigmore Hall in London.
He remained with the viola ever after, and became the first violist ever to have been awarded unanimously the First Prize at the International Music Competition in Geneva. He left Vienna in 1938 and from 1939 to 1947 was solo violist with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra. He moved to the United States in 1947 and became an American citizen in 1952. In addition to his solo career he established with Yaltah Menuhin the Duo Doktor-Menuhin, and became a faculty member at the Juilliard School.
- Felix Prohaska was born in Vienna in 1912, the son of composer Carl Prohaska. He had his primary music education at home with his father, and then studied piano and theory with other teachers.
After serving as répétiteur at the Graz opera from 1936 to 1939, he conducted opera in Duisburg from 1939 to 1941 and in Strasbourg from 1941 to 1943.
Following his early work of conducting, Felix Prohaska rehabilitated the Salzburg Festival following World War II and conducted for many years at the Vienna State Opera (1945-1955). He was Principal Conductor of the Frankfurt Opera from 1955-1961 before his appointment as director of the Frankfurt Hochschule für Musik. He again conducted at the Vienna State Opera (1964-1967), and then at the opera of Hannover (1965-1974), and he also served as director of the Hochschule fur Musik there (1961-1975).
Prohaska was one of the pioneers in recordings of Bach’s vocal works in the early 1950s. In preparing the works for recording all efforts were made to insure a reading as close to Bach's intentions as possible. The chorus and the orchestra were held to the approximate size of Bach’s own, and wherever possible, authentic instruments were used.
This diligent approach to music making is evident in the Sinfonia Concertante, in which the contribution of the orchestra is far more than simply accompanying the two soloists – in this work the orchestral score and solo instruments support and complement each other in a fully integrated fashion.
In the childhood days when I grew to love this music it was simply the music itself that attracted me. Almost sixty years on I can see it also as a small part of postwar reconstruction – part of the revival of something like normal life after the horrors of the war, Viennese survivors playing Viennese music, recorded for the new technology – the long-playing (but not microgroove) record.
Much as I love this recording, I have to acknowledge that it is just a “filler” for the real reason for Preiser Records releasing this CD. The feature piece is an historic wartime (April 1944) recording of a performance of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, KV 218, with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Clemens Kraus, and Walter Barylli as soloist. This was discovered by chance in 2006, in the archives of the Stiftung Deutches Rundfukarchiv by the Belgian physician and music-lover Professor Eric Derom. It is another example of Barylli’s immaculate playing.
For those interested in acquiring these historic recordings, they are available at Presto Classical. This link should take you straight to the relevant page.
