Catching up, October 2022
This Week in Classical Music: October 10, 2022. Catching up. For a lot of the final month we’ve been preoccupied with Arnold Schoenberg and we’re glad we have been whereas he could not have been the best artistic genius within the historical past of classical music, few, if any, composers affected it a lot and within the course of modified the listeners’ notion of what music is and take heed to it. Whereas we have been engaged with Schoenberg and the genesis of atonal music, we missed numerous attention-grabbing dates, so in the present day we’ll look again on the month since Schoenberg’s birthday. Girolamo Frescobaldi, probably the most necessary composers of keyboard music of the late Renaissance, was born on the identical day as Schoenberg however three centuries earlier, on September 13th of 1583. Jean-Philippe Rameau, the good French composer of the Baroque, was born on September 25th of 1683, 100 years after Frescobaldi. Rameau was well-known for his operas, however the final opera composer was, little question, Giuseppe Verdi who was born on October 9th of 1813. And Dmitry Shostakovich, probably the most necessary Russian-Soviet composers was born in St.Petersburg on the identical day as Rameau, September 25th, in 1906.
A number of extra names: Heinrich Schütz of the early Baroque period, thought-about by many as an important German composer earlier than Bach, was born on October 8th of 1585. Camille Saint-Saëns was born a day and two and a half centuries later, on October 9th of 1835. After which there have been a number of composer who have been essential to their specific nations if not essentially on the identical stage as a number of the names we’ve simply talked about: Komitas, the nationwide Armenian composer; Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who occupied the same place in Lithuanian tradition; the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik; and the American, George Gershwin, born on September 26th of 1898. And eventually, Alexander von Zemlinsky, who performed such an necessary half within the lifetime of Schoenberg – and in addition was a really attention-grabbing composer — was born on October 14th of 1871.
A number of eminent pianists have been born throughout the identical interval, amongst them the American William Kapell, whose 100th anniversary was on September 20th, (he tragically died in a aircraft crash in 1953, at simply 31 years previous); Glenn Gould, who additionally had a spherical anniversary (90th), on September 25th. And Vladimir Horowitz was born on October 1st of 1903. We actually ought to point out the strings: the violinist Jacques Thibaud (9/27/1880), David Oistrakh (9/30/1908) and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who turned 67 on October 7th. We’ll point out only one conductor, Charles Munch, born on September 26th of 1891. We’ve talked about him a number of instances prior to now however failed to write down about him at any size; we must always appropriate this lapse – he was among the finest interpreters of French music and led the Boston Symphony for 13 years. And eventually, a number of singers: Anna Netrebko, who’s been within the media fairly a bit recently, not due to her singing – she hasn’t been doing a lot of that, being quickly banned from the Met and a number of other European levels – however due to her perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin who’s conducting a murderous warfare in Ukraine; she turned 51 on September 18th. And two of our all-time favourite (and really completely different) tenors, the German Fritz Wunderlich, who excelled in Mozart and Schubert, born on September 26th of 1930, and Luciano Pavarotti, on October 12th of 1935.
