Classical Favourites - Page 2

This is a some explanatory information I gathered for my friend Leigh Perry. Leigh mentioned that he loved classical piano music.
This is not piano music only. I have included some of my overall classical favourites. I recorded the music described on this photo and text information site on a MP3 CD for Leigh.
Anyone else interested in such a CD should let me know. The work is done now, and it is easy to burn another MP3 CD. I might consider it.

Photos 1-4. Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) - The Four Seasons.
Photos 5-8. Johann Sebastian Bach ( 1685-1750) - The Violin Concertos
Photos 9-10. Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Piano Concertos 23 and 27 (KV 488 & KV 599)
Photo 11. Ludwig van Beethoven ( 1770-1827) Moonlight Sonata
Photo 12-13. Robert Schumann ( 1810-1856) Piano Concerto
Photo 14-16. Frederic Chopin ( 1810-1849) Piano Concertos no 1 & 2
Photo 17-18. Ludwig van Beethoven ( 1770-1827) Violin Concerto in Dmin
Photo 19. Dmitri Shostakovich ( 1906-1975) Piano concerto No 2
Photo 20. Royal concertgebouw Orchestra plays Tea for Two

Gallery pages: < 1 2 3 >

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BOB > Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer of classical music, who lived predominantly in Vienna, Austria. Beethoven is widely regarded as one of history's supreme composers, and he produced notable works even after losing his hearing. He was one of the greatest figures in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in music. His reputation has inspired — and in many cases intimidated — composers, musicians, and audiences who were to come after him.
Among his most widely-recognized works are his Fifth, Sixth and Ninth symphonies (the latter containing the "Ode to Joy"); Piano Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor"); a Violin Concerto; the Pathétique, Moonlight and Appassionata piano sonatas; and the bagatelle Für Elise .

Ludwig van Beethoven's opus 27 no. 2 is the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia" (Italian: Almost a fantasy), popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.
Beethoven wrote this sonata in 1801 and dedicated it to his pupil, the 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was (or, according to some accounts, had been) in love. In 1832, several years after Beethoven's death, the poet Ludwig Rellstab compared the music to moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne. Since then it has been known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.
The "Moonlight" Sonata is one of Beethoven's most popular works, and it is frequently performed and recorded

BOB > Robert Schumann

The son of a bookseller, publisher and writer, Robert Schumann showed early abilities in both music and literature, the second facility used in his later writing on musical subjects.

After brief study at university, he was allowed by his widowed mother and guardian to undertake serious study of the piano with Friedrich Wieck, whose favourite daughter Clara Wieck was later to become Schumann's wife.

His ambitions as a pianist were thwarted by a weakness in the fingers of one hand, but the 1830s nevertheless brought a number of compositions for the instrument.

The year of his marriage, 1840, was a year of song, followed by attempts in which his young wife encouraged him at more ambitious forms of orchestral composition.

Settling first in Leipzig and then in Dresden, the Schumanns moved in 1850 to Duesseldorf, where Schumann had his first official appointment, as municipal director of music.

In 1854 he had a serious mental break-down, followed by two years in the asylum at Endenich before his death in 1856.

As a composer Schumann's gifts are clearly heard in his piano music and in his songs.

BOB > Kuerti, Anton (Emil).

Pianist, teacher, composer, concert organizer, artistic director, social activist, b Vienna 21 Jul 1938, naturalized US 1944, naturalized Canadian 1984; B MUS (Cleveland Institute) 1955, honorary FRHCM 1978, honorary D MUS (Laurentian) 1985. After lessons as a child with Edward Goldman in Boston he made a debut at nine, playing the Grieg Concerto with the Boston Pops Orchestra. He studied 1948-52 at the Longy School, Cambridge, Mass, with Erwin Bodky and Gregory Tucker (piano) and Arthur Shepherd (composition); 1952-3 at the Peabody Institute with Ernö Balogh (piano) and Henry Cowell (composition); 1953-5 at the Cleveland Institute with Arthur Loesser and Beryl Rubinstein (piano) and Marcel Dick (composition); and 1955-8 at the Curtis Institute with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. Of his many teachers, he regards Loesser and Serkin as having had the greatest influence on his musical thinking.
During his student years he was a soloist with the Zimbler Sinfonietta (1950) and with the MIT Symphony Orchestra (1951) and gave recitals (1953) at the Gardner Museum, Boston, and the Phillips Gallery, Washington. He also performed annually 1953-6 at the Marlboro Festival. His professional concert career began in 1957, when he won the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth Prize, the National Music League Award, and the coveted Leventritt Award, which includes engagements with major US orchestras; he consequently appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Over the next 30 years he performed with many other US orchestras, including the Philadelphia and the Minnesota, and, (before and after settling in Canada) with all of the main Canadian orchestras, including the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (MSO), the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) (in Ottawa and, in 1973, on tour), Symphony Nova Scotia, the Toronto Symphony (TS) (the first time in 1961 as a replacement for Myra Hess), the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. In 1965 Kuerti left the United States and settled in Canada.

BOB > Chopin Piano Concerto No 2 in F op. 21
Martha Archerich with Montreal Symphony, Conductor Charles Dutoit

MARTHA ARGERICH

Martha Argerich was born in Argentina and made her debut at the age of five. While still a child she gave recitals in Buenos Aires at the Astral and the Colón before moving to Europe where she studied with Friedrich Gulda, Nikita Magaloff and Michelangeli.

At the age of sixteen, Argerich won the Geneva International Music Competition and the Busoni Competition. In 1964 she toured Western Europe and Poland before making her London debut in November that year. In 1965 she won the Seventh Warsaw International Chopin Competition and the Polish Radio Prize for her performances of Chopin Waltzes and Mazurkas. As this collection of awards shows, her technical skills are among the most formidable of her generation and her playing is notable for its uninhibited brilliance. It is therefore no surprise that she is considered to be one of the greatest pianists of our time, among such renowned pianists as Michelangeli, Horowitz, and Maurizio Pollini.

EMI Classics has released a number of recordings by Martha Argerich, including a disc containing Beethoven Piano Concerto No.2 coupled with Haydn Piano Concerto No.11 with the London Sinfonietta; a recording of the Debussy and Franck Cello Sonatas with Mischa Maisky and a disc of Schumann's Fantasie Op.17 and Fantasiestücke Op.12. Her discography also includes a disc of Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen with Alexandre Rabinovich and a collection of Schumann’s chamber music, with some of her friends including: Alexandre Rabinovich, Dora Schwarzenberg, Lucy Hall, Nobuko Imai, Natalia Gutman, Mischa Maisky and Marie Luise Neunecker.

In August 1998 EMI Classics released an album recorded following sensational live performances in Canada and New York, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. This three-concerto disc features her first ever recordings of Prokofiev's First and Bartok's Third Piano Concertos, as well as Prokofiev’s Concerto No.3.

Martha Argerich and Charles Dutoit chose to make these recordings, to celebrate forty years of performing together in concerts throughout the world. Their partnership dates back to when Charles Dutoit first began to conduct and Martha Argerich appeared as his first soloist in one of these early concerts. It is for this historical reason, that they chose to produce this album in collaboration with EMI Classics.

The partnership between these two great artists continued with the release in 1999 of a disc of Chopin Piano Concertos Nos.1 & 2, with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. This won a phenomenal amount of critical acclaim including a Grammy award in March 2000. EMI Classics then released a Chopin recital disc, which Argerich recorded in 1965 at the time of the International Chopin Competition: this too won great critical praise.

In July 1999 Argerich released a disc of chamber music by Bartók, Kodály, Liszt and Prokofiev with a group of musicians including the pianist Nelson Freire. This release was followed closely by a recording of Beethoven and Franck Sonatas with Itzhak Perlman, released in September 1999.

In March 2000 two live recordings were released from a series of historic concerts in 1978, 1979 and 1992. One is a solo recital including Bach, Chopin, Bartók, Ginastera, and Prokofiev, and the other is a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.25 in C with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.1 in C with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Both releases include works never before recorded by Argerich. Her latest recording released in January 2001 is also from live Concertgebouw concerts in 1978, 1979 comprising Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op.12 and Ravel’s Sonatine and Gaspard de la nuit.

BOB > Beethoven Violin Concerto

Franz Clement was a talented violinist of Beethoven's day. Leader and director of the Theater an der Wien where Fidelio had premiered in 1801, the twenty-six year old musician was a prominent figure in Vienna's music circles, and a composer as well as a performer. Late in 1806, Clement decided to give a benefit concert --- for his own benefit: he would keep the proceeds himself. He assembled an orchestra of his colleagues and selected a program of works by Mozart, Cherubini, and Handel. Yet the concert would need something more, a show-stopper to attract attention during the business Christmas season, so Clement invited his friend Beethoven to write a violin concerto. The composer agreed, even though very little time remained. Working with uncustomary haste, Beethoven managed to complete the work only hours before the concert was to begin. The official tale is that Clement sight-read the entire work, but it takes little imagination to suppose that he probably had been visiting his friend throughout the composition process, trying out the piece several pages at a time. Moreover, the first two movements, though fiercely demanding of a performer's tone and lyrical ability, offer no technical challenges that would need to be beat into the fingers, and the concluding Rondo, though brimming with fire, is not so long that a virtuoso might not learn it in an afternoon.
At the premiere December 23, 1806, Clement declared that the concerto's opening movement would be played prior to intermission, and its conclusion following intermission. No one today would think of dissecting a piece in this fashion, but it was common practice at the time. This separation of the work into two portions explains why, between movements of the concerto, Clement indulged himself and his audience by playing a solo fantasia while holding his violin upside-down. These gravity-defying acrobatics did not arise from a lack of reverence for Beethoven's effort, but rather were only a pre-intermission encore. Bring them back for more, the stunt seems to say, so they can appreciate the rest of the concerto, too. Indeed, the audience received the new work enthusiastically, though the critics were less appreciative. "Tiring" and "commonplace" were amongst the adjectives used to describe the piece, which has since been accepted as one of Beethoven's most gracious and masterful works.

Beethoven often dedicated his compositions to aristocrats who might pay handsomely for the privilege. Yet when it came time to publish the Violin Concerto in 1808, he chose instead to honor someone closer to home. The work is dedicated to Stephan von Breuning, the composer's childhood friend with whom he had grown up back in Bonn. As a boy, Beethoven had often escaped his father's drunken demands by seeking refuge in the Breuning home. He and Stephan remained close throughout their lives, and the composer recognized that friendship with this dedication. Soon afterward, Beethoven prepared a revision of the work in the form of a piano concerto, which, upon publication, would be dedicated to Breuning's new bride Julie. His timing was good, for Julie would die the following year at the age of nineteen. Beethoven, who had been in the habit of visiting the young couple at their Vienna home and improvising for them at the piano, was reported to have been particularly fond of his good friend's wife.

BOB > Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)

Piano Concerto No 2
Angela Cheng piano, CBC Radio Orchestra
Music recorded for the Movie “The Overcoat”

Dmitry Shostakovich belongs to the generation of composers trained principally after the Communist Revolution of 1917. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory as a pianist and composer, his First Symphony winning immediate favour. His subsequent career in Russia varied with the political climate. The initial success of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, based on Leskov, and later revised as Katerina Ismailova, was followed by official condemnation, emanating apparently from Stalin himself. The composer's Fifth Symphony, in 1937, brought partial rehabilitation, while the war years offered a propaganda coup in the Leningrad Symphony, performed in the city under German siege. In 1948 he fell foul of the official musical establishment with a Ninth Symphony thought to be frivolous, but enjoyed the relative freedom following the death of Stalin in 1953. Outwardly and inevitably conforming to official policy, posthumous information suggests that Shostakovich remained very critical of Stalinist dictates, particularly with regard to music and the arts. He occupies a significant position in the 20th century as a symphonist and as a composer of chamber music, writing in a style that is sometimes spare in texture but always accessible, couched as it is in an extension of traditional tonal musical language.

Shostakovich wrote an early concerto for piano, trumpet and strings, and a second piano concerto, a vehicle for his son Maxim, in 1957. He also wrote two violin concertos and two cello concertos.

Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized 17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer of classical music, who lived predominantly in Vienna, Austria. Beethoven is widely regarded as one of history's supreme composers, and he produced notable works even after losing his hearing. He was one of the greatest figures in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in music. His reputation has inspired — and in many cases intimidated — composers, musicians, and audiences who were to come after him.
Among his most widely-recognized works are his Fifth, Sixth and Ninth symphonies (the latter containing the "Ode to Joy"); Piano Concerto No. 5 ("Emperor"); a Violin Concerto; the Pathétique, Moonlight and Appassionata piano sonatas; and the bagatelle Für Elise .

Ludwig van Beethoven's opus 27 no. 2 is the Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia" (Italian: Almost a fantasy), popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.
Beethoven wrote this sonata in 1801 and dedicated it to his pupil, the 17-year-old Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, with whom he was (or, according to some accounts, had been) in love. In 1832, several years after Beethoven's death, the poet Ludwig Rellstab compared the music to moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne. Since then it has been known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.
The "Moonlight" Sonata is one of Beethoven's most popular works, and it is frequently performed and recorded