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Showing posts with label .Music Herstory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label .Music Herstory. Show all posts
.Music Herstory

Music HERstory: Teresa Carreño (1853-1917)

Thursday, 14 May 2020



Teresa Carreño (1853-1917)
By Polymnia
Biography

The Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño was born in Caracas in December 22, 1853. Baptized under the name Maria Teresa Gertrudis de Jesús, she began her piano studies with her father, Manuel Antonio Carreño, approximately when she was six years old. Since the age of three she showed a sharp musicality and curiosity that encouraged her explorations on the instrument through melodies keyboard decoding and left hand musical accompaniment. Teresa recalled that when she was ten years old her repertoire already included pieces of extreme difficulty, such as the Fourth Ballad by Chopin, among others.


In 1862 Teresa and her family decided to move to the U.S. as a consequence of the political instability in Venezuela and thanks to her father connections, who had been Minister of Foreign Affairs for a short period of time. In New York Manuel Antonio organized soirées at home in order to introduce the little pianist to the scene of American and European artists that visited the city. Thus Teresa was introduced to pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who gave her interpretation classes and also recommended her to public presentations in important theaters. The Carreño family gradually grew dependent to the income earned by the child prodigy, who signed her first contract with manager L. F. Harrison when she was ten years old and had her first published composition at the age of ten.

In 1863 Teresa was invited to perform a piano concert at the house of president Abraham Lincoln. Her condition of child prodigy compelled her to a non-stop schedule that became criticized by professor Gottschalk, among others. Attempting not to exaggerate the burden upon Teresa’s shoulders, her father invested a great amount of her gains in an enterprise that unfortunately ended up filing for bankruptcy. Aiming to reach a better situation to all, Manuel Antonio decided to move the family to Paris for a fresh start in 1866.

In the City of Light, the famous piano manufacturer Erard became engaged in introducing little Teresa to the musical scenery. She succeeded in charming the new audiences, receiving compliments by the press and enjoying the admiration of masters such as Rossini and Liszt. Resulting from that she started to undertake new marathons of concerts in which she included the performances of her own compositions aside to works by Thalberg, Beethoven and Gottschalk.

When she was twenty years old Teresa got married to the French violinist Emile Sauret and gave birth to her first child, Emilita. The couple soon realized the inconvenience of touring together with a baby, changing hotels and cities (sometimes under precarious conditions). Another additional burdening factor was the competition that surfaced between the artists, with a clear advantage towards Teresa Carreño. They finally decided to separate in 1877 and Teresa, alone and without proper conditions to raise Emilita, accepted an offer by a wealthy friend of hers to adopt the child. Later, after many years, Teresa tried to revert this process but did not succeed.

Returning to New York, Teresa engaged in an informal commitment with baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra. In 1878 she gave birth to her second daughter, Lulu, whom would die at the age of three. Aiming to reach a higher level of professional and financial stability the composer created a company with singer Emma Donaldi to organize and produce the concerts to both of them. Resulting from her relationship with baritone Tagliapietra, Teresa gave birth to Teresita in 1882 and to Giovanni in 1885. This was a stable period for the composer once she could focus in studying, teaching and performing concerts in a good balance between her professional activities and the family life.

In 1885 Teresa was invited to perform in Caracas, being received with pomp and ceremony upon her arrival. She also received a state commission to compose the Hymn to Bolivar as part of the Venezuelan Libertador centennial celebrations. Resulting from this successful process Teresa decided to bring her husband and children from the U.S. to establish an Opera company in Venezuela. The venture ultimately became a failure and led the composer in 1887 to return with her family to the U.S. completely broke and demoralized.

A third marital separation led Teresa to move with her children to Paris. She was accommodated there by her brother who was then the Venezuelan Ambassador in France. Teresa retook her tours and concerts and also engaged in a fourth marriage, this time with composer Eugen DÁlbert. They had two children, Eugenia and Hertha. Unfortunately the relationship ended up in another divorce in 1894, under the accusations of adultery and even mental insanity by Eugen against her spouse. Even though these accusations were unfounded the composer’s health began to deteriorate after those facts took place.

Teresa Carreño died in 1917 at the age of sixty-four. Relatives and friends commented that her death resulted from the tiredness and the infinity range of turbulences she had to face during her whole life. Her ashes were laid to rest in Caracas at the Pantheon of Venezuela. She is considered one of the greatest Latin American composers and musical performers.

Compositions

Teresa began to compose at the age of seven. Then she composed popular pieces such as polkas and waltzes but also some contemplative and more austere songs. At the age of ten she had her first published piece, Vals Gottschalk, a homage to her professor and great pianist who supported her upon her arrival in the U.S. The following pieces were compositions dedicated to people or to special occasions such as Saludo a Cuba and the Impromptu offered to the Cuban composer and pianist Nicolás Ruiz Espadero, when she was touring in this Caribbean country.

As much as it had happened to Clara Schumann, Teresa’s compositions were directly influenced by the repertoire that she interpreted in recitals (pieces from the classical and romantic periods in general). They are generally virtuosic works for piano with wide chords, sequences of eighths for both hands and technically challenging passages such as the ones that can be heard in Le Printemps Op. 25. The author used to choose tones with several sharp (or flat) notes and applied scales in thirds and/or sixths, as the cascades of notes used by Thalberg and Liszt. In wide terms she always aimed to maintain a good coherence among the tonalities of the movements, as Beethoven used to do.

The native music of Venezuela also influenced the composition of Teresa Carreño, specially in the simultaneous usage of superimposed or juxtaposed ¾ and 6/8 metrics. Dances such as the Vals, Polka and Mazurka, derived from European suites, incorporated local melodies. Her Bal em Réve exemplifies the usage of these practices once the rhythm, composed of three successive eighth notes followed by two punctuated eighth notes, refers to the merengue venezuelano. In all of them Teresa introduced chromatic values to the traditional chords in order to provide them colors similar to the German romantic music and, thus, giving them a classical music atmosphere.

The author’s contact with Rossini and the Italian music became an influence to Un Revue à Prague Op 27, also known as Caprice de Concert. The musical genre Capricho had been explored by Mendelssohn, Chopin and Clara Schumann, under the enchantment of Italy and the opera. This is another Teresa’s virtuosic piece of joyful and witty character. In this piece one can notice her intention to insert some syncopated passages that characterize the Latin American music, following a reversed practice compared to the one mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Venice is the inspiration for the pendular murmur heard in Reverie-Barcarolle Op. 33, which reminds the movement of gondolas through the city canals. Also inspired by Italy, Florence Cantilene Op. 34 is considered by many the jewel of Teresa’s mature phase. Other significant compositions by the composer are the studies approaching difficulties commonly faced by pianists over their career path. This is the case of Le Ruisseau Op. 29, a lounge music study that intends to train consecutive intervals of sixths for both hands. In other direction Un Rêve en Mer brings successive chords in milder speed, being called by Teresa the “study-meditation for the mantra atmosphere”.

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MAY 14



JULIANE REICHARDT - GERMANY
Born 14 May


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MAYKE NAS - THE NETHERLANDS
Born 14 May


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.Music Herstory

Music HERstory: Bun-ching Lam (b. 1954)

Thursday, 7 May 2020




Bun-ching Lam (b. 1954)


By Polimnia
Biography:

Bun-ching Lam was born in Macao, China, on June 26, 1954. At the age of 7, she began studying piano, performing in solo recital at 15. She graduated in Piano at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1976, receiving a scholarship to study at the University of California, San Diego. There she studied composition with Pauline Oliveros, Bernard Rands, Robert Erickson and Roger Reynolds, until graduating Ph.D. in 1981.

Bun-ching taught at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle from 1981 to 1986. She was a resident composer of the Macao Orchestra and the New Jersey Symphony, performing at the America Dance Festival in 2000 and 2001. She won the Prix de Rome composition competition in 1991 and the Lili Boulanger 1st Prize in 1992, as well as China's first international competition, the Shanghai Music Competition.

Among other things, she was awarded scholarships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and funding for 3 months of study in Japan by the Cultural Council of Asia.

Bun-ching chamber compositions were presented in a retrospective about the author by the German University of Heidelberg in 2009 in the format of 3 recitals. On the same occasion were exhibited books that the composer produced with the Kadelwey Press, as part of the program "Cluster of Excellence". The full of these concerts was released on a double CD album under the title “Heidelberg Concerts” (Mutable Music). A similar retrospective entitled “Lam Bun-ching & Friends” was presented two years later in Macao, as part of the 26th Macao International Music Festival.

Bun-ching was one of 27 composers invited by violinist Hilary Hahn to create a work for her "Encore Project". The CD for this project was released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2013. She also integrated the Atlas Ensemble concert with the piece Atlas, premiered at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with works by 30 musicians from China, Europe and the Middle East.

Her chamber opera Wenji - Eighteen Songs of the Nomade Flute was premiered at the Asia Society in New York and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. The composer has had orchestral pieces performed by major international groups such as the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Macao Orchestra, Albany Symphony, Women's Philharmonic, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, National Youth Orchestra of Holland, and Hong Kong Sinfonietta.

Bun-ching also acts as a conductor. She performed in front of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra / Macao Chamber Orchestra on a program dedicated to her own works as part of the 16th Macao International Music Festival. Her play Missing Macao was commissioned by the Macao Cultural Institute for the event.

Compositions:

Bun-ching Lam's compositions are described by various media as “alluringly exotic” or even “hauntingly attractive”. The author inserts musical and poetic elements from her childhood in Macao, as can be seen in Song of the Pipa, for solo kite and orchestra. In this work, Bai Juyi's poem (Tang Dynasty) has its environment and spirituality recreated musically through ancient kite melodies. The soloist instrument presents a kind of cadenza, followed by a dialogue between it and the orchestra. The culmination is reached by all in unison, and evokes the need for unity between people. The work is dedicated to the composer's mother (https://www.bunchinglam.com/programnotes.htm).

In turn, Atlas was created from the plot and design of an oriental rug. It contains repetitive musical elements, such as the graphic motifs on the edge of a Persian rug, which lead to the main theme at the center of the work (rug and piece). Also the musical motifs are based on Persian tunes such as Gushe. Inspired by the title of the ensemble that commissioned the work - the Atlas Ensemble - Bun-ching imagined a large musical map, an atlas, traversing the different regions where the instruments used were created (Idem).

Abstract language is used by the musician in works such as Piccolo Concertino. The author treats the instrument, often used in virtuosic parts, as responsible for intimate melodies, exploring its lower registers, imposing weak dynamics and calm character.

Nevertheless, Missing Macau brings the gong as the protagonist of the 3rd movement of a nostalgic piece, in 5 movements. Macau Cantata is written in 7 languages, with texts by 7 authors considered important to Macao's formation, such as Jesuit Matteo Ricci.

Speaking of her compositional style, the author defines herself as “postmodern”, “post-minimalist” and “everything else that can be a 21st-century composer”.

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MAY 07



LOU KOSTER - LUXEMBURG
Born 07 May


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ANN K GEBUHR - USA
Born 07 May


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Music HERstory: Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990)

Thursday, 23 April 2020


Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990)



Biography

Peggy Winsome Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990), composer and music critic, was born on 29 December 1912 at St. Kilda, Melbourne, eldest child of Ernest Glanville Hicks, journalist, and Myrtle, née Barley. Peggy began composing at the age of 7, encouraged by her mother, an amateur singer and artist, and her father, author of The Turn of the Tide and Other Poems (1932). Educated at Milverton, Methodist Ladies’ College and Clyde School, Woodend, she studied composition with Fritz Hart at the Albert Street Conservatorium, in Melbourne. In 1932, following a farewell concert in the Melbourne Town Hall, she left Australia and, over four years at the Royal College of Music, London, supported by scholarships, studied composition (with Ralph Vaughan Williams), conducting (with Sir Malcolm Sargent) and piano (with Arthur Benjamin). Her early works included the opera Caedmon (c.1936), music for film, and the Spanish Suite (c.1935). The Octavia traveling scholarship enabled her to study with Egon Wellesz in Vienna (1936) and Nadia Boulanger in Paris (1937).


After a brief visit to Melbourne in 1938, Glanville-Hicks (who later hyphenated her name) returned to London for the performance of two movements from her suite for female voices, oboe and strings (Choral Suite, 1937) at a concert of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). She was the first Australian whose work was performed for the ISCM, and one of the youngest composers represented. Several of her songs were published that year by Louise Dyer’s Editions de l’Oiseau-Lyre in Paris. Dyer’s recording company released the Choral Suite in 1940. On 9 November 1938, at the Kensington register office, Glanville-Hicks married Stanley Richard Henry Bate, an English composer. In 1940 a British Council grant allowed them to travel to Australia; in 1941 they sailed for the United States of America and settled in New York. In 1943-44 she was a member of the League of Composers Committee, which gave concerts of modern music in New York’s Central Park, and she collaborated with Carleton Sprague Smith in founding the International Music Fund, which operated through UNESCO to assist European artists in postwar re-establishment.

When in 1947 Glanville-Hicks reviewed an ISCM festival in Copenhagen for the Musical Courier, she embarked on a career as a respected critic and commentator on modern music. The composer Virgil Thomson, chief critic of the New York Herald Tribune, employed her as a correspondent; the first of five hundred reviews appeared on 27 October 1947. Through the 1940s she also contributed major pieces to Music & Letters (on Paul Bowles), Musical America (on John Cage) and Musical Quarterly (on Thomson). In 1948 she travelled to the ISCM festival in Amsterdam to hear a performance of her Concertino da Camera and in 1950 she embarked on a lecture tour of universities in America’s mid-west. During this period she was engaged in notable activities for the propagation of new music and the encouragement of young composers.

Peggy became an American citizen in 1949, and in the same year obtained a divorce from Bate. On 4 January 1952 she married the journalist Rafael da Costa in a civil ceremony in New York; they divorced the following year.

The 1950s brought Glanville-Hicks to prominence as a composer of 'exotic’ music and as a catalyst for the performance of new music. Her most performed work, a Sonata for Harp, was premièred by Nicanor Zabaleta in Caracas (1951) and New York (1952); in 1953 her Letters from Morocco (1952), conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was featured in one of the concerts she initiated as a member of the junior council of the Museum of Modern Art. Among the works that followed were the Etruscan Concerto (1954, written for the pianist Carlo Bussotti), Concertino Antico (1955, for the harpist Edna Phillips), Concerto Romantico (1956, for the violist Walter Trampler) and The Glittering Gate (1956), based on a story by Lord Dunsany.

In 1951-60 (excepting the 1955-56 season) Glanville-Hicks was director of the New York Composers’ Forum, an enterprise overseen by the most eminent New York composers. She contributed 106 articles on American and Danish composers to the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954). Until 1958 she worked for the New York Herald Tribune - from October to April each year - and spent her summers composing and attending festivals in Europe, Jamaica and Australia.

In 1953 Glanville-Hicks won an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, and was offered a commission by the Louisville Philharmonic Society, through the Rockefeller Foundation, to write an opera—the first such offer made to a woman, as per her claim. This opera, The Transposed Heads, based on a story by Thomas Mann, had its première in Louisville (1954) and was staged in New York in 1958. It demonstrated her interest in Indian music and increasing desire to promote a fusion of Eastern and Western compositional methods. In 1956-58 she was supported by Guggenheim Foundation awards for composition.

After a major surgery in 1956, and again in 1959, Glanville-Hicks moved to Athens. In 1960 she was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant to 'study the relationships among musical forms in the West, the Middle East and Asia’; furthermore, a Fulbright award (1961) was devoted to research into the traditional music of Greece. Her opera Nausicaa (1960)—with a libretto drawn from Robert Graves’s novel Homer’s Daughter and set in the ninth century BC—was performed at the Athens Festival in August 1961. It was recorded and broadcasted in the USA, reviewed in major publications in several languages, and praised for its lyricism and ingenious orchestration.

Commissioned by the San Francisco Opera (and supported by a Ford Foundation grant), Glanville-Hicks’s next opera, Sappho (1963), derived from a play by Lawrence Durrell, was written to a punishing schedule; it was finally not produced and the composer remained unhappy with it. Her major works of the 1960s were ballets, conceived in conjunction with the New York choreographer John Butler, including Saul and the Witch of Endor (1959) and Jephthah’s Daughter (1966) for CBS TV, and A Season in Hell (1967) for the Harkness Ballet. After years of failing eyesight, in June 1966 she underwent surgery in New York for a brain tumor; further surgery was required in April 1969. As well as depriving her from the ability to compose, the effects of surgery and radiotherapy undermined her health for the rest of her life.


In 1970 Glanville-Hicks travelled to Australia for a performance of The Transposed Heads in Sydney. In 1972 The Glittering Gate was performed at the Adelaide Festival. The works were heard jointly at the 1986 festival. She returned permanently in 1975, once her affinity with the Asian inspirations of younger composers lead her to a position as consultant for Asian Music Studies at the Australian Music Centre, Sydney. In 1987 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of music by the University of Sydney. On 25 June 1990 she died at Darlinghurst, Sydney. She entrusted her house at Paddington as a residence for young composers.

Glanville-Hicks was delicate and slight in appearance, but in character brilliant and articulate. Her works were often modal (demonstrating her interest in folk song), transparent in texture and colorful in instrumentation. She was a major figure in mid-twentieth century music, her profile formed as much by prodigious organizational skills and acumen as by her elegant music.

Compositions
  • Caedmon, opera, (c.1933)
  • Choral Suite (J. Fletcher), female chorus, oboe, string orchestra - (1937)
  • Concertino da camera (1945)
  • Letters from Morocco (for tenor and small orchestra) (1952)
  • Sinfonia da Pacifica (1952–53)
  • The Transposed Heads. A Legend of India, opera after the novel Die vertauschten Köpfe by Thomas Mann, 1953
  • Etruscan Concerto (for piano and chamber orchestra) (1956)
  • Concerto Romantico for viola and chamber orchestra (1956)
  • The Glittering Gate, opera after Lord Dunsany, (1957)
  • The Masque of the Wild Man, ballet (1958)
  • Nausicaa, opera after Graves: Homer’s Daughter, (1961)
  • Saul and the Witch of Endor, television ballet, (1964)
  • Sappho, opera, (1963), unproduced
  • Tragic Celebration (Jephtha's Daughter), ballet, 1966
  • Sonata for Harp - 1951
More information:
  • “The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers,” edited by Julie Anne Sadie and Rhian Samuel. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1995
  • "Australian Dictionary of Biography”, Volume 17, by Suzanne Robinson. Edited by Langmore, Diane; Bennet, Darryl. Published by Melbourne University Press, 2007.
  • "Peggy Glanville-Hicks: a transposed life”, by Murdoch, James. Published by Pendragon Press, 2002.
  • "Mulheres Compositoras – Elenco e Repertório", by Baroncelli, Nilcéia. Published by Instituto Nacional do Livro and Roswitha Kempf Editores, 1987.
  • "The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks", by Victoria Rogers - University of Western Australia. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2009.
  • “Drama for Orchestra”, de Peggy Glanville_Hicks (video). Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I46BxEwavto.
  • “Tragic Celebration”, de de Peggy Glanville-Hicks (video). Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL55JSPgSFY.
  • “Sonata for Harp”, de Peggy Glanville-Hicks (video). Marshall McGuire (harp). Available at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3rJqdSMCR4.

Leia em Português

APRIL 23



GILLIAN WHITEHEAD - NEW ZEALAND
Born 23 April


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BIRKE J. BERTELSMEIER - GERMANY
Born 23 April


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.Music Herstory

Music HERstory: Geraldine Mucha (1917-2012)

Thursday, 16 April 2020


Geraldine Mucha (1917-2012)


Geraldine Mucha was born in London on the 5th July 1917. She was fortunate to belong to a family with a strong musical background. Her father, Marcus Thomson, was a popular Scottish concert baritone and a professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Her mother enjoyed success as a singing-actress and appeared in several notable London musical productions. Sir Thomas Beecham and Dame Edith Evans were among the friends that Geraldine remembered visiting her parents' home.

 The precocious Geraldine was able to read music long before she could read words. She was encouraged to compose by her father and given lessons in harmony by his colleague, the composer Benjamin Dale. Later she was introduced to Sir Arnold Bax, who showed a keen interest in her ability and would often play through her compositions and discuss them with her. "He always took my music seriously", she recalled. After leaving school Geraldine gained a place to study composition and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music. Here she was able to continue her tuition with Benjamin Dale, also being taught by the composers Alan Bush and William Alwyn. Alwyn is said to have remarked, "that girl has so much talent you don't know if she's got a brain or not."

With Antony Judd as fellow pianist, Geraldine gave a performance of her first ballet Nausicaa at a student concert. When this score was later shown to Constant Lambert, conductor for Sadler's Wells Ballet, he was, "impressed, but sceptical that a woman could have written it." When the war began in 1939 the Royal Academy remained open but Geraldine was obliged to combine her studies with work on a telephone switchboard. However, she was able to compose incidental music for an anti-fascist play, which was well received, and to make musical arrangements for the BBC. In 1941, Geraldine met a young man in French uniform in Leamington Spa. He turned out to be the writer and war correspondent, Jiří Mucha, son of the famous Czech Art Nouveau painter, Alphonse Mucha. Before long the young couple were married and had set up home in a flat behind Marble Arch. With a key left under the mat, their flat became a refuge for any stray serviceman or poets, such as Dylan Thomas, that Jiří met on his travels. The couple returned to Prague in the autumn of 1945. Rafael Kubelik, the conductor, was a neighbour and soon became a good friend. Geraldine became involved in helping with the first Prague Spring Festivals. She gave suppers after the concerts and her guests included such notable musicians as Leonard Bernstein, David Oistrakh and Yehudi Menuhin. In 1950 Jiří was imprisoned by the Communists because he had been employed by the BBC during the war. Geraldine and their young son, John, lived in the country subsisting on a smallholding. After Jiří was released in 1953 the family returned to Prague and moved into the apartment which was to become their home for the next sixty years. In order to help their finances Geraldine worked for a music publisher as an editor and translator but she managed to write her own music too, "in order to keep me sane." As a member of the Czechoslovak Composers Union, Geraldine was given access to orchestral performances. Although these were infrequent, she was able to hear her piano concerto, suites and overtures played by orchestras such as the Czech Philharmonic and the conductor, Karel Sejna. The piano concerto and a suite from the ballet Macbeth were also recorded and issued by Supraphon.

Marriage to her bohemian husband proved neither easy nor conventional. For Jiří to be able to leave Czechoslovakia, Geraldine moved back to Great Britain so that he was permitted occasional "marital visits." From her cottage in Scotland, the couple were then able to travel the world organising exhibitions of the work of Alphonse Mucha. To the flower-power generation of the swinging sixties Mucha's graphics came as a revelation and proved to be immensely popular. Despite the great amount of extra work this involved, Geraldine still found time to compose. She wrote many works for a broad range of small ensembles, amongst them nonets, string quartets, a sonata for violin and piano, a wind trio, a piano trio, duos, and a wide variety of vocal pieces and songs. She was particularly fond of the "brilliant colours" of the woodwinds. In the early seventies she wrote several pieces for the soprano, Jill Gomez, some of which were broadcast by the BBC. Although some of her chamber music continued to be played, Geraldine's utter lack of professional ambition led to her orchestral works becoming neglected.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain she was once more able to make Prague her permanent home. Despite her retiring nature, Geraldine became a well-respected and much-loved figure and entertained visitors from all over the world – musicians, diplomats, and art-lovers – in her apartment near the castle. Here, surrounded by the family collection of artifacts and furnishings from Alphonse's Paris studio, she generously dispensed tea to those eager to hear her stories of the great painter and designer. Although she herself never met him (he died shortly after interrogation by the Gestapo in 1939), Geraldine was able to recount many vivid details passed on to her directly by the painter's wife, Maruška. Though Geraldine continued to work regularly at her compositions, modesty prevented her from drawing anyone's attention to the manuscript paper that was often open on her desk or propped on the piano. As she passed eighty, then ninety, friends and well wishers began to arrange occasional public performances of her chamber music, and respected Czech soloists asked her to write small pieces for them. Geraldine died on the 12th October 2012. Only two weeks earlier she had attended a special concert of some of her orchestral music given in honour of her 95th birthday. Following Jiří's death in 1992, Geraldine and her son, John, established the Mucha Foundation, to publicise and preserve the work of Alphonse and Jiří. The Mucha Foundation now also oversees Geraldine's archive and promotes her music.


APRIL 16



LILIA VAZQUEZ KUNTZE - AUSTRALIA
Born 16 April


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ROSHANNE ETEZADY - USA
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Music HERstory: Tatiana Nikolayeva (1924-1993)

Thursday, 9 April 2020


Tatiana Nikolayeva (1924-1993)

Jonathan Summers
Born: May 4, 1924 - Bezhitz (in the Bryansk district), Russia.
Died: November 22, 1993 - San Francisco, California, USA.

Tatyana Nikolayeva’s mother was a professional pianist who had studied with Alexander Goldenweiser, with whom Tatyana also studied from the age of thirteen, continuing her lessons with him when she went to the Moscow Conservatory. While studying there, Nikolayeva won first prize in a competition held in Moscow to commemorate the death of Alexander Scriabin thirty years before. Three years after graduating from Goldenweiser’s class, Nikolayeva graduated also from the composition class of Evgeny Golubev; and whilst still at the Conservatory she won second prize at the first International People’s Competition in Prague.

In 1950 Nikolayeva won first prize in the Bach Competition in Leipzig. On the jury that year was composer Dmitri Shostakovich who was greatly impressed with Nikolayeva’s performances of Bach’s preludes and fugues of which she could play any from memory. Shostakovich wrote his set of Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 for her between October 1950 and March 1951. Nikolayeva telephoned him every day during the period of composition, going to his home to hear him play the most recently written prelude and fugue, and gave the first performance of the complete work in Leningrad in 1952. Their friendship lasted until the day of his death, more than twenty-five years later. The State Prize she won at that time was in recognition of her services as a pianist and also for the composition of a piano concerto. From 1959 Nikolayeva taught at the Moscow Conservatory and has left a generation of devoted students including Nikolai Lugansky. She was also a composer. Her works include two piano concertos, twenty-four concert studies for piano and a piano sonata as well as an arrangement for solo piano of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

Nikolayeva had a career as teacher and performer in the USSR, but it was not until the early 1980s that she began to perform in Europe, Japan and America, eventually playing in more than thirty-five countries. She regularly visited London to give concerts and master-classes and appeared at the ‘Last Night of the Proms’ playing Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major Op. 102. Often her programmes would be of major works such as Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations BWV 988, Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080 or Das wohtemperierte Klavier complete (performed over four evenings). Her repertoire was vast, with some fifty works for piano and orchestra ranging from Bach to Bartók and 
Shostakovich, all the keyboard works of Bach, all the piano sonatas by Beethoven, plus major compositions by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Arensky, Liadov and Stravinsky. She had a phenomenal memory and travelled abroad without music scores. On one occasion, when she came to rehearse Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major Op. 44 she asked the conductor if they were playing the abbreviated version by Alexander Siloti, which she was expecting to play. They were not, so Nikolayeva launched into a performance of the original version. In the 1990s she played Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 4 Op. 40 in America and it was during a performance in San Francisco of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 that she suffered a stroke. She continued to play to the end of the first half of the programme, but had to cancel the rest of the performance. She died 9 days later.

With her huge repertoire and popularity in her homeland, Nikolayeva made many recordings for the state label Melodya in the USSR which were issued on 78rpm discs and LP. Early recordings on 78rpm discs include an excellent Moment Musical in E minor Op. 16 No. 4 by Rachmaninov and Chopin’s early Variations Brillantes Op. 12. In the early 1950s Nikolayeva also recorded for the Supraphon label in Czechoslovakia, and these recordings deserve reissue, particularly Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor Op. 18 with the Czech Philharmonic and Konstantin Ivanov and a recital disc containing an excellent Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue BWV 903 by Bach, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 3 Op. 28, some of the recently written preludes and fugues by Shostakovich and three of her own concert études. Of her Melodya recordings, the most important are Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G major Op. 44 with Nikolai Anosov (issued on compact disc by Dante), Medtner’s Piano Concertos Nos 1 and 3 with Yevgeny Svetlanov, an excellent Piano Concerto No. 5 Op. 55 by Prokofiev with Rozhdestventsky, a 1966 disc of Arensky and Liadov piano solos, an excellent 1976 disc of Liadov piano music including a superlative Barcarolle Op. 44, a disc of unusual solo works by Tchaikovsky, and Glinka’s Trio and Viola Sonata with Rudolf Barshai. She also recorded the Piano Sonatas No. 4 in F minor Op. 22 and No. 7 in B flat major Op. 65 by her composition teacher Yevgeny Golubev for Melodya. In 1975 Nikolayeva performed all the Bach keyboard concertos, including those for two and three keyboards, in Moscow. Recordings of these performances were released in Europe by Ariola-Eurodisc. Later LPs from the 1980s include Hindemith’s Four Temperaments for piano and orchestra and Haydn’s Piano Concertos in D major and G major, both conducted by Saulius Sondeckis.

Keeping track of Nikolayeva on compact disc is very difficult as she recorded for many labels and many of her Melodya recordings made in Russia have been licensed to various European and American labels. Nikolayeva first appeared on compact disc in the early days of digital recording. In the early 1980s she recorded two recitals of Bach and Das wohltemperierte Klavier complete in Japan. These were released on the JVC label, (and later Mezhdunarodna Kniga) as was a 1977 recording of the two- and three-part inventions of Bach. Many Soviet recordings have been licensed to European companies including Harmonia Mundi, who issued Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D major and Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E flat K. 482. Nikolayeva recorded many works two or three times including the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues Op. 87 and Das wohltemperierte Klavier of Bach. There have been at least three versions of Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations BWV 988 on compact disc: the 1970 Melodya recording reissued by Relief in Switzerland, a 1987 live performance from Stockholm issued by Bluebell and a 1992 studio recording by Hyperion. An interesting disc on the Berlin Classics label contains a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor Op. 23 with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Kurt Masur. Made in April 1959, it was apparently Masur’s first recording. Nikolayeva gives a stately performance reminiscent of Emil Gilels. It is a musically satisfying rendering, not used as a vehicle for display.

The French label Vogue has reissued some fascinating Nikolayeva repertoire in its Archives Sovietiques Series including Richard Strauss’s Concerto for piano left hand Op. 73 (Parergon), Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano and orchestra, and a 1950 performance of Tchaikovsky’s Concert Fantasy for piano and orchestra in G major Op. 56 conducted by Kyrill Kondrashin. Most interesting of the Vogue releases is a coupling of a live performance of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor from 1967 and Henri Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata recorded live in 1978. The Liszt sonata is one of the most musically satisfying on disc with Nikolayeva understanding perfectly the whole structure and the relationship between the sections of this work.

During her visits to London in the 1990s Nikolayeva recorded for the Hyperion label some of her core repertoire: Bach’s ‘Goldberg’ Variations BWV 988 and a masterly performance of Die Kunst der Fuge BWV 1080, Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues Op. 87, Piano Sonata No. 2 Op. 61, Twenty-four Preludes Op. 34 and his three Fantastic Dances Op. 5. She also recorded the complete Shostakovich preludes and fugues for BBC television in Scotland. Her previous recording of the Shostakovich preludes and fugues, made for Melodya three years earlier in 1987, was available on compact disc and is in some ways preferable as the Hyperion recording is extremely reverberant. Many other Russian recordings have appeared on compact disc on the Melodya label or have been licensed to other labels, such as the complete Beethoven piano sonatas which were recorded in concert at the Moscow Conservatory in 1983 and issued in Britain by Olympia in 1994 (and again by Scribendum in 2004). Olympia also issued Nikolayeva’s excellent recordings of the first three partitas of Bach which were made in 1980. Over five days in May 1991 whilst in Switzerland, Nikolayeva recorded three discs for the Relief label: one of Schumann, one of Tchaikovsky (including the Piano Sonata in G major Op. 37), and one of works by Borodin, Liadov and Prokofiev. Nikolayeva appeared as volume fifteen of BMG’s Russian Piano School Series where she plays Schumann’s Drei Romanzen Op. 28 recorded in 1983, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in B flat Op. 84 and her own transcription of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, both recorded in the mid-1960s. She recorded her transcription of Peter and the Wolf again in 1991 for JVC in Japan. It is included on a delightful disc of children’s pieces with other Nikolayeva compositions We Draw Animals Op. 31, Eight Little Pieces Op. 27, Little Baroque Style Variations in G major and Album for Children. This disc is one of her best as it captures her extraordinary range of tone and touch and a great deal of her wit and humour. Many of her JVC recordings are only available in Japan; another excellent one being a disc of Bach’s twelve Little Preludes, six Little Preludes and other miscellaneous works.

A disc on the Novalis label of two Beethoven sonatas claims to be her last recording. It was made in August 1993 in Blumenstein, Switzerland, the location where her recordings for Relief were made. Fortunately however, recordings of Nikolayeva continue to be released. Recently a recital from the Salzburg Festival of 1987 was issued, and the Scribendum label has licensed her Melodya recordings of the complete Das wohltemperierte Klavier from the early 1970s, complete French Suites from 1984 and English Suites Nos 1 and 4 from 1965.

Nikolayeva was one of the great pianists of the twentieth century. She had a wonderfully warm tone reminiscent of Shura Cherkassky, but this was coupled with a piercing intelligence and a delightful generosity of spirit. Her great love of music was transmitted in every performance she gave, and her recitals were always greeted with enthusiasm by her army of ardent admirers. The greatest Bach player of her generation, an undisputed authority on the music of Shostakovich and a musician of the highest capabilities, Nikolayeva will be fondly remembered through her public appearances and many recordings.

Read more on: Tatiana Nikolayeva's Website

APRIL 09


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