"The sound was not of this world, it hovered in space like some celestial blessing". He could play the piano ”before he had learned to smile”, his mother said, and he gave his first concert at the age of six. He studied under
Alfred Cortot,
Charles Munch,
Paul Dukas, and
Nadia Boulanger. He was an esteemed teacher and critic at 19, an international phenomenon at 24. He escaped from his native Rumania to Switzerland in 1943 with his fiancée, a joint capital of five Swiss francs in their pockets. After the war, just as he had arrived in the pantheon of great performing artists,
Dinu Lipatti was diagnosed with leukemia. In September 1950, near death, despite the urgings of his doctors Lipatti insisted upon
one last recital at Besançon. As his wife recalled,
this was the only way Lipatti could bear to take his leave of the world. Lipatti was
so weak he could barely walk to the piano. But once he began playing, he became transformed.
After performing 13 waltzes, he could no longer muster the strength necessary to perform the final selection. So he substituted
Myra Hess's piano arrangement of Bach's 'Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring".
(page with sound). Three months later,
Lipatti died at the age of 33. After Lipatti's funeral, his old mentor Cortot wrote: "There was nothing to teach you. One could, in fact, only learn from you."
posted by matteo
on May 20, 2006 -
15 comments
After a
Noel Mewton-Wood performance of
Hindemith's (.pdf) Ludus Tonalis, Dame
Myra Hess exclaimed: ‘The boy is truly remarkable, and
what shall he be like at 40-odd?’.
Glowing testimonials to his ‘genius’ (Sir Malcolm Sargent) from Beecham, Schnabel, Bliss, Hindemith and Britten were countered by indifference from the major record labels and concert managements. In 1953,
at the age of 31, the pianist, a shy young man susceptible to depression, committed suicide. Now, the
Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive of Middlesex University offers
a scan of the The London Evening News page with the report of Mewton-Wood's death. And here is
a mp3 page with some of his out-of-print work.
posted by matteo
on Mar 24, 2006 -
11 comments
The Riot of Spring. Théâtre
Champs-Elysées, Paris, May 29, 1913. Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy are among those present at the premiere of
The Rite of Spring (the score is
here), written by
Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by the great Russian dancer
Vaslav Nijinsky.
The music and the choreography shocked the audience with its daring modernism, ripping up the rulebook of classical ballet with its heavy, savage movements. Many in the audience promptly booed, then yelled, insulting the performers and each other. Then fistfights broke out. The police was summoned, but was unable to stop an
all-out riot.
Now
the BBC has made a TV movie about that night. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 11, 2006 -
27 comments
Miracle on 57th Street. Thomas Wolfe said that America is not only the place where miracles happen, but where they happen all the time. This is the story of a miracle, a true-life fairy tale, and appropriately enough it begins with the intervention of the Almighty.
Artur Rodzinski, music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1943 to 1947, was an eccentric, a health nut who drank only milk from goats he raised himself and who kept a loaded revolver in his back pocket whenever he conducted. Rodzinski said that God told him to hire 24 year old
Leonard Bernstein, to be his assistant conductor. In the fall of 1943 Rodzinski decided to take a vacation, spend a little time with his goats, and called in
Bruno Walter to conduct seven concerts in ten days. Only hours before one of those concerts (in the program, works by Schumann, Rosza, Strauss and Wagner)
Walter fell ill. Rodzinski was only four hours away, in his farm. But he declined to come back to Carnegie Hall: "Call Bernstein. That's why we hired him." The concert was broadcast over radio and
a review appeared on page 1 of The New York Times the next day: "Young Aide Leads Philharmonic; Steps in When Bruno Walter is Ill". In the same size type as another that read, "Japanese Plane Transport Sunk." More inside.
posted by matteo
on Dec 28, 2005 -
48 comments
"The extraordinary radiance of the voice. I still remember that. The extraordinary, enveloping, overwhelming beauty of Ferrier's voice."
When
Kathleen Ferrier died at 41 in October 1953, she was as famous as the newly crowned Queen.
A working class girl from Blackpool who had to quit school at 14 to work as a telephone operator, a young woman who lacked formal musical training and whose husband bet that she would never win a music contest, Ferrier -- under the guidance of the great conductor
Bruno Walter -- went on to become an international superstar. An "
ordinary diva" who humbly
worshipped "
Herr Doktor Bruno Walter", gave very few newspaper interviews, never appeared on television or in cinema newsreels. Her speaking voice can be heard only briefly and only twice, on a tape made at a post-concert New York party, and in a short speech she made for the BBC at an Edinburgh Festival. Her extraordinary career lasted only less than 12 years.
Half a century later, although her legacy lives on through her music,
Ferrier herself -- "Klever Kaff" -- remains elusive. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Dec 3, 2005 -
11 comments
Music is nothing.
Sound could become music.
The end must be in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end.
I am here because I am not here.
Music lives in the eternal now.
Music is the now becoming now.
What I learned from
Sergiu Celibidache, by
Markand Thakar. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Oct 14, 2005 -
6 comments
Wagner, the repulsive giant If, on one hand, you ever wanted to know what a swine Richard Wagner was,
this is the book to tell you. It does so at length, in reliable detail, calmly, without prurience, perfectly backed with documentation, and in a translation whose only fault is in giving no Translator’s Notes for in-house German references. Joachim Köhler sustains his story with new ideas, revises other interpretations and modestly deconstructs Cosima née Liszt’s creation of “Richard Wagner Enterprises Inc”. (This she developed so far as to keep Parsifal exclusive to Bayreuth, prompting George Bernard Shaw to remark in 1889 that it “would almost reconcile me to the custom of
suttee”!).
posted by matteo
on Sep 3, 2005 -
11 comments
