For the month of October, the #ClassicsaDay team (of which I’m a part), decided to go with a Halloween theme. The idea is to share works marked in some way with the composer’s demise. It can be the last piece a composer completed before death, or one left incomplete at death. For my part, I […]
Franz Joseph Haydn
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#ClassicsaDay #Bernsteinat100 Week 4
August 2018 is the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth. Many classical radio stations, performance groups, and writers marked the occasion. And so did #ClassicsaDay. Bernstein was known as a composer, conductor, performer and an educator. Since #ClassicsaDay is primarily a music feed, I concentrated on the first two of those roles (and occasionally the third). […]
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Alec Frank-Gemmill Shows Merit of Horn Concertos Before Mozart
Alec Frank-Gemmill is making a point with this recording. For many horn soloists, Mozart’s concertos are the earliest works in their repertoire. Frank-Gemmill contends that there was plenty of good material that predated them. Frank-Gemmill opens with a 1740 concerto by Christoph Förster. Although primarily an organist, Förster wrote about 50 concertos. He was also […]
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Discovering the Classical String Trio
As the Vivaldi Project points out in the liner notes for this release, string trios from the classical era are woefully under-represented in the performing and recording repertoire. It’s not because instrumental grouping’s unusual — there were hundreds of string trios written between 1750 and 1827 (the approximate dates of the classical era). And, as […]
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Charming duos for Flute by Haydn
The Six Duo Concertantes on this release were all originally composed by Haydn — just not in this form. These duos for violins were transcribed for two flutes and published in 1801 by a Parisian firm. And as flute duos, the music works very well. Ginevra Petrucci and Gian-Luca Petrucci perform with modern instruments. Yet […]
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Jean-Efflam Bavouzet performs Haydn Concertos
Pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet partners with conductor Gábor Tákacs-Nagy to create some truly individualistic performances of three Haydn concertos. The use of a chamber orchestra (in this case, the Manchester Camerata) is a good one. Haydn’s keyboards concertos have much different character than Beethoven’s, and are well-suited to the smaller, more intimate sound of a chamber […]
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The Deceptively Easy Mastery of Gilbert Kalish
In this recording of Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert, Gilbert Kalish presents an appealing program of works he knows well. The opening and closing works are the final piano sonatas of their respective composers — Haydn and Schubert, with a selection of short works by Beethoven in the middle. Haydn’s Sonata No. 62 in E-flat (Hob.XVI:52) […]
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What makes good opera?
Tags: Franz Joseph Haydn, OperaWhat makes a good opera? Most of my non-classical friends would dispute that there’s any such thing, but we’ll let that pass. The question arose yesterday when I revisited a work I hadn’t listened to in a while: Franz Joseph Haydn’s opera Il Mondo della Luna. Most people don’t think of Haydn as an opera […]