The German composer Johann Simon Mayr dominated the music scene in northern Italy in the early 1800s. He was the maestro di cappella at the Cathedral of Bergamo and wrote a prodigious amount of music: over 70 operas, 18 masses, and 57 symphonies. Today, he’s best known (if at all) as Gaetano Donizetti’s teacher. This […]
Franz Joseph Haydn
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#ClassicsaDay #ClassicalAutumn Week 1
In 2019 the Classics a Day team has been making its way through the seasons. We’ve had Classical Winter (January), Classical Spring (April), and Classical Summer (August). For October, we complete the cycle with Classical Autumn. I tried to steer clear of the really obvious choices (like Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”). In the process, I managed […]
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#ClassicsaDay #SummerClassics Weeks 1 and 2
It was a busy summer for the Classics a Day team. In June, we marked African-American Music Appreciation Month. In July we celebrated national holidays in the U.S. and Canada. So that just left August to have a summer theme. For my part, I chose to choose anything except Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” In the process, […]
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McDermott Delivers Intimate Performances of Haydn Sonatas
This release is a follow-up to McDermott’s 2014 release of Haydn Piano Concertos and Sonatas. This time, Anne-Marie McDermott presents an entire program of solo sonatas. Haydn’s sonatas have a deceptive simplicity to them. The technical demands are modest (compared to sonatas by Beethoven and later composers). But that doesn’t mean they’re insubstantial. McDermott performs […]
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#ClassicsaDay #ClassicalWinter Week 1
For January 2019, #ClassicsaDay went with a winter theme. December’s theme, #ClassicalChristmas centered around sacred works of the season. #ClassicalWinter is about sharing secular compositions. that have a snow or winter theme. Here are my Classical Winter posts for the first week of January. Giacomo Puccini – “Che gelida manina” (What a cold little hand) […]
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#ClassicsaDay #FamousLastWorks Week 1
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 […]
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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 […]