Mozart gets my GOAT

Baseball fans will argue until they are blue in the face about everything and anything. Was this player “Safe” or “Our”? Was that ball “Fair” or “Foul”? Who was the better pitcher: Steve Carlton or Tom Seaver?

Everybody has their GOAT - “Greatest of All Time”. Honus Wagner? Ty Cobb? Babe Ruth? Is that before or after the Colour Barrier was broken? Was that before or after games were played at night? Do “Steroid era” players get considered?

To me, the GOAT was Willie Mays. He could do everything – he could hit, he could run, he could play the field… Everybody remembers that catch at the Polo Grounds during Game 1 of the 1954 World Series. I wasn’t born yet, but I saw the footage. Nobody will ever remember Vic Wertz – the guy who thought he hit it out of Mays’ reach – but he’s viewed today as a goat of a different kind…

Baseball fans aren’t the only ones to debate things, as we humanoids are an argumentative bunch! The GOAT argument is something that transcends baseball and gets into every human endeavor, and the parameters that make somebody ”great” are always open to interpretation.

Although it may not be a fair question to ask, who is – in your mind – the GOAT among Classical Music luminaries – composers, performers…

Not easy…

The reason why it isn’t easy is because the playing field isn’t level. Going back to baseball for a minute, the game has evolved a lot over 100-plus years, athletes are bigger and stronger, the parameters of play have changed – whether the pitcher’s mound was at this or that height, whether seasons had this many or that many games, whether or not teams travelled from coast to coast. I mean, it’s hard to come up with ways of compensating for these factors when players played under different conditions.

Rather than come up with pie charts and graphs to justify my answer, let me just come out and make a statement – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is Classical Music’s GOAT, the Greatest of All Time.

We all know the story, and we all saw the film [Amadeus (1984)]. Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already accomplished on keyboard, he picked up the violin and became so good at it that he was second (and sometimes first) chair on the Salzburg court orchestra! He composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty.

At 17, he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and travelled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame - but little financial security.

During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized (RE: the afore-mentioned Amadeus).

To say that Mozart was prolific is an understatement – J.S. Bach’s works catalogue more than doubles the size of Mozart’s, but he did live to a ripe old age… Mozart wrote in many genres (opera, symphony) that weren’t in vogue - and he wrote for instrument combinations that weren’t usual - in Bach’s time. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concerto, chamber, operatic, and choral music. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and his influence on subsequent Western art music is profound.

This summer, all my Friday blogs will feature the music of Mozart, most of them from past posts from my many plartforms. I also am programming four new podcasts dedicated to the Mozart piano concertos, feauring foive great pianists of the 2oth century. Here’s the menu –

July 3 - Ideomeneo re di Creta (Past post from my series Once or Twice a Fortnight) http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/07/mozarts-idomeneo.html

July 10 – Pianist Mitsuko Uchida is featured in three Mozart piano concertos http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/07/mitsuko-uchida-mozart.html

July 17 - Mozart's European Vacation (Encore from ITYWLTMT) http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/07/mozarts-european-vacation.html

July 24 – Pianist Clara Haskil is featured in three Mozart piano concertos http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/07/clara-haskil-mozart.html

August 1^st - Le Nozze di Figaro http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/08/le-nozze-di-figaro-mozart.html

August 7 – Pianists Murray Perahia & Radu Lupu are featured in three Mozart piano concertos – one each individually, and one as a tandem http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/08/radu-lupu-murray-perahia-mozart.html

August 14 – Mozart String Quartets http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/08/la-chambre-de-mozart.html

August 21 – Pianist Geza Anda is featured in three Mozart piano concertos http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/08/geza-anda-mozart.html

August 29 – Mozart and his Horny Friends http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/08/mozart-his-horny-friends.html

Great Voices from the (not so distant) past

This is ma Once or Twice a Fortnighty post from June 28, 2015.

For this my second of a two-part OTF leveraging some of Sean Bianco’s “Opera Potpourri” podcasts, I thought I would share some more great moments from singers in recordings from after 1950.

"Every theater is an insane asylum, but an opera theater is the ward for the incurables."


According to the Capital Public Radio website, this quote from Austrian conductor Franz Schalk is Sean Bianco’s favourite …

Sean Bianco was born in Stockton. He began his passionate journey into the world of music with violin and viola lessons at the age of 8. He studied in the Suzuki violin program and privately for 10 years while performing in recitals and in several regional youth orchestras. When he was 17 he began to sing in his high school choir and quickly became a featured soloist, winning many top awards at regional solo festivals and competitions. Sean also participated in several summer music programs and master classes.

Sean studied voice and violin at the University of the Pacific and continued his singing and conducting training at Chapman College. In 1989, Sean was a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera Regional Vocal Competition.

Sean has performed with the Los Angeles Opera and the opera companies of Stockton, Sacramento and Orange County. He has also appeared as a soloist with the Stockton, Sacramento, Napa and Merced symphonies.

Sean joined Capital Public Radio as an on-air announcer in 1998 and has been a supportive voice for opera in the region ever since. In addition to local audiences, At the Opera is also enjoyed by a world-wide audience via the Internet. Sean plays vintage opera recordings from the 78 era and new release as well.

Sean has been a guest lecturer on opera for the UC Davis Extension program and is also the emcee for the classical concerts series at the Crocker Art Museum. Sean can also be seen giving pre-performance talks for the Sacramento Opera Association. Sean has also assisted with the string programs for the Waldorf School and has taught violin and voice for Sacrmaneto Country Day School.

Sean is a voice and violin teacher in Nevada City and is currently a rehearsal conductor for the Sacramento Youth Symphony.

About the Music

The first clip (from Sean’s podcast of Cosi fan Tutte which we featured very recently on OTF provides selections sung by three great singers: tenor Jerry Hadley, soprano Regine Crespin (in Wagner, no less…) and Swedish baritone Ingvar Wixell singing Verdi.

In the second clip (originally aired on 21 April 2012), Sean completes his broadcast of Andrea Chenier (which we featured last year) with sime excerpts of selections from the opera, including two versions of the baritone aria "Nemico della patria" by two late great Italian baritones: Aldo Protti and Piero Cappuccilli.

He also gives us a performance of the “Improviso” by a rather famous tenor, but I don’t want to spoil it for you…

The final track features Canadian bass-baritone George London singing Wotan’s farewell. Sean further teases another duet from Parsifal, which you can find in one of my podcasts from last year.

Selections from 7 August 2009

LEHÁR: The Land of Smiles (highlights – sung in English)
“My heart belongs to you!”
Finale, Act Two: “I forbid you to go!”
Jerry Hadley, tenor
Nancy Gustafson, soprano
English Chamber Orchestra
Richard Bonynge, conducting

VERDI: Il Trovatore “Tutto è deserto”
Ingvar Wixell, baritone
National Philharmonic Orchestra
Richard Bonynge, conducting

WAGNER: Lohengrin: “Einsam In Trüben Tagen” (Elsa's Dream)
WAGNER: Parsifal “Ich Sah Das Kind “
Regine Crespin, soprano
Orchestre National De La Radiodiffusion Française
Georges Prêtre, conducting

Selections from 21 April 2012

GIORDANO - Andrea Chenier "Nemico della patria"
Aldo Protti, baritone
The NHK Symphony Orchestra
Franco Capuana, conductor

Piero Cappuccilli, baritone
Milan Teatro alla Scala Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly, conducting


GIORDANO - Andrea Chenier "Un dì all'azzuro spazio"
Mario Lanza, tenor
RCA Victor Orchestra
Constantin Callinicos, conducting

WAGNER: Die Walkure Wotan's Farewell (Leb' wohl) and Magic Fire Music
George London, bass-baritone
London Symphony Orchestra
Erich Leinsdorf, conducting

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/OperaPot...1Apr2012Protti

Franck & Fauré

No. 204 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast204

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This week ends our several week-long look at the sonata, and is our last Blog and Podcast before we enter an “every other week” format of new montages for July and August.

The sonatas in A Major by Cesar Franck and Gabriel Faure are probably one of the most recorded “pairings” of similar works in the same key , other than maybe the pairing of the A Minor piano concertos of Edvard Grieg and Robert Schumann. Unlike the Grieg/Schumann pairing, the works by the Belgian and French composers are contemporary to each other, and the composers were – if not friends – certainly well aware of each other’s work.

In a post from a couple of years ago in my Once Upon the Internet series, I featured both sonatas adapted for cello and piano from the original violin and piano. The rich sound of the cello confers a different character to the sonatas, and is worth taking in for comparison – some of you may even prefer these adaptations to the originals.

Today’s montage assigns the sonatas to different pairs of performers – the Franck is played by the Lefèvre brothers, and the Fauré is played by the studio coupling of Joshua Bell and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Both performances are heart felt and strong in their own right.

To complete the montage, I added a cello sonata by Fauré.

I think you will love this music too.

Sonatas with orchestra and soloist

No. 203  of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast203

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A few months ago, we discussed concertos in many different forms, and featured some sinfonie concertanti, works that feature a solo instrument with orchestral accompaniment yet are not called “concertos”, either for historical reasons or because the solo instrument doesn’t get “equal billing”.

I’d suggest that listeners consider the short set of selections I retained today in the same vein – these are called “sonatas”, but they could also be “concertos”, if only because of the way they have been constructed; with a solo instrument and an accompanying orchestra.

Case in point: Nicolo Paganini’s “grande sonate” for viola and orchestra. There is no doubt that the viola is the feature performer. Yes, there are episodes where the orchestra is front and center but, as we heard last week in the Beethoven sonatas, it’s not uncommon for the accompanist to hog the spotlight…

Works by Corelli and Purcell, from the baroque period, are probably a more apt example of what we would take as a sonata, as many compositions of that era didn’t feature a solo instrument and a keyboard accompaniment – sometimes, accompaniment was intended for a small complement of instruments – thus the sonata a cinque or the sonata a quattro…

Johannes Brahms wrote chamber works for the clarinet rather late in his career – his quintet for clarinet and stings, a trio for piano, violin and clarinet and a pair of sonatas for clarinet and piano, both published under his op. 120.  Luciano Berio, an avant-garde composer in his own right, often orchestrated works by other composers, and he provided his own orchestration of the piano accompaniment to the first of these sonatas, a work commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered with clarinetist Michele Zukovsky in Los Angeles, on 6 November 1986.

To complete the montage, I retained a sampling of some of the seventeen Church Sonatas (sonata di chiesa), also known as Epistle Sonatas, written by Mozart between 1772 and 1780. These are short single-movement pieces intended to be played during a celebration of the Mass between the Epistle and the Gospel – a place where contemporary Mass inserts the “Hallelujah”. The vast majority of these are scored for organ and strings (with no violas). In eight of the sonatas, the organ has an obbligato solo part and in the other nine the organ accompanies along with the figured bass.

Shortly after Mozart left Salzburg, the Archbishop mandated that an appropriate choral motet or congregational hymn be sung at that point in the liturgy, and the "Epistle Sonata" fell into disuse. Thankfully, there are many recordings of these sonatas, including this fine one by I Musici de Montreal and baroque organist Genevieve Soly.

I think you will love this music too.

J.S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (Part 2)

This is a past Tuesday Blog from Jun-16-2015.

This week’s PTB concludes our look at the J.S. Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin with the three partitas and – as a bonus, the partita for solo flute all performed on the viola by Scott Slapin.

According to notes available on the Eroica Classical Recordings website Myron Rosenblum, founder and first president of the American Viola Society wrote, "Scott Slapin is a musician of great talent and abilities - a violist of technical accomplishments and superior musicality. He is a violist to watch".

Scott Slapin studied the viola at the Manhattan School of Music and earned his Bachelor of Music degree by the age of eighteen, making him one of the youngest graduates in the school's history.

Scott began his professional career as the on-stage solo violist in the New York City production of Orpheus in Love (1992-93), a chamber opera by Gerald Busby and Craig Lucas He has premiered other works by Busby including his Muse for Solo Viola in Carnegie's Weill Hall (1994), and he has inspired other outstanding American composers including Richard Lane, David Noon and Frank Proto to write him solo works as well. In the late 1990's, Scott gave the premiere performances of Richard Lane's Third Viola Sonata and Nocturne for Solo Viola.

Scott and his wife, violist Tanya Solomon, often perform together as a duo, and have toured extensively throughout the United States and South America as members of the Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra and the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and they are former principal violists of the Knoxville and Chattanooga symphonies.

Scott was the first violist in history to have recorded the complete cycle of J.S. Bach's Sonatas and Partitas on the viola, a cd-set which has been widely featured in print and on radio. Here is an excerpt from an article written by Scott about the sonatas and partitas:

I feel the Sonatas and Partitas are the best solo Bach the viola has. Yes, as a cycle, better than the Cello Suites. […] From my vantage point, it would seem natural, since we have no solo Bach of our own, to borrow from the closer instrument of the two, which is the violin.

[…] Bach himself transcribed many of his own works into different keys for different instrumentation-- including several movements from the Sonatas and Partitas. […] As great as the Cello Suites are, I feel the Sonatas and Partitas as an overall set are simply even greater, more interesting music. Bach, the master of polyphony, clearly felt technically freer with the violin to write more complex works. Whether we're talking about the three-part fugues, the Chaconne, or the beautiful slow movements of the sonatas, the additional lines that are close to non-existant or just hinted at in most of the Cello Suites really add to the beauty and interest of the violin sonatas and partitas.

Lastly there's the issue of the viola's character and the character of the music; […] most of the Sonatas and Partitas are very introspective, contemplative (the opening movements of all three sonatas come to mind.) I think many of the movements gain depth by being played a fifth lower. While I enjoy the Cello Suites an octave higher on the viola, I'm not sure that I look at any of the movements on viola as an improvement or as enhancing their musical character, I tend to see it as just something different.

Hard to disagree!



Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Partitas (Partias) for solo violin
Partita No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002
Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004
Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006
Partita in A minor for Solo Flute , BWV 1013

Scott Slapin, viola
(1st recording of these works by S. Slapin. Jan 1998)
Eroica Classical Recordings JDT-3025
Downloaded from MP3.COM, 15 May 2002

Sonatas by Beethoven

No. 202 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast202

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Week two of our June sonata series is dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven left us 32 sonatas for solo piano, but also a several sonatas for instruments with piano accompaniment, and I selected three of those.

Pianist and composer Andre Gagnon wrote many lovely pieces of music, but one comes to mind specifically when I think of works for a feature instrument with piano accompaniment – this piece is called Premier Episode, and was his way of paying tribute to the many singers he worked with, and accompanied as a pianist, especially early in his career: Claude Leveillee and Monique Leyrac are two names that come to mind. In that setting, the solo flute “stands in” for the singer, and though at one point he introduces a string orchestra into the mix, the early measures display the piano, playing chords as ornamentation to a melody.

When I think of sonatas for, say, the violin with piano accompaniment, that’s the image that I have in my mind – like a “singer”, the solo instrument is allowed to shine, sometimes relinquishing the spotlight to the accompanying piano, but sometimes taking center stage. A sonata is not unlike a song or lieder cycle – the movements aren’t so disparate that you can’t recognize that they form an homogeneous group of short pieces.

Let’s start with two rather familiar sonatas – the Kreutzer sonata for violin and the op. 69 cello sonata in A Major. Both are mainstays in the chamber repertoire for their respective instruments, and they are performed here by top artists in Gidon Kremer and Mstislav Rostropovich. As pianists, both Martha Argerich and Sviatoslav Richter are not too shabby either.

The first sonata of the set, the op. 17 sonata in F Major is sometimes heard for cello and piano – we offered such a setting in a post from earlier this year in our Once Upon the Internet series. The setting in the montage is the original pairing of horn and piano.

I think you will love this music too.

J.S. Bach: Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin (Part 1)

This is a past Tuesday Blog from Jun-09-2015.

For the next two weeks, we will be sampling the set of six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006) composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. The set consists of three sonatas da Chiesa (or church sonatas), in four movements, and three partitas (or partias), which are “dance suites”. The set was completed by 1720, but was only published in 1802 by Nikolaus Simrock in Bonn. Even after publication, it was largely ignored until the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim started performing these works. Today, Bach's Sonatas and Partitas are an essential part of the violin repertoire, and they are frequently performed and recorded.

This week’s instalment focuses on the three sonatas.

The Sonata da chiesa was a common baroque compositional for, period, generally consisting of four movements, following a slow–fast–slow–fast formulawith respect to tempo. The second movement was usually a fugal allegro, and the third and fourth were binary forms that sometimes resembled the sarabande and gigue.

Although it was not uncommon to play Sonatas de Chiesa (or sinfonias written along the same formula) as part of church services, they were not necessarily written with an explicitly liturgical function, such as, for instance, a Requiem Mass. Symphonic works written in the sonata da chiesa were more often performed as concert pieces for entertainment.

Bach who wrote a great number of sacred works didn’t leave us with many sonatas in that form – these three sonatas for solo violin and his six sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord are about all he wrote. Other baroque composers like Arcangelo Corelli and Giovanni Battista Bassani are more prolific in that regard.

The sonata da chiesa had become outdated by the time of Joseph Haydn, although he did compose a few of his early symphonies in this style (slow-fast-minuet-fast). Later, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would compose seventeen "church sonatas", but these served a different purpose. Mozart's works were single-movement organ and strings pieces that were played during the celebration of the Mass between the Epistle and the Gospel. I have programmed some of these sonatas for a podcast this month.

Although these works have been performed and recorded by luminaries of past generations (Enescu, Szigeti, Menuhin, Heifitz…) and contemporary violinusts, there are some recordings of the set on the viola – and it is in that specific setting that we will be listening to them in this two-part series.

According to the International Music Score Library Project, viola arrangements of these works are by Angelo Consolini (1859–1934) [ca. 1910]. In this recording, the artist lowered the pitch of the works a fifth to accommodate the range of the viola.

Next week, I will discuss the partitas, and the artist, Scott Slapin

Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Sonatas for solo violin
Sonata No. 1 in G minor, BWV 1001
Sonata No. 2 in A minor, BWV 1003
Sonata No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1005
Scott Slapin, viola
(1st recording of these works by S. Slapin. Jan 1998)
Eroica Classical Recordings JDT-3025
Downloaded from MP3.COM, 15 May 2002

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/110SonateNo.3EnUtMajeurPour

Sonatas for solo instrument

No. 201 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast201

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June already!

As the days get longer and the weather (finally) gets warmer, we start thinking about the summer and for me here at ITYWLTMT, a two-month semi-break where we will be recycling some old posts and featuring a handful of new ones that will focus on Mozart. More on that in a “programming” post near the end of the month.

In the meantime, we will continue on a theme we started last week – the theme is “sonatas”. Indeed, three of our montages featured piano sonatas by Beethoven, Prokofiev and Liszt but, as you know, there are many more sonata “variants” than the sonata for solo piano – there are indeed many other variants and even some for other solo instruments. Today’s montage considers sonatas for solo instruments “other” than the piano.

Three of the selections I have programmed today consider sonatas for the solo violin – the first is by Johann Sebastian Bach. One of Bach’s best loved movements for solo violin is the chaconne from his second partita for solo violin, and that chaconne inspired two other 20^th century composers and their own sonatas – by violin virtuoso Eugene Ysaye, and by Bela Bartok.

Another violin virtuoso who left us solo sonatas is Nicolo Paganini; Paganini was not only the devilish violinist of renoun, but also an excellent guitarist, and the sonatas of his I chose for today are a pair of short sonatas for the guitar.

An organ sonata from Vincenzo Bellini’s student days and a guitar adaptation of one of the many short keyboard sonatas of Padre Soler complete this week’s selections.

I think you will love this music too.