Project 366 - Dates on the musical calendar for January 2020

Project 366 continues in 2019 with "Dates on the Musical Calendar". Read more here.

We begin a new year and a new four month tranche of our Musical Calendar (See the four month layout here). 

Highlights

• 1 Jan – New Year’s Day (Guide #68)
• 7 Jan – HB Francis Poulenc (Born OTD, 1899) (Guide #321)
• 16 Jan – Rachmaninov and Mahler at Carnegie Hall (OTD, 1910) (Guide #72)
• 20 Jan – Martin Luther King Jr. Day (US Holiday) (Guide #234)

The remainder of the listener guides for this month picks up things near the end of Part 1, and starts Part 2 with a few baroque entries. Added this month, a pair of Schubert symphonies (Guide # 320), compositions from composer and organist Alexandre Guilmant (Guide #323) and clarinettist Benny Goodman playing Mozart and Copland (Guide #322).

Your Listener Guides

Listener Guide # 320 - Schubert, Klemperer, Philharmonia Orchestra ‎– Symphony No. 5 & 8

Schubert would be especially amazed to learn that he has come to be regarded as a great symphonist. Of all the genres in which he excelled, these fared the worst during his life. His first two were written for his school orchestra and the next four for an amateur group he was able to assemble, all intended to be heard once and then forever forgotten. Written in his teens, they gleam with dewy innocence, reminiscent of Mozart's juvenilia, with only the barest hint of an incursion of strife. Among his most enduring from that period we can single out the Fifth, a buoyant package of joy. (Vinyl's Revenge # 15 - March 22, 2016)

Listener Guide # 321 - Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)

Music was not the Poulenc family business - pharmaceuticals was - but the well-off Poulenc explored music as a hobby at first and (later uder the tutilage of Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes) as an all-consuming passion. Very early on, Poulenc hooked up with a group of up-and-coming composers that author Jean Cocteau would champion under "Les Six" (a kind of thinly-veiled homage to the Russian Mighty Handful). Though their music wasn't strictly nationalistic, it was distinctive and indicative of their shared carefree lifestyle. (ITYWLTMT Podcast # 133 - 29 Nov 2013)

Listener Guide # 322 - Mozart & Goodman

Goodman was a well-established Jazz clarinetist when he answered, shall we say, a late calling to explore the classical clarinet repertoire. In 1949, when he was 40, Goodman decided to study with Reginald Kell, one of the world's leading classical clarinetists. To do so, he had to change his entire technique: instead of holding the mouthpiece between his front teeth and lower lip, as he had done since he first took a clarinet in hand 30 years earlier, Goodman learned to adjust his embouchure to the use of both lips and even to use new fingering techniques. He had his old finger calluses removed and started to learn how to play his clarinet again—almost from scratch. (ITYWLTMT Podcast # 72 - 21 Sep, 2012)

Listener Guide # 323 - Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911)

A student of his father, then of the Belgian master Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, Guilmant became an organist and teacher in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a city ion Northern France and his place of birth. In 1871 he was appointed to play the organ regularly at la Trinité church in Paris - the same church and organ Messiaen occupied for 60 years and a position Guilmant himself held for a mere… 30 years.(ITYWLTMT Podcast #149 - 28 Mar 2014)