Catching up, October 2022

Catching up, October 2022

This Week in Classical Music: October 10, 2022.  Catching up.  For many of the final month we’ve been preoccupied with Arnold Schoenberg and we’re glad we had been whereas he might not have been the best artistic genius within the historical past of classical music, few, if any, composers affected it a lot and within the course of modified the listeners’ notion of what music is and find out how to take heed to it.  Whereas we had been engaged with Schoenberg and the genesis of atonal music, we missed lots of attention-grabbing dates, so right this moment we’ll look again on the month since Schoenberg’s birthday.  Girolamo Frescobaldi, one of the essential composers of keyboard music of the late Renaissance, was born on the identical day as Schoenberg however three centuries earlier, on September 13^th of 1583.  Jean-Philippe Rameau, the good French composer of the Baroque, was born on September 25^th of 1683, 100 years after Frescobaldi.  Rameau was well-known for his operas, however the final opera composer was, little question, Giuseppe Verdi who was born on October 9^th of 1813.  And Dmitry Shostakovich, one of the essential Russian-Soviet composers was born in St.Petersburg on the identical day as Rameau, September 25^th, in 1906.

A number of extra names: Heinrich Schütz of the early Baroque period, thought-about by many as crucial German composer earlier than Bach, was born on October 8^th of 1585.  Camille Saint-Saëns was born a day and two and a half centuries later, on October 9^th of 1835.  After which there have been a number of composer who had been crucial to their specific nations if not essentially on the identical degree as among the names we’ve simply talked about: Komitas, the nationwide Armenian composer; Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who occupied the same place in Lithuanian tradition; the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik; and the American, George Gershwin, born on September 26^th of 1898.  And at last, Alexander von Zemlinsky, who performed such an essential half within the lifetime of Schoenberg – and likewise was a really attention-grabbing composer — was born on October 14^th of 1871.

A number of eminent pianists had been born throughout the identical interval, amongst them the American William Kapell, whose 100^th anniversary was on September 20^th, (he tragically died in a aircraft crash in 1953, at simply 31 years outdated); Glenn Gould, who additionally had a spherical anniversary (90^th), on September 25^th.  And Vladimir Horowitz was born on October 1^st of 1903.  We actually ought to point out the strings: the violinist Jacques Thibaud (9/27/1880), David Oistrakh (9/30/1908) and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who turned 67 on October 7^th.  We’ll point out only one conductor, Charles Munch, born on September 26^th of 1891.  We’ve talked about him a number of instances up to now however failed to jot down about him at any size; we must always appropriate this lapse – he was the most effective interpreters of French music and led the Boston Symphony for 13 years.  And at last, a number of singers: Anna Netrebko, who’s been within the media fairly a bit currently, not due to her singing – she hasn’t been doing a lot of that, being quickly banned from the Met and a number of other European levels – however due to her perceived closeness to Vladimir Putin who’s conducting a murderous struggle in Ukraine; she turned 51 on September 18^th.  And two of our all-time favourite (and really totally different) tenors, the German Fritz Wunderlich, who excelled in Mozart and Schubert, born on September 26^th of 1930, and Luciano Pavarotti, on October 12^th of 1935.