(D’me’-tre Ka-ba-lef-ske) 1904–87 Russian composer A rather late developer, Kabalevsky made a career as a pianist before beginning composition studies in his twenties. His style is conservative but, especially in his opera Colas Breugnon (1938) and in music for his own instrument (three concertos, three sonatas, numerous preludes and fugues), freshly and often catchily melodious. Recommended Recording: ...
1906–75, Russian Born in tsarist Russia, Shostakovich spent his entire career under the critical and often hectoring gaze of the Soviet regime, yet he still managed to produce some of his nation’s most powerful and engaging twentieth-century music. Studying composition at the Petrograd Conservatory from 1919 to 1925, he presented Symphony No. 1 as his graduation piece ...
Composed: 1930–32 Premiered: 1934, Leningrad Libretto by the composer and Alexander Preys, after the short story by Nikolay Leskov Act I Katerina is married to Zinovy Ismailov. Despite his great wealth, she is bored. She has no children and Boris, her father-in-law, accuses her of being frigid. Zinovy has to go away on business. Boris makes ...
(D’me’-tre Shus-ta-ko’vich) 1906–75 Russian composer Shostakovich was the first of his country’s composers to come to attention after the Russian Revolution of 1917, and since Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and (until the 1930s) Prokofiev were all living abroad, his early successes made him the great hope of Soviet music. He became associated with the Western-influenced modernist movement in the Soviet ...
1868–1917 American composer More than any other composer, Joplin brought ragtime to its pinnacle: his Maple Leaf Rag (1899) is characteristic of his joyous and infectious but disciplined art, while 15 years later Magnetic Rag, with its dramatic and unexpected shifts of key, suggests a composer ready to expand into other areas. Joplin evidently thought so, ...
Unlike the ‘New German School’ of Liszt and Wagner, Schumann did not pursue a path of radical experimentation in form and harmony; his style more aptly encapsulates German literary Romanticism in music, interpreting the rhythms and melodic shapes of German poetry and folk music through his own ardent and whimsical nature, and incorporating themes and ideas from Goethe ...
Keyboard percussion instruments include the western xylophone, marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel, the log xylophones and marimbas of Africa and Central America, and the barred instruments played in the Indonesian gamelan. The orchestral xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel have thin wooden or metal rectangular bars laid out like a chromatic piano keyboard. The back row of bars – ...
A range of metal percussion instruments are found in the western orchestra, many of which have ancient and global origins. Triangle The triangle comprises a slim steel bar, circular in cross-section, bent into an equilateral triangle (18 cm/7 in each side) with one corner open. It is played with a metal rod, and is suspended from a ...
The violin family is a group of fretless bowed stringed instruments that has its roots in Italy. Four instruments make up the family: the violin, the viola, the violoncello (commonly abbreviated to cello), and the double bass. The characteristic body shape is one of the most recognizable in music; the particular acoustic properties this shape imparts have made the ...
After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...
The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...
The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...
Composed: 1836 Premiered: 1836, St Petersburg Libretto by Baron Yegor Fyodorovich Rozen and others Background The years of turmoil following the death of Tsar Fyodor I in 1598 might finally be coming to an end. The revolt of the ‘False Dmitri’ in 1605 has led to Polish intervention. In 1613, after an interregnum of nearly three years, Mikhail ...
(Ed’-värd Greg) 1843–1907 Norwegian composer Of Scottish ancestry, Grieg first studied music with his mother, and later went to Leipzig (1858–62) to study with Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Reinecke, and with Gade in Copenhagen. There he became organizer of the Euterpe Society for Scandinavian Music and subsequently, in Norway, founded the Norwegian Academy of Music (1867). The ...
1915–2006, German The great soprano Olga Maria Elisabeth Friederike Schwarzkopf was perhaps one of the greatest Mozart singers of the twentieth century. Trained as a mezzo before becoming a coloratura soprano and joining Berlin’s Deutsche Oper in 1938, she was signed to an EMI recording contract by producer Walter Legge in 1946. Legge, who subsequently became her husband ...
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