I’ve been working with The Phoenix Symphony (TPS) for two seasons. Last season, I wrote and recorded eight video program notes (which were made available on the symphony’s YouTube Channel as well as on my Facebook page) and presented three lectures in association with the TPS’s Chamber Concert Series. This season my role has expanded. I will deliver self-standing lectures on Mozart and Schubert; I will join TPS music director Maestro Tito Muñoz on stage for two subscription concerts, and two weeks ago I recorded 22 video program notes for the 2018-19 season. It took me all of August and a good bit of September to research and write those notes, which together run about 24,000 words. I can say with all due modestly that as of today, no one knows TPS’s 2018-19 concert season better than I do. Among the great pleasures of such an assignment is learning about and listening to works I did not know beforehand: music by such living composers as Timo Andres, Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne and Michael Hersch. Thanks to writing these previews, I got to know (and fall in love with) Florence B. Price’s Symphony No. 1 (which I wrote about a couple […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 60
Today we mark the death of the songwriter and bon vivant par excellence Cole Albert Porter. He was born on June 9, 1891, and died at the age of 73 on October 15, 1964: 54 years ago today. We begin with what is, I think, is a great story. In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky travelled from his home in Paris to Cambridge Massachusetts, there to be the Norton professor at Harvard for the school year. By the time his residency ended in June of 1940, France was being overrun by the Nazis. Stravinsky and his wife Vera had a choice to make: go back to Europe and take their chances or stay in the United States where the Hollywood studios were begging Stravinsky to head west. Not a tough choice. Stravinsky instantly became a Hollywood celebrity and his music a sought-after commodity. Disney used The Rite of Spring for the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia. Barnum and Bailey’s circus commissioned Stravinsky to write a work for its dancing elephants. The producer-huckster Billy Rose commissioned a work called Scènes de ballet. After the premiere of Scènes de ballet, Rose telegraphed Stravinsky: “YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF […]
Continue ReadingPatreon Patron, Mr. Franklin, asks: “Dr. B – how about a post/lecture discussion about WHY certain composers or genres chose specific major or minor keys. To state the obvious, the intervals between the pitches in all major keys are the same whether the tonic is C or Ab. Why choose one over the other? Thanks.” This is an excellent question, one I am asked rather frequently. I would take this opportunity, then, to go on the record with response. To my mind, there are – different issues here: tuning systems; pitch levels; and the nature and physical demands of different musical instruments. Tuning Systems Ron Franklin correctly observes that in the equal tempered tuning system that is standard today, the intervals in all the major (and minor) keys are exactly the same. However, despite its adoption here and there during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, equal temperament did not become the gold standard, default tuning system in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century. The “system” that existed to that time was something called “well temperament”, which in fact is not a single tuning but rather, an umbrella term for various tunings in which certain keys were rendered incrementally brighter […]
Continue ReadingMy Parsifal Conductor opens October 11, 2018 for a limited engagement at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater at the West Side Y, 10 West 64th Street, New York, NY; presented by The Directors Company. Starring Eddie Korbich, Claire Brownwell, Geoffrey Cantor, Carlo Bosticco, Logan James Hall, Alison Cimmet, and Jazmin Gorsline, and directed by Robert Kalfin. About three weeks ago, I received an email from Matt Sicoli, a media marketer who is promoting a new, off-Broadway play entitled My Parsifal Conductor, written by the Emmy and Writer’s Guild Winner Allan Leicht. Mr. Sicoli generously offered tickets in exchange for advertising and promotion. I informed him that I am keeping both my Facebook and Patreon sites free of advertising (for now), but that I’d be happy to read the script and, pending an enthusiastic response, write about the play. I am most enthusiastic and thus this post. Here is a synopsis provided by Mr. Sicoli: “Musical genius Richard Wagner (Eddie Korbich) and his ever-faithful wife, Cosima (Claire Brownell), find themselves in a moral, political and musical dilemma when King Ludwig II of Bavaria (Carlo Bosticco) insists that Hermann Levi (Geoffrey Cantor), the son of a rabbi, conduct Wagner’s final masterpiece, […]
Continue ReadingOn October 8, 1897 – 121 years ago today – Emperor Franz Joseph I of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary officially named Gustav Mahler Director of the Vienna Court Opera. For the 37 year-old Mahler, it was the culminating moment in what had been (and sadly, what would continue to be) a very difficult life. He was born on July 7, 1860 in the village of Kalischt, in central Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today part of the Czech Republic. Mahler’s was a lower middle class Jewish family; they spoke German and were thus a double-minority among their predominately Catholic, Czech-speaking neighbors. Mahler grew up abnormally sensitive and morbidly imaginative; a constant witness to his father’s brutality and his mother’s helplessness. According to Henry Raynor: “All the Mahler children were incapable of facing reality and suffered from a sense of inevitable tragedy.” Young Gustav’s sense of morbid tragedy was also a function of the disastrous mortality rate of his siblings. Of the fourteen Mahler children, seven died in infancy and only four (including Gustav) lived into full adulthood. Mahler’s musical talent was prodigious. He attended the Vienna Conservatory from 1876 to […]
Continue ReadingDuring the course of some correspondence, my Patron Cory-Paul Allen mentioned his love for the piano playing of Yeol Eum Son. For those of you who are not familiar with her, she is a 32 year-old miracle (born 1986) from South Korea. Here’s a link to a live performance of her playing Chopin’s Etudes Op. 25. Ignore, please, the handful of wrong notes she plays over the course of her 32-minute performance. This is the real world of live performance, a world in which mistakes are made. (Although based on her body language, Ms. Son is not so forgiving of herself.) The fluffs make no difference. Yeol Eum Son’s artistry is what counts, and her artistry is superb. And in this, she is not alone. For a country of 50 million people, Korean’s presently make up a disproportionate percentage of some of the best young pianists currently plying their trade. I discussed my friend, the wonderful Joyce Yang (born 1986) in my first Dr. Bob Prescribes post. I hired three pianists to perform the piano excerpts for my “23 Greatest Solo Piano Works” course made for The Great Courses. Two of the three are South Korean: Woo Bin Park (born […]
Continue Reading“Showing the Path”: Antonin Dvořák in America By 1891 – at the age of fifty – Antonin Dvořák was that rarest of living composers: successful, world famous, and not in financial need. Dvořák’s music has a distinctly Czech “flavor” to it, and it was Dvořák’s fame as a “nationalist” composer that made him an attractive catch for an American philanthropist named Jeanette Meyers Thurber, who had founded the National Conservatory of Music in New York City in 1885. On June 5, 1891, Thurber cabled Dvořák in Prague and offered him the Directorship her National Conservatory of Music. The moment was auspicious, as the following year – 1892 – marked the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ presumed “discovery of America.” At this signal moment in American history, Jeanette Thurber wanted Dvořák to help found – through his own example – an “American” school of composition at a time when almost every American composer wanted to sound like Brahms. Ms. Thurber made Mr. Dvořák an offer he could not refuse: come to New York, become the director of her conservatory, teach three hours a day, and put together some concerts. For this the National Conservatory was prepared to pay dearly: Dvořák was offered […]
Continue ReadingThis is a long piece. Its length is a function of intersecting thematic lines: a number of topics we’ve been discussing on the site – tempo and metronome markings in general; tempo and metronome markings in Beethoven’s symphonies; the piano, pianists, and the virtuosity of Franz Liszt (in particular) – all intersect in this post. Let’s start with my recommendation and move on from there. Cyprien Katsaris (born 1951) performing Beethoven’s Symphonies, transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt. While I write these words I’m listening to Katsaris’ performance of the breakneck fourth movement of Mr. B’s Symphony No. 4, and I’m doing everything I can to focus on typing and not jump out of my skin! In Katsaris’ hands, the symphony is easily as exciting, visceral, and slam-dunk powerful as it is when performed John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantic. Katsaris’ performances of these transcriptions have to be heard to be believed. I do not kid; I do not exaggerate; and I would never waste your time or money: you must have this recording. Stop reading, go on Amazon (or wherever), order it, and then come back. I’ll wait. I’m going to make a statement, for some […]
Continue ReadingLet us contemplate the word “colonel.” No, we’re not talking about a discreet unit of corn, “k-e-r-n-a-l”; rather, we’re talking about the military rank and honorific of “colonel”: “c-o-l-o-n-e-l.” The word itself is of Italian origin; its root is the word colonna, which means “column”; in this case, as in a “column of soldiers”. By the sixteenth century, the word “colonello” was employed as a high military rank – someone who commanded a “column of soldiers” – in the various armies of the Italian city-states. Just as the French adapted Italian cuisine to create their own (that was thanks to the Florentine Princess Caterina Maria Romola di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who as Queen of France from 1547 until 1559 and Queen Mother from 1559 to 1589 brought her cooks and the fork to France, giving birth to French cuisine); yes, just as the French made Italian cuisine their own, so they borrowed the Italian word “colonello” and made it their own, spelling (and pronouncing) it “coronel” – “c-o-r-o-n-e-l”. By the seventeenth century, the English military had adopted the word as well, employing the French pronunciation – coronel – but the Italian spelling: colonel. The rank of colonel in the United […]
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