I am well aware that today is July 4 and that, perhaps, the patriotic thing for me to do today would be to celebrate the national anthem of the United States – The Star-Spangled Banner – and, perhaps, a famous arrangement of that very anthem. Sadly, no-can-do, because it has already-been-done: just last year, in Music History Monday for July 4, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes for July 5, 2022. Those posts – respectively entitled “As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property” and “Stravinsky in America” – together recount the story of The Star-Spangled Banner as well as Igor Stravinsky’s famous and most controversial arrangement of the anthem, made in 1944 and subsequently banned in Boston! I would humbly direct your attention to these two posts for appropriately “spangled” reading. As for today, we pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, with the Czech composer Leoš Janáček and his two superb string quartets: No. 1, subtitled “The Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2, subtitled “Intimate Letters.” Leoš Janáček(1854-1928) Our impressions of Leoš Janáček tend to be conditioned by photographs taken of him later in life. […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with the incredulity we should all feel when faced with the astounding magnitude of Wolfgang Mozart’s talent and the beauty and quality of his music. It is appropriate, then, that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post should celebrate at least some of Mozart’s astonishing music, and I have chosen his two Piano Quartets and what is a brilliant and relatively new recording, one released in 2018. Superlatives The title of this album of Mozart’s two piano quartets is “Apotheosis.” The program booklet packaged with the CD defines apotheosis as: “1. Elevation to divine status 2. The perfect form or example of something” With its references to “divine status” and “perfection,” that definition indulges in superlatives: “Something of the highest quality or degree.” Statements of superlatives are dangerous because they can ride roughshod over important details, details that would otherwise force us to qualify those superlative statements. For example. The consensus “greatest baseball player” of all time is Babe Ruth (1895-1948), whose statistics as a power hitter were so far ahead of his contemporaries as to put him in a league of his own. (His stats as a pitcher – had he continued to pitch regularly […]
Continue ReadingIn my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of June 6, 2023, on Martha Argerich, I recommended an album containing two piano trios: Pyotr Tchaikovsky one-and-only piano trio of 1882, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s second piano trio, in E minor of 1944, as performed by Martha Argerich, piano; Gidon Kremer, violin; and Mischa Maisky, cello. In that post, I observed that Ms. Argerich (born 1941) has long been associated with the violinist Gidon Kremer (born 1947) and the cellist Mischa Maisky (born 1948). Their album containing live performances of Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 and Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A minor, Op. 50 is superb. I opined that as musical compositions go, Tchaikovsky’s trio is wonderful, but Shostakovich’s is a world-class masterpiece, a bristling gut-wrenching chef-d’oeuvre. I then promised that I would write about Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E minor as soon as possible, and here we are, two weeks later, ready to go. Who says I don’t keep my promises? Shostakovich’s trio, composed in 1944, was a product of the war years and, in many ways, a product of the war itself. As such, some necessary historical background is called for. So bear with me, as we address – by necessity – something of […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the birth of the American pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (1941-2021), in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A good bit of that post was spent discussing Corea’s stunning versatility as a pianist and composer: he could play the piano and compose for the piano in almost any conceivable style. This versatility was a function of his talent, of his training, and of his omnivorous musical appetite: when it came to music in general and jazz in particular, Corea consumed and internalized it all. The result is a body of music so varied that many commentators appear to spend more time categorizing it than actually listening to it. (I say that because if they actually listened to and thought about Corea’s music, they’d realize that for all its stylistic variety Chick Corea’s music always sounds like Chick Corea’s music, its “stylistic category” notwithstanding.) Corea addressed this issue in an interview conducted in 2010: “I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and […]
Continue ReadingYesterday – Monday, June 5 – marked Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. As promised in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, it is a birthday we will celebrate here, now, today, in Dr. Bob Prescribes! Over the course of her storied career, Martha Argerich has made people say the darndest things. I present for your reading pleasure a selection of frankly gushing statements by some otherwise jaded, hard-nosed music critics (as if there’s any other kind!): Writing in The New Yorker in 2001, Alex Ross asserts that: “[Argerich] reigns supreme over the feudalistic world of virtuoso pianists. Rivals become mere fans around her, lingering at the door of her dressing room and then skulking away. Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it.” Critic Barney Zweitz, writing in […]
Continue ReadingI am doing something here in this post today that I have only done twice before in the storied history of Dr. Bob Prescribes: I am recommending a recording for the second time. The other two times I did so were a matter of expedience, as I reran two posts back in early March immediately after my heart bypass surgery. The issue today is not one of expedience but rather, of necessity. You see, Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor remains his least-known masterwork, and it deserves a much harder sell than it was given in what was a brief post back on March 10, 2020. Yesterday’s Music History Mondayfocused on Verdi’s Requiem and its premiere on May 22, 1874, 149 years ago yesterday. What went unmentioned in yesterday’s post is that following the premiere of his Requiem, Verdi shocked the operatic world by announcing his retirement. It was an announcement that appeared to have aggrieved pretty much everyone on the planet with the notable exception of Giuseppe Verdi himself, who believed that with the composition of Aida (1871) and his Requiem (1874) he had freaking written enough. Verdi and Retirement In 1875 Giuseppe was truly at the very […]
Continue ReadingIn choosing a topic for last week’s (May 8) Music History Monday post, I had a difficult choice: to either mark the birthday of the short-lived American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) or the birthday of the even shorter-lived American blues songwriter, singer, and guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938). I chose to run with Gottschalk. Today, then, we are offering up a belated birthday greeting to Robert Johnson, who is among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived. Was that last bit an overstatement, “among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived”? No; it is not. But we would note that Johnson’s musical influence was primarily felt by rock ‘n’ roll musicians, living and working a full generation after his death in 1938. As we will soon discuss, we know next to nothing about Johnson himself: his life (and his death). He was an itinerant musician who performed on a small musical circuit up-and-down the Mississippi Delta, playing on street corners, saloons, Saturday night dances, and what were called juke joints. (“Juke joints” were pop-up establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, operated primarily by Black Americans in the deep south). Johnson’s recording career spanned […]
Continue ReadingThe Prodigy and the Musical Venues of New Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk began playing the piano at around age 5, and by the time he was 7 he was one of those “child prodigies” of which every city could boast. However: Moreau (as he was called) lived in New Orleans, and for him, that made things different. It was no exaggeration when an article in the New Orleans Bee asserted – on November 18, 1837 – that: “the little musical enthusiasm prevailing in the United States is nearly entirely concentrated in New Orleans.” The young prodigy would grow up in a city whose population had available to them a variety of music unique in the United States at the time. There were three essential public venues for music in Gottschalk’s New Orleans: theaters (meaning opera houses, concert halls, and standard theaters); ballrooms and dance halls; and the streets. In the decades prior to the Civil War, New Orleans was the opera capital of North America. In the 1830s, New Orleans had two permanent opera houses before any other city in the United States had even one. In a single week in 1836 – the year the 7-year-old Moreau Gottschalk attended […]
Continue ReadingMy Dr. Bob Prescribes post for February 21 of this year feature Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s superb video of Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville. During the course of that post, I wrote: “Comedy requires deftness, speed, and timing, timing, and more timing. Ponnelle’s production has it all, and the opera crackles under his direction. I would like to say that I can hardly imagine an equally good opera film, but actually, I can: Ponnelle’s own version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, filmed in 1976. With an all-star cast featuring Hermann Prey, Mirella Freni, Dieterich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Maria Ewing; accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm; staged and directed by Ponnelle; and produced by DG, this version of Figaro remains among the very best opera films I’ve ever seen. I will find a reason to feature the performance in a post of its own sooner than later.” Yesterday’s anniversary of the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro on May 1, 1786, is all the excuse we need to celebrate Ponnelle’s film! Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988) The opera director and designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was born in Paris on February 19, 1932. He died, much too young, in Munich on […]
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