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Famous Soloists—Gil Shaham

2011
12.21

Gil Shaham [b. 1971], a classical violinist, was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to Israeli husband-and-wife scientists who were working at the time at the University of Illinois.  He returned with them to Israel when he was two, and five years later began violin lessons at Jerusalem’s Rubin Academy of Music.  At age nine he played for several professional violinists, Isaac Stern among them, and a year later made his professional debut as a soloist with the Jerusalem Symphony.

In 1982, when he was 11, Shaham won the Claremont Competition and used that prize to help secure a scholarship to the Juilliard School; he is one of the youngest students to attend that institution.  Along with his sister, the pianist Orli Shaham, Gil also attended classes at Columbia University.  At the age of 19 he was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Shaham’s solo career has included appearances with most of the world’s top orchestras.  This list includes the New York, Israel, Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto Symphony Orchestras, and the Russian National Orchestra.  His list of recordings is broad and extensive, including many of the most popular violin concertos—by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruch—but also a number of lesser known pieces which have become more popular thanks to his stewardship.  These include Violin Concertos No. 1 and No. 2 by Polish composer Henryk Wieniawski, violin concertos by Edward Elgar, Bela Bartok and Samuel Barber, and chamber pieces by Messiaen, Prokofiev, Franck, and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Shaham is a multiple Grammy Award winner and has also received acknowledgements for excellence in classical recording from Gramophone and in winning the Grand Prix du Disc.  In 2007 he formed his own record label, Canary Classics, for which he has recorded five CDs thus far.  These include Mozart’s Six Sonatas (Op. 1) with Orli Shaham on piano, and the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor (Op. 50) with Truls Mørk on cello and Yefim Bronfman on piano.  Shaham’s instrument is the 1699 “Comtesse de Polignac” Stradivarius, on loan to him by the Stradivarius Society of Chicago.

Shaham performs the final part of Carmen Fantasy by Pablo de Sarasate (Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor):

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Composer’s Corner—Robert Schumann

2011
12.19

Robert Schumann [1810–1856] was a German composer firmly entrenched in the Romantic period.  Although encouraged by his family to become an attorney, his itinerant piano studies soon captured his full attention, and he twice withdrew from his law classes—first at Leipzig University and later at Heidelberg University—until abandoning them forever at the age of 20.  He eventually married Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher and herself an accomplished pianist.  She became his muse over the course of his career as a composer, although there was considerable tension as well since she out-earned him during much of their life together.  His original plans to become a concert pianist were thwarted by a finger injury that caused his right hand irreparable damage.

A great deal of Schumann’s early output (from 1832 through 1839) was for the piano, but the year 1840 saw the beginning of his interest in composing songs; he wrote more than 160 that year alone.  Many of his song cycles involved music set to the works of well-known poets, among them Heine, Goethe, Burns and Byron (translated into German, of course), and these remain among his most popular works today.  The following year, Schumann composed his first two symphonies—there were four in all—while 1842 was a year primarily devoted to the creation of various chamber pieces, including one of his best-known works, the Piano Quintet in E flat.

In the mid-1840s, Schumann’s health—never especially robust to begin with—became a serious issue and greatly affected his music.  After returning home to Germany in late 1844 after touring Russia with Clara, symptoms of nervous exhaustion and the fear of even the most benign everyday items and scenarios seeped into his music.  This sense of unease is clearly heard in his Symphony in C, which he published in 1845.  Feeling somewhat recovered a year later, he visited Prague and Vienna with the hope of increasing awareness of his music beyond the narrow scope of Dresden and Leipzig.

Schumann wrote his only opera in 1848.  Based on a medieval legend, Genoveva premiered in 1850 but was so poorly received that it was performed only three times during its initial run before disappearing for close to 70 years.  Sufficiently discouraged and thus vowing never to compose another opera, Schumann’s groundbreaking methodology of writing virtually nonstop music (in other words, a total lack of recitatives) was soon adopted by Richard Wagner and thoroughly exploited in the latter’s operatic Ring Cycle.

In 1853, Schumann was introduced to Johannes Brahms, at the time a 20-year-old music student, and the younger man quickly became the elder’s protégé.  However, it was during this time that Schumann’s ills made a sharp return, combining hallucinogenic sensations—he is reported to have heard a near-continuous string of musical notes as well as disembodied voices—with actual physical symptoms thanks to what was most likely late-stage syphilis.  Schumann died in a sanatorium, slightly more than two years after he had attempted suicide by leaping from a bridge over the Rhine.

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings “Mondnacht” by Robert Schumann [1974]:

Category Composer's Corner |

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Opera Stars of Today—Renée Fleming

2011
12.16

Renée Fleming [b.1959] is an operatic soprano born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, whose parents were both music teachers.  She spent most of her early years in Rochester, New York—her family moved there when she was still a child—and subsequently studied voice at the Crane School of Music, part of SUNY–Potsdam.  She later returned to Rochester for graduate studies at the Eastman School of Music.

After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Fleming worked in Europe with legendary soprano Elizabeth Schwartzkopf before returning to the States and additional studies at Juilliard.  At this point in her performing career, Fleming was dividing her time between appearing with smaller opera companies plus at the Juilliard opera center, as well as singing in jazz clubs around New York City to help cover her living expenses.  Her career took off after being named one of the Metropolitan Opera Audition winners in 1988, when she was 29.  Later that same year, Fleming made her major company debut with Houston Grand Opera, appearing as the Countess in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.  This is the same role that would mark her debut with the San Francisco Opera and at the Met, both in 1991.

Fleming continued to build her repertoire throughout the 1990s, expanding it to include many bel canto roles in works by Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini—the three compositional giants of that era—that included the title roles in Donizettti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Rossini’s Armida.  But she also became known for taking on an even broader range, such as appearing in John Corigliano’s world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles at the Met [1991], in Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah with Chicago Lyric Opera [1993], in Massenet’s Hérodiade (as Salome) in San Francisco [1994], in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (as the Marschallin) in Houston [1995], and in Gounod’s Faust (as Marguerite) in Chicago [1996].

After the turn of the new century, Fleming’s star continued to rise in the opera world, especially at the Met in New York.  Thanks to an exclusive recording contract with Decca—the first female opera singer since Marilyn Horne, 31 years earlier, to sign such a deal with that label—Fleming became perhaps the most recognizable opera performer in North America.  Particularly thanks to the influence of new general manager Peter Gelb, the Met felt comfortable enough to create revivals of long-neglected works or mount premieres of pieces never done on the Met’s stage, simply because they knew that casting Renée Fleming as the lead soprano would invariably sell out the house.  Some of these operas were Il Pirata by Vincenzo Bellini, Thais by Jules Massenet, and Rodelinda by G.F. Handel (the latter subsequently revived for the Met’s 2011–12 season).

A triple Grammy winner, Fleming’s most recent award was in 2010 for Best Classical Vocal Performance for Verismo, a CD of rarely performed Italian arias.  A number of her more recent operatic performances with the Metropolitan Opera have been captured on DVD, notably as part of the “Met in HD” cinecast series.  When she is not singing, Fleming also fulfills the role of host for many of those Saturday afternoon performances.

Performing what has become her signature aria, Fleming sings “Song to the Moon” from the opera Rusalka by Antonin Dvořák [1991]:

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Masters of the Podium—John Eliot Gardiner

2011
12.14

John Eliot Gardiner [b.1943], a native of Dorset, England, is considered one of the leading conductors of Baroque music.  As founder of the Monteverdi Choir in 1964, Gardiner helped revive interest in 17th and 18th century music, which expanded further when his ensembles began the practice of employing period instruments (whether restored antiques or modern-day reproductions) in his various performances and recordings.

Gardiner was very nearly a child prodigy of the podium, beginning his career as a conductor at the age of 15.  While studying history and Arabic in his late teens at King’s College, Cambridge, he toured the Middle East as conductor of the Oxford and Cambridge Singers.  His work with the aforementioned Monteverdi Choir eventually led him to form the English Baroque Soloists, which made its professional debut in a performance of the Handel pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea, in 1977 at the Innsbruck [Austria] Festival of Early Music.

The first time Gardiner conducted an opera in his native England took place in 1969, when he appeared with the English National Opera for a performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte.  His debut at Covent Garden came four years later when he conducted a production of Iphigénie en Tauride by Gluck, which was composed in 1779.  In the early 1980s, Gardiner was lead conductor for CBC Vancouver [Canada] Orchestra, after which [1983–88] he became music director of Opéra National de Lyon in France.

More recently, Gardiner took a music ensemble on tour throughout the United States and Europe in 2000—the project became known as the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage—where they performed all of Bach’s sacred cantatas over a 52-week period in various churches.  He has continued to appear as a guest conductor with some of the world’s most prominent musical ensembles, including the Cleveland Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Gardiner has made more than 250 recordings on a number of classical labels, primarily DG and Philips.  He has also earned quite a few honors along the way.  He received the Gramophone “Artist of the Year” award in 1994, was named Klassik Echo’s “Conductor of the Year” in 1995, and that same year became the first conductor to win the Dietrich Buxtehude Prize.  Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1998.

John Eliot Gardiner leads the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir in a selection from the Christmas Oratorio by J.S. Bach:

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Modern American Composers—John Corigliano

2011
12.12

John Corigliano [b.1938], the son of two noted musicians—his mother was a pianist, while his father was concertmaster (first-chair violinist) with the New York Philharmonic—is an American composer known primarily for his symphonic works.  Early in his career, he helped produce the Carnegie Hall series known as Young People’s Concerts that were the brainchild of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein.

Corigliano’s first achievement as a composer came in 1964, when he won the Spoleto [Italy] Festival’s chamber music competition—at the age of 26—for his Sonata for Violin and Piano.  He has gone on to write a number of concertos (eight to date), the most recent of which is Conjurer [2008] for string orchestra plus percussion.  Among his more unusual works is Vocalise [2000], a single-movement concerto that features a solo soprano singing a “wordless libretto” consisting simply of vocal sounds.

Three symphonies form the bulwark of John Corigliano’s compositional repertoire.  His Symphony No. 1 [1991] expresses his grief and angst over the loss of many of his colleagues to AIDS over the preceding decade.  Symphony No. 2 [2001] expands on the surrealistic themes he developed as part of an earlier string quartet.  Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus [2004] has been described alternatively as “extravagant,” “ambitious,” and “grandly barbarous.”  This piece is hardly one’s everyday symphony, as it is scored for a wind orchestra plus multiple smaller wind ensembles.

The Ghosts of Versailles is Corigliano’s sole opera.  Commissioned in 1991 by New York’s Metropolitan Opera— its first commission in 30-plus years, and in honor of the company’s one hundredth anniversary—the libretto by William Hoffman (loosely based on a play by the 18th century French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais) is a satirization of comic operas in general.  It mashes together two incongruent story lines, a continuation of the “Figaro” history as previously explored by Mozart and Rossini, plus social commentary by the victims of “The Terrors” of the French Revolution, such as Marie Antoinette.

Today, Corigliano fulfills two pedagogic roles.  He is a professor of music at the City College of New York’s Lehman College (where a scholarship in his name has been established) and also a member of the composition faculty at the Juilliard School of Music.  Among his lifetime achievements are a Pulitzer Prize, three Grammy Awards and an Academy Award, the latter for the original musical score to the 1999 feature film, The Red Violin.

Northwestern University’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble performs the first part of Corigliano’s Symphony No. 3: Circus Maximus:

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Opera Stars of Today—Juan Diego Flórez

2011
12.09

Juan Diego Flórez [b.1973], an operatic tenor and the son of a popular Peruvian singer and musician, has risen to become the most famous opera singer ever to have come from Lima.  After securing a place at his country’s National Conservatory of Music as a teenager—although reportedly still wavering as to whether he should pursue a classical singing career— Flórez joined the Coro Nacional (National Chorus), which gave him significant experience in performing works by the world’s greatest composers.  From 1993 to 1996 he attended Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music on a scholarship, performing in several student operas there.

Flórez also spent time in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he was tutored in vocal studies by the great mezzo-soprano, Marilyn Horne.  In 1994, Peruvian tenor Ernesto Palacio asked Flórez to come to Italy and participate in the making of an opera recording; the elder statesman of South American opera soon became the younger singer’s teacher and mentor.

With a voice that combines a lightness of tone with surprising projection, despite its seeming lack of power, Flórez gravitated toward the bel canto repertoire of Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini.  Perhaps not surprisingly, that particular era—roughly 1805 to 1840—was also the preferred period for both Horne and Palacio.  The best singers of this type of music exhibit the following characteristics: flexible technique; wide range, especially with upper notes; highly focused attack; and graceful phrasing with impeccable breath control.

At age 23, Flórez made his professional debut at the Rossini Festival in the composer’s birth city of Pesaro, Italy.  He sang the lead tenor role in Matilde di Shabran, a fairly obscure work among the 30-odd operas Rossini wrote, filling in when the scheduled performer (American tenor Bruce Ford) took ill.  Later that fall, Flórez made his La Scala [Milan] debut in Armida by Gluck.  It was opening night of the 1996–97 season at La Scala, and famed conductor Riccardo Muti was on the podium.  The maestro went on to play an important part in the young tenor’s continued professional development and exposure.

The following year saw Flórez appear for the first time at London’s Covent Garden, where he sang the main tenor role in the world premiere of Elisabetta, an opera by Gaetano Donizetti recently discovered after being lost for more than 150 years.  Among his most frequent roles is that of Count Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Sevilla; Flórez debuted at Vienna in this part in 1999, and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2002.

At last count, his repertoire totals 31 operas, of which eleven are by Rossini.  His most acclaimed roles, however—other than the Almaviva from “Barber”—have involved works by the other two primary bel canto composers.  In Donizetti’s La fille du regiment (“Daughter of the Regiment”), the signature tenor aria includes six high Cs.  This role was said to be the one that catapulted Luciano Pavarotti to instant fame.  Anyone who has heard Flórez perform the same piece, “Ah! Mes ami,” cannot help but notice the seemingly effortless way he hits those high notes without the slightest concern.  Flórez has sung  a number of times in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and L’elisir d’amore (“Elixir of Love”), as well as making highly regarded appearances in Vincenzo Bellini’s I puritani and La sonnambula (“The Sleepwalker”).  He has recorded half a dozen solo CDs on the Decca label, receiving a Grammy nomination in 2009 for his album, Bel Canto Spectacular.

Juan Diego Flórez (with soprano Nino Machaidze) sings “A te, o cara” from Bellini’s I puritani [Bologna, 2009]:

Category Opera Stars of Today |

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