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Famous Soloists—Yefim Bronfman

2012
02.01

Yefim Bronfman [b. 1958] was born in Tashkent (formerly the Soviet Union, now the capital of Uzbekistan), immigrating to Israel with his family when he was 15.  He subsequently studied the piano at Tel Aviv University’s Rubin Academy of Music.  After performing publicly in various venues around Israel, Bronfman made his international debut in Montreal, with Zubin Mehta and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

His family relocated again in 1976, moving this time to the United States.  Bronfman enrolled at the Juilliard School and also continued his studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia.  Among his instructors were concert pianists Leon Fleischer and Rudolph Serkin.  Bronfman first performed at Carnegie Hall in 1989, the same year he became a U.S. citizen.

While most pianists carve out a career by appearing with orchestras in the performance of various piano concertos, Bronfman has taken a slightly different tack—although he has certainly performed his share of concertos—by placing a major emphasis on performing with chamber ensembles.  Among his most notable musical collaborations have been appearances with the Emerson, Juilliard, Guarneri and Cleveland String Quartets, as well as a number of performances with Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society.  He has played in recital with many top solo musicians, including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Joshua Bell, opera singer Placido Domingo, and the late flautist, Jean-Pierre Rampal.

Bronfman won a Grammy Award in 1997 for his recording of the three piano concertos of Bela Bartók, along with the Los Angeles Philharmonic led by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and he has received a number of Grammy nominations for assorted other recordings.  These have included all of Prokofiev’s piano sonatas and concertos, as well as the second and third piano concertos by Rachmaninoff.  His most recent Grammy nomination came during the 2009–10 concert season, upon recording with the L.A. Philharmonic a piano concerto written expressly for him by the aforementioned Salonen.  Both pianist and composer toured the work at several European music festivals that season, including events at Helsinki and Edinburgh.

The current concert season saw Bronfman perform in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s opening gala—with Riccardo Muti on the podium—where he played the Prokofiev Second Piano Concerto.  He followed that a month later with a performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Gustavo Dudamel, conducting) of the Bartók Third Piano Concerto.  In all, Bronfman’s 2011 performing schedule included 21 solo recitals and additional appearances with more than two dozen different orchestras.

Bronfman joins violinist Isaac Stern in an encore performance of Mozart’s Rondo in C major [Moscow; 1991]:

Category Famous Soloists |

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Composer’s Corner—Frédéric Chopin

2012
01.30

Frédéric Chopin [1810–1849], the son of a French father and a Polish mother, was born in the vicinity of Warsaw, Poland, and is today considered the greatest composer to have come from that land.  During his early years he was often known as “The Polish Mozart,” as he was clearly a child prodigy as a pianist as well as a composer—Chopin’s first composition was published when he was seven years old.  After attending the Warsaw Conservatory, he recognized the value of broadening his horizons musically and moved to Vienna.  After a debut performance at the Kärntnerthor Theatre there in 1829, he embarked on a concert tour through Germany and Italy.

At the age of 20, Chopin made his first trek to Paris and soon became a popular member of the social and artistic circles popular in those days.  Due to the fragility of his health—Chopin was never terribly robust—he declined to perform in the major concert halls of the city (where people such as Franz Liszt and Sigismund Thalberg were in great demand) and instead concentrated on composition.  However, thanks to a close relationship with the Rothschild banking family, Chopin was able to maintain a reasonably comfortable lifestyle by using those connections to play for smaller audiences in the salons of the wealthy.  It was this segment of society that allowed Chopin to meet feminist author George Sand (real name, Amandine Dupin), who for a decade was Chopin’s lover, confidante, and nursemaid as he struggled with a variety of health issues.

Thanks to his prowess at the keyboard, the vast majority of Chopin’s compositions were works for solo piano.  Quite a few pieces were dances, and he seemed to favor the harmonies and rhythms of his native Poland as the basis for much of his material.  Among his most popular compositions are mazurkas, waltzes (the Minute Waltz is one of his most famous), polonaises, preludes, nocturnes, and etudes.  In many ways, his piano music echoed the operatic bel canto style that was all the rage in 1840s Paris, with works by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini—all of whom were equally familiar with Chopin and his salon performances.

Among Chopin’s compositions that were not for solo piano are a sonata for cello and piano, a number of songs for voice and piano (including 19 songs set to poems in Polish), and a funeral march for full orchestra.  Chopin was also fond of borrowing themes by other composers against which he created unique pieces.  Two such examples are his Opus 2, Variations on “Là ci darem la mano” (the tune from a Mozart duet in the opera, Don Giovanni) and Grand Duo Concertante in E Major (a collaborative work with August Franchomme), which used popular themes from the Meyerbeer opera, Robert le Diable.  This is a piece for piano and cello, where Chopin composed the piano portion and Franchomme contributed the cello part.

Elena Kuschnerova plays Chopin’s Polonaise Op. 53 [Heroic]:

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Opera Stars of Today—Diana Damrau

2012
01.27

Diana Damrau [b. 1971] is an operatic soprano—her style is technically “coloratura”—from Günzberg, Germany.  Although currently enjoying worldwide exposure in opera houses throughout Europe and North America, Damrau spent the first six years of her professional career [1996–2002] formally contracted to three different opera companies in her native land.  These were Würzburg—the site of her 1995 debut, as Barbarina in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro—Mannheim and Frankfurt, spending two years at each of these respective venues.

Damrau’s contractual circumstances, however, did not prevent her from appearing elsewhere during this stretch.  She sang her first Queen of the Night (from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte) in Berlin in 1998, and it is the role with which she is most often associated.  However, it was as Zerbinetta in the Richard Strauss opera, Ariade auf Naxos that she made her first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which took place in 2005.

In addition to performing in many operas from the basic repertoire—aside from the aforementioned Mozart and Strauss roles, Damrau has appeared multiple times in several Wagner operas, plus in Rigoletto and Un ballo in maschera, both by Verdi—she has enjoyed considerable acclaim in productions that are well out of the mainstream.  For example, Damrau was invited to perform the title role in Europa reconosciuta by Antonio Salieri, in honor of the 2004 reopening of Milan’s La Scala opera house after it had undergone considerable renovation.  She has also sung important roles in several other fairly obscure operas, such as Rita by Gaetano Donizetti, Ascanio in Alba and Zaïde by Mozart, and 1984 by Loren Maazel.

During 2011–12, Damrau is debuting in several new roles in various European venues.  In Munich this past November, she sang all four heroine roles in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, and the current season also marks her first performance as the title characters in Donizetti’s Linda di Chamonix (Barcelona) and in Mignon (Geneva) by Ambroise Thomas.

Damrau sings the famous Queen of the Night aria, “Der Hölle Rache,” in a Salzburg production from 2006:

Category Opera Stars of Today |

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Masters of the Podium—James Levine

2012
01.25

James Levine [b. 1943] began his musical life as a pianist but rose to become one of the most prominent opera and orchestra conductors of the latter part of the 20th century.  Although he has been stricken with health problems that stretch back over the past decade, Levine remains a prominent force with the two institutions he is most often associated: the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Levine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he debuted with the local symphony at the age of ten, performing Mendelssohn’s second piano concerto.  In 1963, after studying piano and conducting at Juilliard, Levine accepted the position of assistant conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra, which at the time was led by George Szell.  His experience there helped raise his skill level as well as his professional profile.  Levine first appeared on the podium of the Metropolitan Opera in 1971, where he conducted Puccini’s Tosca.  Two years later he became the company’s principal conductor, and he was named to the post of music director in 1976.

More than any single person, Levine’s tenure at the Met has led to its continued prominence as the top opera company in the world.  In his role as music director, Levine is the primary decision maker for each season’s repertoire.  He also enjoys unofficial “right of first refusal” as to which productions he will personally conduct, although these have declined considerably over the past few years as he has battled back problems and other ills.

Simultaneous to his long career at the Met, Levine has also been intimately associated with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).  His first appearance there took place in 1972, and every year since he has conducted a number of programs with the ensemble.  However, it wasn’t until 2001 that he officially became music director of the BSO, but that was more a formality as he’d effectively fulfilled that role for several decades.

With the Met in 1980, Levine was the initiator of their Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, which has served as a major proving ground for up-and-coming opera singers.  Among those who have benefited from membership in this program are Renée Fleming, Danielle de Niese, Dwayne Croft, Eric Cutler, Nathan Gunn, and Sondra Radvanovsky, among many others.

Levine conducts the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in the overture (and a bit of the first-act orchestration) to the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet:

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Modern American Composers—Virgil Thomson

2012
01.23

Virgil Thomson [1896–1989], born in Kansas City, Missouri, was a composer who contributed to nearly every classical genre—orchestral, chamber music, choral, operatic, solo voice, and solo instrument—and whose music is considered among the most accessible to young singers and musicians.  After a course of study at Harvard, Thomson lived for 15 years in Paris [1925–40] and spent considerable time with prominent members of what was considered Bohemian Society back then.  Members of his social circle included writers Joyce and Hemingway, fellow musicians Stravinsky and Copland, and Gertrude Stein.  The latter became his mentor and artistic collaborator, and Thomson would later write the opera, The Mother of Us All [1947]—which depicting the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony—to a Stein libretto.

The music of fellow Paris resident Erik Satie was considerably influential in the material Thomson would create throughout his life.  Nonetheless, his music is decidedly American in theme and rhythm, with critics describing his overall work as having “hymnbook-type harmony.”  Many of his early works were for chorus or vocal soloist, or a combination of the two, and tended to reflect a religious theme.  Included among these are Sanctus [1921], Missa brevis [1924], and Five Phrases from “The Song of Solomon” [1925].

Thomson was also famous for creating what he called “musical portraits” of people he knew.  Some of these individuals were quite famous—philanthropist Peggy Guggenheim [1940] and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia [1942]—with others considerably less so, such as French Surrealist writer Lisa Deharme [1940].  Among his orchestral works are three symphonies, the final one composed in 1972, as well as a number of movie scores.  These include documentaries The Plow That Broke the Plains [1936] and The River [1938], both directed by Pare Lorentz, and Louisiana Story [1948], directed by Robert Flaherty.  This latter effort won Thomson a Pulitzer Prize.  He also received the National Medal of Arts in 1988.

A brief excerpt from the film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, with a score by Virgil Thomson:

Category Modern American Composers |

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Opera Stars of Today—Ramón Vargas

2012
01.20

Ramón Vargas [b. 1960] is an operatic tenor from Mexico City, whose singing career began at the age of nine as a member of the boys’ choir of the Basilica of Guadalupe.  Continuing his studies in his native country, Vargas took first prize in the 1982 Carlo Morelli National Vocal Competition.  Shortly thereafter, he made his professional operatic debut in Monterrey, Mexico, in a production of Lo Speziale by G.F. Handel.  He appeared in two additional roles on Mexican stages—as Fenton in Verdi’s Falstaff, and as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni—before traveling to Italy in 1986 and taking the top prize in Milan’s Enrico Caruso Tenor Competition.  That award was key in allowing him to continue his vocal studies with the school attached to the Vienna State Opera in the Austrian capital.  Vargas continues to make his home in Vienna.

For Vargas, his international operatic debut came courtesy of a cancellation, replacing Luciano Pavarotti (as Edgardo) at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in a 1992 performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor.  A year later he reprised his Fenton role at La Scala in Milan, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the premiere of Falstaff.

Vargas has risen to become one of the sought-after tenors in opera.  A list of the places where he has performed is a Who’s Who—or perhaps more accurately, a “Where It’s At”—of the most prominent venues around the world.  In addition to the aforementioned New York and Milan opera houses, Vargas has appeared at Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, Teatro Real in Madrid, Opéra Bastille in Paris, Opera di Verona in Italy, and Covent Garden in London, among many others.

The Vargas repertoire is heavily invested in the Italian repertoire; most notably this includes works by Verdi and Donizetti.  He has performed regularly as the lead tenor in La traviata, Un ballo in maschera, Rigoletto, and Don Carlos [Verdi], plus La favorita, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereaux, and L’elisir d’amore [Donizetti].  Thanks to the worldwide exposure offered by the “Met in HD” series that transmits Saturday afternoon performances of the Metropolitan Opera to movie theatres on five continents, Vargas has enjoyed great popular acclaim for such performances as Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème [2008, opposite Angela Gheorghiu] and as Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin [2008, opposite Renée Fleming].  His most recent HD appearance was as Don Ottavio (Don Giovanni) during the current [2011–12] Met season.

Vargas sings “Lensky’s Aria” from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin [Met Opera, 2008]:

Category Opera Stars of Today |

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