|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
RIGHT HERE - WHERE WE LIVE |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
CHAMBER CONCERT 2010 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
Chamber
Music Concert
Antonin Dvořák Friedrich Kuhlau Giovanni Gabrieli Alfred Uhl
Alfred Uhl (1909–1992) studied with Franz Schmidt at the Vienna Music Academy, receiving a diploma in composition with honours in 1932. He subsequently worked as Kappelmeister of the Swiss Festspielmusik in Zürich. While there he composed scores for a variety of cultural and industrial films. He returned to Vienna in 1938 and in 1940 was drafted into the Austrian Army. From 1940 to 1942 he commanded a French prison camp in Neumarkt. He joined the faculty of the Vienna Music Academy in 1945, where he taught theory, orchestration and composition until his retirement in 1980. One of his notable students was Alfred Prinz. He was the recipient of the Vienna Schubert Prize 1943, the Austrian State Prize 1960, the Vienna Music Prize 1961, the Viennese Gold Medal of Honour 1969 and the Austrian Badge of Honour for Service and Arts 1980. From 1949 to 1954, Uhl was co-founder and president of the Austrian Society for Contemporary Music. He also served as the president of the Austrian Society of Authors, Composers und Music Publishers 1970 and the Artists-Union 1976. As a composer, Uhl synthesized elements from neo-classicism, atonality, serialism and traditional tonal and contrapuntal idioms. His vibrant style combined technical sophistication and musical charm with wit and humour, rhythmic inventiveness, thematic development and advanced harmonic language. He wrote eight feature film scores, one opera, several choral works, and multiple symphonic and chamber music pieces. He wrote extensively for the clarinet, including educational material and works that are still common repertoire. His most famous educational pieces are two volumes which comprise the 48 Studies for Clarinet. His Divertimento for Three Clarinets and Bass Clarinet is one of the most performed works for the medium. Written in 1942 for clarinettists from the Vienna Philharmonic, it is a very demanding piece structured similarly to a conventional concerto. A three movement work, the first is a highly engaging Allegro followed by an expressive and nostalgic Andante sostenuto concluding with an energetic and demanding Allegro con brio in which each instrument of the quartet has an equally difficult part. * *Some data has been obtained from the Alfred Uhl page on Wikipedia and used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Uhl
Friedrich Daniel Rudolph Kuhlau (1786-1832) was born in Ülzen, near Hanover, Germany. In 1793, he and his family moved to Lüneburg, where in 1796 following a street injury, he lost the use of his right eye. The Kuhlau family made several other short term moves before settling in Hamburg around 1803. It was here that Kuhlau began a formal study of music with the assistance of the music director of the city, who himself was a former student of C. P. E. Bach. In Hamburg, the young musician gave his first piano recitals and published his first works which included pieces for flute and piano, among others. Kuhlau's years in Hamburg aburptly ended in 1810 when Napoleon's forces entered the city, and Kuhlau, along with his parents, fled to Copenhagen. Within a year, Kuhlau had established himself as a musician with promise in Copenhagen, and Denmark in general, through concerts, teaching and composing. So successful was he that he was appointed chamber musician to the royal court (an upaid position until 1818) in 1813, which led to his first notable achievement in 1814 of a singspiel Røverborgen (The Robber's Castle) at the Imperial Theater. Other successes followed including his second and third operas, Trylleharpen (The Magic Harp) and Lulu. In terms of strictly instrumental music, Kuhlau achieved enormous success with his incidental music to the play, William Shakespeare; but his broadest recognition came with his incidental music to a Romantic national play by Johan Ludvig Heiberg entitled Elverhøj (The Elf Hill). Kuhlau made concert tours throughout Scandinavia and undertook concerts and conducting visits to Germany and Austria. In 1825, he met Beethoven in Vienna and exchanged impromptu musical exercises with him. From this meeting, Kuhlau became an ardent champion of Beethoven's music in the Scandinavian countries. Kuhlau died in 1832 from chest ailments aggravated by smoke inhalation during a fire that ravaged his house in 1831. Over half of Kuhlau's published compositions are for piano - sonatas, sonatinas, and variations. They show the clear influence of the Viennese school of composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven and give a nod toward Clementi, Hummel, and Weber, among others. The Grand Trio in E minor for Three Flutes is the first of a set of three trios for three flutes in the Opus 86. The other two are in D major and E major. Although he was not himself a flautist, Kuhlau had an unusual affinity for the flute and wrote numberous pieces for the instrument. His compositions for one, two, three, and four flutes were written not only to satisfy popular demand for such works, but to supplement his income as well.
Prior to 1878, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) was little known outside his native Bohemia, but "[a]t home in my own circles I was by this time pretty well known as the composer of a Bohemian Patriotic Hymn." It was not until 1878 that
So popular was the demand for Dvořák's music that Simrock rushed to publish much of Dvořák's earlier output, including symphonies, concertos, choral settings, songs and chamber works; at the same time the firm begged the new-found composer for newer works, especially those suitable for small ensemble and home performance. Dvořák was more than happy to comply with Simrock's requests. Among the newly composed works that the composer sent the music publisher was the Bagatelles, Op 47, for string trio and harmonium. The use of the harmonium, essentially a free-reed organ, was no doubt Dvořák's attempt to capitalize on the home market where the instrument had taken a perferred place in many households. He was not alone in this marketing of his music, for several well-known composers of the time made similar gestures toward the harmonium, among them Camille Saint-Saëns, Max Reger, and Richard Strauss. The French composer César Franck wrote over two hundred pieces of varying length and quality for the instrument. The Frenchman Alexandre Debain is generally credited with having invented the harmonium around 1842, although there had been earlier prototypes. By Dvorak's time, the harmonium had evolved into an elaborate, sophisticated instrument and was employed widely in small churches that could not afford a pipe organ. In the home it proved a popular companion to the piano, and in movie houses it was used to accompany the action in silent films. Dvořák often played chamber music with his friends, frequently trying out his new compositions before submitting them to Simrock for publication. He sometimes played chamber music with friends at the flat of music critic Josef Srb-Debrnov, who was the owner of a harmonium. The Bagatelles for Two Violins, Cello and Harmonium was written for one of these friendly gatherings to make use of Srb-Debrnov's harmonium which, judging from the absence of a viola part (the viola was Dvořák's customary instrument) the composer himself probably played. For all its uniqueness, the harmonium part is not difficult to play; it functions more or less as an understated harmonic background to the more interesting string parts, although on occasion Dvořák gives it some important melodic passages.
Giovanni Gabrieli (1554?-1612), Italian composer and organist, was one of the most influential European musicians of his time and represented the Venetian School of music during the shift from the Renaissance to the Baroque. In fact, he was instrumental in bringing about the change from the one musical style to the other.
Gabrieli's advanced his career further after he assumed the position of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, a position along with his San Marco post, he kept for life. San Rocco was the most prestigious and wealthy of the Venetian brotherhoods, and second only to San Marco itself in splendor of its musical establishment, but it was San Marco that had the superior tradition of musical excellence. And it was from San Marco that Gabrieli's fame as composer and teacher spread throughout Europe. Composers from all over Europe came to Venice to study with the distinguished master and took back to their home countries the Venetian polychoral style as well as the more intimate madrigal style. The Germans particularly benefited from the teachings of Gabrieli, with Leo Hassler, Heinrich Schütz, and Michael Praetorius instigating the move to the German Baroque which culminated with Johann Sebastian Bach.
Home / Events / Tickets / Personnel / Support
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Clinton Symphony Orchestra PO Box 116 Clinton, IA 52733-0116 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
