Composers Datebook

Synopsis

Many 20th century composers were scarred by the violence and turmoil of their times — but none quite so literally as Greek composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis, who died at 78 on today’s date in 2001.

In the early 1940s, Xenakis was a member of the Communist resistance in Greece, fighting first the German occupation, then, as the war ended, the British. In 1945, when Xenakis was 23, his face was horribly disfigured by a shell fragment fired by a British tank, resulting in the loss of one of his eyes. Two years later he was forced to flee to Paris. As he laconically put it: “In Greece, the Resistance lost, so I left. In France, the Resistance won.”

Xenakis wanted to write music, but earned his living as an architect and engineer in Paris at Le Courbusier’s studio. Xenakis designed and was involved in major architectural projects for Le Courbusier, including the famous Philips pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.

As a composer, Xenakis wrote highly original music that was meticulously ordered according to mathematical and scientific principles, but sounded intensely emotional, almost primeval. His music might even be described as “Pre-Socratic,” as Xenakis seemed to echo the theories of the early Greek thinker Pythagoras, who saw a relationship between music, mathematics, and religion.

Music Played in Today's Program

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Opening of A Colone; New London Chamber Choir; Critical Band; James Wood, conductor; Hyperion 66980

Huuem-Duhey; Edna Michell, violin; Michael Kanka, cello; Angel 57179

Synopsis

Contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág is famous for writing short, sparse and concentrated musical works. He has, however on occasional written more expansive pieces, including one big orchestral piece for the Berlin Philharmonic and some works for large chorus.

Obsessively self-critical, Kurtág disavowed most of the music he wrote before his mid-thirties, which included some for chorus, but a suggestion from Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono that he write for chorus again resulted in a work that the BBC Singers premiered in London on today’s date in 1981.

It has an Italian title, Omaggio a Luigi Nono, or Tribute to Luigi Nono, — a tip of the hat to his Italian colleague, but the work itself is a setting of bits of Russian poems. Now at the time of its premiere, 25 years after the Russian-led invasion of Hungary in 1956 and 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungarian eyebrows were raised when Kurtág chose to set Russian texts. Disparaging or just plain dissing anything Russian was the normal M.O. for Hungarian intellectuals in those days.

Kurtág, for his part, stood his ground: as an ardent Dostoevsky’s fan, he simply said Russian was a sacred language to him.

Music Played in Today's Program

György Kurtág (b. 1926): Omaggio a Luigi Nono; SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart; Marcus Creed, director; SWR Music; 93.174

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1795, Haydn was in England and about to conduct one of his new symphonies at The King’s Theater in London. An early biographer recounts what happened next:

“When Haydn entered to conduct the symphony, the curious audience left their seats and crowded towards the orchestra the better to see the famous Haydn. The seats in the middle of the floor were thus empty, and hardly anyone was there when the theater’s great chandelier crashed down and broke into bits, throwing the numerous gathering into great consternation.

As soon as the first moment of fright was over and those who had pressed forward could think of the danger they had luckily escaped and find words to express it, several persons uttered the state of their feelings with loud cries of ‘Miracle! Miracle!’”

And thus, one of Haydn’s symphonies, his symphony No. 96, came to be called The Miracle Symphony. It’s a nice story, but it actually occurred just before the first performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. Somehow or another the nickname got stuck to one of Haydn’s earlier London Symphonies, and simply refused to become “unstuck.”

In his book, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide, musicologist Michael Steinberg suggests an elegant solution: He still lists Haydn’s Symphony No. 96 as The Miracle but give the Symphony No. 102 a new nickname: The REAL Miracle.

Music Played in Today's Program

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): Symphony No. 96; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis, conductor; Philips 442 611

Synopsis

On today's date in 1862, while President Lincoln was fretting over General McClellan’s unwillingness to confront Secessionist rebels, New York concert-goers could find some relief from Civil War headlines by attending a New York Philharmonic concert at Irving Hall.

Conductor Carl Bergman had programmed some brand-new music by a Hamburg composer named Brahms, whose Serenade No. 2 received its American premiere at their February 1 concert — a concert that took place almost two years to the day after the serenade’s world premiere in Hamburg in 1860.

Give the New York Philharmonic some credit for daring programming. After all, it would be another year before the same Serenade would be performed in Vienna. Moreover, in 1863, during the Vienna Philharmonic’s final rehearsal of this “difficult” new music by a composer nobody there had ever heard of, open mutiny broke out.

The first clarinetist stood up and declared that the music was too darn hard and the orchestra simply refused to play it. Conductor Otto Dessoff, who had programmed the Brahms, turned white with anger, laid down his baton, and resigned on the spot, joined by the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmaster and principal flutist.

Alarmed at the threatened disintegration of their orchestra, the Viennese rebels capitulated; and the performance of Brahms’ Serenade No. 2 took place as scheduled and was, to the mutineers’ chagrined astonishment, a tremendous success.

Music Played in Today's Program

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Serenade No. 2; Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Sir Charles Mackerras, conductor; Telarc 80522

Synopsis

American composer Philip Glass was born in Baltimore on this date in 1937.

Glass says he discovered music via his father’s radio repair shop, where, in addition to servicing radios, Papa Glass sold records. When certain titles sold poorly, Papa would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn't appeal to customers. And so the future composer rapidly became familiar with commercially unsuccessful records of Beethoven string quartets, Schubert piano sonatas, and Shostakovich symphonies.

After some decades studying music, both commercially successful and not, Glass struck out on an original path. In the 1970s, he made a name for himself as both a composer and a performer of hypnotically and repetitiously patterned music for dance and theatrical events in association with Mabou Mines and avant-garde theatrical director Robert Wilson. In 1976 the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach premiered in France and was subsequently staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In the decades that followed, Glass has composed many more operas, symphonies, and film scores, and has the dubious distinction of generating of “Philip Glass jokes,” the most famous being:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass

Music Played in Today's Program

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Symphony No. 3; Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies, conductor; Nonesuch 79581