The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: What is your favorite piece of music to greet Spring with? Plus, British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies has died at 81

SURVEY: This is the first day of Spring. The vernal equinox  just arrived here in Madison, Wisconsin and the Midwest about a half-hour ago, on Saturday, March 19, at 11:30 p.m. CDT.

What is your favorite piece of music to greet the season with? Antonio Vivaldi‘s “Four Seasons”? Robert Schumann‘s Symphony No. 1 “Spring”? A miniature piano piece by Felix Mendelssohn or Edvard Grieg? A song by Franz Schubert? Leave word in the COMMENT section, with a link to a YouTube performance if that is possible.

Here is a link to a similar post from 2011:

https://welltempered.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/classical-music-which-piece-of-classical-music-best-expresses-the-coming-of-spring/

The Ear especially loves the “Spring” Sonata for Violin and Piano by Ludwig van Beethoven. Here is a link to a YouTube video with the first movement played by pianist Arthur Rubinstein and violinist Henryk Szeryng.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAcWGVC4Nqc

By Jacob Stockinger

He was a contrarian who was widely accepted and valued.

He was an iconoclast who achieved the height of respectability when Queen Elizabeth II of England named him to an honorary knighthood.

And he was an eclectic composer, whose style could be charmingly simple, melodic and tonal, or knottily atonal, difficult and complex.

The British composer and conductor Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (pronounced Davis, below) died this past week at his island home off the coast of Scotland. He was 81 and had been ill with leukemia. (You can hear his “An Orkney Wedding With Sunrise” in a YouTube video at the bottom.) 

The year is early yet, but it has not been a kind one to classical music. We have already lost the avant-garde French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, the German-Austrian conductor and early music pioneer Nikolaus Harnoncourt and now Davies.

Here are obituaries about Sir Peter Maxwell Davies with video and audio clips:

From BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35802564

From the Deceptive Cadence blog on NPR (National Public Radio):

http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2016/03/14/470408883/british-composer-peter-maxwell-davies-dies-at-81

From the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/arts/music/peter-maxwell-davies-contrarian-british-composer-dies-at-81.html?_r=0

From The Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/mar/14/sir-peter-maxwell-davies-obituary

And from Classical-music.com:

http://www.classical-music.com/news/sir-peter-maxwell-davies-dies-aged-81