The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: In 2019 who died? What recordings won prizes? What music had its premiere? Here is a comprehensive and detailed worldwide retrospective from Wikipedia | January 2, 2020

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By Jacob Stockinger

A new year is always a good time to do a review and take a look backward to assess the previous year.

Many local publications – newspapers and magazines — do Best of the Year round-ups.

But The Ear has never seen a more comprehensive list with major news and almost daily entries around the world than he found in Wikipedia, which has retrospectives going back to 2009 and looking forward to 2029.

In short, all the reviws are well worth exploring for the reminders they hold that, as the proverb goes, “Ars longa, vita brevis” or “Art is long, life is short.” (It is usually quoted in Latin translation from the original ancient Greek that was written by Hippocrates.)

There are seven different categories to click on, each with long entries. If you hover the cursor over the names or words that are spelled in blue, you will see more text and often a photograph. The categories are:

EVENTS

NEW WORKS

NEW OPERAS

ALBUMS

DEATHS

MAJOR AWARDS

REFERENCES

There are so many details that you may want to check out just one or two categories at a time over several days.

Here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_in_classical_music

Do you know of someone or something – especially of local importance, such as the death in October of longtime Madison music critic John W. Barker (below, in a photo by Mark Golbach) – that did not make the list? Please leave word in the Comment section.

And here’s hoping that 2020 brings us even more important and memorable new and old music, but less loss.


Posted in Classical music
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2 Comments »

  1. I agree that the Wikipedia entry is marvelous. Note that it has 586 footnotes so there are lots of references and leads to be followed too.

    Paul Badura-Skoda, the famous Austrian pianist died in September at the age of 91. Although born in Europe, he was an artist in residence at the UW Music School in the 1960’s: I heard a concert from him. He was a magnificient pianist.

    Like

    Comment by fflambeau — January 2, 2020 @ 8:26 pm

  2. Michael Hanson.
    Jazz performer and radio announcer at WPR.
    RIP.

    Like

    Comment by Ronnie — January 2, 2020 @ 6:36 am


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