The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Who are the 12 greatest opera singers on the stage today?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Who do you think are the 12 greatest opera stars and singers performing today?
You can see how your judgment compares with that of the panel of experts who did the same for Limelight, an Australian arts magazine.
Here is a link:
http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/262092%2Ctoday-s-12-greatest-opera-singers.aspx
See how you score.
And what you think of their choices.
Use the COMMENTS section to let us know.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Arts, Australia, choral music, Classical music, experts, Jacob Stockinger, Limelight magazine, Music, opera, singer, star, United States, vocal music
Classical music: Happy Halloween! Here is some spooky music along with a spooky way to listen to it.
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By Jacob Stockinger
BOO!
Today is Halloween 2015.
Trick or treat?
The Ear is giving out treats today.
Eeriness has played a role in classical music since its beginning.
So here are the 13 scariest pieces of classical music – with links to performances – as determined by Limelight magazine:
http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/13-scariest-pieces-classical-music-halloween
And here is another selection of Halloween music, 10 pieces also with links to performances, from The Imaginative Conservative:
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/10/classical-music-pieces-for-halloween.html
Together the two websites offer a wide variety of composers: Camille Saint-Saens, Franz Liszt, Johann Sebastian Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, Hector Berlioz, Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Gyorgy Ligeti, Antonin Dvorak, Josef Suk, Jean Sibelius, Andre Caplet, Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert.
You could stream them loudly as you do trick-or-treat with neighborhood children.
But The Ear also wants to share what he finds to be a fascinating and irresistible but nonetheless spooky way of listening to the famous Organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, a work that made both lists of music appropriate to Halloween.
The YouTube video uses an ingenious but spooky visual bar graph bar way to follow the music. Try it and see for yourself! Over 25 million people have!
Then leave any suggestions you have for Halloween music, along with a link to a YouTube or other performance if possible, in the COMMENT section.
The Ear wants to hear.
Tags: Andre Caplet, Arnold Schoenberg, Arts, Bach, bar graph, Baroque, Bartok, Berlioz, BWV 565, Carl Maria von Weber, Chamber music, choral music, Classical music, Dvorak, Franz Schubert, fugue, graph, Halloween, Jacob Stockinger, Jean Sibelius, Johann Sebastian Bach, Josef Suk, Ligeti, Limelight magazine, Liszt, Madison, Music, Mussorgsky, Orchestra, Piano, Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saens, Schoenberg, The Imaginative Conservative, toccata, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, trick or treat, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Viola, vocal music, YouTube
Classical music: Mother’s Day turns 100 today. What piece of music would you play for your Mom on her holiday? And can you pass NPR’s Mother’s Day opera quiz?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today is Mother’s Day, 2014.
That makes it the 100th anniversary of the national holiday that President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed in 1914, as World War I was beginning. The timing then seemed appropriate since the now festive and consumer-driven holiday was started in 1908 by Anna Jarvis as a way to honor fallen soldiers and to work for peace.
Here is a link to a story about the holiday’s history — with information about how Mother’s Day is celebrated in the Midwest and the Arab world — from National Geographic Society:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140508-mothers-day-nation-gifts-facts-culture-moms/
In past years I have asked: What is the best music you can think of to express Mother’s Day? ?Songs My Mother Taught Me” by Antonin Dvorak? The lovely and moving “mother” movement from the “German” Requiem by Johannes Brahms? The beautiful song cycle “Frauenliebe- und -leben” (A Woman’s Loves and Life) by Robert Schumann?
Here is a Top 10 list from Limelight Magazine:
And here are the Top 5 classical choices by the famed classical music radio station WQXR-FM in New York City:
http://www.wqxr.org/#!/story/208323-top-five-classical-pieces-about-moms/
Today I want to challenge to take a Mother’s Day quiz that appeared on the “Deceptive Cadence” blog on NPR.
Here is a link:
But this year my thoughts are more personal.
The Ear lost his Mom a year ago last March, but in the time since then I have had plenty of time to think about the loss and to see what music comes to mind when I think of her.
Now she was not a sophisticated listener of classical music.
But she loved a lot of fine music and had good taste.
She especially loved one piece in particular: Frederic Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp Minor, Op. 64, No. 2. It is arguably Chopin’s finest waltz.
But it also embodies my Mom for two reasons.
One reason: When I was young she took to see Arthur Rubinstein (below top) at Carnegie Hall (below bottom) – she even got STAGE sets — for his all-Chopin recital on Nov. 10, 1961. (I later found out that a young Emanuel Ax was also in the audience that evening, and was as impressed it as I was.) Rubinstein played that waltz, as I recall, perhaps as an encore.
More importantly, she also liked the particular Chopin waltz because I played it. In fact she probably liked the way I played more than the way Rubinstein did.
I was her son, after all, and Rubinstein wasn’t.
So this one is for you, Mom, on your day:
Now, if you care to, please leave me a REPLY, with a link to YouTube video if possible, of the one piece of music -– instrumental, song or opera aria, whatever -– that you would like to play and dedicate to you Mom whether she is living or not.
The Ear wants to hear.
And so would your Mom.
Tags: Anna Jarvis, Antonín Dvořák, Arthur Rubinstein, Brahms, Carnegie Hall, Child, Chopin, Dvorak, Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Limelight magazine, Mother, Mothers Day, National Geographic, National Geographic Society, New York City, NPR, Robert Schumann, Schumann, son, Waltz, Woodrow Wilson, WQXR-FM, YouTube
Classical music: Today is Valentine’s Day. What piece of music best celebrates love? Here are Limelight Magazine’s Top 10 Sexiest Moments in Classical Music. Leave some music and words for your Valentine right here. Plus, the University of Wisconsin School of Music has successfully reinvented the annual Concerto Competition Winners’ concert -– to loud approval and multiple standing ovations from a packed house.
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READER SURVEY: Today is Valentine’s Day. What is the best piece of romantic music you know of to listen to or to send to someone to celebrate this day? You can even leave a link to a YouTube video and a dedication in the COMMENT section. Here is a link to Limelight Magazine’s Top 10 Sexiest Moments in Classical Music:
http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/371934,the-10-sexiest-moments-in-classical-music.aspx
By Jacob Stockinger
Little things can add up to a big difference.
Take the annual concert given by the winners (below) of this year’s concerto competition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music.
Here are links to background of the event and the performers in the preview story that was posted on this blog and and a link to the performers’ biographies that appeared on “Fanfare,” the outstanding bog of the UW School of Music:
http://uwmadisonschoolofmusic.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/symphony-showcase2013-14/
Someone at the SOM (as the School of Music is referred to by insiders) rightly decided that the event deserved a higher public profile. (Except where noted, performance photos are by The Ear.)
So they made a few adjustments.
They booked Mills Hall for a Saturday night – last Saturday night, in fact — the best night of the week for entertainment events.
Then they rechristened the event the Symphonic Showcase, since the UW Symphony Orchestra (below with graduate student and assistant conductor Kyle Knox) is the common denominator and accompanies all the concerto winners and also premieres the winning piece by a student composer. The Ear likes that emphasis on collective or collaborative music-making.
They started the concert early, at 7 p.m.
That was because they also added a small and informal dessert reception from 9 to 11 p.m. — with all the proceeds of a $10 ticket going to a student scholarship fund — at the nearby Tripp Commons in the UW Memorial Union.
And what were the results?
Nothing short of a spectacular success.
Mills Hall was packed just about full (see the photo below by Michael R. Anderson).
And the big, enthusiastic audience greeted each performer with cheers and a standing ovation. And they deserved that. All of the winners played well and all chose great works to perform.
Here a rundown by contestant.
If you weren’t there -– well, you probably should regret it, You missed out on a lot of fun and a lot of beautiful music-making by a very impressive group of talented students. Maybe some state legislators were in the audience and will stop clowning around trying to micro-manage and ruin the UW while they say they’re really trying to fix it.
The evening started out with an orchestral showpiece, a kind of Romantic tone poem-concerto grosso that highlighted each section. That might be expected since the “Russian Easter” Overture came from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a master orchestrator who taught Igor Stravinsky the craft of scoring music.
Graduate student Kyle Knox (below) conducted and did a fine job of bouncing the music around to various sections and keeping a clear line.
Violinist Madlen Breckbill (below) confidently commanded the stage with an appropriately lyrical and heart-breaking reading of the first movement of Samuel Barber’s masterful Violin Concerto. It was a thoroughly convincing rebuff to those people and critics who say you need to hear a new piece of music several times to know it is great. This kind of greatness you get from the first notes.
Saxophonist Erika Anderson (below left) played and projected with absorbing conviction the new “Poema” (2014) by student composer 24-year-old Russian-born composer Daria Tennikova (below right), who writes in an impressively accessible yet thoroughly modern idiom.
Clarinetist Kai-Ju Ho (below top) brought both lyricism and swing to Aaron Copland’s underperformed Clarinet Concerto, pleasing conductor James Smith (below bottom right), himself a very accomplished clarinetist who performed the same concerto five times under the composer.
SeungWha Baek (below top, playing; below bottom by Michael R. Anderson) brought out the sizzle and virtuosity in the dazzling first movement of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with its ingenious Hanon-like five-finger exercise motif – except that this is no work for beginners, as you can see and hear at the bottom in a YouTube video with pianist Martha Argerich and conductor Andre Previn.
Flutist Mi-Li Chang brought beautiful tone and playfulness, even Gallic charm, to the Concerto for Flute by Jacques Ibert.
And pianist Sung-Ho Yang brought the show to a close with a surprising subtle reading of Franz Liszt’s flashy and bombastic Piano Concerto No 1. The whole work is like one long cadenza – not one of the Ear’s favorites — so it was refreshing to hear Yang emphasize the quiet passages and subtlety, all the while bringing out the dialoguing back and forth between the piano and the orchestra.
And after the music, we went to a quiet but friendly reception that featured coffee and tea as well as chocolate cake and pumpkin bars (below), set out much like a Wayne Thiebaud painting. It was a chance to meet the musicians and thank them for a splendid evening.
Bravo to all.
The Ear is betting and hoping that next year will find the new format repeated.
Tinkering with failure is one thing.
But why tinker with success?
Tags: Aaron Copland, Andre Previn, Arts, Barber, blog, clarinet concerto, Classical music, composer, Fanfare, flute, flute concerto, Franz Liszt, Igor Stravinsky, Jacques Ibert, Kyle Knox, Limelight magazine, Liszt, Martha Argerich, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Orchestra, Overture, Piano, Piano concerto, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Romantic music, Russia, Russian Easter Overture, Samuel Barber, Saturday, Saxophone, Sergei Prokofiev, sex, sexy, Stravinsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Valentine, Valentine's Day, Wayne Thiebaud, YouTube
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The Well-Tempered Ear 
Classical music: Legendary Austrian pianist and scholar Paul Badura-Skoda dies at 91. In the 1960s, he was artist-in-residence at the UW-Madison School of Music
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By Jacob Stockinger
Paul Badura-Skoda, the celebrated Austrian pianist who was equally known for his performances and his scholarship, and who was artist-in-residence at the UW-Madison in the mid-1960s until 1970, died this past Tuesday at 91.
A Vienna native, Badura-Skoda was especially known for his interpretations of major Classical-era composers who lived and worked in that city including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
He was the only pianist to have recorded the complete sonatas by those composers on both the modern piano and the fortepiano, the appropriate period instrument.
If memory serves, Badura-Skoda’s last appearances in Madison were almost a decade ago for concerts in which he played: the last piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert; a Mozart piano concerto with the UW Chamber Orchestra; and a solo recital of Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin at Farley’s House of Pianos.
But he also performed and recorded Bach, Chopin and Schumann among others. And Badura-Skoda was also renowned as a conductor, composer, editor and teacher.
You can find many of his recordings and interviews on YouTube. Normally, this blog uses shorter excerpts. But the legendary Paul Badura-Soda is special. So in the YouTube video at the bottom you can hear Badura-Skoda’s complete last recital of Schubert (Four Impromptus, D. 899 or Op. 90), Schumann (“Scenes of Childhood”, Op. 15) and Mozart (Sonata in C Minor, K. 457). He performed it just last May at the age of 91 at the Vienna Musikverein, where the popular New Year concerts take place.
Here are links to several obituaries:
Here is one from the British Gramophone Magazine:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/classical-music-news/pianist-paul-badura-skoda-has-died-at-the-age-of-91
Here is one from WFMT radio station in Chicago, which interviewed him:
https://www.wfmt.com/2019/09/26/pianist-paul-badura-skoda-dies-at-age-91/
Here is one, with some surprisingly good details, from Limelight Magazine:
https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/paul-badura-skoda-has-died/
And here is his updated Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Badura-Skoda
But you will notice a couple of things.
One is that The Ear could not find any obituaries from such major mainstream media as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. But each had many other feature stories about and reviews of Badura-Skoda’s concerts over the years in their areas.
The other noteworthy thing is that none of the obituaries mentions Badura-Skoda’s years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music in the 1960s, where he helped to raise the profile and prestige of the School of Music. Getting Badura-Skoda to join the university was considered quite an unexpected coup.
So here are two links to UW-Madison press releases that discuss that chapter of his life and career.
Here is an archival story from 1966 when Badura-Skoda first arrived at the UW-Madison:
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/UW/UW-idx?type=turn&entity=UW.v67i8.p0011&id=UW.v67i8&isize=text
And here is a press release that came from the UW-Madison News Service eight years ago on the occasion of one of Badura-Skoda’s many visits to and performances in Madison:
https://news.wisc.edu/writers-choice-madison-welcomes-badura-skoda-again-and-again/
Rest in Peace, maestro, and Thank You.
It would be nice if Wisconsin Public Radio paid homage with some of Badura-Skoda’s recordings since a complete edition was issued last year on the occasion of his 90th birthday.
If you wish to pay your own respects or leave your memories of Paul Badura-Skoda and his playing, please leave something in the comment section.
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