Ernő Dohnányi (born July 27, 1877, Pozsony, Hung.—died Feb. 9, 1960, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, and conductor, principally known for his Variations on a Nursery Song for piano and orchestra.
Dohnányi studied in Budapest at the Royal Academy of Music, where his first symphony was performed in 1897. As a pianist he traveled widely and established a reputation as one of the best performers of his day.
He taught at the Berlin Academy for Music (1908–15) and was conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic and associate director of the Budapest Academy of Music (1919). In 1931 Dohnányi was musical director of Hungarian radio. In 1948 he left Hungary as a political exile; his influence under the prewar regime was held against him, and his music was banned in communist Hungary for more than 10 years. He taught in Argentina and from 1949 held the position of composer-in-residence at Florida State University. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955.
Dohnányi’s music, which was chiefly influenced by Johannes Brahms, was late Romantic and conservative in style, and after 1910 he occupied only a minor place among contemporary Hungarian composers. His works include the Ruralia Hungarica for violin, three symphonies, a ballet, the Suite in F-sharp Minor, three operas, and chamber works, notably the Second String Quartet and the two piano and string quintets.
Ernő Dohnányi’s composition Symphonic Minutes comprises of five short movements, each only a couple of minutes long. It has undoubtedly become one of the composer’s most popular works, a popularity that predates the more recent renaissance in the composer’s fortunes. Indeed for the past few decades, it has been performed regularly in Hungary and could frequently be heard on the radio.
We can thank Dohányi’s second wife, Elza Galafrs for the work’s inception. Elza was a Berlin born actress and from 1912 Dohnániy regarded her as a collaborative partner for his own stage music creations. It was she who successfully mounted Dohnányi’s pantomime Pierette in Vienna, where earlier it had been a failure.
Dohnányi had long been preoccupied with the thought of turning his successful Ruralia Hungarica composition into theatre music, but the work was self evidently too short. The Symphonic Minutes are, then, a supplement to the Ruralia movements, and the two cycles combined became the dance legend Holy Torch. This was premiered at the Hungarian State Opera House on December 6th 1934, with choreography by Elza Galafrs, who devised an entirely novel system of notation for the work, writing essentially a dance score. She had long sensed that the traditional method of notating dance steps was both cumbersome and misleading, and so taking the five line system of music as her starting point, she wrote her instructions, which thus became readily comprehensible to even a layman, between five lines, each a few centimetres apart. This contained the music, a textual description of the action, precise movements of the dancers, the placing of the dance groups on the stage and even instructions for the lighting. In the choreography, she endeavoured for the placing of the dancers in each group scene to evoke a Hungarian folk motif. (This remarkable “score” is now on display at the Paris Museum of Dance.)
The composition however was premiered not in its stage version but in an orchestral guise. Earlier of course, there had been occasions when new works by Bartók, Kodály and Dohnányi were premiered together, but this still counted as a very special occasion. The first occasion was the legendary concert marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda into modern day Budapest, in which Kodály’s Psalmus Hungaricus, Bartók’s Dance Suite and Dohnányi’s Festival Overture were all given their world premieres. Ten years later in 1933, the Orchestra of the Philharmonic Society celebrated its eightieth birthday with a concert that gave the first performances of Kodály’s Galantian Dances, Bartók’s Five Folk Songs with Orchestral Accompaniment, and Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes. The critics were enthusiastic – Aladár Tóth wrote appreciatively: “What nation could present three such geniuses at the same time?” He had this to say about Dohnányi’s work: “This little bagatelle is all harmony, form and lightness, which frolics in one place, is capricious in another, and pure song elsewhere; when it is witty it is also wild, in other words, a divertimento which not only entertains the mind but also raises the soul. It transfixes and liberates.”
We think of Dohnányi’s artistry in terms of its light handed composition, its virtuosity, its remarkable craftsmanship and its largely unclouded, upbeat charm. The score of Symphonic Minutes matches these expectations perfectly.
The opening moment, marked Capriccio, is awash with filigree woodwind passages which evoke the technique of German Romantic piano virtuosity, although perhaps we ought rather to think in terms of Mendelssohn’s fairy music. The handling of the orchestra and the richness and virtuosity of the orchestration evokes the art of Richard Strauss.
The Rhapsody movement begins with a sad, discursive melody on the cor anglais to which the clarinet responds. In this evocative music, we encounter both the nature music of late Romanic opera – for example Wagner’s shepherd boy’s melody (and we also hear a near verbatim quotation from Tristan) – coupled with a night monologue closely related to folk music that occurs often in the works of Kodály and Wagner.
At the centre of the work is the Scherzo which is momentous robustly orchestrated dance music. We could be forgiven for thinking we can hear the influence of Prokofiev. The brass sonorities of the emotional, lyrical melody that counterpoints the boisterous principal section is late Romantic in character, although we can find similar emotional devices employed by film composers in the mid 1950s.
Dohnányi’s Symphonic Minutes also employs a self-explanatory variation form. The Tema con variazioni takes as its subject matter a nobly simple 16th century melody (“Tema del seicento”). The variations initially resolve the rhythm of the theme into soft, constant motion, but then the music takes on a more steely edge. The mood of this music was to return in the chorale of Bartók’s Concerto. The gracefully shaped clarinet melody of the penultimate variation seems very distant from the original theme, but the final variation faithfully returns to the theme, whereupon a celesta joins in, and its secretive sonority raises the music into a hitherto unsuspected ethereal world.
The closing movement (Rondo) is full of energy and again, we find the virtuosity of the opening fairy scherzo music. But here the music takes on folk music character: it is good humoured, cloudless and joyful, a fitting successor to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.
Although Dohnányi’s composition is a treasure trove of musical historical associations, when we hear the five movements performed together, we derive an unmistakeable impression of a first rate musical personality.
Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers and he was best known for his Requiem.
Life and Music
It would appear that Fauré’s exceptional gift for music was obvious to everyone except his father, Toussaint-Honore.
Composer-teacher Louis Niedermeyer was so impressed by the nine-year old Fauré that he was belatedly enrolled (free!) at the Ecole de Musique Classique et Religieuse Paris. He stayed there for 11 years.
Among the budding young composer’s earliest published works are Chants Sans Paroles (Songs Without Words), and the Cantique de Jean Racine, a ravishing choral miniature from 1865.
In 1883, Fauré married Marie Fremiet, daughter of the renowned sculptor, Emmanuel.
In 1888, after almost 20 year’s labour, Fauré’s Requiem, a radiant masterwork affirming the composer’s unshakeable belief in the afterlife, received its first performance.
In 1892, Fauré was appointed Inspector of Music in Paris. By then he had begun an affair with Emma Bardac (who later became Debussy’s wife), an effervescent, musically cultured woman who gave birth to a daughter, Helene in June of that year.
In 1896 he was appointed chief organist of the Madeleine and, succeeding Massenet, professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. During his 25 years there, he taught an extraordinary array of talented pupils including Ravel, Cortot, Enescu, Roger-Ducasse and Nadia Boulanger.
At the turn of the century Fauré met 24-year old Marguerite Hasselmans, a highly intelligent and gifted pianist. She was to remain his mistress and constant companion to the end of his days.
Behind the public success lay the private tragedy of Fauré’s increasing deafness and the onset of disturbing aural hallucinations.
Fauré died in 1924 from pneumonia.
Did you know?
It wasn’t until he was 50 years old that Fauré’s exceptional talents began to be recognised.
With music described as “breathtaking” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record), “imaginative and expressive” (The National Post), “a pulse-pounding barrage on the senses” (The Globe and Mail), and “Bartok on steroids” (Birmingham News), Kelly-Marie Murphy’s voice is well known on the Canadian music scene. She has created a number of memorable works for some of Canada’s leading performers and ensembles, including the Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras, The Gryphon Trio, James Campbell, Shauna Rolston, the Cecilia and Afiara String Quartets, and Judy Loman.
Dr. Murphy’s music has been performed around the world by outstanding soloists and ensembles, and has had radio broadcasts in over 22 countries. Her music has been interpreted by renowned conductors such as Sir Andrew Davis, David Brophy, Bramwell Tovey, and Mario Bernardi. Her music has been heard in iconic concert halls, such as Carnegie Hall in New York, The Mozarteum in Salzburg, and The National Concert Hall in Dublin.
Besides many academic scholarships awarded in Canada and England, Dr. Murphy has also won prizes for her music, dating back to 1992. She won first prize and the People’s Choice Award at the CBC Young Composer’s Competition in 1994 (string quartet category); received 2 honorable mentions in the New Music Concerts competition in 1995; earned fifth place at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1996 for her first orchestra piece, From the Drum Comes a Thundering Beat. . .; was awarded first and second prizes in the Maryland Composer’s Competition at Loyola College in Baltimore, 1998; won third place in the Alexander Zemlinsky Prize for Composition in 1999 for her work, Utterances; won first prize in the International Horn Society’s Composer’s Competition, 2001, for her work, Departures and Deviations; and in 2003 won first prize for her harp concerto, And Then At Night I Paint the Stars in the Centara Corporation New Music Festival Composer’s Competition.
Dr. Murphy has completed short residencies at the Snowbird Institute for the Arts, Utah, with Joan Tower; Tapestry Music Theatre/Canadian Opera Company, Toronto; rESOund Festival of Contemporary Music, Edmonton; Strings of the Future International String Quartet Festival, Ottawa; Soundstreams/Encounters, Toronto; and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In 2004 Dr. Murphy was honored with The Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Calgary, and in 2005 as the Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition from the University of Toronto. Dr. Murphy was granted the distinction of Honorable Mention in the 2008 Barlow Prize for composition. From 2006 to 2008, she served as composer-in-residence to the National Youth Orchestra of Canada.
Kelly-Marie Murphy was born on a NATO base in Sardegna, Italy, and grew up on Canadian Armed Forces bases all across Canada. She began her studies in composition at the University of Calgary with William Jordan and Allan Bell, and later received a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Leeds, England, where she studied with Philip Wilby. After living and working for many years in the Washington D.C. area where she was designated “an alien of extraordinary ability” by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, she is now based in Ottawa.
Curiosity, Genius, and the Search For Petula Clark
This piece was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with the support of the Government of Canada and the Glenn Gould Foundation. It is a single movement work for orchestra written to celebrate Glenn Gould’s 85th birthday and the 70th anniversary of his debut performance with the TSO.
Glenn Gould was a prodigiously talented pianist who had already made his mark on the concert stage by the age of 30. He retired from the stage in 1964 and turned his energies towards recording, broadcasting, and communication. He had a staggering intellect and was interested in everything. He read many newspapers each day, and at least 4 hard cover books each week. One wonders when he found the time to practice?
For this piece, I wanted to explore the difference between the public perception of Glenn Gould (quirky, odd, ingenious, obsessive), and how Glenn perceived himself (a regular guy with many interests; possibly wearing a cheap suit). He did a fascinating series of radio documentaries, the first of which was called The Search for Petula Clark. Essentially, Glenn was intrigued by chasing radio relay stations on a drive up to Northern Ontario. At certain intervals, he could hear Petula Clark’s current hit, “Who Am I?” By the end of the drive, Glenn was quite an expert on the piece, and the distance between relay stations. Another thing you need to know about Glenn was that he loved games, especially guessing games. You can imagine him driving so as not to miss any of the relayed broadcasts of Petula Clark on his way up north! He speaks about this pop song with the same focus, attention, and intellect as he would use on Bach. It is both funny and charming. I tried to weave these elements through the piece — energy, curiosity, reflection, and satisfaction.
I am very grateful for the support of the Glenn Gould Foundation, and to Lorne Tulk – Gould’s longtime friend and recording engineer. It was a wonderful experience getting to know more about what made Glenn Gould an extraordinary person.
Premiere: First performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor, Toronto, September 2017.
“[Azmeh’s] rhapsodic clarinet [is] able to seduce with a rare intimacy and explode in ecstasy.”Los-Angeles Times
“Spellbinding!”The New Yorker
“brilliant liquidity and meltingly beautiful tone” The Times, London
Hailed by critics and audiences alike, winner of Opus Klassik award in 2019 clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh has gained international recognition for his distinctive voice across diverse musical genres.
Originally from Damascus, Syria, Kinan Azmeh brings his music to all corners of the world as a soloist, composer and improviser. Notable appearances include the Opera Bastille, Paris; Tchaikovsky Grand Hall, Moscow; Carnegie Hall and the UN General Assembly, New York; the Royal Albert Hall, London; Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires; Philharmonie, Berlin; the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, Washington DC; the Mozarteum, Salzburg, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie; and in his native Syria at the opening concert of the Damascus Opera House.
He has appeared as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Dusseldorf Symphony, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, The Azerbaijan State Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, Symphony Nova Scotia, Toronto Symphony, A Far Cry, The Knights Orchestra,Calgary philharmonic, Qatar Philharmonic and the Syrian Symphony Orchestra among others, and has shared the stage with such musical luminaries as Yo-Yo Ma, Daniel Barenboim, Marcel Khalife, John McLaughlin, Francois Rabbath, Aynur and Jivan Gasparian.
Kinan’s compositions include several works for solo, chamber, and orchestral music, as well as music for film, live illustration, and electronics. His resent works were commissioned by The New York Philharmonic, The Seattle Symphony, The Knights Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Elbphilharmonie, Apple Hill string quartet, Quatuor Voce, Brooklyn Rider, Cello Octet Amsterdam, Aizuri Quartet and Bob Wilson.
An advocate for new music, several concertos were dedicated to him by composers such as Kareem Roustom, Dia Succari, Dinuk Wijeratne, Zaid Jabri, Saad Haddad and Guss Janssen, in addition to a large number of chamber music works.
In addition to his own Arab-Jazz Quartet CityBand and his Hewar trio, he has also been playing with the Silkroad Ensemble since 2012, whose 2017 Grammy Award-winning album “Sing Me Home” features Kinan as a clarinetist and composer.
Kinan Azmeh is a graduate of New York’s Juilliard School as a student of Charles Neidich, and of both the Damascus High institute of Music where he studied with Shukry Sahwki, Nicolay Viovanof and Anatoly Moratof, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering. Kinan earned his doctorate degree in music from the City University of New York in 2013.
His first opera “Songs for Days to Come” which is fully sung in Arabic, was recently premiered in Osnabruck, Germany in June 2022 to a great acclaim. He has recently been appointed to the National Council for the Arts on a nomination by President Joe Biden.
We would love more than anything to sit down and pick Kinan Azmeh’s brain about the art of improvisation. Lucky for us Jeremy Chapman, of playbyearandimprovise.com, did just that back in May of 2021.
I have always loved to compose, always loved to play as a soloist with orchestra and I have always loved to improvise, so I decided to write a piece that would allow me to do it all at once!
The three movements: Love on 139th Street in D, November 22nd and Wedding were originally written in 2005 for my project Hewar, an ensemble made of clarinet, oud and voice, and what began simply as three lead-sheets ended up becoming a full orchestral work and my most performed work.
The suite tries to blur the lines between the composed and the improvised, which comes from my belief that some of the best-written music is one that sounds spontaneous and improvised, and some of the best improvisations are the ones that sound structured as if composed. This work is meant to both turn an orchestra into a band and to give a great room for the soloist to improvise
and to “composer on the spot” and to play freely within the larger structure of
the work.
Love on 139th street in D, is inspired by NewYork City’s neighborhood of Harlem where I lived for few years, a simple homage to its cultural mix and a dedication to my downstairs neighbor who blasted reggaetone all day long!
November 22nd is a meditative work that tries to depict that ambiguous emotion one encounters by feeling at home somewhere far from one’s original home. I wrote this piece in the US inspired by the sonic memory of a marketplace that used to exist behind my parents apartment back in Damascus, it seemed to have a slow and steady pulse to it similar to the rhythm of life which keeps moving forward regardless of our emotions about it.
Wedding is made of two contrasting sections, a relatively calm one followed by a fast and energetic dance. It tries to capture the general mood found in a Syrian village wedding party usually held in the public square for everyone to attend. These parties are always exciting and never predictable.
Long known as the “Dean of African-American Classical Composers,” as well as one of America’s foremost composers, William Grant Still has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. On May 11, 1895, he was born in Woodville (Wilkinson County) Mississippi, to parents who were teachers and musicians. They were of Negro, Indian, Spanish, Irish and Scotch bloods. When William was only a few months old, his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English in the high school. There his musical education began–with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather.
In Wilberforce University, he took courses leading to a B.S. degree, but spent most of his time conducting the band, learning to play the various instruments involved and making his initial attempts to compose and to orchestrate. His subsequent studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music were financed at first by a legacy from his father, and later by a scholarship established just for him by the faculty.
At the end of his college years, he entered the world of commercial (popular) music, playing in orchestras and orchestrating, working in particular with the violin, cello and oboe. His employers included W. C. Handy, Don Voorhees, Sophie Tucker, Paul Whiteman, Willard Robison and Artie Shaw, and for several years he arranged and conducted the Deep River Hour over CBS and WOR. While in Boston playing oboe in the Shuffle Along orchestra, Still applied to study at the New England Conservatory with George Chadwick, and was again rewarded with a scholarship due to Mr. Chadwicks own vision and generosity. He also studied, again on an individual scholarship, with the noted ultra-modern composer, Edgard Varese.
In the Twenties, Still made his first appearances as a serious composer in New York, and began a valued friendship with Dr. Howard Hanson of Rochester. Extended Guggenheim and Rosenwald Fellowships were given to him, as well as important commissions from the Columbia Broadcasting System, the New York Worlds Fair 1939-40, Paul Whiteman, the League of Composers, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the American Accordionists Association. In 1944, he won the Jubilee prize of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra for the best Overture to celebrate its Jubilee season, with a work called Festive Overture. In 1953, a Freedoms Foundation Award came to him for his To You, America! which honored West Points Sesquicentennial Celebration. In 1961, he received the prize offered by the U. S. Committee for the U. N., the N.F.M.C. and the Aeolian Music Foundation for his orchestral work, The Peaceful Land, cited as the best musical composition honoring the United Nations.
After moving to Los Angeles in the early 1930’s, citations from numerous organizations, local and elsewhere in the United States, came to the composer. Along with them came honorary degrees like the following: Master of Music from Wilberforce in 1936; Doctor of Music from Howard University in 1941; Doctor of Music from Oberlin College in 1947; Doctor of Letters from Bates College in 1954; Doctor of Laws from the University of Arkansas in 1971; Doctor of Fine Arts from Pepperdine University in 1973; Doctor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, the Peabody Conservatory and the University of Southern California.
Some of the awards that Still received were: the second Harmon Award in 1927; a trophy of honor from Local 767 of the Musicians Union A.F. of M., of which he was a member; trophies from the League of Allied Arts in Los Angeles (1965) and the National Association of Negro Musicians; citations from the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Board of Supervisors (1963); a trophy from the A.P.P.A. in Washington D.C. (1968); the Phi Beta Sigma George Washington Carver Award (1953); the Richard Henry Lee Patriotism Award from Knotts Berry Farm, California; a citation from the Governor of Arkansas in 1972; the third annual prize of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982. He also lectured in various universities from time to time.
In 1939, Still married journalist and concert pianist, Verna Arvey, who became his principal collaborator. They remained together until Still died of heart failure on December 3, 1978. ASCAP took care of all of Dr. Stills hospitalization until his death.
Dr. Still’s service to the cause of brotherhood is evidenced by his many firsts in the musical realm: Still was the first Afro-American in the United States to have a symphony performed by a major symphony orchestra. He was the first to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the United States, when in 1936, he directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in his compositions at the Hollywood Bowl. He was the first Afro-American to conduct a major symphony orchestra in the Deep South in 1955, when he directed the New Orleans Philharmonic at Southern University. He was the first of his race to conduct a White radio orchestra in New York City. He was the first to have an opera produced by a major company in the United States, when in 1949, his Troubled Island was done at the City Center of Music and Drama in New York City. He was the first to have an opera televised over a national network. With these firsts, Still was a pioneer, but, in a larger sense, he pioneered because he was able to create music capable of interesting the greatest conductors of the day: truly serious music, but with a definite American flavor.
Still wrote over 150 compositions (well over 200 if his lost early works could be counted), including operas, ballets, symphonies, chamber works, and arrangements of folk themes, especially Negro spirituals, plus instrumental, choral and solo vocal works.
“Intensely soulful… Virtuoso” The New York Times
Long known as the “Dean of African-American Classical Composers,” as well as one of America’s foremost composers, William Grant Still has had the distinction of becoming a legend in his own lifetime. On May 11, 1895, he was born in Woodville (Wilkinson County) Mississippi, to parents who were teachers and musicians. They were of Negro, Indian, Spanish, Irish and Scotch bloods. When William was only a few months old, his father died and his mother took him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she taught English in the high school. There his musical education began–with violin lessons from a private teacher, and with later inspiration from the Red Seal operatic recordings bought for him by his stepfather.