classical music
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Cécile Chaminade *VIII 8 1857 / The Life You Give
Cécile Chaminade, born Aug. 8, 1857, in Paris, France, is the composer and pianist known chiefly for her piano music, which she performed on numerous concert tours, particularly in England.Chaminade’s earliest music studies were with her mother, a pianist and singer. Because her father forbade her enrollment in a conservatory, Chaminade studied composition privately with…
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Parsifal (Wagner) premiered today in 1882
Parsifal, WWV 111Music Drama / Opera in three actsComposer: Richard WagnerLibretto: Richard WagnerBased on the 13th-century Middle High German chivalric romance Parsifal of the Minnesänger Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the Old French chivalric romance Perceval ou le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes, in the 12th century. Both tell different accounts of the Arthurian…
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Evelyn Glennie *VII 19 1965 / The Life You Give
Evelyn Glennie is the world’s foremost, and first full-time, solo percussionist. She has been pivotal to the expansion of percussion as solo instruments, personally having commissioned over 200 new works. The recipient of enormous media attention due to her deafness, Glennie is likewise noteworthy for the variety of her repertoire and recording projects. Glennie was…
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Herman Prey *VII 11 1929 / The Life You Give
Growing up during the regime of the the National Socialist Party, Hermann Prey was scheduled to be drafted at the age of 15 when the end of World War II brought peace and a chance for him to study voice with Gunther Baum and Jaro Prohaska at the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. He sang…
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Carl Orff *VII 10 1895 / The Life You Give
Carl Orff, born July 10, 1895, in Munich, Germany, is the composer known particularly for his operas and dramatic works and for his innovations in music education. Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music and with the German composer Heinrich Kaminski and later conducted in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt. His Schulwerk, a manual describing…
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Gustav Mahler *VII 7 1860 / The Life You Give
Gustav Mahler, born July 7, 1860, in Kaliště, Bohemia, Austrian Empire, is the composer and conductor, noted for his 10 symphonies and various songs with orchestra, which drew together many different strands of Romanticism. Although his music was largely ignored for 50 years after his death, Mahler was later regarded as an important forerunner of…
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Leoš Janáček *VII 3 1854 / The Life You Give
Leoš Janáček, born July 3, 1854, in Hukvaldy, Moravia, Austrian Empire, is a composer who counts as one of the most important exponents of musical nationalism of the 20th century. Janáček was a choirboy at Brno and studied at the Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna conservatories. In 1881 he founded a college of organists at Brno,…
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Die Walküre (Wagner) premiered today in 1870
Die Walküre / The Valkyrie, WWV 86B, is the second of the four epic music dramas known Der Ring des Nibelungen / The Ring of the Nibelung. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 26 June 1870, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at…
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Harry Partch *VI 24 1901 / The Life You Give
Harry Partch, born June 24, 1901, in Oakland, Calif., U.S.A., is the visionary and eclectic composer and instrument builder, largely self-taught, whose compositions are remarkable for the complexity of their scores (each instrument has its own characteristic notation, often involving 43 tones to each octave) and their employment of unique instruments of his invention. Partch’s…
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Éva Marton *VI 18 1943 / The Life You Give
Hungarian soprano Eva Marton has enjoyed a highly successful career on the world’s leading operatic stages since the late ’60s. With her powerful, attractive voice she has managed to score numerous successes in the Italian spinto roles of Verdi and Puccini, the heftier roles of Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the more delicate but equally…
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Charles Gounod *VI 17 1818 / The Life You Give
Charles Gounod, born Charles-françois Gounod, June 17, 1818, in Paris, France, is a composer noted particularly for his operas, of which the most famous is Faust. Gounod’s father was a painter, and his mother was a capable pianist who gave Gounod his early training in music. He was educated at the Lycée Saint-Louis, where he…
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Igor Stravinsky *VI 17 1882 / The Life You Give
Igor Stravinsky, born Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, June 5 [June 17, New Style], 1882, Oranienbaum [now Lomonosov], near St. Petersburg, Russia, is the composer whose work had a revolutionary impact on musical thought and sensibility just before and after World War I, and whose compositions remained a touchstone of modernism for much of his long working…
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Martha Argerich *VI 5 1941 — La Vida Que Das / The Life You Give
Martha Argerich, (born June 5, 1941, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Argentine pianist known for her recordings and performances of chamber music, particularly of works by Olivier Messiaen, Sergey Prokofiev, and Sergey Rachmaninoff. A prodigy, Argerich was performing professionally by age eight. In 1955 she went to Europe, where her teachers included Friedrich Gulda and Arturo Benedetti…
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The Life You Give: Edward Elgar *VI 2 1857
Sir Edward Elgar, born Edward William Elgar, June 2, 1857, in Broadheath, Worcestershire, England, is the composer whose works in the orchestral idiom of late 19th-century Romanticism—characterized by bold tunes, striking colour effects, and mastery of large forms—stimulated a renaissance of English music. musicus, organicuscelebrates the life in music ofEdward ElgarJune 2 at 10:30 pm…
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György Ligeti *V 28 1923 / The Life You Give
György Ligeti, born György Sándor Ligeti, May 28, 1923, in Diciosânmartin [now Tîrnăveni], Transylvania, Romania, is a leading composer of the branch of avant-garde music concerned principally with shifting masses of sound and tone colours. Ligeti, the great-nephew of violinist Leopold Auer, studied and taught music in Hungary until the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when…
Sila Blume 