The rough guide to classical music

ROUGHGUIDES

“The perfect classical
music primer”
BBC Music Magazine

THE ROUGH GUIDE to

Classical Music
AN A-Z OF COMPOSERS, KEY WORKS AND TOP RECORDINGS

5th EDITION: REVISED & EXPANDED



THE ROUGH GUIDE to

Classical
Music
Edited by

Joe Staines
Written by
Jonathan Buckley, Philip Clark, Andrew Dickson, Kate Hopkins,
Stephen Johnson, Nick Kimberley, Joe Staines, Gavin Thomas

www.roughguides.com


Credits
The Rough Guide to Classical Music

Rough Guides Reference

Editor: Joe Staines
Layout: Nikhil Agarwal
Picture research: Joe Staines
Proofreading: Jason Freeman
Production: Rebecca Short

Reference Director: Andrew Lockett
Editors: Kate Berens, Peter Buckley, Tom Cabot,
Tracy Hopkins, Matthew Milton,
Joe Staines and Ruth Tidball

Acknowledgements
Thanks to all those who have helped in the creation of this guide, in particular all the record and distribution
companies without which it would not have been possible. Thanks are also due to Elbie Lebrecht and
everyone at Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library, John Moelwyn-Hughes at Corbis, the helpful staff at the
Barbican Music Library, and Hester Rowland at Harold Moores Records.
Finally, a big thank you to all those who contributed to the four previous editions of this book:
Ruth Blackmore, Matthew Boyden, Simon Broughton, Kim Burton, Richard Chew, Duncan Clark, David
Doughty, Sophie Fuller, Andy Hamilton, Sarah Harding, Stephen Jackson, Michael Jameson, Francis Morris,
David Nice, Francesca Panetta, Mark Prendergast, Matthew Rye, Jonathan Webster, Barry Witherden and
Michael Wrigley.

Publishing Information
This fifth edition published May 2010 by
Rough Guides Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
375 Hudson St, 4th Floor, New York 10014, USA
Email:

Distributed by the Penguin Group:
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
Penguin Putnam, Inc., 375 Hudson Street, NY 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2YE
Penguin Group (New Zealand), Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
Printed by Toppan Security Printing, Singapore
Typeset in Minion, Myriad and DIN to an original design by Duncan Clark
The publishers and authors have done their best to ensure the accuracy and currency of all information in
The Rough Guide to Classical Music; however, they can accept no responsibility for any loss or inconvenience
sustained by any reader as a result of its information or advice.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the
quotation of brief passages in reviews.
© Rough Guides Ltd
688 pages; includes index
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84836-476-9
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2


CONTENTS
Introduction
Chronology of composers
100 Essential Works

1
4
6
8
9

10
12
14
16
18
33
34
36
41
45
63
65
67
71
74
78
79
81
84
85
87
89
90
93
103
108
110
118

Ferruccio Busoni

Dietrich Buxtehude
William Byrd
John Cage
Marie-Joseph Canteloube
Giacomo Carissimi
Elliott Carter
Francesco Cavalli
Emmanuel Chabrier
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Frédéric Chopin
Muzio Clementi
Aaron Copland
Arcangelo Corelli
François Couperin
Luigi Dallapiccola
Claude Debussy
Léo Delibes
Frederick Delius
Gaetano Donizetti
John Dowland
Guillaume Dufay
Paul Dukas
John Dunstable
Henri Duparc
Maurice Duruflé
Henri Dutilleux
Antonín Dvořák
Hanns Eisler
Edward Elgar
Manuel de Falla

Gabriel Fauré
Morton Feldman
César Franck
Giovanni Gabrieli
Roberto Gerhard
George Gershwin

119
121
122
125
127
128
129
132
133
135
136
142
143
147
148
151
152
158
159
161
163
165
166

168
169
170
172
173
180
181
188
190
194
196
199
200
202

CONTENTS

John Adams
Thomas Adès
Isaac Albéniz
Tomaso Albinoni
Gregorio Allegri
Louis Andriessen
Malcolm Arnold
Grażyna Bacewicz
C.P.E. Bach
J.S. Bach
Samuel Barber
Agustín Pio Barrios
Béla Bartók

Arnold Bax
Ludwig van Beethoven
Vincenzo Bellini
George Benjamin
Alban Berg
Luciano Berio
Hector Berlioz
Leonard Bernstein
Heinrich Biber
Harrison Birtwistle
Georges Bizet
Luigi Boccherini
Alexander Borodin
Lili Boulanger
Pierre Boulez
Johannes Brahms
Benjamin Britten
Max Bruch
Anton Bruckner
Antoine Brumel

vii
ix
xii

iii


CONTENTS
iv

Carlo Gesualdo
Orlando Gibbons
Umberto Giordano
Philip Glass
Alexander Glazunov
Mikhail Glinka
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Henryk Górecki
Charles François Gounod
Percy Grainger
Enrique Granados
Edvard Grieg
Sofia Gubaidulina
George Frideric Handel
Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Jonathan Harvey
Joseph Haydn
Hans Werner Henze
Hildegard of Bingen
Paul Hindemith
Gustav Holst
Arthur Honegger
Johann Nepomuck Hummel
Engelbert Humperdinck
Charles Ives
Leoš Janáček
Josquin Desprez
Mauricio Kagel
Aram Khachaturian

Oliver Knussen
Zoltán Kodály
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
György Kurtág
Helmut Lachenmann
Francesco Landini
Roland de Lassus
William Lawes
Franz Lehár
Ruggero Leoncavallo
György Ligeti
Magnus Lindberg
Franz Liszt

204
207
208
209
212
213
215
216
219
220
222
223
227
230
240
242

244
253
255
258
262
264
265
267
268
271
275
277
279
280
282
285
288
291
293
294
295
298
299
300
304
305

Jean-Baptiste Lully
Witold Lutosławski
Elisabeth Lutyens

Guillaume de Machaut
James MacMillan
Elizabeth Maconchy
Gustav Mahler
Frank Martin
Bohuslav Martinů
Pietro Mascagni
Jules Massenet
Nicholas Maw
Peter Maxwell Davies
Felix Mendelssohn
Olivier Messiaen
Darius Milhaud
Claudio Monteverdi
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Tristan Murail
Modest Mussorgsky
Conlon Nancarrow
Carl Nielsen
Luigi Nono
Michael Nyman
Johannes Ockeghem
Jacques Offenbach
Carl Orff
Johann Pachelbel
Nicolò Paganini
Giovanni da Palestrina
Hubert Parry
Arvo Pärt
Krzysztof Penderecki

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Perotin
Francis Poulenc
Michael Praetorius
Sergey Prokofiev
Giacomo Puccini
Henry Purcell
Sergey Rachmaninov
Jean-Philippe Rameau

310
311
314
316
318
320
322
330
332
334
335
337
339
341
346
350
351
356
371
373

376
378
382
384
387
388
390
392
393
396
398
399
401
403
405
407
411
414
423
426
432
437


Einojuhani Rautavaara
Maurice Ravel
Max Reger
Steve Reich
Ottorino Respighi
Wolfgang Rihm

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Joaquín Rodrigo
Gioacchino Rossini
Poul Ruders
Kaija Saariaho
Camille Saint-Saëns
Erik Satie
Alessandro Scarlatti
Domenico Scarlatti
Giacinto Scelsi
Alfred Schnittke
Arnold Schoenberg
Franz Schreker
Franz Schubert
Robert Schumann
Heinrich Schütz
Alexander Scriabin
Dmitri Shostakovich
Jean Sibelius
Bedřich Smetana
Ethel Smyth
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Alessandro Stradella
The Strauss family
Richard Strauss
Igor Stravinsky
Barbara Strozzi
Josef Suk

440

441
446
448
452
453
455
457
458
461
463
465
468
470
471
474
476
478
485
486
499
508
510
513
520
527
529
531
535
536
537

544
552
555

Arthur Sullivan

556

Karol Szymanowski

558

Toru Takemitsu

562

Thomas Tallis

564

Giuseppe Tartini

567

John Tavener

570

John Taverner

571

Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

572

Georg Philipp Telemann

581

Michael Tippett

583

Michael Torke

586

Mark-Anthony Turnage

588

Viktor Ullmann

590

Edgard Varèse

593

Ralph Vaughan Williams

594

Giuseppe Verdi

600

Tomás Luis de Victoria

605

Heitor Villa-Lobos

606

Antonio Vivaldi

608

Richard Wagner

613

William Walton

620

Carl Maria von Weber

622

Anton Webern

625

Kurt Weill

628

Judith Weir

630

Silvius Leopold Weiss

631

Charles-Marie Widor

633

Hugo Wolf

635

Iannis Xenakis

638

Alexander Zemlinsky

641

Glossary

643

Index

667

CONTENTS
v


Feature Boxes
Tuning & Temperament

26

Luther and Music

413

What is a Fugue?

30

St Cecilia – Patron Saint of Music

431

Sonatas and Sonata Form

58

Less is More? – The Origins of

Famous First Words

112

The “Bruckner Versions” Problem

114

Development of the Keyboard

472

Rivals at the Piano

141

The Crisis of Tonality

480

The Madrigal History Tour

205

The Lieder Poets

494

Castrati

233

Clara Schumann

500

Baroque: A Period or a Style?

236

Romanticism and the

Gregorian Chant

256

Expressionism and After

259

Electronic Music – The First 70 Years

533

Composers at the Movies

287

Music in the Third Reich

539

Consort Musick

296

Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet

547

Troubadours and Trouvères

317

Concerto di Donne

553

The Cult of the Conductor

323

Music and Reformation in England

565

The Ondes Martenot

348

There is Nothing Like a Strad

569

The Birth of Opera

354

Postmodernism and After

587

CONTENTS

Total Serialism and the

vi

Minimalism

Austro-German Tradition

451

503

The Concerto

610

Darmstadt School

384

The Leitmotif

615

The Rise of the Virtuoso

395

The Strange Case of August Bungert 617

Stabat Mater Dolorosa

404

The Clarinet Comes of Age

Notation

406

Cavaillé-Coll and the French

Jean Cocteau and Les Six

409

Organ Tradition

624
634


INTRODUCTION
T

here are many books on composers and
their works, and there are numerous
guides to the countless recordings of classical music available on CD. The Rough Guide to
Classical Music aims to be both of these things
– and to do so with a degree of selectivity that
will help readers get straight to the most important and enjoyable works and recordings. In
short, it’s an A to Z survey of over 200 of the
most significant composers in the history of
western music – ranging from Hildegard of
Bingen, one of the great figures of eleventh-century Europe, to Thomas Adès, born in London
in 1971. Each composer gets a fact-filled biography, followed by discussion of each of their
most important works, along with reviews of

recommended recordings.
Producing a book such as this inevitably means
leaving out many composers and even more compositions and recordings. But that’s partly the
point. Joseph Haydn, for example, wrote 104 symphonies and while all are worth hearing, some are
definitely more exciting than others – especially
for someone new to his music. We’ve gone for
what we think are the best works by the most
interesting composers, mixing some underrated
figures with the big names. We’ve also included
42 feature boxes covering such diverse topics as
troubadours, the birth of opera, the rise of the virtuoso and electronic music (see opposite).

CD recommendations

How the book works
Immediately after this introduction you’ll find
a list of all the composers covered in the guide,
arranged chronologically, so you can see at a
glance who fits where. If you find you like the
music of Vivaldi, you could check the list and
decide to listen to Telemann, his contemporary.
Things are more complicated with the stylistically
varied twentieth century: Xenakis and Arnold
were born just a year apart but their music seems
to come from different worlds. When a musical
connection does exist (as in the case of Mozart
and Haydn or Schoenberg and Berg), a cross-reference in the main text will point you in the right
direction. This is followed by a list of 100 essential
works that would serve as a good place to start for
anyone new to classical music. At the end of the

book there’s a detailed glossary that defines all the
technical terms we’ve used.
Between lies the bulk of the guide, an A to Z
of composers from John Adams to Alexander
Zemlinsky. Each entry starts with an introduction
to the composer’s life and music, followed by a runthrough of the main compositions, moving from
the largest-scale works to the smallest. With the
most important figures – such as Bach, Mozart and
Beethoven – we’ve generally grouped the music

INTRODUCTION

Choosing which CDs to recommend requires
even greater ruthlessness than selecting which
composers and works to include. Beethoven only
wrote nine symphonies, but there have been hundreds of recordings made of the fifth symphony
alone. While it’s arguable that several of these
should never have been issued, a piece of music
as complex as a Beethoven symphony can bear
many different interpretations and a sizeable proportion of them are worth listening to.
Although some cases recordings stand head
and shoulders above the competition, no performance can be described as definitive. That’s
one reason why we often recommend more than
one version of a piece. Whereas all our first-

choice CDs make persuasive cases for the music,
some of the additional recommendations make
valid, and sometimes provocative, alternatives.
In several instances, we’ve recommended
a “historical”, pre-stereo recording as well as

a modern digital recording. While there are
undoubtedly many extraordinary performers
around today, and modern recordings usually benefit from technically immaculate sound
quality, new is not always best. Few recent releases
can match the excitement of Vladimir Horowitz’s
1943 account of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto
No. 1 or Reginald Kell’s moving performance
of Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet from the 1930s.
Furthermore, it doesn’t follow that a recording
made more than sixty years ago will have terrible
sound quality – many sound surprisingly good,
and there are several companies who specialize in
reissuing and remastering old recordings.

vii


under generic headings (eg “Chamber Music”),
giving an introduction to the composer’s work in
that genre before going on to individual pieces.
Each discussion of a work or works is followed
by reviews of recommended recordings, with the
performer details conforming to a regular format:
soloist first, then orchestra/choir/ensemble, then
conductor – with the name of the record company and the number of CDs in parenthesis,
along with a summary of the other works featured
on the disc. Take this recording of Glazunov’s
Violin Concerto:

r

Znaider; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra;
Jansons (RCA; with Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2)

Here, Nikolaj Znaider is the soloist, he’s playing
with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mariss Jansons (we’ve left off first
names to save space).

INTRODUCTION

Purchasing CDs

viii

If you purchase your CDs through a record store,
many of those we’ve recommended will need to
be ordered, since most stores stock just the bestsellers and new releases. Should you find that a
listed CD is not in your store’s catalogue, it may
have been deleted or be about to be repackaged:
the major companies are pretty quick to delete
slow-moving items, but often reissue them, either
at a lower price or combined with different music.
Newly deleted and second-hand CDs can usually be located via the Internet, which is also a
good place to purchase new CDs – from retailers
and record companies, and, in several instances,
directly from the performers or the composer.
There’s been a continuous downturn in the
production of classical CDs from the major companies over the last ten years. In several cases
this has led to projects being curtailed and major
performers and orchestras losing lucrative contracts. Not everyone has taken this lying down

and a wealth of small independent companies has
emerged to plug gaps in the market. Many orchestras (including the Hallé, the London Symphony
Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra)
now have their own labels, and even venues, such

as London’s Wigmore Hall, produce their own
recordings. In the case of individual composers
and performers, several have bought the rights
to formerly deleted recordings, repackaged them
and made them available via their own websites.
Full-price recent releases can still be expensive,
but the last two decades have seen an explosion of
budget labels – pioneered by Naxos – and this has
spurred both the big multinationals and the larger
independent companies to put more effort into
their own mid- and budget-price series. These
reissues often feature some of the finest performances of a work ever made, so don’t think for a
minute that quality of a CD is always reflected in
its price.

Classical downloads
Another development in the recording industry
is the growth of music download services, which
allow you to purchase music online and download it to your computer to then either play using
a dedicated jukebox application (such as iTunes),
“burn” to a CD (to use just as you would a regular
CD) or transfer to an MP3 player. Apple’s iTunes
Store has blazed the trail for such services since
2003, its success due in part to the popularity of
the same company’s iPod. At first classical music

was pretty poorly served by downloads but by the
end of 2009 a huge amount of quality material was
available. Many record labels offer their own sites
where you can download new recordings, back
catalogue and, in some cases, deletions. There
are also several download providers with a strong
classical catalogue, such as eMusic, classicsonline.
com and passionato.com.
The advantages of downloading are the cost
(between half and a third of the price of a CD),
the fact that you can choose to purchase either an
entire album or individual tracks and, of course,
the fact that it delivers to your home more or less
instantaneously. The drawbacks are the marginally inferior sound (not a problem for most
people and, anyway, likely to improve), the lack
of sleeve notes and, in the case of song and opera,
the absence of the words – although such information is easily found on the Internet and is often
provided on record company download sites.


CHRONOLOGY OF
COMPOSERS
Born before 1400
Hildegard of Bingen
Perotin
Guillaume de Machaut
Francesco Landini
John Dunstable

1098–1179

c. 1170–c.1236
c. 1300–1377
c. 1325–1397
c. 1390–1453

Born 1400–1499
Guillaume Dufay
Johannes Ockeghem
Josquin Desprez
Antoine Brumel
John Taverner

c. 1400–1474
c. 1420–1497
c. 1455–1521
c. 1460–c. 1520
1490–1545

Born 1500–1599
c. 1505–1585
1526–1594
1532–1594
c. 1537–1623
1548–1611
1557–1612
c. 1561–1613
1563–1626
1567–1643
1571–1621
1582–1652

1583–1625
1585–1672

Born 1600–1699
William Lawes
Francesco Cavalli
Giacomo Carissimi
Barbara Strozzi
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Dietrich Buxtehude
Heinrich Biber
Alessandro Stradella

1602–1645
1602–1676
1605–1674
1619–c. 1677
1632–1687
1637–1707
1644–1704
1644–1682

1645–1704
1653–1713
1653–1706
1659–1695
1660–1725
1668–1733
1671–1750
1678–1741

1681–1767
1683–1764
1685–1750
1685–1759
1685–1757
1686–1750
1692–1770

Born 1700–1799
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
C.P.E. Bach
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Joseph Haydn
Luigi Boccherini
Muzio Clementi
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Nepomuck Hummel
Nicolò Paganini
Carl Maria von Weber
Gioacchino Rossini
Gaetano Donizetti
Franz Schubert

1710–1736
1714–1788
1714–1787
1732–1809
1743–1805
1752–1832

1756–1791
1770–1827
1778–1837
1782–1840
1786–1826
1792–1868
1797–1848
1797–1828

Born 1800–1824
Vincenzo Bellini
Hector Berlioz
Johann Strauss the Elder
Mikhail Glinka
Felix Mendelssohn
Frédéric Chopin

1801–1835
1803–1869
1804–1849
1804–1857
1809–1847
1810–1849

CHRONOLOGY OF COMPOSERS

Thomas Tallis
Giovanni Palestrina
Roland de Lassus
William Byrd

Tomás Luis de Victoria
Giovanni Gabrieli
Carlo Gesualdo
John Dowland
Claudio Monteverdi
Michael Praetorius
Gregorio Allegri
Orlando Gibbons
Heinrich Schütz

Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Arcangelo Corelli
Johann Pachelbel
Henry Purcell
Alessandro Scarlatti
François Couperin
Tomaso Albinoni
Antonio Vivaldi
Georg Philipp Telemann
Jean-Philippe Rameau
J.S. Bach
George Frideric Handel
Domenico Scarlatti
Silvius Leopold Weiss
Giuseppe Tartini

ix


Robert Schumann

Franz Liszt
Giuseppe Verdi
Richard Wagner
Charles François Gounod
Jacques Offenbach
César Franck
Anton Bruckner
Bedřich Smetana

1810–1856
1811–1886
1813–1901
1813–1883
1818–1893
1819–1880
1822–1890
1824–1896
1824–1884

Born 1825–1849
Johann Strauss the Younger
Alexander Borodin
Johannes Brahms
Camille Saint-Saëns
Léo Delibes
Georges Bizet
Max Bruch
Modest Mussorgsky
Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
Emmanuel Chabrier

Antonín Dvořák
Jules Massenet
Arthur Sullivan
Edvard Grieg
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Charles Marie-Widor
Gabriel Fauré
Henri Duparc
Hubert Parry

1825–1899
1833–1887
1833–1897
1835–1921
1836–1891
1838–1875
1838–1920
1839–1881
1840–1893
1841–1894
1841–1904
1842–1912
1842–1900
1843–1907
1844–1908
1844–1937
1845–1924
1848–1933
1848–1918

CHRONOLOGY OF COMPOSERS

Born 1850–1874

x

Engelbert Humperdinck
Leoš Janáček
Edward Elgar
Ruggero Leoncavallo
Ethel Smyth
Isaac Albéniz
Gustav Mahler
Hugo Wolf
Claude Debussy
Frederick Delius
Pietro Mascagni
Richard Strauss
Paul Dukas
Alexander Glazunov
Carl Nielsen

1854–1921
1854–1928
1857–1934
1858–1924
1858–1944
1860–1909
1860–1911
1860–1903

1862–1918
1862–1934
1863–1945
1864–1949
1865–1935
1865–1936
1865–1931

Jean Sibelius
Ferruccio Busoni
Erik Satie
Umberto Giordano
Enrique Granados
Franz Lehár
Alexander Zemlinsky
Alexander Scriabin
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sergei Rachmaninov
Max Reger
Gustav Holst
Charles Ives
Arnold Schoenberg
Josef Suk

1865–1957
1866–1924
1866–1925
1867–1948
1867–1916
1870–1948

1871–1942
1872–1915
1872–1958
1873–1943
1873–1916
1874–1934
1874–1954
1874–1951
1874–1935

Born 1875–1899
Maurice Ravel
Manuel de Falla
Franz Schreker
Marie-Joseph Canteloube
Ottorino Respighi
Béla Bartók
Percy Grainger
Zoltán Kodály
Igor Stravinsky
Karol Szymanowski
Edgard Varèse
Anton Webern
Arnold Bax
Agustín Pio Barrios
Alban Berg
Heitor Villa-Lobos
Frank Martin
Bohuslav Martinů
Sergey Prokofiev

Arthur Honegger
Darius Milhaud
Lili Boulanger
Paul Hindemith
Carl Orff
Roberto Gerhard
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Hanns Eisler
George Gershwin
Viktor Ullmann
Francis Poulenc

1875–1937
1876–1946
1878–1934
1879–1957
1879–1936
1881–1945
1882–1961
1882–1967
1882–1971
1882–1937
1883–1965
1883–1945
1883–1953
1885–1944
1885–1935
1887–1959
1890–1974
1890–1959

1891–1953
1892–1955
1892–1974
1893–1918
1895–1963
1895–1982
1896–1970
1897–1957
1898–1962
1898–1937
1898–1944
1899–1963


Born 1900–1924
Aaron Copland
Kurt Weill
Joaquín Rodrigo
William Walton
Maurice Duruflé
Aram Khachaturian
Luigi Dallapiccola
Karl Amadeus Hartmann
Giacinto Scelsi
Michael Tippett
Elisabeth Lutyens
Dmitri Shostakovich
Elizabeth Maconchy
Elliott Carter
Olivier Messiaen

Grażyna Bacewicz
Samuel Barber
John Cage
Conlon Nancarrow
Benjamin Britten
Witold Lutosławski
Henri Dutilleux
Leonard Bernstein
Malcolm Arnold
Iannis Xenakis
György Ligeti
Luigi Nono

1900–1990
1900–1950
1901–1999
1902–1983
1902–1983
1903–1978
1904–1975
1905–1963
1905–1988
1905–1998
1906–1983
1906–1975
1907–1990
1908–
1908–1992
1909–1967
1910–1981

1912–1992
1912–1997
1913–1976
1913–1994
1916–
1918–1990
1921–2006
1922–2001
1923–2006
1924–1990

Born 1925–present
Luciano Berio
Pierre Boulez
Morton Feldman

1925–2003
1925–
1926–1987

Hans Werner Henze
György Kurtág
Einojuhani Rautavaara
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Toru Takemitsu
Sofia Gubaidulina
Mauricio Kagel
Henryk Górecki
Krzysztof Penderecki
Harrison Birtwistle

Peter Maxwell Davies
Alfred Schnittke
Nicholas Maw
Arvo Pärt
Helmut Lachenmann
Steve Reich
Philip Glass
Louis Andriessen
Jonathan Harvey
Michael Nyman
John Tavener
John Adams
Tristan Murail
Poul Ruders
Wolfgang Rihm
Kaija Saariaho
Oliver Knussen
Judith Weir
Magnus Lindberg
James MacMillan
George Benjamin
Mark-Anthony Turnage
Michael Torke
Thomas Adès

1926–
1926–
1928–
1928–2007
1930–1996

1931–
1931–
1933–
1933–
1934–
1934–
1934–1998
1935–2009
1935–
1935–
1936–
1937–
1939–
1939–
1944–
1944–
1947–
1947–
1949–
1952–
1952–
1952–
1954–
1958–
1959–
1960–
1960–
1961–
1971–
CHRONOLOGY OF COMPOSERS

xi


100 ESSENTIAL
WORKS
B
J.S. Bach, Brandenburg Concertos
J.S. Bach, Goldberg Variations
J.S. Bach, St Matthew Passion
J.S. Bach, Violin Sonatas and Partitas
Bartók, Music for Strings,
Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, String Quartet No. 4
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23
(The Appassionata)
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 7
Beethoven, Symphony No. 7
Beethoven, Violin Concerto
Bellini, Norma
Berg, Violin Concerto
Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique
Bizet, Carmen
Brahms, Clarinet Quintet
Brahms, Symphony No. 4
Britten, Serenade for Tenor,
Horn and Strings
Bruch, Violin Concerto No. 1
Bruckner, Symphony No. 7

E

23
25
21
31
39
39
60
56
50
53
64
69
77
84
99
97
107
109
116

C

100 ESSENTIAL WORKS

Chopin, Piano Concerto No. 1
Chopin, Préludes
Copland, Appalachian Spring

xii

137
138
144

D
Debussy, Images
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Donizetti, L’elisir d’amore
Dvořák, Cello Concerto
Dvořák, Symphonies No. 9

Elgar, Cello Concerto

F
Falla, Nights in the Gardens of Spain
Fauré, Requiem
Franck, Violin Sonata

189
192
197

G
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice
Grieg, Peer Gynt

203
215
225

H
Handel, Giulio Cesare
Handel, Messiah
Handel, Water Music
Haydn, String Quartets Op. 76
Haydn, Symphony No. 44
Hildegard of Bingen,
Symphonia harmoniae
Holst, The Planets

232
234
238
252
247
257
263

I
Ives, Three Places in New England

270

J
Janáček, String Quartet No. 1

157
154
162

176
176

186

274

L
Liszt, Piano Sonata in B Minor

308


M
Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde
Mahler, Symphony No. 3
Mendelssohn, Octet
Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto
Messiaen, Turangalila-symphonie
Monteverdi, Fourth Book of Madrigals
Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea
Mozart, Clarinet Concerto
Mozart, La nozze di Figaro
Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 23
Mozart, Requiem
Mozart, Serenade No. 10 (Gran Partita)
Mozart, Symphony No. 40
Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition

S

330
325
344
344
347
355
353
366
358
365
362
368
363
375

N
Nielsen, Symphony No. 4
(The Inextinguishable)

379

O
Orff, Carmina Burana

391

P
Pergolesi, Stabat Mater
Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5
Prokofiev, Piano Sonata No. 6

Puccini, La Bohème
Purcell, Dido and Aeneas

405
417
422
424
422

R
436
446
445
456
460

467
469
473
483
497
492
488
493
507
505
501
516
519
523

526
528
541
543
549
548

T
Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1
Tchaikovsky, The Sleeping Beauty
Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6
(The Pathétique)

579
575
577

V
Vaughan Williams, The Lark Ascending
Verdi, Requiem
Verdi, La traviata
Victoria, Requiem
Vivaldi, Four Seasons
Vivaldi Gloria

598
604
602
606
611

612

W
Wagner Tristan und Isolde

618

100 ESSENTIAL WORKS

Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 3
Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit
Ravel, String Quartet
Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade
Rossini, Il barbiere di Siviglia

Saint-Saëns, Le carnaval des animaux
Satie, Trois Gymnopédies
Scarlatti, Keyboard Sonatas
Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht
Schubert, Piano Sonata No. 21
Schubert, String Quintet
Schubert, Symphony No. 5
Schubert, Winterreise
Schumann, Dichterliebe
Schumann, Fantasie in C Major
Schumann, Piano Concerto
Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 10
Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5
Sibelius, Symphony No. 5
Sibelius, Violin Concerto

Smetana, Má Vlast
Strauss, Four Last Songs
Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier
Stravinsky, Pulcinella
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring

xiii



a
John Adams (1947–

L

greater influence was the composer John Cage
(see p.125), whose Silence, a delightfully eccentric Zen-like collection of essays, gave Adams the
courage to find his own voice as a composer.
After graduation, he headed west to San
Francisco, where he encountered the minimalist
works of Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass
for the first time (see p.451). Adams was immediately drawn to minimalism’s resolute reliance
on tonality, its insistent, hypnotic rhythms, and
its absorption of Balinese, African, Indian and
other non-Western musics. Yet, while Adams still
stands by the view that minimalism is “the most
important stylistic development in Western art
music since the fifties”, he soon saw the limitations of a technique that placed so much emphasis
upon repetition. With Shaker Loops (1978) he
heralded what he termed “post-minimalism”, a

style characterized by a more fluid and layered
sound, and greater dynamic contrasts.
With his three-act opera Nixon in China, premiered at Houston in 1985, Adams really hit his
stride. The choice of subject – President Nixon’s
visit to Peking in 1972 – was a daring departure
for a genre that tends to fall back on ancient history or mythology for its plots, and Adams’s music
showed the potential of a style that amalgamated
minimalist procedures with more dramatic forms

JOHN ADAMS

ike Philip Glass and the other minimalists with whom he is often bracketed, John
Adams set out to reverse the influence of
modernist cerebralism, to make it okay for composers to write unashamedly tonal music again. For
Adams, “tonality is not just a cultural invention,
but a natural force, like gravity”. But unlike any
thoroughgoing minimalist, Adams writes fairly
eventful music which in a way is reminiscent of
Charles Ives: never coy about using vernacular and
“banal” elements, he is a crusading synthesist who
is quite happy to borrow openly from sources as
wide-ranging as jazz, Arab music, church music
and folk tunes.
Taught clarinet by his father (a successful
dance-band saxophonist) Adams was encouraged by both parents to listen to a huge variety of
music, ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington.
(A cherished childhood memory is of being taken
to an Ellington concert and sitting on the piano
stool next to the jazz maestro.) When Adams
arrived at Harvard in the late 1960s he was swept

up by the radicalism of the times, and was particularly fascinated by William Burroughs’ use
of “vernacular, junkie language”, which directly
inspired him to write music that “didn’t make a
distinction between high art and low art, highbrow and middlebrow and lowbrow”. An even

)

1


JOHN ADAMS

John Adams rehearsing the BBC Symphony Orchestra, January 2002.

2

of writing. As well as a wealth of highly kinetic
repetitive rhythms, Nixon also has stretches of
witty pastiche and parody. Audience response was
positive but critics were divided, with European
critics notably less enthusiastic than their US
counterparts. However, by the time of his second
opera, The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), Adams
was widely recognized as a major figure on both
sides of the Atlantic.
The 1990s saw Adams continuing to work
on a large scale, with a series of concertos for
violin, for clarinet (Gnarly Buttons) and for
piano (Century Rolls). The decade culminated
with El Niño, an ambitious meditation on

Christ’s nativity in the form of an oratorio – a
kind of modern-day Messiah. Since the turn of
the new century, Adams has seen his position as
America’s unofficial composer laureate consolidated by his thoughtful response to 9/11, On
the Transmigration of Souls (2002) and another
opera on a US historical theme, Doctor Atomic
(2005). With a libretto by his regular theatre
collaborator, Peter Sellars, the opera focused
on the 1945 atom-bomb test at Los Alamos,
in particular the paradox of how the sensitive
J. Robert Oppenheimer came to be involved
in the creation of a mass-killing machine.
Generally considered dramaturgically abstruse
but musically powerful, Adams reworked some
of the material into the compelling Doctor
Atomic Symphony (2007).

The Death of Klinghoffer
The Death of Klinghoffer is similar to Nixon in
China in that it tackles an event from recent
political history – the hijacking of the ocean
liner Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, and
their murder of one of the passengers, Leon
Klinghoffer. Adams created it in partnership with
the librettist Alice Goodman and the director
Peter Sellars, but there the similarities between
the two operas end. While Nixon in China was
essentially a comedy, Klinghoffer is preoccupied
with the deep religious and economic conflicts
that drove the terrible events of October 1985.

Whereas Nixon in China is for the most part
naturalistic in pace and setting, the dramaturgy
of Klinghoffer is based, according to Adams,
on largely static models, encompassing Bach’s
Passion settings, Greek tragedy, and Persian and
Japanese drama. Klinghoffer is too raw to make
for a comfortable night at the theatre, but it is
an emotionally riveting experience, and one of
Adams’s most impressive achievements to date.

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Maddalena, Felty, Hammons, Young, Perry, Sylvan,
Friedman, Nadler; Lyon Opera Chorus & Orchestra;
Nagano (Elektra Nonesuch; 2 CDs)

From the opening orchestral F minor chords Kent Nagano
exerts a tight grip on this piece, and the entire performance
turns out to be deep and searching. The Lyon Opera
Orchestra is always impressive, while James Maddalena,
as the ship’s philosophical captain, and Sanford Sylvan, as
Klinghoffer, are outstanding.


El Niño
In El Niño (The Child), a “nativity oratorio”
composed 1999–2000, John Adams reworked
the Christmas story as an exploration of
his own faith and a wider celebration of the
marvel of birth. The libretto – assembled from

texts ranging from the writings of Hildegard
of Bingen to extracts from the Bible and the
Wakefield Mystery Plays – draws heavily on
the work of Hispanic American poets such as
Rosario Castellanos, whose presence gives a clue
to Adams’s desire to liberate the story from the
West and to provide a female perspective.
Nearly two hours long and very much defined
by its variety, El Niño is as impressive a display
of Adams’s compositional faculties as anything in
his output. It exploits many different textural and
timbral possibilities with various configurations
of soloists, chorus and orchestra (guitars and
deftly handled percussion add to the kaleidoscopic orchestral palette) yet there’s a consistent
sense of the Baroque in the mixture of directness,
poignancy and rhetoric in the vocal writing.

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Lieberson, Upshaw, White; Theatre of Voices;
London Voices; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester
Berlin; Nagano (Nonesuch; 2 CDs)

This live recording, from the first run of performances in
Paris, is a highly impressive achievement. Mezzo Lorraine
Hunt Lieberson and soprano Dawn Upshaw are expressive
yet controlled, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin
sound vivid and precise, and Nagano binds the whole thing
together with consummate skill.

dence during the 1980s. It marks a turning point
in his attempt to transform minimalism into
something richer and less rigid – from, in his own
words, “Great Prairies of non-event” into “forms
that grow”. Written for chorus and orchestra,
Harmonium is a setting of three poems, the
first of which, John Donne’s “Negative Love”, is
a complex meditation on different types of love.
It begins on a single note, around which other
notes gradually accumulate, building up in size
and momentum into a euphoric blaze of throbbing sound. The second and third poems are both
by Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop
for Death”, a poignant review of the writer’s life
seen from the window of a carriage, has a chantlike simplicity which is soothing and reassuring
whereas “Wild Nights” is an astonishing cry of
visionary ecstasy which returns to the pulsating
vigour of the work’s opening but this time with
an electrifying, volcanic power.

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San Francisco Symphony Orchestra & Chorus; de
Waart (ECM)

There’s little to choose between this recording and the one
listed below. Edo de Waart conducted the premiere, and
his commitment to the work is palpable in this 1984 live
recording. The sheer excitement is electrifying with the
chorus really letting themselves go in “Wild Nights”.

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San Francisco Symphony Orchestra & Chorus;
Adams (Elektra Nonesuch; with Klinghoffer Choruses)

Thirteen years on and there’s more restraint under the
composer’s direction. The sound is brilliantly clear, and the
emotional core of the work, “Because I Could Not Stop for
Death”, comes across with heart-stopping poignancy. But
the chorus, in the louder moments, sounds a little “set back”,
making for a more natural but less exciting atmosphere.

Shaker Loops

Harmonium came about as a result of Adams’s
relationship with the San Francisco Symphony
Orchestra for whom he was composer in resi-

JOHN ADAMS

Harmonium

Shaker Loops grew out of Wavemaker, a string
quartet in which Adams tried to merge the
repetitive processes of minimalism and his own
interest in waveforms. Its premiere was a failure,
and Adams used his classes at San Francisco
Conservatory as a means of salvaging something
from it. Renamed, amended and expanded to a
septet, Shaker Loops appeared in 1978. Its new

title was inspired by the minimalist tape-loop
works of the 1960s (for example It’s Gonna Rain
by Steve Reich); a pun on the musical term for a
rapid tremolo; and the state of religious ecstasy
attained by members of the Shaker sect.
Shaker Loops is characterized by ceaseless motion
even in the slower sections, where the lines drift
like mist in a forest breeze. The restless first and

3


fourth parts (“Shaking and Trembling” and “A Final
Shaking”) frame the slow and languid glissandos
of the second (“Hymning Slews”) and the lyrical
character of the third (“Loops and Verses”), which
moves towards a “wild push-pull section” – what
Adams calls “the emotional high point” of the work.

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Orchestra of St Luke’s; Adams (Nonesuch; with Violin
Concerto)

In 1983 Adams expanded the instrumentation of Shaker
Loops further, producing a version for string orchestra.
This has become one of Adams’s most popular scores, and
was used in the film Barfly. This 1988 recording by Adams
himself must be regarded as authoritative (though Edo de
Waart’s vibrant recording with the San Francisco Symphony

Orchestra is equally impressive).

r

Ensemble Modern; Edwards (RCA; with Chamber
Symphony & Phrygian Gates)

For those who think they might prefer the purity of the septet version (for three violins, two cellos, viola and bass) this
Ensemble Modern recording conducted by Sian Edwards
is excellent. Crisply and energetically performed, the music
achieves a greater clarity with little loss of power.

Violin Concerto
Co-commissioned by the New York City Ballet,
the LSO and the Minnesota Orchestra, the Violin
Concerto was created with the knowledge that it
would be choreographed, and this influenced its
form as well as its content and character. It may
seem odd that, writing music for dancing, Adams
should tone down the strong rhythmic character
of his style, but the violin part moves through the
three movements in an endless line that weaves its
way in and out of the orchestral texture. Though
he follows the outline of the traditional concerto –
a rhapsodic beginning, a slow central movement
(“Chaconne”; “Body Through Which the Dream
Flows”) and an energetic climax (“Toccare”) –
the violin is always an active presence, flowing
through the body of the orchestra rather than
engaging with it in the usual dialogue.

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Kremer; London Symphony Orchestra; Nagano
(Nonesuch; with Shaker Loops)

The world premiere of the concerto was performed by Jorja
Fleezanis in 1994, but Gidon Kremer was the soloist in the
European premiere six months later, so it’s hardly surprising
he sounds thoroughly steeped in the music. Kremer’s playing is sleek, sinuous and supple, and his tone glows richly
against the varied orchestral background.

Harmonielehre
Adams was never really a pure minimalist: his
music had too much harmonic momentum, too
much timbral lushness – factors which gave classic
early pieces like Harmonielehre their exhilarating
feel. The opening movement, inspired by a dream
in which Adams saw a gigantic tanker rise from
San Francisco Bay and hurtle into the sky, begins
with shattering chords dominated by brass and
percussion. The second movement, “The Anfortas
Wound” (a reference to the stricken guardian of
the Holy Grail in Wagner’s Parsifal), is completely different: richly expressive, its harmonic
and melodic idiom recalls the late Romanticism
that Schoenberg believed signalled the end of
tonal music. Indeed, Harmonielehre is the title of
Schoenberg’s 1911 treatise on harmony in which he
spelled out his new radical departure, and by purloining the title, Adams states his faith in tonality
as a still living tradition. The last movement,

“Meister Eckhardt and the Quackie”, interweaves
the minimalism and the neo-Romanticism of the
previous movements into a marvellous fusion – a
celebration of the key of E flat.

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Rattle
(EMI; with The Chairman Dances, Tromba Lontana & Short
Ride in a Fast Machine)

Simon Rattle regards Adams as one of the most significant
composers of modern times, and in this vigorous performance he certainly seems to be putting his energy where his
enthusiasm is. The CBSO plays with wonderful punch and
precision in the minimalist episodes, and a languid grace in
the neo-Romantic passages.

THOMAS ADÈS

Thomas Adès (1971–

4

C

omposer, performer, conductor: in these
days of strict demarcation, few musicians
are capable of taking on all three roles, but
Thomas Adès manages it, and with prodigious
success. It was as a pianist that he first attracted

)

attention when he won Second Prize (Piano
Class) in the 1989 BBC Young Musician of the
Year. It proved a turning point: “It gave me quite a
fright”, he later recalled; “Did I want to go through
all this again, play the same things again? I went


for Anthony Marwood, and another large-scale
orchestral work, Tevot (2007), for the Berlin
Philharmonic.
A further dimension has been added to Adès’s
work by his relationship – both professional and
personal – with the artist and filmmaker Tal
Rosner. In Seven Days (2008), a multi-media piece
inspired by the opening chapters of Genesis, created a hypnotic correspondence between swirling
onscreen abstractions and Adès’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic music for piano and orchestra.

Asyla
Commissioned by the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Simon
Rattle, Asyla (the plural of the word “asylum”)
is one of Adès’s most impressive big pieces. The
opening percussion fanfare (including a quasiMahlerian pealing of cowbells) ushers in a
keening horn melody that wakes the wind section
to sympathetic muttering. Throughout, the large
percussion section seems to set the agenda. In
the third movement, subtitled “Ecstasio”, a savage

frenzy courses through the whole orchestra as
Adès pays homage to rave culture and its stimulant of choice. Yet the predominant mood,
established in the opening moments and elaborated in the solo for bass oboe that sets the second
movement in motion, is of mournful longing, and
there are passages of the most refined delicacy.
Adès, evidently not overawed by the large canvas,
provides a thorough workout for the modern
virtuoso orchestra.

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra;
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group; Rattle,
Adès (EMI; with …but all shall be well, Concerto Conciso &
Chamber Symphony)

Eight months after giving the premiere, Simon Rattle and
his orchestra recorded Asyla over two live performances on
successive days. Their reading has the stamp of experience
and authority – here and throughout the CD, every detail is
cleanly etched, from the very loud to the almost inaudible.

America: A Prophecy
Adès’s music has usually been commissioned by
British organizations or individuals, but his talent
has not gone unnoticed elsewhere. In 1999 the
New York Philharmonic Orchestra celebrated the
new millennium by commissioning works from
six composers. Adès’s response was America: A
Prophecy, a work full of menace rather than millennial optimism. It dramatizes a genuine clash of

civilizations, between Spanish conquistadors and

THOMAS ADÈS

home and said, ‘I’m going to become a composer
today, and do it properly.’ I started at the top note
of the piano, and went on from there.”
By this time he had already studied piano
and composition at London’s Guildhall School,
and had gone on to King’s College, Cambridge,
where he graduated with a double-starred
first. The piece he began immediately after
winning the BBC competition was Five Eliot
Landscapes for soprano and piano, completed
in 1990 as his Opus 1, and first performed in
1993. Throughout the 1990s Adès’s oeuvre
grew steadily, as did his portfolio of prestigious
appointments: composer-in-association with
the Hallé Orchestra (1993–95), music director
of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
(1996–2000), artistic director of the Aldeburgh
Festival (1999–2008). In addition, EMI developed a close interest in his work, releasing
several CDs before signing him to an exclusive
seven-year contract in 1999.
Works for solo piano (usually premiered by the
composer) form a significant part of his catalogue,
but he has also written for chamber ensembles of
various sizes, from the string quartet Arcadiana
(1994) to the 14-piece ensemble required for
Living Toys (1993), while major works for large

orchestra include Asyla (1997) and America: A
Prophecy (1999). Combining head and heart in
unexpected ways, Adès has consistently shown
the knack of turning tonality and rhythm on their
head, and of wrily reshaping “extraneous” idioms
(Ecstasy-driven dance rhythms, a slinky tango,
sundry baroqueries, tough blues voicings) to his
own ends.
His most celebrated work is the opera Powder
Her Face (1995), a caustic satire on British hypocrisy that gained notoriety for its treatment of the
life, divorce and death of the Duchess of Argyll:
at one point the soprano impersonating the
duchess has to perform what has been claimed as
the world’s first onstage fellatio aria. The opera’s
irreverent high spirits are matched by its cinematic skill in delineating location and character.
The success (or notoriety) of Powder Her Face
led to an operatic commission from the Royal
Opera House. Adès aimed high, taking as his
text Shakespeare’s The Tempest in an adaptation
by playwright Meredith Oakes. Premiered in
2004, with an outstanding cast conducted by the
composer, it contained some magical moments
but was less musically daring and coherent than
his earlier opera. It was followed, the next year,
by Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths), written

5


the Maya whom they annihilated. The Maya are

represented by a mezzo-soprano, intoning in a
voice almost drained of emotional inflection;
a chorus takes the side of the Spanish, while the
orchestra bridges the two, slithering and stomping
for the Mayan passages, clamorous and chaotic
for the Spanish. Ades’s texts include such lines
as “They will come from the east … they will
burn all the land, they will burn all the sky”. On
11 September 2001, the whole piece suddenly
seemed truly prophetic, but even without that
unlooked-for relevance, America: A Prophecy has
an unsettling power.

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City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Adès
(EMI; currently download only)

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
know Adès’s music intimately, and it shows. No less importantly, Susan Bickley conjures up a tranced intensity for
the Mayan prophecies. Adès’s dark humour and restless
imagination find their fullest expression in this, his most
compelling work for orchestra.

Chamber Music
Adès has been fascinated by the sound-worlds
opened up by period instruments, and his
Sonata da Caccia (1993) pays tribute to the
music of François Couperin (see p.148). Written

for baroque oboe, horn and harpsichord, it
occasionally sounds almost like a genuinely
eighteenth-century work (notably at the highly
melodic beginning of the third movement) but
one renewed by Adès’s distinctly contemporary
sonic imagination and rhythmic stamp.
For his only string quartet, Arcadiana (1994),
Adès provides the second movement with a
heading that quotes from Mozart, while the third
(“Auf dem Wasser zu singen”) takes its epigraph
from the Schubert song of that title. The musical
allusions – imaginative links rather than quotations – form a network of “images associated
with ideas of the idyll, vanishing, vanished, or
imaginary”. Tuneful fragments rise to the surface
and quickly subside, as in the deliberately corny
gondolier’s melody that bubbles through the
opening movement, “Venezia notturna”, or the
fourth movement’s lopsided tango. The whole
work is suffused with an air of wistful elegy, as
befits a work evoking Arcadia.

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Niesemann, Clark, Adès; Endellion Quartet
(EMI; with Sonata da Caccia & other pieces)

Arcadiana was premiered by the Endellion Quartet as part
of the 1994 Elgar Festival, a fact reflected in the stylish
finesse of the group’s performance. It’s matched by the
graceful performance of Sonata da Caccia, on which the

composer plays harpsichord.

Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909)

ISAAC ALBÉNIZ

I

6

saac Albéniz, a crucial figure in the creation
of a distinctively Spanish classical musical
idiom, is associated primarily with works for
the piano, and above all with Iberia, a suite of
twelve piano pieces composed between 1906 and
1909. It’s hardly surprising that the majority of
his pieces were written for that instrument, given
Albéniz’s extraordinary gifts as a performer.
Born into a musical family, Isaac made his
public debut at Barcelona’s Teatro Romea at the
age of 4, where some members of the incredulous
audience suspected that some kind of fraud was
being perpetrated. At 7 he auditioned at the Paris
Conservatoire, where he was praised by Professor
Marmontel – the teacher of both Bizet and Debussy
– but was considered too young to become a
student. In 1869 he enrolled at the Madrid conservatory but at the age of 10 he suddenly ran away from

home and supported himself by giving concerts
in various cities in Castile. A couple of years later

he topped that escapade by stowing away on a
ship to South America, travelling to the USA via
Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico,
earning his bread by playing piano in so-called
“places of entertainment”.
Although he returned to Spain and became a
diligent student, Albéniz never fully exorcized
his wanderlust and spent much of the rest of his
life moving between Barcelona, Madrid, Paris
and London. On one trip in 1880 he followed his
idol Liszt through Weimar, Prague, Vienna and
Budapest, gaining invaluable instruction along
the way. The fulcrum of his nomadic existence
for much of the 1890s was Paris, where he taught
piano and struck up friendships with, among
others, Debussy, Fauré and Dukas. His encounters


with the new wave of French composers, headed
by Debussy and Ravel, were immensely productive – and the relationship was not the one-way
process it’s sometimes depicted as having been,
as Albéniz contributed much to the emergence of
impressionist music.
But the most significant influence on Albéniz
came from the musicologist and folk-song
collector Felipe Pedrell. Albéniz’s earliest compositions were overindebted to Liszt, but after
meeting Pedrell he began to explore and experiment with Spanish folk idioms. As the nineteenth
century came to a close, it was Albéniz’s music
above all that defined everything that was exciting
about modern Spanish piano writing. Pieces like

La Vega, the Cantos de España and Suite española
are bursting with national colour, evoking the
sound of guitars, flamenco rhythms and dances
like the sevillana and corranda.
As well as writing for the piano, Albéniz had a
rather less successful, and slightly bizarre, career
as an opera composer. On a trip to London he
made an agreement with the banker Francis
Money-Coutts to set his English librettos to music
in exchange for a regular allowance. The results
were four operas, of which the last, Merlin (1886),
was the first of a projected but never completed
Arthurian trilogy on Wagnerian lines. None
has entered the repertoire, although Merlin has
recently been revived and recorded in Spanish.

Piano Music

the most important Spanish work for solo piano,
a status it still retains, and its bold sonorities and
harmonies proved an inspiration for that country’s
young composers.

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Iberia; Navarra; España; La Vega; Yvonne en visite!:
Hamelin (Hyperion; 2 CDs)

In this recent recording Marc-André Hamelin, a Canadian
pianist of dazzling virtuosity, brings all his brilliant technique to bear on Iberia while also managing to convey all

the subtleties and colours of Albeniz’s glittering Spanish
travelogue. The additional pieces are no less impressive.

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Iberia; Suite española; Navarra: de Larrocha
(Decca; 2 CDs)

Alicia de Larrocha studied with Frank Marshall, a pupil of
Albéniz’s friend Granados who in turn studied with Pedrell.
This Decca set (recorded in 1973) is a glorious celebration
of a great pianist. She particularly relishes the more poetic,
melancholy pieces – the multi-layered subtleties of the
opening Evocación is especially beautifully handled.

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Sevilla; Mallorca; Asturias; Canción y Danza No, 1:
Russell (Telarc; with additional pieces by Granados,
Tarrega, Malats and Pipo)

Several of Albéniz’s piano works are just as effective
played on the guitar, especially when the guitarist is as
gifted as David Russell. This collection of Spanish favourites, Reflections of Spain, contains only four of the most
well-known Albéniz pieces but they are delivered with an
infectious verve and great expressive warmth.

ISAAC ALBÉNIZ

Written when he was 26, the Suite española is the

finest of Albéniz’s early piano works, in which he
reveals a total understanding of regional Spanish
dance forms, at the same time transforming them
into something uniquely pianistic. The exception to
this rule is Asturias (the fifth of the eight-part suite)
in which insistently repeated notes so strongly suggest a guitar that the work has been transcribed for
and is often performed on that instrument. This
assimilation of folkloric elements reaches a greater
level of sophistication with Albéniz’s masterpiece
Iberia, a work on which he laboured obsessively for
the last three years of his life. Subtitled “12 nouvelles impressions”, Iberia conjures up the presence
of a whole array of different regions (including
the then Spanish colony of Cuba), capturing the
musical essence of each local culture not by merely
aping and embellishing its tunes – in fact, all the
tunes are original – but through a subtle snatch of
rhythm here and the faintest outline of a melodic
refrain there. Iberia was immediately recognized as

Isaac Albéniz – pianist and composer.

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Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1750)

TOMASO ALBINONI

A

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lbinoni is almost entirely known for a
piece of music he didn’t actually write.
The famous Adagio in G Minor was not
merely reconstructed by the Italian musicologist
Remo Giazotto, as is usually acknowledged after
Albinoni’s name – it was pretty well written by
him in its entirety. Giazotto came across a manuscript in the ruins of the Dresden State Library
just after World War II. The music (which may
not even have been by Albinoni) consisted of
a bass line, a few bars of the violin part, and
nothing more. Deciding that what he’d found was
a church sonata, Giazotto scored the piece for
organ and strings. The result is a work of solemnity and affecting simplicity, which has proved
an astonishingly durable favourite, almost on a
par with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (which was rediscovered around the same time, but is entirely
genuine). If, as is rumoured, Giazotto owns the
copyright to the Adagio, he must by now be very
rich indeed.
Approaching Albinoni’s genuine compositions
after the lushness of the Adagio can come as a
shock. On the whole it is bright, lively and melodious music, with an obvious debt to Corelli and
more than a passing resemblance to that of Vivaldi,
his contemporary and fellow Venetian – but
without the same degree of energy or inventiveness.
Unlike Vivaldi, Albinoni didn’t have to compose to earn his living. As the eldest son of a
highly prosperous paper merchant and stationer,
he approached music as a committed amateur,
but soon made his mark as an opera composer,

writing over fifty works (of which few have survived intact). In 1721 the family business, part
of which he had inherited in 1709, was successfully claimed by one of his father’s many
creditors, but this loss of income coincided with
the most successful period of Albinoni’s career.
His operas were being performed outside Italy,
and he was invited to supervise one of them,
I veri amici (The True Friends), at the Bavarian
court of Maximilian II Emanuel in Munich.
He even received the accolade of having three
themes (from his trio sonatas, Opus 1) used as
the subjects for fugues by J.S. Bach – perhaps the
pinnacle of his reputation until the resurrection
of the Adagio.

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Adagio in G Minor: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
(Deutsche Grammophon; with Pachelbel Canon, etc)

Performances of the Adagio range from the overblown to
the briskly efficient. The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra take
the middle line; their refined string sound makes the best
possible case for the music and keeps the schmalz quotient
low. The Adagio is coupled with a selection of Baroque
favourites, including Pachelbel’s Canon.

Concertos
Albinoni was an important figure in the development of the concerto, helping to establish the
three-movement (fast-slow-fast) pattern and introducing the idea of fugal finales. The solo melodies,
especially when written for the oboe, are closely

modelled on the vocal ideal of smooth arching
phrases with no great leaps. A feeling of balance
and order prevails in most of Albinoni’s instrumental writing, but this is particularly true of his
twelve Opus 9 concertos (four for violin), which
are outstanding for their elegance and melodic
ease. The slow movements, in particular, are lyrical
creations, and are often – as in the D minor oboe
concerto – outstandingly beautiful.

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12 Concertos, Op.9: Academy of Ancient Music;
Hogwood (Decca; 2 CDs)

The whole of Opus 9 in hugely assured and elegant performances. Oboists Frank de Bruine and Alfredo Bernardini
combine immaculate intonation with refined phrasing, while
violinist Andrew Manze gets the pulse beating faster with his
spirited accounts of the four violin concertos.


Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652)

T

In his previous appointments Allegri had
adopted the new more expressive style of composition (the seconda prattica), but in the papal chapel,
where no instruments were permitted, he returned
to the stile antico (or prima prattica) as exemplified by Palestrina. Very little of this music has been
recorded. At its best, as in the six-part Missa Vidi
Turbam Magnam, Allegri breathes new life into the

old forms with a wide range of contrasted voice
groupings and a masterful control of sonority.

Miserere
The Miserere, a penitential psalm much concerned
with sin, was performed at Lauds on the three days
before Easter. These were Tenebrae services – as
they progressed, the candles which illuminated
the chapel were extinguished one by one until, in
almost complete darkness, the Miserere was performed. In Allegri’s setting the verses of the psalm
alternate between plainsong (the even verses) and
falsobordone or harmonized chant (odd verses).
A further subdivision occurs: the falsobordone is
performed in a five-part version and a four-part
version by different choirs. Originally the falsobordone sections were a vehicle for improvised
embellishments of a highly virtuosic nature in
which the castrati in particular excelled. In the
eighteenth century these were described by Charles
Burney as “certain customs and expressions such
as swelling and diminishing the notes altogether;
accelerating or retarding the measure, singing some
stanzas quicker than others”. But already the tradition of improvisation was lost and what Burney
is describing is really an interpretation of Allegri’s
simple harmonies onto which the embellishments
had been fixed. Burney introduced the work to
England but its resurgence in modern times is due
to the recording made by King’s College Choir in
the early 1960s.

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Goodman; King’s College Choir; Willcocks
(Decca; with Palestrina Stabat Mater, etc)

Thirty or so years on and this performance still packs a punch.
The treble soloist Roy Goodman (now a well-known conductor) had been cavorting around the football pitch minutes
before this recording was made, but he still produced an
effortless purity of tone and incisiveness which has never
been bettered. The sound is warm and natural for such a
notoriously difficult acoustic.

GREGORIO ALLEGRI

he Sistine Chapel was built by Pope Sixtus
IV to aggrandize not just himself and his
family but the very office of the papacy
itself. Subsequent popes contributed to its visual
splendour, most notably through the frescoes
of Michelangelo, but much of the chapel’s fame
derived from its music. The choir became a yardstick for choral excellence, and contributed to the
refinement of polyphonic singing which culminated in the spiritualized serenity of Palestrina
(see p.396). Its most celebrated work, however,
came from an obscure composer of the next generation, Gregorio Allegri, whose setting of the
Miserere Mei (Psalm 51 in the English Bible) was
performed three times during Holy Week from
the year of its creation until 1870. So renowned
did this work become that its music was a closely
guarded secret and illicit copyists were threatened
with excommunication – though this did not
stop the 14-year-old Mozart transcribing it from

memory after hearing it once.
In fact the reputation of Allegri’s Miserere
derived not so much from the music itself – a
simple harmonized chant – as from the astonishingly ornate embellishments improvised by
members of the choir. This skill was gradually lost
over the centuries so that the version that we usually hear today is one using ornamentation fixed
around the end of the eighteenth century. It may
be less dramatic than original performances, but
its embellishment – above all the climactic top C
– makes it one of the most rarefied and ethereal
pieces in the whole of Catholic church music.
Allegri’s musical career began in 1591 as a chorister at Rome’s San Luigi dei Francesi, where he
took lessons with the maestro di cappella Giovanni
Bernardino Nanino, a follower of Palestrina.
When his voice broke, Gregorio was replaced by
his younger brother Domenico, but he returned
as an alto in 1601. About four year later, he took
holy orders and left Rome, taking up positions as
composer and singer at the cathedrals of Fermo
and Tivoli. After a brief spell as maestro di cappella
of Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome, Allegri joined
the papal choir at the end of 1629. He retained the
position until his death some 22 years later, and
was elected maestro di cappella by his colleagues
for the Holy Year of 1650.

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