The Swingle Singers, "Libertango"

 
Their first album, from 1963, was called Jazz Sebastian Bach. Most of the songs were preludes and fugues arrangements of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. They featured drums and double bass, and exuded an exquisite "swing" flavour. Due to the latter, a large part of its admirers around the world must have believed for decades that the name chosen to call this a cappella voices ensemble, was also recalling the popular jazz style of the 1930s.

Ward Swingle and the French group
But no, everything was much simpler. The word "swingle" came from the surname of its creator, the vocalist and jazz musician born in Alabama in 1927, Ward Swingle, who in 1962 put together the group in Paris with the purpose of providing vocal accompaniment to renowned singers. Swingle's musical culture soon led him to experiment with classical a cappella music, using the jazzy device of scat songs, vocal improvisation with syllables and made-up words, a specialty in which Ella Fitzgerald excelled as a virtuoso.

Ward Swingle (1927 - 2015)

The English group
In 1973, the French group dissolved and Swingle moved to London, where he recruited new members to form a revamped Swingle Singers that from that date until today maintains a continuous activity, winning awards, recording, and making successful presentations throughout Europe and the United States.
Unlike the French group, the current eight voices of the British group dispense with all instrumental percussion to execute, through scat singing, a very wide repertoire that, surprisingly, can range from a simple Bach prelude to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, passing through rock music, latin, pop and jazz.

At present, the group is made up of two sopranos, two altos, two tenors and two basses. Absolutely consolidated as a group formation, as individual members have left the group, remaining members have held auditions for replacements. Ward Swingle continued as a performer in the group until retiring to the United States in 1984 and taking the role of "musical adviser" to the Swingles until his death in 2015. 

The video shows its version of the well-known piece Libertango, by the Argentine composer Astor Piazolla.

Debussy, "Prelude a l'aprés-midi d'un faune"

 
In 1880, his composition teacher called the father of modern music, Claude Debussy, "of a strange but intelligent nature". In December of that year, just turned eighteen, Claude had enrolled in composition lessons at the Paris Conservatory. There, he would stand out as a highly gifted student but with a certain tendency to indiscipline, to the extent that his teachers would advise the need to "restrain" him.

A friend of symbolist poets, of Parisian cafes and impressionist painters, the young Claude would be difficult to be restrained. In 1888 he visited Bayreuth, in Bavaria, to attend the performance of Wagner's operas in the theater built by him to stage his own plays. He returned immersed in a sea of ​​doubt.

The following year, he went on pilgrimage again. And got convinced. The programmatic music lavished on Wagner's works and their explicit emotional content decided him to take exactly the opposite direction, distancing himself as far as possible from the German author and from what he called "excesses of romanticism."

Debussy, "impressionist"

Claude Debussy (1862 - 1918)

From that moment on, Debussy would focus on the composition of music that, assisted only by sounds, is capable of creating in the listener mind an atmosphere similar to that which Impressionist painting and the Symbolist poets of those days could suggest with their pictures and poems. For this reason, his first compositions were described as "impressionists." In 1910, asked by a Viennese journalist on this matter and the school that it would have subsequently sown, Debussy just replied:

"There is no Debussy school. I have no disciples.  I am me."

Prelude a l'aprés-midi d'un faune
The triptych projected in 1892 included Prelude, interludes and final paraphrase for the afternoon of a faun. But the composer only finished the Prelude, premiered on December 22, 1894, at the Societé Nationale de Musique, to great acclaim, to the point that it had to be repeated.

The piece is loosely inspired by the bucolic poem Afternoon of a Faun, by Stéphane Mallarmé. To clarify his intentions, the author added some notes:

"The music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé's beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of it. Rather there is a succession of scenes through which pass the desires and dreams of the faun in the heat of the afternoon. Then, tired of pursuing the timorous flight of nymphs and naiads, he succumbs to intoxicating sleep, in which he can finally realize his dreams of possession in universal Nature."

In order to achieve the subdued and vaporous sound pursued by Debussy, the orchestration of the work completely dispenses with trumpets, trombones and percussion. 

The rendition is by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The video has been beautifully constructed with the help of paintings by French creators.

Shostakovich, "Lady Macbeth..." opera - Interlude

"Pornophonic" music

Despite the conflicting opinions that his figure arouses, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, called Stalin, was a rather ingenious guy. He was the inventor of the brilliant neologism "pornophony". He used it for the first time to refer to an opera by the comrade composer Dmitri Shostakovich, after attending its performance at the Bolshoi Theater, a venue he left that night visibly upset.

The work in question was Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenck District, an opera in four acts that Dmitri had premiered to great success almost simultaneously in Leningrad and Moscow in January 1934. Set in pre-revolutionary times, it tells the story of a woman who has an affair with a servant of her husband, which leads her to commit a crime.

Pravda's review
The play was a resounding success and ran for two years, until Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili came to attend the premiere at the Bolshoi on the night of December 26, 1935. The following day Pravda published an editorial entitled "Muddle instead of music "; the epithets ranged from "animally realistic" to "howling concert." The text closed with these words:

"... it is not enough to smudge pages. This author has to know that music for the theater must evoke the great traditional opera, and that symphonic music must be clear and explicit, simple and direct."

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975)

In just a couple of days, the work went from masterpiece to reprehensible concoction. Stormy debates took place within the Union of Soviet Composers, in the presence of Dmitri, who stood, distraught, in a corner of the room. The work was withdrawn from billboard in early 1936.

Something similar to rehabilitation appeared the following year after Dmitri premiered his Fifth Symphony. That same year he was appointed professor of composition at the Leningrad Conservatory. Creative work had to wait a bit, it was necessary to pause.

Lady Macbeth  - Interlude
The entire opera lasts two and a half hours. We present here an Interlude, written to accompany the stage changes. It is more accessible than the rest of the work and does not include any pornophonic section. It lasts barely two minutes; the rest is applause.

Chopin, Nocturne No 20, Op posth

 
The pianist of the Warsaw ghetto
In Polanski's film The Pianist, it appears that the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman spent a few months in the destroyed Warsaw trying to survive. Actually, his ordeal lasted two years, according to his memoirs collected in the book The Death of a City, published in 1945 in reduced circulation. However, it was not an obstacle for the authorities at the time to condemn and censure it. The book didn´t agree with their vision of the war, as if Szpilman's torments did not count for history.

It was not until 1998 that the memoirs, with the collaboration of a Polish author, were republished, first in German, and then in English under the title The Pianist. Two years later, they were published in Spain under the title El pianista del ghetto de Varsovia.

The movie
In 2002, the Polish director Roman Polanski adapted these memoirs for the cinema, resulting in the ultra-award-winning film The Pianist, starring the brilliant actor Adrien Brody in the role of Wladyslaw Szpilman.
The film begins with Szpilman, on a Polish radio station, performing a posthumous opus by Chopin, a piece from his youth that Frédérik did not want to be published in his lifetime. Perhaps because of this, a renowned biographer has described it as a mediocre work. It didn't seem that way to Polanski, or to the audience.

The piece is Nocturno N° 20 in C sharp minor. The rendition is by the Polish pianist Janus Olejniczak, who recorded the entire piano for the soundtrack.

It is the year 1939, September, and the German invasion has begun. The bombings interrupt the performing of Szpilman.

Following, the whole piece by Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki.

Haydn, "Farewell" Symphony

An unconventional labor protest 

The contract signed by Joseph Haydn with Prince Paul Anton Esterházy on May 1, 1761, contains fourteen articles. A cursory review of some of them reveals the social appreciation that the Old Regime had of musicians.

Article 2 committed Haydn to "behave as befits an honorable official of the princely house," as well as to "avoid all brutality against his subordinates," and to "ensure that his subordinates, and himself, always wear his work uniform." Article 3 demanded "to avoid all vulgarity by eating, drinking and in any other circumstance." Article 4 (which fortunately never applied to Haydn) required that his music could not cross the limits of the prince's domain. Article 5 obliged Haydn "to appear twice a day in the antechamber to find out whether His Highness is ready for a musical audition or not." And so it goes on.

Despite all this, the maestro born in the vicinity of Vienna on March 31, 1732, did not hesitate for a moment to sign the contract and thus ended up joining the Esterházy family, gratefully serving Prince Paul Anton and later Prince Nikolas, a brother of the former, for almost thirty years.

But not always everything went wonderfully. The summer of 1772 was long and with a generous climate, so the prince extended his stay in the palace. Much of the musicians at his court came from Eisenstadt, where they had left their families. They wanted to go back, but how to tell Nikolas? Not even Haydn himself could have requested it — at least not in words —, so he decided to do it through music, devising an ad-hoc piece: Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor, later known as Farewell Symphony.

To achieve his goal, the final movement of the work necessarily had to be slow, so in the fourth and last movement, suddenly, after a coda that seemed to lead to the conclusion, Haydn added an unusual adagio, a deliberate anticlimax.

The full story is told by actor Peter Ustinov in the superb video below.

I'm just adding here the sequence of withdrawal of the instrumentalists:
Second file violins - First oboe and second horn - bassoon - second oboe and first horn - double basses - cellos - violins (except those in the first row) - viola. The violins of the first rank remain until the end because they are in charge of finishing the work. As they retire, the musicians play a brief solo, although there are some who leave without saying goodbye: the bassoon and the cellos.

Rossini, Il Barbieri - Ecco ridente in cielo

For the Italian public at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, opera — and especially opera buffa — was a true passion, affecting all social classes. It was a dedicated audience that used to demand new shows each season, so composers and librettist had to work hard to finish the next work in record time, being usually not well paid for it. Because of this, it was common for composers to use overtures — or full arias — from previous works and, with some modification or without it, transfer them to the new production.

Despite his expertise, that led him to compose up to four operas in a year, the writing of Il Barbieri di Siviglia complicated Gioachino Rossini more than usual. He had only two months to fulfil the commission. So, in addition to the overture he should have taken from previous work, he did not manage to compose all the arias either. Consequently, the serenade that the Count of Almaviva had to sing for Rosina in the first act had to be improvised by the tenor, who made use of a piece of his authorship that was not to the liking of the audience.

Rossini (1792 - 1868)

Ecco, ridente in cielo
And as tradition pointed out that the author of the work should conduct the premiere, that February 20, 1816, the failed aria surprised Rossini in the front line, joining to the failure that, incidentally, affected the entire work. But Gioachino had the solution at hand.

For the next performance, he borrowed the melody of the opening chorus of his opera Aureliano in Palmira, from 1813, which in turn came from Ciro in Babylon, from 1812, and with that material he wrote one of the most beautiful arias for a tenor of the bel canto period, the cavatina (short aria without repetition) Ecco, ridente in cielo, sung by the Count of Almaviva at the beginning of Act I, under Rosina's balcony.

The aria has two parts, a lyrical and expressive one, and another of greater liveliness (minute 3:04) that entails a higher degree of technical difficulties, which the Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus addresses here with great ease to finish off with a spectacular ending.

Tchaikovsky, Marche Slave

In 1866, the region of Europe that we now know as the Republic of Serbia declared itself in a "state of war" with the Turks, and in June of that year, the Serbians began to fight valiantly against the Ottoman Empire that had annexed the region a long time ago: in the middle of the XVI century. But the Serbs were not alone in their fight. The Russian Empire came to their aid, openly supporting them by sending volunteers to the battlefields and receiving back the wounded and maimed. Despite the effort, Serbia lost the war.

The newly created Red Cross Society was then forced to request help from the Russian Musical Society to programme a concert for the benefit of both the organization and Serbian veterans. Promptly, the director of the musical society scheduled a concert for November of that year, commissioning the professor of the Moscow Conservatory, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovski, to compose a work to enhance the event.

Despite being going through one of his accustomed creative drought periods, Pyotr Ilyich got down to work. The piece, which he called "Serbo-Russian March" while he was working on it, was premiered on November 17 of that year with the definitive French title Marche Slave (Slavic March).

On the occasion, the conductor was his friend, pianist and director of the Moscow Conservatory, Nicolai Rubinstein, who the following month would intensely disrupt the life of Pyotr Ilyich by getting him the patronage of a wealthy Russian lady, Nadezhda von Meck. But that is another story.

The work was well received by the audience and satisfied Pyotr Ilyich. This is how he told his sister:

"Last Saturday my Serbo-Russian march was played here for the first time, resulting in a real storm of patriotic enthusiasm."

Marche Slave, op 31
The work belongs quite properly to the genre known as programmatic music. Hand in hand with Serbian folk songs, there are distinguishable passages about the oppression suffered by the Serbs, their cry for help, the Russian response on the way, and even a hopeful song of future triumph, through the invocation of the Russian national anthem.
The work shares some passages with the 1812 Overture, which Piotr would compose four years later.

The rendition is by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas, conducted by César Iván Lara.

Maurice Jarré, "Lawrence of Arabia" - soundtrack

The French composer Maurice Jarre was far from being a child prodigy as his interest in music came to him a little late. Shortly before turning 20, he discovered that he did like music and that he could pursue a career on it. And like any self-respecting composer, child prodigy or not, he had to face and overcome the opposition of his family to enter the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition, harmony and percussion after abandoning engineering studies at La Sorbonne.

He made his debut as a musician at 22 in the company of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. 
Pierre was at the piano and Maurice on the "Martenot waves", an electronic instrument invented in 1928 by the French composer and engineer Maurice Martenot. Five years later, he was asked by film director Georges Franju to compose the soundtrack for a 23-minute documentary, Hotel des Invalides. The work did not launch him to fame but helped him to forge a name as a composer of film music. It will be followed by two more films in communion with Franju, the last one in 1960 for his most memorable film, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a face).

Maurice Jarre (1924 - 2009)

The next year, Maurice's career would take a spectacular turn. The Polish producer Sam Spiegel engaged him to compose the soundtrack for a David Lean film that turned out to be nothing more and nothing less than Lawrence of Arabia, an epic film telling the story of a quirky English hero, Thomas Edward Lawrence, who from his position as an intelligence officer, led the Arab revolt against the Turks during the First World War. Maurice Jarre (1924 - 2009)

His involvement in the movie earned him an Oscar. Then a second job with Lean emerged, Doctor Zhivago. From then on, Maurice would compose the soundtrack for all David Lean films, being awarded two more Oscar.

Until his death in 2009, Maurice Jarre collaborated as a soundtrack composer in countless films, among which, to name a few, stand out The Collector, by William Wilder, Jesus of Nazareth, by Zefirelli, and The Tin Drum. In the eighties, using electronic means he wrote the complete score for the movie The Year of Living Dangerously.

In the opinion of the American composer Aaron Copland, music composed for films constitutes a new musical medium capable of exerting a fascination of its own. It is not opposed to concert, symphonic or chamber music, but rather constitutes a new form of dramatic music, as traditionally was, and still is, that written for opera, ballet or theater. Copland closes the corresponding chapter of his remarkable outreach work "What to listen for in music" with this striking suggestion to the reader:

"Next time you go to the movies, don't stop siding with the composer."

An abstract of the complete Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack is presented here (don't forget the film lasts almost four hours) in the rendition of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of its author, Maurice Jarré.

Paganini, Violin Concerto No 1

The popular idol of the 19th century, Niccolo Paganini, made his debut in Parma at the age of fifteen. Later on, accompanied by his father, he would tour the Lombardy region offering concerts and increasing his fame with his brilliant performances and the infernal virtuosity that used to accompany each of them. Not by chance, then, before turning twenty, the distinguished violinist achieved his financial independence, a circumstance that altogether with both his youth and charisma would make him fond of the game and of course, romantic adventures.

But the costly lifestyle that his talent allowed him to lead was not an obstacle since between 1801 and 1807 he devoted himself to the composition of his first great works, which would forever revolutionize the violin technique. Combining the enjoyment of life with intense work did emerge his best known and most performed work to date, the set of 24 Capriccios for solo violin, and the two sets of six sonatas for violin and guitar. Ten years later he would compose his first violin concerto.

Niccolo Paganini (1782 - 1840)

The conquest of Europe
After leaving his post as music director at the principality of Lucca and Piombino serving Princess Elisa Bonaparte (Napoleon's sister), he set about touring Italy offering recitals with his own works. Many years went on before he decided to conquer Europe which, it seemed, was waiting for him. In 1828 he gave his first recital in Vienna to great acclaim. Three years later, performances in Paris and London kept on with stunning results. The following year, he visited England and Scotland. Upon returning from that four-year tour, Niccolo settled in Paris in 1833. He was fifty-one, and a wealthy man.

Retirement
Perhaps for this reason, soon after he decided to retire from the stage. In 1834 he simultaneously left Paris and the concert career. But two years later he returned to the City of Lights as an entrepreneur, to open a casino, the Paganini Casino, a business in which he invested a large part of his fortune with disastrous results. The entrepreneurship closed its doors just two months after its opening.

The legend
The incredible virtuosity of Paganini was attributed in his time to a pact with the devil or to hidden deals with beings from beyond the grave, to which his almost cadaverous countenance and a somber image contributed valiantly. Legend has it that Niccolo's music came from the soul of beautiful-voiced women he held captive inside his violin.

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1
Composed around 1817-18, Concerto No. 1 astonished audiences and critics at its premiere for its brilliance and demanding virtuosity. It is in three movements and lasts about thirty-five minutes. The first movement, as well as the last, show the incredible technical ability that Paganini surely possessed. The second movement is brimming with elegant melodies and moments of great beauty.

00:00  Allegro maestoso

20:35  Adagio espressivo

25:42  Rondo. Allegro spiritoso

The rendition is by the young maestro Ruifeng Lin, accompanied by the Harbin Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Yusupov.

Lorenzo Fernández, "Batuque"

 

Although Heitor Villa-Lobos, his countryman, was ten years his senior, the assert claiming that the Brazilian composer Oscar Lorenzo Fernández was an absolute contemporary of Villa-Lobos is quite legitimate since Fernández also died ten years earlier. But, apart from having seen the same world, their life and musical biography are quite different.

The composer was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1897. He did his musical studies at the National Institute of Music and in 1936 he founded the Conservatorio Brasileiro de Música, which he lead until his death in 1948. Despite having composed a ballet, symphonies, two suites for orchestra and more than 80 compositions for piano, Oscar Lorenzo Fernández is mainly remembered today for an Afro-Brazilian piece plenty of great rhythmic and musical richness, "Batuque".

"Reisado do Pastoreio" Suite
From his opera Malazarte, previously composed with a libretto extracted from a play, Fernández set aside three pieces in 1941 to build a suite he called Reisado do Pastoreio, whose movements he named: Pastoreio, Toada and Batuque.
The last piece enchanted Toscanini in his time, who took over its outreach enthusiastically.
Today it is worldwide recognized, being part of the standard repertoire when it comes to making third world symphonic music.

Its name comes from the religion practiced by the ancient slaves of Bantu or Sudanese origin: "batuque" or "batuke", and which spread through the Rio Grande do Sul region in the mid-nineteenth century, reaching Argentina and Uruguay. This appellation also gave rise to the words "batuque" or "batucada" as synonyms for percussion.

The rendition is by the UFF National Symphony Orchestra (Universidade Federal Fluminense), under the baton of a lady, the Brazilian conductor Ligia Amadio.