Mussorgsky, Nigth on Bald Mountain

Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, born in Karevo, Russia, on March 21, 1839, showed remarkable piano skills from a young age. Although his father was no external to music and his mother played the piano moderately well as an amateur, the little boy had to enter the Cadet School of the Guards in St. Petersburg at the age of thirteen, because in the opinion of his parents his musical talent should not be an impediment to forging a stable future.

Officer and musician
Graduated from the School with the rank of officer, Mussorgsky was faced with a serious nervous breakdown, as the development of his military career required him to move away from Saint Petersburg. In the salons of the city, he had the opportunity to meet various rising musicians: Cui, Borodin and Balakirev (with whom he would later participate, along with Rimski-Kórsakov, in the famous group "Mighty Five"), and had become a disciple of the latter so that leaving the city meant getting away not only from family and friends but also from music.

Cadet Modest Mussorgsky
(1839 -1881)

Leaving the military ranks
The vocational crisis that absorbed him lasted almost two years, until in 1859, at the age of twenty, in a moment of supreme lucidity and commendable sharpness, he decided to come out of the military ranks to devote himself entirely to musical art. Unfortunately, during the next decade, despite being a member in good standing of the aforementioned Mighty Five – formally established in 1862 –, he would be afflicted by new and deep emotional crises, caused by the dire economic situation of his family.

Official and musician
The family crisis forced him to enter a ministry as an administrative employee, where he would remain for no less than fifteen years, taking away thousands of precious hours from creative work. All in all, the end of the decade is a relatively fertile period, in which the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain is created. The years to come will register the birth of the suite Pictures at an Exhibition and, perhaps his most famous work, the opera Boris Godunov.

Night on Bald Mountain - Tone poem
The work is inspired by a Gogol tale relating the experience of a peasant who witnesses a coven on the night of San Juan. It was never published during Mussorgsky's lifetime, and the version that has become popular – the one we heard in the animated film Fantasia in Stokowski's arrangement – corresponds to the orchestral arrangement that his fellow countryman Nicolai Rimski-Kórsakov made of Mussorgsky´s sketches.

The rendition is by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Claudio Abbado.

John Cage, "In a Landscape"

While many pianists from around the world, without lifting a finger, would sit at the piano to give their audience the novel work 4'33'', its author, John Cage, was making an effort to compose a musical piece whose score was going to show in its short pages a cluster of half notes, crotchets, quavers and semiquavers, in the traditional way.

It was 1948 and quite a few years had passed since Cage had taken lessons with Arnold Schoenberg, after which the latter told to the former that he should have a feeling for harmony. Cage answered; "Yes. I have no feeling for harmony". Schoenberg then said: "You will always encounter an obstacle, and that it would be as though you came to a wall through which you could not pass." I said: "In that case, I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.'

In a Landscape

John Cage (1912 - 1992)

So, when some years after he was asked to write the musical accompaniment for the choreographic work "Dream", for the dancer Louise Leopold, the composer recalled the words of maestro Schoenberg and, against all odds, there was no need to beat his head against the wall to give birth to the piece In a Landscape, an unmistakable composition of musical modernism, which incidentally brings to mind the memory of Erik Satie and which was complete to the taste of Louise, the dancer.

The piece, around eight minutes long, was composed for piano or harp.
The rendition, here, is by Israeli pianist Shira Legmann, during a live concert in Boston.

John Cage, 4'33''

The Sounds of Silence

The American avant-garde philosopher, poet, painter, pioneer of aleatory and electronic music, and composer, John Cage, was not the first to invent a musical composition that contained not a single note. Before and after him, there were breakthrough composers who worked on silence as musical material. But undoubtedly, his work titled 4'33 '' is the one that has survived the longest. Furthermore, it is considered his masterpiece, and the most controversial, far surpassing other works that gave silence a leading role.

4'33 ''
The piece, 4 minutes and 33 seconds long – as it will have been noticed – was composed in 1952, It can be played by any instrument or set of instruments, although it was originally conceived to be performed on the piano. Despite its short extension, it is structured in three movements. His score only contains the Latin word "tacet" which is customary to use to indicate to the orchestra musician that his contribution is not required for a considerable period, for example, during a complete movement. In this case, tacet instructs the interpreter to remain silent for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

John Cage (1912 - 1992)

The music "of the environment"
In Cage's own opinion this was his most important work and with it, he attempted to show that any sound or set of sounds can be music, if we agree. The four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence are intended for the audience to listen to the sounds of the environment while the piece is "performed", sounds that neither the author nor the interpreter nor the audience is in a position to control, which, for true, is an irrefutable truth.

The various versions
There is an online version played on the piano, apparently by John Cage himself, but it is somewhat old and the video is a low-resolution one. The sound, moreover, is poor.
I've preferred to show here an orchestral version with soloist, which Cage devised a few years later due to the enthusiasm that the original piece aroused in the public, a project that meant some good years of work for the composer. As rarely before, at the end of the piece, the audience knew how to keep the overwhelming silence that the end of every musical manifestation requires.

To the benefits already described, 4'33 '' adds an unmatched feature: it can be heard both with and without headphones.

Rossini, "Semiramis" - Overture

Gioachino Rossini not only laid the foundations for the bel canto that would dominate the panorama of Italian opera in the early nineteenth century but was also the one who inaugurated the surprising behaviour adopted by the musicians of his time of getting hold of a mistress older than themselves (his loyal followers will be Franz Liszt, who fell in love with Marie d'Agoult, six years older; and then Chopin and Sand, who was seven years older than her "Chopinski"). Indeed, in 1815, when Chopin was only five years old, and Liszt was only rising above four, the precocious Gioachino, at twenty-three, would find love in the Madrid-born singer Isabella Colbran, seven years older.

Isabella, soprano and mezzo
A high-class soprano and mezzo, at the time of meeting Gioachino –whose comic operas have brought to fame only four years after his career began–, Mme Colbran was a singer whose tessitura and register were the polar opposites of the typical flourishes that, at that stage, the music of Gioachino exhibited. Therefore, she will urge the young composer to work in more serious operas, in order to perform heroines where her voice could display her full potential.

Isabella Colbran (1785 - 1845)

Gioachino fulfilled her wishes as far as possible. Along with a Barbiere, a Cinderella and a Thieving Magpie the young Rossini (blessed are you) wrote for Isabella various dramatic roles specially created for her voice features.

The decline
But as time doesn't pass for nothing, by 1822 the voice of the Colbran had begun to decline. Rossini was forced to adapt the arias to her failing voice, until there was the last opera written for her: the drama in two acts, Semiramis. A year before its premiere they had been married, but the marriage would not be for life as their relationships will always be tangled and thorny. The rupture would come in 1837 when Isabella had spent many years without singing and Rossini turned eight composing absolutely nothing.

Semiramis
The two-act opera Semiramis took its script from Voltaire's tragedy, "Semiramis", based in turn on the legend of Semiramis, queen of Babylon. Premiered at the La Fenice theater, Venice, in February 1823, it is rarely performed today but is survived by its Overture, one of the most beautiful written by Rossini, and the most extensive of all.

The rendition is by the outstanding Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he has been the holder since 2009, and with which he won a Grammy Award in 2012 for the best orchestral performance, with the Symphony No. 4 by Johannes Brahms.

The familiar and overwhelming Rossini's crescendo rehearses a first song at minute 4:10. A second theme begins at 6:00, which will be resumed at 10:30 to lead to the climax and then to a thunderous finale.

Johann Strauss Sr., Radetzky March

Johann Strauss Sr (1804 - 1849)

Johann Strauss Sr. never said to his eponymous son "I hope you will go further than I do" or anything like that. There was no need. Naturally, the son's talent would soon surpass the father's. Thus, the relations within the Strauss Orchestra, founded by Strauss Sr in 1825, would be complicated. To the point that Strauss Jr later decided to create his own orchestra, vying with his father in the battle to gain the favour of the audience, the nascent Viennese bourgeoisie, who in those years was in need of dancing.

The invention of the "Viennese waltz"
Over the years, the son's fame overshadowed that of the father. This reality, however, is petty with Strauss Sr. Although it was his son who in his time earned the title of "the king of the waltz" in Europe, Johann Strauss Sr. was the author of the idea. From the elaboration of simple peasant dances, it was he who managed to introduce a danceable piece in triple time into the halls of Vienna, which until today is known as the "Viennese waltz" and which, of course, the son upscaled. And it was the father who, for the first time, decided to designate the pieces composed with a descriptive title and not simply with a number, so that the son did not need a focus group to decide between The Blue Danube and Vals N ° 7, or 15, or 31.

Joseph Wenzel Radetzky
(1766 - 1858)

Joseph Wenzel, Graf Radetzky
In the exaltation of the waltz, the son performed brilliantly, by the way, but it resulted. unexpectedly. in that only one piece by the creator of the Viennese waltz is heard on today's stages. This is the extraordinarily famous Radetzky March, composed in honor of the Austrian Field Marshal, Joseph Wenzel, Count Radeztky, whose glory at the time would consist in safeguarding Austria's military might during the clashes of 1848-49, in the framework of the Italian independence wars.

The "New Year" March 
The father was far from the brilliance of the son, but his ingenuity was enough for his rightfully famous march to be heard every morning of the first day of January in the Musikverein Hall of Vienna. The Radetzky March is the jubilant piece destined to proudly close the proverbial New Year's Concert in that city.

During the performance of the piece, tradition prescribes that the conductor turns to the audience and invites them to clap out the rhythm. This is what we see the young and remarkable Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, doing on the occasion of a tour of Europe, leading the no less outstanding Venezuelan group, the Simon Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra.