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Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 3 pm
Old South Church
Copley Square, Boston
See press release for this concert.
Hear the WHRB radio ad for this concert.
See the NECN interview of Music Director Betsy Burleigh about Chorus pro Musica's new season!
Featuring:
 Ross Wood, organist |
 Laurie Szablewski, mezzo-soprano |
 Marc DeMille, baritone |
Born: January 11, 1902, Louviers, Eure (Haute-Normandie), France
Died: June 16, 1986, Louveciennes, near Paris
In 1912, at the age of 10, Maurice Duruflé became a chorister at the Rouen Cathedral Choir School, where he studied piano and organ. At age 17, he moved to Paris and took private organ lessons with Charles Tournemire, whom he assisted at Ste-Clotilde until 1927. In 1920 Duruflé entered the Conservatoire de Paris, where he took courses in organ, harmony, fugue, and composition and graduated with first prize in piano accompaniment. Between 1922 and 1928 he won several prizes for composition, piano accompaniment, harmony and organ. Duruflé became the assistant to Louis Vierne at Notre Dame in 1927. In 1929, he became organist of St. Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, a position he held for the rest of his life. In 1943 he became professor of harmony at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he remained until 1970.
In 1947, Duruflé wrote the most famous of his very few works: the Requiem, Op. 9, for soloists, choir, organ and orchestra. That same year, the organist Marie-Madeleine Chevalier became his assistant. They married in 1953, when he was 51. The couple became a famous and popular organ duo, sharing the position of organist at St. Étienne-du-Mont and going on tour together several times throughout the 1960s and early 1970s.
Duruflé suffered severe injuries in a car accident in 1975, and as a result he gave up performing; indeed he was largely confined to his apartment, leaving organist duties at St-Étienne-du-Mont to his wife Marie-Madeleine (who was also injured in the accident).
Maurice Duruflé published only fourteen works. He was a perfectionist as a composer, often continuing to edit and change pieces after publication. His best known compostions are the Requiem and a Mass (1967). His last published work, from 1977, is a setting of the Lord's Prayer for four mixed voices.
Born: December 16, 1882, Kecskemét, Hungary
Died: March 6, 1967, Budapest
Laudes organi was Kodály's last major work, completed on 24 February 1966, just one year before his death at age 84. It was commissioned for the 1961 National Convention of the American Guild of Organists.
Kodály's father was a stationmaster and keen amateur musician, and Kodály learned to play the violin as a child. He also sang in a cathedral choir and wrote music, despite having little formal musical education. In 1900, Kodály entered the University of Budapest to study modern languages, and began to study music at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, where Hans Koessler taught him composition.
One of the first people to undertake the serious study of folk tales, Kodály became one of the most significant early figures in the field of ethnomusicology. In 1905 he visited remote villages to collect songs, recording them on phonograph cylinders. Around this time Kodály met fellow composer Béla Bartók, whom he introduced to some of the methods involved in folk song collecting. The two became lifelong friends and champions of each other's music. After gaining his PhD in philosophy and linguistics, Kodály went to Paris, where he studied with Charles Widor. There, he discovered and absorbed new influences, notably the music of Claude Debussy. In 1907, he moved back to Budapest to become a professor at the Academy of Music. He continued his folk music-collecting expeditions without interruption throughout World War I.
Kodály's emergence was delayed by the outbreak of the World War and subsequent major geopolitical changes. In 1919, he played a role in the socialist Hungarian Republic, as one of the three members of the Musical Directory (the other two being Bartók and Ernst von Dohnanyi); when the Republic fell later that year, he was stripped of his teaching positions for next two years. His first major public success was in 1923, when his Psalmus Hungaricus premiered at a concert to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest (Bartók's Dance Suite premiered on the same occasion). The performance gave him international celebrity.Kodály was very interested music education. Beginning in 1935, he and colleague Jenö Ádám embarked on a long-term project to reform music teaching in the lower and middle schools that resulted in the publication of several highly influential books. He has had a profound impact on musical education around the world.
Kodály remained in Budapest through World War II, retiring from teaching in 1942. In 1945 he became the president of the Hungarian Arts Council, and in 1962 received the Order of the Hungarian People's Republic. His other posts included a presidency of the International Folk Music Council and honorary presidency of the International Society for Music Education. He died in Budapest in 1967, one of the most respected and well-known figures in the Hungarian arts.
Born: May 7, 1833, Hamburg, Germany
Died: April 3, 1897, Vienna
Geistliches Lied, Op. 30 (“Lass dich nur nichts nicht dauren”); text by Paul Flemming (1609–1640)
This motet was composed around 1859, when Brahms was a choral conductor in Hamburg. It is a double canon, with the sopranos and tenors in counterpoint with the altos and basses. The remarkably expressive piece is dedicated to Clara Schumann after her husband Robert was confined to an asylum. (The introduction quotes from Robert Schumann's Fourth Symphony, which he had dedicated to Clara.) The final “Amen” abandons the canon and unfolds over a held low E-flat from the organ.
Biography condensed from http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Brahms-Johannes.htm.
Johannes Brahms was the second child of Johann Jakob Brahms and Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen. His father had come to Hamburg hoping to become a town musician; he was proficient on several instruments but found employment mostly as a horn player and double bassist. His mother was a seamstress, "a frail, unattractive woman who walked with a slight limp because one of her legs was shorter than the other." They lived in a poor neighborhood near the docks. Brahms's parents married in 1830, when his father was 24 and his mother was 41. His father left his mother in 1864; she died the following year. Brahms had an older sister and a younger brother.
Johannes learned to play piano from his father (his brother Fritz also became a pianist) and supplemented the family income by playing the piano in restaurants and theaters, as well as by teaching. For a time, he also learned the cello, although his progress was cut short when his teacher absconded with Brahms's instrument. Brahms also studied mathematics, history, English, French, and Latin in private elementary and secondary schools, and was a voracious reader. The young Brahms gave a few public concerts in Hamburg, and, though he did not become well known as a pianist, he made some concert tours in the 1850s and 1860s and in later life frequently participated in the performance of his own works. In his early teens he began to conduct choirs, and eventually became an successful orchestral conductor.
Brahms began to compose early, but his efforts did not receive much attention until he went on a concert tour in 1853 as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. On this tour he befriended Joseph Joachim at Hanover, and met Franz Liszt at the Court of Weimar. At that meeting, Liszt performed Brahms's own op. 4 Scherzo at sight, but Reményi was offended when Brahms fell asleep during a performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor, and he and Brahms soon afterwards parted company. But Joachim had given Brahms a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann; Brahms walked to Düsseldorf and was welcomed into the Schumann family. Schumann was amazed by the 20-year-old's talent and actively promoted his work. Brahms eventually developed a lifelong, emotionally passionate, but (as far as is known) always platonic relationship with Clara Schumann, who was 14 years his senior. (Brahms never married, despite strong feelings for several women and despite entering into an abortive engagement with Agathe von Siebold in 1859.) After Schumann's attempted suicide and subsequent encarceration in a mental sanatorium in 1854, Brahms was the main go-between between Clara and her husband, and found himself virtually head of the household. He lived with Robert and Clara between 1855–56.
After Schumann's death at the sanatorium in 1856, Brahms divided his time between Hamburg, where he formed and conducted a ladies' choir, and Detmold, where he was court music teacher and conductor. He first visited Vienna in 1862, staying there over the winter, and in 1863 was appointed conductor of the Vienna Singakademie. Though he resigned the position the following year, he soon made his home there. From 1872 to 1875, he was Director of the concerts of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; afterwards he accepted no formal position.
Brahms composed steadily throughout the 1850s and 60s, but his music had evoked divided critical responses and the First Piano Concerto had been badly received in some of its early performances. It was the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem in 1868 that may have given him the confidence finally to complete a number of works that he had wrestled with over many years, such as the cantata Rinaldo, his first String Quartet, Third Piano Quartet and, most notably, his First Symphony. The other three symphonies then followed in fairly rapid succession (1877, 1883, 1885). In 1890, the 57-year-old Brahms resolved to give up composing. However, as it turned out, he was unable to abide by his decision, and in the years before his death he produced a number of acknowledged masterpieces—including the Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge), Op. 121 (1896).
While completing the Op. 121 songs Brahms fell ill of cancer (sources differ on whether this was of the liver or pancreas). He died on April 3, 1897 and is buried in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.
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