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August 22, 2019Read More
By Michael Talbot
I first came across Francesco Barsanti (ca. 1690–1775) in the early 1960s, when I bought an LP of French horn concertos. I gave him little thought over the next five decades, when my research focused on Albinoni and Vivaldi. But my interest was rekindled when, following my retirement, I began to direct my attention also to music composed in eighteenth-century Britain by Italian immigrants. Barsanti, who lived for most of his working life in England and Scotland, was an ideal composer and musical personality to investigate; he not only integrated himself well into British musical life but also contributed something truly individual to it. His secular vocal music output encompasses four very different genres: the chamber cantata, the Italian madrigal, the French air, and the English catch.
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May 01, 2019Read More
By Jonathan Wainwright
Many years ago, as an undergraduate, I remember finding a couple of articles suggesting that Walter Porter was a pupil of the great Monteverdi, and thinking, “an English composer called Walter who studied with Monteverdi: a bit unlikely?!” As I continued my studies at the Ph.D. level and discovered more about the dissemination and influence of Italian music in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, I learned that Walter Porter didn’t need to go anywhere near Italy in order to study and get to know the most up-to-date Italian styles, and that all Monteverdi’s publications were easily available in London, but, I’m sad to say, my skepticism still shone through. Twenty years later, when editing Walter Porter’s collected works for A-R Editions, I had the opportunity to really get to know Porter’s music, and I’m now slightly embarrassed about my previous skepticism. I can now quite believe that Porter was a pupil of the great Monteverdi!
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March 20, 2019Read More
By Martin Harlow
Modern clarinet players owe a debt of gratitude to Iwan Müller (1786–1854), whose developments to the clarinet in the early nineteenth century served to shape many of the features found in the instrument that is used today. In 1809, at the Saale zum römischen Kaiser in Vienna, he premiered Philipp Jakob Riotte’s (1776–1856) Clarinet Concerto in C Minor, op. 36, the first known work composed specifically the thirteen-keyed, “omnitonic” instrument he had recently developed. Recently published in A-R’s Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era series, this important work offers a new perspective on the clarinet’s development at a seminal point in its history.
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August 16, 2018Read More
By Jennifer Oates
When I stumbled upon a CD of Hamish MacCunn’s music as a young graduate student, I was entranced by the excerpts from his opera Jeanie Deans, whose combination of folk-like music evoking the Scottish countryside, juxtaposed with the surprisingly modern sounding arias, suggested a composer with great range and depth. Most of what has been written about MacCunn and his music has focused on his Scottish artistic persona from 1887 through 1894 and on the Scottish-styled compositions that had cemented this persona and established his career. But while I enjoyed MacCunn’s overtly Scottish compositions, they did not have the range and emotional depth of the music from Jeanie Deans that I had heard on that recording long ago. Where, I wondered, was the dynamic musical style that had so vividly captured my attention? I found the MacCunn of Jeanie Deans in his works for solo instruments (particularly those piano, cello, and violin), partsongs—and especially in his songs. -
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By Harvey H. Miller
The Recueil de morceaux d’orgue à l’usage spécial des élèves de l’Institution impériale des jeunes aveugles de Paris (1863) is one of the earliest known publications of music in braille notation. Its fifty-four pieces were composed by four blind composers who attended and later taught at the Institution des Jeunes Aveugles, Paris’s school for the blind. With this edition (N071), which includes historical background on the composers, the institution, and braille notation, this music is available to sighted musicians for the first time. The following is the editor’s account of the genesis of this project, which took him upward of ten years to complete.
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February 22, 2018Read More
By Jane Schatkin Hettrick
Six oboes, four clarinets, ten bassoons, one contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, and two timpani—such are the extra instrumental forces that Salieri added to the Vienna Hofkapelle orchestra for an extraordinary occasion in 1804: the inauguration of an empire, when Holy Roman Emperor Franz II became Emperor Franz I of Austria. For this event, Hofkapellmeister Antonio Salieri created his most monumental work of liturgical music, the twelve-movement, double-choir Plenary Mass with Te Deum, published here for the first time. The complete work took shape in stages over several years, being based on a mass Salieri originally composed in 1799, as well a single-choir Te Deum dating back to a setting from 1790. For the 1804 version, Salieri used his original scores but devised letter codes to indicate the new instruments and only sketched out some sections. This historic composition stands apart from all Salieri’s other liturgical music, showing the composer at his grandest. -
November 02, 2017Read More
By Albrecht Gaub
Within the annals of Russian opera, the collaborative opera-ballet Mlada (1872), with music by four members of the group of composers known as the Mighty Handful, is a case sui generis. The four-act spectacle was originally devised by Stepan Gedeonov, the director of the imperial theaters, who combined a scenario borrowed from an 1839 ballet with his own historical theories concerning the Western Slavs and their role in founding the first Russian empire. The music was divided act by act among the members of the Handful, with Cui taking the first act, Borodin the fourth, and Musorgskii and Rimskii-Korsakov sharing the two middle acts scene by scene. The surviving music for Mlada is now available in its entirety for the first time, and with this edition all surviving operas by major Russian composers of the nineteenth century have been published.
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September 05, 2017Read More
By Michael Burden
Musical works rarely come in pairs—at least in genuine ones, that is. But the two oratorios written to mark the feast of the Assumption by the Venetian composer Benedetto Marcello (1688–1739)—Il pianto e il riso delle quattro stagioni (1731) and Il trionfo della Poesia, e della Musica (1733)—are exceptional in this regard. They were both written by the same composer for the same feast day, the same venue, and the same series of oratorio performances; and both texts, though unconnected, are highly allegorical in nature. In both works, the story is carried forward by a small number of characters, with little or no involvement of a chorus, and both are characteristic examples of the oratorio volgare genre—the dominant oratorio genre of early eighteenth-century Italy. -
April 19, 2017Read More
By Nancy November
The name of Emanuel Aloys Förster (1748–1823) comes up with some frequency when one researches Beethoven’s string quartets, yet Förster’s own quartets are no longer part of the standard chamber music repertoire, nor are they much discussed by musicologists. This neglect stems partly from the fact that only three of Förster’s string quartets were available in score until recently. But it also reflects the fact that his works have invariably been considered solely in comparison with Beethoven’s string quartets. These three editions, comprising the eighteen quartets published during Förster’s lifetime (opp. 7, 16, and 21, featuring six quartets each), aim to bring this important composer back to the notice of performers and scholars. -
January 18, 2017Read More
By Amanda Eubanks Winkler
John Eccles was one of the most popular composers working for the Restoration-era London stage, second only to Henry Purcell, with whom he briefly worked in 1693–95. Judging from contemporary reports, Eccles’s music often surpassed Purcell’s in terms of its crowd-pleasing qualities. Although he did write for professionals, Eccles spent most of his time composing for actor-singers, expertly devising music that suited their talents. Eccles gave his collaborators the space to add their own expression, which made his songs tremendously effective in the theater—even if they do not always reward modern musicologists keen on analysis.
