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August 18, 2016
By Paula Eisenstein Baker
It is two weeks before Rosh Hashanah 1929, the Jewish New Year, and the movie show is about to start at the Capitol, one of New York’s huge “picture palaces.” Over the decade, the more than 5,000-seat Broadway theater has often programmed a minor work on Jewish motives to acknowledge the Jewish holidays, but this year, their choice is more ambitious: conductor Yasha Bunchuk raises his baton, and the eighty-man Capitol Grand Orchestra opens the program with Leo Zeitlin’s Palestina. The piece received both critical and popular acclaim, hailed by reviewers as “exotically descriptive” and “a new number . . . that is appreciated”: “once more,” one wrote, “[conductor] Yascha [Bunchuk] overworks the traps and the brass to the delight of Capitol payees.” The theater repeated Palestina in November 1929, in April of the following year (in honor of Passover), and again for the High Holy Days in September 1930 and September 1931.
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June 29, 2016
By Louise K. Stein
Celos aun del aire matan (Jealousy, even of the air, kills), by the composer Juan Hidalgo (1614–85) and the dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), is the first extant opera in Spanish and the most significant musical-theatrical work to survive from the vibrant culture of the Spanish siglo de oro. Written to commemorate the marriage of the Infanta María Teresa to Louis XIV of France, Celos transformed the ancient myth of Cephalus and Procris so that chastity is dethroned by the power of womanly desire, while tragic consequences unfold when marital harmony is disturbed by neglect and jealousy.
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By Kevin C. Karnes
In a magazine essay of 1933, the Latvian folk music collector Emilis Melngailis writes of a remarkable collection of over 120 Jewish folk songs, in Yiddish and Hebrew, that he and helpers transcribed in and around the Kovno town of Keidan. Adorning his transcriptions with photographs, he explained, he donated the collection to the Imperial Geographical Society in St. Petersburg when he returned to that city in the fall.
Although the collection subsequently disappeared from the society’s archives amidst the chaos of the October Revolution, more recent research in the Archives of Latvian Folklore and in Riga’s Museum of Literature and Music has brought to light a wealth of material related to Melngailis’s collecting projects, from field notes and photographs to transcriptions of songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, and Latvian. This music is published for the first time in Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics, enabling us to study and sound anew songs and dances performed in the historical Jewish communities of this region.
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March 23, 2016
Seventeenth-Century Italian Motets with Trombone
By D. Linda Pearse
The exact specification of instruments gained momentum in the final decades of the sixteenth century in Italy and early decades of the seventeenth. Trombones, in particular, were increasingly specified and were often used interchangeably with voices. The early Italian motets in this edition contain parts explicitly designated for trombones and document this tendency toward naming particular instruments and composing idiomatic parts for them. Of the more than hundred works that were identified, the nineteen works in this edition were chosen for the variety of textures and compositional styles represented, as well as for their inherent beauty.
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October 21, 2015
By David J. Buch
The research that resulted in A-R Editions’ publication of the Liedersammlung für Kinder und Kinderfreunde am Clavier (1791; C095), the collection for which Mozart wrote his last three songs (K. 596–98), was personally gratifying in several ways. What started in the late 1990s as an attempt to identify the eleven named composers of the sixty songs in these two volumes devoted to the spring and winter seasons (entitled Frühlingslieder and Winterlieder, respectively) led to the discovery of the identity of editor of the collection, Placidus Partsch. Composed by Mozart, Wenzel Müller, Johann Baptist Wanhal, and other Viennese composers of the late eighteenth century, the songs bring to mind the style characteristics of contemporary popular Viennese comic opera and cover a wide spectrum of technical abilities and ranges.
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September 11, 2015
By Teresa Radomski
Manuel del Pópulo Vicente Rodríguez García (b. 1775, Seville; d. 1832, Paris) is widely recognized as one of opera history’s greatest tenors. Although his place in history has been secured by his renown as a performer and teacher, he was also an extremely prolific composer; his five chamber operas, composed in 1830–31, effectively illustrate the ample artistic requirements of early nineteenth-century singers. Un avvertimento ai gelosi, a one-act farsa giocosa with a small cast and piano accompaniment, was composed as a teaching piece for García’s students and features a humorous plot, charming arias, virtuosic fireworks, and a wide variety of dazzling ensembles that will still delight today’s singers and audiences.
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By Stephen Rose
Leipzig’s churches have a long and distinguished tradition of music-making. According to most accounts, sacred music in Leipzig reached its zenith in the years after 1723, when Johann Sebastian Bach became cantor at the Thomasschule. Less well known are the musical achievements of Bach’s predecessors as Thomaskantor: Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle, and Johann Kuhnau. One reason that the compositions of Bach’s Leipzig predecessors remain little known is that only a small portion of them survive. By the 1720s such pieces were considered old-fashioned, and most manuscripts were destroyed. Hence church music from late-seventeenth-century Leipzig survives not in the city’s libraries but in other collections. One such location is the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which holds the music manuscripts collected by the English apothecary James Sherard (1666–1738). Sherard’s collection includes eight compositions by Leipzig cantors, five of which survive nowhere else. These eight works are now available in Leipzig Church Music from the Sherard Collection (Y2-020).