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Piano Concerto No. 20 (Mozart)
The Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1785. The first performance took place at the Concert Hall in Vienna on 11 February 1785, with the composer as the soloist. Background A few days after the first performance, the composer's father, Leopold, visiting in Vienna, wrote to his daughter Nannerl about her brother's recent success: " heard/nowiki> an excellent new piano concerto by Wolfgang, on which the copyist was still at work when we got here, and your brother didn't even have time to play through the rondo because he had to oversee the copying operation." The concerto is written in the key of D minor. Other works by the composer in that key include the Fantasia K. 397 for piano, the Requiem, a Kyrie, a mass, the aria " Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen" from the opera ''The Magic Flute'' and parts of the opera ''Don Giovanni''. It is the first of two Mozart piano concertos written in a minor key ( No. 24 in C min ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age resulted in List of compositions by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, more than 800 works representing virtually every Western classical genre of his time. Many of these compositions are acknowledged as pinnacles of the symphony, symphonic, concerto, concertante, chamber music, chamber, operatic, and choir, choral repertoires. Mozart is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Classical music, Western music, with his music admired for its "melodic beauty, its formal elegance and its richness of harmony and texture". Born in Salzburg, Mozart showed Child prodigy, prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. At age five, he was already competent on keyboard and violin, had begun to compose, and performed before European r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don Giovanni
''Don Giovanni'' (; K. 527; full title: , literally ''The Rake Punished, or Don Giovanni'') is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. Its subject is a centuries-old Spanish legend about a libertine as told by playwright Tirso de Molina in his 1630 play '' El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra''. It is a ''dramma giocoso'' blending comedy, melodrama and supernatural elements (although the composer entered it into his catalogue simply as ''opera buffa''). It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the National Theatre (of Bohemia), now called the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787. ''Don Giovanni'' is regarded as one of the greatest operas of all time and has proved a fruitful subject for commentary in its own right; critic Fiona Maddocks has described it as one of Mozart's "trio of masterpieces with librettos by Da Ponte". Composition and premiere The opera was commissioned after the success of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cleveland Orchestra
The Cleveland Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Cleveland, Ohio. Founded in 1918 by the pianist and impresario Adella Prentiss Hughes, the orchestra is one of the five American orchestras informally referred to as the " Big Five". The orchestra plays most of its concerts at Severance Music Center. Its current music director is Franz Welser-Möst. History Founding and early history (1918–1945) The Cleveland Orchestra was founded in 1918 by music-aficionado Adella Prentiss Hughes, businessman John L. Severance, Father John Powers, music critic Archie Bell, and Russian-American violinist and conductor Nikolai Sokoloff, who became the orchestra’s first music director. A former pianist, Hughes served as a local music promoter and sponsored a series of “Symphony Orchestra Concerts” designed to bring top-notch orchestral music to Cleveland. In 1915, she helped found the Musical Arts Association, which presented Cleveland performances of the Ballets Russes in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Szell
George Szell (; June 7, 1897 – July 30, 1970), originally György Széll, György Endre Szél, or Georg Szell, was a Hungarian-born American conductor, composer and pianist. Considered one of the twentieth century's greatest conductors, he was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra of Cleveland, Ohio, and recorded much of the standard classical repertoire in Cleveland and with other orchestras. Szell came to Cleveland in 1946 to take over its respected if undersized orchestra, which was struggling to recover from the disruptions of World War II. By the time of his death he was credited, to quote the critic Donal Henahan, with having built it into "what many critics regarded as the world's keenest symphonic instrument." Through his recordings, Szell has remained a presence in the classical music world long after his death, and his name remains synonymous with that of the Cleveland Orchestra. While on tour with the Orchestra in the late 1980s, then-Music Director Chr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Casadesus
Robert Marcel Casadesus (; 7 April 1899 – 19 September 1972) was a renowned 20th-century France, French pianist and composer. He was the most prominent member of a Casadesus, distinguished musical family, being the nephew of Henri Casadesus and Marius Casadesus, husband of Gaby Casadesus, and father of Jean Casadesus. Biography Casadesus was born in Paris, and studied there at the Conservatoire de Paris, Conservatoire with Louis Diémer, taking a ''Premier Prix'' (First Prize) in 1913 and the Prix Diémer in 1920. Robert then entered the class of Lucien Capet, who had exceptional influence. Capet had founded a famous quartet that bore his name (Capet Quartet) and in which two of Robert's uncles played: Henri and Marcel. The Quartet often rehearsed in the Casadesus home, and so it was that Robert was exposed to chamber music. The Beethoven Quartets held no secret for him—he knew them backward and forwards. Beginning in 1922, Casadesus collaborated with the composer Maurice ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clara Schumann
Clara Josephine Schumann (; ; née Wieck; 13 September 1819 – 20 May 1896) was a German pianist, composer, and piano teacher. Regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic music, Romantic era, she exerted her influence over the course of a 61-year concert career, changing the format and repertoire of the piano recital by lessening the importance of purely virtuoso, virtuosic works. She also composed solo piano pieces, a Piano Concerto (Clara Schumann), Piano Concerto, chamber music, choral pieces, and songs. She grew up in Leipzig, where both her father Friedrich Wieck and her mother Mariane Bargiel, Mariane were pianists and piano teachers. In addition, her mother was a singer. Clara was a child prodigy, and was trained by her father. She began touring at age eleven, and was successful in Paris and Vienna, among other cities. She married the composer Robert Schumann, on 12 September 1840, and the couple had eight children. Together, they encouraged Johan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni (1 April 1866 – 27 July 1924) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer, and teacher. His international career and reputation led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time, and he was a sought-after keyboard instructor and a teacher of composition. From an early age, Busoni was an outstanding, if sometimes controversial, pianist. He studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Vienna Conservatory and then with Wilhelm Mayer (composer), Wilhelm Mayer and Carl Reinecke. After brief periods teaching in Helsinki, Boston, and Moscow, he devoted himself to composing, teaching, and touring as a virtuoso pianist in Europe and the United States. His writings on music were influential, and covered not only aesthetics but considerations of microtones and other innovative topics. He was based in Berlin from 1894 but spent much of World War I in Switzerland. He began composing in h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (14 November 177817 October 1837) was an Austrian composer and pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. He was a pupil of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Salieri, and Joseph Haydn. Hummel significantly influenced later piano music of the nineteenth century, particularly in the works of Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Felix Mendelssohn. Life Early life Hummel was born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia). Unusually for that period, he was an only child. He was named after the Czech patron saint John of Nepomuk. His father, Johannes Hummel, was the director of the Imperial School of Military Music in Vienna; his mother, Margarethe Sommer Hummel, was the widow of the wigmaker Josef Ludwig. The couple married just four months before his birth. Hummel was a child prodigy. At the age of eight, he was offered music lessons by the classical composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms (; ; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period (music), Romantic period. His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality and freer treatment of dissonance, often set within studied yet expressive contrapuntal textures. He adapted the traditional structures and techniques of a wide historical range of earlier composers. His includes four symphony, symphonies, four concertos, a Requiem, much chamber music, and hundreds of folk-song arrangements and , among other works for symphony orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. Born to a musical family in Hamburg, Brahms began composing and concertizing locally in his youth. He toured Central Europe as a pianist in his adulthood, premiering many of his own works and meeting Franz Liszt in Weimar. Brahms worked with Ede Reményi and Joseph Joachim, seeking Robert Schumann's approval through the latter. He gained both Robert and Clara Schumann's strong support ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles-Valentin Alkan
Charles-Valentin Alkan (; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life. Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart
Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (26 July 1791 – 29 July 1844), also known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Jr., was the youngest child of six born to composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his wife Constanze Mozart, Constanze and the younger of his parents' two surviving children. He was a composer, pianist, conducting, conductor, and teacher of the late Classical period (music), classical period whose musical style was of an early Romanticism, heavily influenced by his father's mature style. He knew Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, both of whom held him in high esteem. Biography Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart was born in Vienna, four months and ten days before his father's death. Although he was baptized Franz Xaver Mozart, he was always called Wolfgang by his family. He received excellent musical instruction from Antonio Salieri and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and studied composition with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Sigismund von Neukomm. He learned to play both the piano and violin. Like ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the Transition from Classical to Romantic music, transition from the Classical period (music), Classical period to the Romantic music, Romantic era. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterised as heroic. During this time, Beethoven began to grow increasingly Hearing loss, deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression. Born in Bonn, Beethoven displayed his musical talent at a young age. He was initially taught intensively by his father, Johann van Bee ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
