If you act quickly enough, you may still be able to sign up for the Chamber Music Society's Musical Heritage tribute to Pablo Casals

Next up in the series is Leon Fleisher (on May 24)
Plus: We peek into the wonderful world of the zither

Apologies for the short notice, but if you catch this right away, you may still be able to register (yes, preregistration is required) for the upcoming installment in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's terrific (and free, though of course donations are welcome) Musical Heritage series, this Monday (April 5), from 7:30 to 9pm, this one devoted to one of the most commanding musical figures of the 20th century, Pablo Casals.

UPDATE: As of Friday, April 9, CMS's Casals Musical Heritage program can be viewed here (with links to all the other CMS Musical Heritage programs).

by Ken

Here's how the CMS blurb puts it:

The great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) stands alone as arguably the most influential and universally revered instrumentalist of all time. The first cellist in history to recognize Bach's Six Solo Suites as great music, and the first to record them, is only one of the musical milestones of this extraordinary man, who not only dominated cello playing for more than half a century, but also served as an uncompromising and indisputable voice of social conscience. In this exploration of Casals the musician and the man, cellist and CMS Artistic Director David Finckel leads a panel of distinguished musicians -- Dmitri Atapine, Arnold Steinhardt, Jaime Laredo, and Timothy Eddy -- who, either through direct contact or inherited influence, have been changed by the art of Casals forever.

This is going a long ways, "arguably the most influential and universally revered instrumentalist of all time," but I'm not inclined to disagree, even though strictly as a cellist he was a long way from a favorite of mine. Still, the moral as well as musical force is undeniable, and so is the influence, not just among the vast number of musicians who came in direct contact with him, notably at his annual summer festivals, but among pretty much all the others, who were influenced by -- and, yes, revered -- him at a distance.


I SHOULD HAVE HAD THE SENSE TO SOUND AN EARLIER
ALERT (NOT JUST GET MYSELF SIGNED UP PRONTO!)

Our Beethoven Seventh performances are connected the most obvious way -- they're by the same conductor

Otto Klemperer

BEETHOVEN: The Creatures of Prometheus (ballet), Op. 43: Overture

Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Nov. 25, 1957
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded June 17-18, 1969

by Ken

In Friday night's preview we heard two extremely lovely performances of the haunting and powerful slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, and I invited readers to identify the connection between them.

As our friend me noted in a comment, performance A is older and quicker than performance B. I'm not sure that the Internet-transmitted mp3 sound does full justice to B, and the sound really does matter, because the wealth of sonic color and texture our conductor is coaxing from his players becomes part of the expressive structure of the performance. It is, as it happens, a performance that's some 45 years old but that I don't think I've ever heard, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.

Let's listen again to performances A and B, with a performance X thrown in between them.

Encores, part 1 -- Three legendary pianists

It makes a nifty encore too! Leonard Bernstein conducts his Overture to Candide, kicking off this December 1989 concert performance of the complete musical with the London Symphony Orchestra.

by Ken

As you may have guessed from Friday's preview ("Encore, encore!"), when we heard the great cellist János Starker play three prime encore pieces -- all, as it happened, arranged for cello and piano from other instrumental configurations. I didn't have a very clear idea Friday where exactly this post was headed, except that it would be all encores.

Okay, we're stretching a little with the above video clip, in which Leonard Bernstein conducts his Candide Overture at the start of a concert performance of the piece. But for easily understandable reasons, countless conductors -- including Lenny himself, as memory serves -- used the Candide Overture as a peerlessly rousing encore.

The thing about encores is that they often represent the artist at his/her most personal, whether they're designed to rouse, seduce, charm, or just plain ravish. It's such a large subject, however, that after initially deciding that we would deal only with instrumental encores, leaving the vast subject of vocal ones for another time, I decided to narrow it down even further, to piano encores, at least once we get to the click-through, where we're going to hear sets of encores from three of the 20th's century's greatest pianists-- two of them actual sets of encores from actual concerts, the third a selection of favorite encores of his made by the artist to fill out an LP side.

Before we go there, though, I though we might hear another encore-suitable piece, an arrangement of a traditional Catalan carol for cello and orchestra, which aims to stir listeners in a very different way.

CASALS (arr.): El Cant dels ocells (The Song of the Birds)


Prades Festival Orchestra, Pablo Casals, cello and cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded 1950


TO HEAR TODAY'S SELECTION OF ENCORES FROM
THREE LEGENDARY PIANISTS, CLICK THE LINK