Physical Release: 24 May 2024
Digital Release: 31 May 2024
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The fascinating itinerary to which the listener of this Da Vinci Classics album is invited touches a series of little-known masterpieces written for unaccompanied solo violin in the twentieth century. Although Bach was not the first to state, with his music, that violins did not perforce need the harmonic support of an accompaniment, his six Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin are the first, impressive example of how that belief could be embodied in music. In spite of this, and of the extreme beauty of this cycle, the works it contained had to wait for several decades before gaining acceptance, in their original form, on the concert scene. A kind of horror vacui was felt, and it seemed necessary to provide the solo violin with a background against which it could shine.
In the meantime, however, Niccolò Paganini had written, among others, his Capriccios for unaccompanied solo violin. They developed, and required, an extremely virtuoso technique, with many innovations; yet, their limited size in terms of time lent performers the possibility of playing just excerpts, e.g. as encores or “fillers” within recital programmes with piano accompaniment. (Indeed, this did not prevent them to be provided with piano accompaniments in turn, as had happened with Bach’s Solos: and their “need” for such an accompaniment was felt by such a great musician as Robert Schumann!).
As time went by, the masterpieces by Bach and Paganini were admitted to the concert stage with increasing frequency, and were flanked by new works such as those by Eugène Ysaÿe, to name but one. The twentieth century saw a flowering of such works, as well as the full acceptance of the earlier unaccompanied works into the standard concert repertoire. The works presented here fully deserve the same fate, and it is likely that they will enjoy such a success in the years to come.
The first composers we meet in our pilgrimage is Miklós Rósza. It is not unheard-of for people to obtain immense success in a field which is not the one they themselves love most. For instance, Busoni was immensely admired as a pianist, but his primary love was composition. And, indeed, something similar can be said even of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose fame was bound to the
In the case of Rósza, his success was, and still is, somewhat atypical, inasmuch as his success organ during his lifetime, and only posthumously came to be admired as a composer. was actually due to his compositions, but to those in the field of film music. He was born to a Hungarian bourgeois family, and his mother was a piano teacher who easily guessed her son’s exceptional musical gifts. At six, the child mastered already many secrets of piano-playing, and at 10 he started concertizing. As a youth, he moved to Leipzig where his father wanted him to study chemistry, but, in Bach’s city, he found his lasting vocation and studied with Hermann Grabner for composition and of Th. Kroyer for musicology. He then came back to Hungary where he perfected his skills with Zoltan Kodaly and Béla Bartók.
The recently-graduated youth, however, failed to make a name for himself in his homeland, and, similar to many others, he decided that Paris was the city for hime. There he did obtain success with his solo and orchestra works, and was appointed the Director of a ballet company – to be followed by the directorship of a London theatre. In London, an epoch-making encounter also took place, i.e. that between the world of film music and a musician who would make its history. After his first movie score, he obtained great success with Knight without armour, by fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda. Later, Rósza would write a number of other scores, among which The Thief of Baghdad, Jungle Book, and others for directors such as Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock (for whose Spellbound Rósza was awarded one of the three Academy Awards he received during his lifetime). Many of these were written during Rósza’s years in the United States, starting from little before World War II. In America, Rósza was eventually asked to write music for the kind of movies which best corresponded to his aesthetic, i.e. the epical/grand style of the kolossals (including Quo vadis?, Ivanhoe, and most notably Ben Hur, which brought him another Oscar statuette).
In the last years of his life, however, Rósza felt increasingly the need to leave a legacy of “classical” works for concert performance rather than film music. Possibly the highlight of his career as a classical composer was the premiere of his Viola Concerto at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall, with Pinchas Zukerman as the soloist and André Previn conducting. These great musicians were but two of the many who admired Rósza’s work, and which included Jascha Heifetz, Grigory Piatigorski and János Starker. As the title of one of Rósza’s most successful film scores went, the composer had a “double life”, partly dedicated to movies, and partly to composition.
His Sonata for Violin Solo dates from 1986 and is Rósza’s swan song in the field of violin music: his output for this instrument thus spans over nearly sixty years, as his first violin pieces had been written back in 1929. It is dedicated to Manuel Compinsky, a close friend of Rósza, and a violinist the composer trusted so much that he constantly referred to his advice when writing for the violin. About this Sonata, Rósza himself stated: “My music had originally started from folk song, which was melody pure and simple; it would end as melody pure and simple”. He also recollects his impromptu violin playing, accompanied by gypsy musicians, and dedicated to some village beauty, back in Hungary in his youth. As he admitted, “However much I may modify my style in order to write effectively for films, the music of Hungary is stamped indelibly one way or other on virtually every bar I have ever put on paper”. And this folk inspiration is clearly discernible throughout the Sonata, which, in particular, shows the influences of gypsy violin playing techniques. Technically, it is a challenging work requiring double stops, polyphony (melodies over drones), bariolage, and other brilliant virtuoso skills. At times, the piece also evokes the sound of the cymbalon, one of Hungary’s national instruments.
Similar to Rósza, also Yuri Falik had breathed music since his early childhood thanks to the profession of both of his parents, who were orchestral musicians. Also in his case, evidence for his talent surfaced very early, but his childhood was deeply marked by the untimely death of his father during World War II. In Odessa, where Falik and his mother came back from their evacuation in Kyrgyzstan in 1944, the boy studied the cello and was quickly admitted to higher education. Falik soon discovered, in turn, that his greatest musical love was composition, even though he did not relinquish professional cello playing at the highest levels (including a prize at the Tchaikovsky competition, where he would serve, much later, as a jury member). His further education took place in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he studied also with Mstislav Rostropovich. He was acquainted with Stravinsky too, who cautioned him against his own “double life” as a cellist and composer, but Falik heeded the master’s advice only partly, focusing more and more on composition but never neglecting his instrument.
His compositional activity became increasingly successful, and included several symphonic works, including three ballets, concertos etc. (and particularly a violin concerto premiered by Grigory Zhislin). He was also inspired by Dmitry Shostakovich, who praised and appreciated his work, but at the same time Falik wished to be independent of Shostakovich’s style which he considered as too personal and self-standing. In his last years, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, Falik dedicated more and more of his creative energies to sacred choral music, leaving some masterpieces in this field. He was also an appreciated teacher and he wrote music for fairy tales.
His curiously-titled Composition for unaccompanied violin belongs in a series of similarly named pieces for other instruments. It is a piece where many of the violin’s expressive resources are employed, starting from the whispered beginning and expanding into waves of sound, with a growth involving both pitch and dynamics.
It is instead to Jewish folk and traditional melodies that the music of Ernest Bloch makes constant reference, although he more precisely wished to rediscover the Biblical spirit and exalting the Jewish heritage. A brilliant violinist himself, who had studied with Ysaÿe, Bloch emigrated to the States, where he taught in New York, Cleveland and San Francisco (his best-known pupils include Roger Session and George Antheil), later settling in Switzerland; once more he moved to the US in 1952. This double alternation between Europe and America mirrors the four stylistic stages of his life. And the two Suites recorded here belong in the very last period of his life, after he had been diagnosed with cancer. So deep was Bloch’s engagement with music that he postponed his surgery until the completion of some works he had on his desk. They belong in a series of similar works, which includes three Suites for unaccompanied cello and an unfinished one for viola.
Yehudi Menuhin, who was their dedicatee, described his two Suites as “latter-day Bach Partitas”, in which the composer “continually perfected his contrapuntal technique, doing elaborate and complex mental contrapuntal exercises in his voluminous notebook”. These works were premiered by Alberto Lysy, a pupil of Menuhin, at the Wigmore Hall of London on January 2nd, 1959. Bloch’s daughter Suzanne defines them as “the culmination of Bloch’s musical expression. He ended his life work by writing for the simplest and yet most difficult and complex medium, music for a single instrument”, at a moment when he “was seventy-eight years old, facing death”. In spite of this, “the miracle of the [first] suite is the flow of youth through its pages, its never-ending inspiration and vitality”. Both Suites consists of four movements, seamlessly connected, and both bear resemblances with some earlier works by Bloch (e.g. Voice in the Wilderness, the Violin concerto, and Baal Shem).
The album is completed by a miniature Partita, in five short movements, where some of the best-known dances of the twentieth century are evoked, such as rhumba, blues, and beguine. In this case, then, the object of artistic evocation is Western modern music, rather than Hungarian or Jewish folksong. This calling is answered by Vytautas Barkauskas, one of the most prominent composers in contemporary Lithuania. With a background in mathematics, he was active as a professor of composition for most of his life. His youthful works are very progressive and influenced by the avant-gardes, whilst later he sought a more immediate and very personal musical language. “I do not adhere to one defined compositional system, but I am constantly looking for a natural stylistic synthesis. I aim for my music to be expressive, emotional and concert-like,” said Vytautas Barkauskas.
And the same can be said of each and all of the composers represented here, who drew inspiration from many sources, but ultimately found a unique voice of their own.
Chiara Bertoglio © 2024
Stefano Zanchetta
He was born in Venice, Italy. He began studying the violin with Sirio Piovesan, at the state conservatory of music “Benedetto Marcello” in Venice, where he graduated summa cum laude in violin and viola, contemporarily studying piano and composition. In the following years, he continued to study violin with Sandor Vegh, at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and chamber music with Antonio Janigro and Franco Rossi, cellist of the Quartetto Italiano. In 1978 he was the only violinist receiving a prize in the competition Auditorium, performing a live recital on the Italian national radio (RAI), broadcasted from the Auditorium concert hall in Turin. In the same period, he obtained several first prizes, for 5 years in a row, at the Rassegna of Vittorio Veneto, which was the foremost competition for young violinists in Italy. He also performed in trio with Mario Brunello and Massimo Somenzi, obtaining important prizes at the international chamber music competitions of Paris and Colmar. At a young age, he was appointed as a violin professor at the conservatory of music of Venice, at the same time continuing a very intense activity, performing in many countries: Japan, Australia, China, South America, USA, New Zealand, Europe and Middle East countries, in the most prestigious concert halls as the Carnegie Hall in New York, the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow, to name a few. He has performed as concertmaster in some of the major Italian orchestras, like the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, RAI orchestra in Rome, Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese in L’ Aquila, Orchestra Regionale di Udine, the Italian-Slovenian Youth Orchestra, and the Orchestra d’ Archi Italiana conducted by Mario Brunello, also performing as a soloist.
His interest in the music of the twentieth century led him to perform works by A. Berg, K. Weill, A. Schnittke, B. Bartok, Weinberg, and many others. Also noteworthy is his world-premiere recording of the Concerto Romantico by R. Zandonai. Numerous is also his contribute to the baroque music, which includes collaborations with many ensembles: I Virtuosi di Roma, I Solisti Veneti, I Sonatori della Gioiosa Marca, performing with Cecilia Bartoli at the Musikverein in Wien. He has recorded for the labels Erato, Decca, Cpo, Divox, Fonè, and Denon. Claudio Abbado invited him to play in the first stands of his Orchestra of Lucerne Festival for a series of concerts at the Musikverein in Wien, with Maurizio Pollini. For many years he has been a jury member of violin competitions as the Postacchini in Fermo, the Vittorio Veneto, and the Musica Goritiensis competitions.
Recently, he has published 12 etudes for the violin, 4 pieces for violin and piano inspired by the novel Le città invisibili by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, and a Paganiniana for solo violin. Since 1980 he is a violin professor at the state conservatory “Benedetto Marcello” of Venice.
Ernest Bloch: (b Geneva, 24 July 1880; d Portland, OR, 15 July 1959). American composer and teacher of Swiss origin. He studied in Geneva with Albert Goss and Louis Etienne-Reyer (violin) and Jaques-Dalcroze (solfège and composition) before leaving, at the suggestion of Martin Marsick, to study in Brussels. There he took lessons from Eugène Ysaÿe (violin), Rasse (composition) and Franz Schörg (violin and chamber music), at whose home he lived from 1896 to 1899. He then went to study in Frankfurt with Knorr (1899–1901) and in Munich with Thuille (1901–3). After a year in Paris (1903–4), during which time he absorbed the French Impressionistic style, he returned to Geneva, married Margarethe Augusta Schneider, and entered his father’s business as a bookkeeper and salesman of Swiss tourist goods. Meanwhile, he kept his hand in music by composing in piecemeal fashion, conducting orchestral concerts in Neuchâtel and Lausanne (1909–10) and lecturing on aesthetics at the Geneva Conservatory (1911–15). A high point of this period was the première of his lyric drama, Macbeth, at the Opéra-Comique, Paris, on 30 November 1910.
Bloch went to the United States in 1916 with the encouragement of Alfred Pochon, second violinist of the Flonzaley Quartet, as conductor for a tour by Maud Allan’s dance company. When the tour collapsed, he accepted a position at the newly formed David Mannes College of Music in New York, teaching theory and composition there and also privately (1917–20). He was thus able to bring his wife and three children, Suzanne, Lucienne and Ivan, to America. The successful première of his String Quartet no.1 by the Flonzaley Quartet on 31 December 1916 led to performances of his orchestral works in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. He conducted his Trois poèmes juifs with the Boston SO in March 1917 and Schelomo, with Kindler as the cello soloist, at a concert sponsored by the Society of the Friends of Music in New York in May of the same year. Following additional successes in Philadelphia, where he conducted a programme of his ‘Jewish’ works with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1918, he signed a contract with G. Schirmer, who published these compositions with what was to become a trademark logo – the six-pointed Star of David with the initials E.B. in the centre; it was an imprimatur which firmly established for Bloch a Jewish identity in the public mind.
Bloch expanded his contact with American life by conducting Renaissance choral music with amateur singers at the Manhattan Trade School, teaching the fundamentals of music to children in Joanne Bird Shaw’s experimental summer school in Peterboro, New Hampshire, and discussing art and life with such figures as Julius Hartt. In 1919 his Suite for viola and piano (or orchestra) won the Coolidge Prize, quickly earning a place in the viola repertory.
Bloch served as founding director of the Cleveland Institute of Music (1920–25), where he conducted the student orchestra, taught composition, established masterclasses and courses for the general public, and proposed such radical reforms as the abandonment of examinations and textbooks in favour of direct musical experience, with study rooted in the scores of the great masters. However, the trustees continued to favour a practical curriculum and a more traditional approach to music education, and this eventually led him to resign. (It was in Cleveland, in 1924, that he became a naturalized US citizen.) He then accepted the directorship of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (1925–30), during which time he was awarded the Carolyn Beebe Prize of the New York Chamber Music Society for his Four Episodes for chamber orchestra (1926), the first prize in a contest sponsored by Musical America for his epic rhapsody in three parts, America, and a shared RCA Victor Award for his homage to his native land, Helvetia.
During the 1930s Bloch lived mainly in Switzerland, composing such works as Voice in the Wilderness, the Piano Sonata, Evocations for orchestra, the Violin Concerto and, most importantly, the Sacred Service, with which he began his second European period. He conducted his works in various European cities, and returned briefly to the USA to conduct the Sacred Service in New York in 1934. Major festivals of his works were held in London in 1934 and 1937, the latter in connection with the founding of an Ernest Bloch Society, with Albert Einstein as honorary president, and Alex Cohen as secretary. Macbeth was revived in Naples in Italian translation in March 1938, but only three performances were given owing to Mussolini’s deference to a visit from Hitler. Because of growing anti-Semitism and also because he wished to retain his American citizenship, Bloch returned to the USA and, in 1940, assumed a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught summer courses until his retirement in 1952. The Berkeley duties fulfilled an obligation he owed the institution, which, in conjunction with a grant from the Stern family had enabled him to compose in Europe from 1930 to 1939 freed from the responsibilities of teaching.
In his later years, during which he lived reclusively at Agate Beach, Oregon, he was the recipient of numerous honours, including the first Gold Medal in Music (String Quartet no.2), from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1947) and the Henry Hadley Medal of the National Association for American Composers and Conductors (1957). He continued to compose in a wide variety of genres, and to pursue his lifelong hobbies of photography and mushroom collecting, and his newer interest in collecting and polishing agates. In 1958, suffering from cancer, he underwent unsuccessful surgery; he died a year later. In 1968 an Ernest Bloch Society was formed in the USA through the efforts of the composer’s children.
Miklós Rózsa
(b Budapest, 18 April 1907; d Los Angeles, 27 July 1995). American composer of Hungarian birth. Raised in Budapest and on his father’s rural estate in nearby Tomasi, he was exposed to Hungarian peasant music and folk traditions from an early age. He studied the piano with his mother, a classmate of Bartók at the Budapest Academy, and the violin and viola with his uncle, Lajos Berkovits, a musician with the Royal Hungarian Opera. By the age of seven, Rózsa was composing his own works. Later, as a student at the Realgymnasium, he championed the work of Bartók and Kodály, keeping his own notebook of collected folktunes.
In 1926, Rózsa left Budapest to enroll at the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied composition with Grabner and musicology with Kroyer. By 1929 his chamber works, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, were being promoted and performed throughout Europe. In 1931 he moved to Paris where he completed his Theme, Variations and Finale (1933, rev. 1943 and 1966), a work that soon gained international recognition. (It was on the programme the night Bernstein made his conducting début with the New York PO in 1943.) In recognition of his musical achievements, Rózsa was awarded the Franz Joseph Prize from the municipality of Budapest in 1937 and 1938.
Rózsa was introduced to the genre of film music through his friend Arthur Honegger. From 1935 to 1939 he frequently shuttled between Paris and London, where he composed for London Films under the Hungarian-born producer Alexander Korda. In 1940 he accompanied Korda to Hollywood to complete the score of The Thief of Baghdad, and was soon in great demand as a freelance film composer and conductor. As a staff member at MGM (1948–62), he became one of the most highly regarded composers in the industry, writing music for over 100 films. From 1945 to 1965 he also taught film music at the University of Southern California.
Most of Rózsa’s film scores employ leitmotifs that accompany and represent specific characters or events on the screen. His angular melodies and contrapuntal textures helped to define the 1940s genre of film noir. Scores for epic and period films in the 1950s distinguished themselves by the accuracy of their well-researched historical detail. Rózsa won Academy Awards for the soundtracks of Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1948) and Ben-Hur (1959), and a César award for the score for Providence (1977).
The essence of Rózsa’s musical style springs from his early experiences with Magyar peasants; his harmonic and melodic constructions characteristically derive from the pentatonic and modal qualities of Hungarian folk music. His works are also infused with the vitality of Hungarian dance rhythms and the sentimental lyricism of the gypsy tradition. Rózsa does not quote folk melodies in his compositions, however. Instead, in works such as North Hungarian Peasant Songs and Dances (1929), Three Hungarian Sketches (1958) and Notturno ungherese (1964) he invents his own folk-like material. His skill at manipulating traditional forms is particularly evident in the Concerto for Strings (1943, rev. 1957) and the Piano Sonata (1948). Also noteworthy are his virtuosic concertos for the violin (1953), piano (1966), cello (1968) and viola (1979).
Vytautas Barkauskas
(b Kaunas, 25 March 1931). Lithuanian composer. He studied the piano at the J. Tallat-Kelpša Music College in Vilnius (1949–53), at the same time studying mathematics at the Pedagogic Institute in that city. He then studied with Račiunas at the Lithuanian State Conservatory, graduating in 1959. In 1961, after a brief period as a teacher at the Čiurlionis Art School, Barkauskas began to teach theory at the Lithuanian Music Academy (he was appointed a lecturer in the department of music theory in 1974, and professor of composition in 1989). In 1972 he was awarded the Lithuanian State Prize, and in 1981 he won the title of Honoured Artist of Lithuania. In 1997 he was awarded the State Stipend of Lithuania.
Barkauskas is one of the most productive of modern Lithuanian composers in the field of instrumental music. In his early work (1954–64) he strove to achieve free atonality. The beginning of his second creative period (1964–81) is marked by his interest in the theories of such musicians as Schaeffer and Krenek. In technique, Barkauskas took his guidelines principally from Lutosławski, Penderecki and Ligeti. During the decade from 1965 to 1975, he was one of the most consistent exponents of modern techniques of composition in Lithuania, but at the same time he avoided using them in an orthodox, undiluted manner, instead interpreting them in his own way and seeking natural interactions. This approach is already evident in the composer's first modern works, for instance Poezija (‘Poetry’, 1964, employing a free interpretation of 12-tone technique) and Intymi kompozicija (‘Intimate Composition’, 1968, an interpretation of serialism in terms of aleatory sound). The end of this period in his career is marked by the Viola Concerto (1981), in which the semantic process of confrontations and monologues leads from the clash of soloist and orchestra to a quiet, cathartic culmination. His third creative period, beginning in 1981, which may be described with some qualifications as post avant-garde, is distinguished by more conventional and pluralistic tendencies, a more intuitive method of composition, the search for natural sonic beauty, and by a certain inner intensity, often expressed within traditional genres and forms. In his work of the 1990s his tonal language was simplified, melody and tone colour are more prominent, and a latent tonality is perceptible. Narrative drama is alien to Barkauskas's compositions, which are more inclined to pursue a concertante course.
Yury Aleksandrovich Falik
(b Odessa, 30 July 1936). Russian composer, cellist and teacher. At the age of nine he entered the Stolyarovskiy Music School in Odessa, where he studied the cello and composition. He began to compose when he was 11, producing a string quartet and some orchestral pieces. In 1955 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory to study the cello with Strimmer, made his début in 1958 and later pursued postgraduate work under Rostropovich. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he performed with success in Moscow and other cities of the USSR, and he won the gold medal in the cello competition at the Eighth World Festival of Youth and Students in Helsinki in 1962. Since then, however, he has given his attention more to composition than to performing. He was accepted into the composition department of the Leningrad Conservatory in 1959, and he graduated from Arapov's class in 1964. For some years he directed the chamber orchestra of the conservatory, where he taught the cello and orchestration. He has been a board member of the Leningrad branch of the Composers' Union. Falik runs a composition class at the conservatory, becoming a senior lecturer in 1980 and professor in 1988. He was nominated Honoured Representative of the Arts of the RSFSR in 1981.
The distinctive features of Falik's compositions are clear and logical thinking, high artistry and economy of means; the influences which formed his style include those of Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern, Lutosławski, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He has used serial technique and traditional modality, both freely treated and frequently in the same work. Though several of his works are concerned with ethical or emotional matters, elements of the picturesque are no less important.
13.55€
Physical Release: 24 April 2026 Digital Release: 1 May 2026
Physical and Digital Release: 24 April 2026
Physical Release: 24 April 2026 Digital Release: 1 May 2026
