Paul Hindemith was born on November 16,1895 in Hanau (near Francfort-on-the-Main). Composer and conductor, he was also a violist who played at the Francfort Opera and, from 1921 to 1929, as violist for the famous Amar Quartet, which championed the avant-garde repertoire. He thaught composition at the Berlin Conservatory and then in Switzerland, from 1938 on, following conflicts with Nazi authorities. In 1940, he left for the United States and taught composition at Yale University. In 1951, he came back to Europe and became head of the musicology departement at the Zurich University.  He died on December 23, 1963, in Francfort.

His rhythmic way of approaching music is called Motorik (motorism), and intended to represent the industrial era in sound. His music is also referred to as Gebrauchsmusik, utilitarian music. Hindemith wrote more than100 works. You can discover his beautiful Harp sonata on Révélation, Valérie Milot’s recital.

If I say Mendelssohn, of course, you will automatically think of Felix, a child prodigy and prolific composer who wrote numerous works in the course of his too short life span. But we all should also think of Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn, his older sister, born on November 14, 1805, in Hamburg.

Raised in a family in which culture and learning played essential roles (her grand-father was philosopher Moses Mendelsssohn), she received the same education her brother did, including piano and composition lessons. Despite her obvious talent, her father nevertheless cut short a possible carreer in the field. As he wrote to her on July 16, 1820: “Music will perhaps be for him (Felix) a profession but for you, it can be only considered a hobby.”

Fanny married in 1829 painter Wilhelm Hensel, organised Sunday morning concerts in Berlin’s Elternhaus from 1843 on, but never stopped composing. She wrote more than 450 works, including a Piano Trio and numerous lieder and works for solo piano. Six of the first songs attributed to her brother Felix are in fact by her, including Italy, a favourite of Queen Victoria.

She died in Berlin from apoplexia on May 14, 1847.  You can learn more about her here…

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born October 12, 1872, in Down Ampney, in England. He was most know as a composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores. He also collected English folk music and song. This influenced his editorial approach to the English Hymnal, in which he included many folk song arrangements.

As a student he had studied piano, “which I never could play, and the violin, which was my musical salvation.”  One of his fellow pupils at the Royal College of Music was Leopold Stokowski. Stokowski later went on to perform six of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies for American audiences. He was also friend with fellow student Gustav Holst whom he first met in 1895. He also took lessons with Max Bruch in Berlin in 1897 and in 1907–1908 perfected his orchestral style when he studied for three months in Paris with Maurice Ravel.

In 1904, Vaughan Williams discovered English folk songs and carols, and he became fascinated by the beauty of the music.

Here is his Fantasy on the popular Greensleeves.

It is on this day, in 1684, in Venice, that composer Alessandro Marcello was born. The son of a senator, he never had to embrace the musical career, even though he completed extensive studies. Nevertheless, he held weekly concerts at his house and art played an essential role in his daily routine. In addition to composing, he played violin and sang, painted, wrote poetry, and was fluent in mathematics and philosophy.

Alessandro lived for a long time in the shadow of his brother Benedetto, more versed into political matters. He is most known today for his Oboe Concerto in D minor, used by Bach (alongside some of Vivaldi’s concertos), when he was trying to better understand the Italian way of approaching music.

The concerto was published in 1718 by Jeanne Roger, in a collection of works by several authors, including Vivaldi and Albinoni. It took a while for specialists to understand that this was the same work mentioned by Bach on the manuscript of his keyboard concerto BWV 974, which read as “from Eterico Stinfalico”… since this was the penname Alessandro Marcello went by as a member of the Academy of Arcadia , a circle of intellectuals inspired by Queen Christina of Sweden!

You can listen to it on Tafelmusik’s album Baroque Feast here…

You had just about enough of Chopin, discovered with pleasure Schumann’s Symphonies and are getting to ready to get overwhelmed by Mahler for a second year in a row? In the midst of all those anniversaries, didn’t you forget that 2010 was also Christoph Graupner‘s 250th anniversary of death?

Extremely prolific, the composer wrote 1418 church cantatas, 24 orofane cantatas, 113 symphonies, around 50 concertos, 86 overtures and suites, 36 sonatas for various ensemble, and an important corpus of music for keyboard. Did you know that in 1722-23, he applied for the same position as Jean Sebastian Bach, to become the successor of famous Telemann? He indeed won the context (Bach couldn’t teach Latin) but Darmstadt’s Landgrave couldn’t accept his leaving the court and gave him a substantial raise to keep him by his side instead.

You can visit the Website devoted to the anniversary here…

To be shared as well, an excerpt from Graupner’s Cantata for the Sunday after Christmas, performed by les Idées heureuses and alto Claudine Ledoux.