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October 2008 - Posts
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Here's a wonderful early 19th century German opera that's good and spooky but ends happily. It's by the once famous German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786 - 1826 ). Weber's music is not played a lot today, which is unfortunate. You sometimes hear the overture to the opera in qustion : Der Freischutz (The Freeshooter) at concerts, and a couple other overtures, the "Invitation to the Dance", originally for piano, orchestrated by Berlioz, etc, but things like his two symphonies, two piano concertos,etc are almost totally unknown outside of recordings, and clarinettists like to play his two attractive clarinet concertos.
Weber was a piano virtuoso and one of the first conductors in the modern sense, but unfortunately died just before he turned 40 because of chronic ill health. Incidentally, he was a cousin of Mozart's wife Constanze. Der Freischutz (two dots over the u in German), takes place in 17th century Bohemia, and is the story of a young forester and marxman Max, who is in love with the head forester's daughter Agathe. But in order to win her hand in marriage, he must win a contest of marxmanship, and despairs of losing her of he should lose.
But one of his marxman buddies is a sinister fellow called Caspar, who has sold his soul to the devil for seven magic bullets which are guaranteed to hit the mark. The catch is that the devil guides the seventh bullet, and no one knows what evil may happen. In desperation, Max goes to a sinister place called the Wolf's glen with Caspar, and the devil appears and forges the magic bullets in a hair-raising scene that is pure terror. The devil is a speaking role, and the opera, like many German operas of the time, has spoken dialogue between the musical numbers.
The shooting contest takes place the next day- but unfortunately the devil has reserved the last bullet for Agathe ! In a scene of confusion and panic, it's Caspar and not Agathe who gets shot, and in dying he reveals the sinister plot. All are horrified, and the local prince angrily banished Max forever. But a kindly hermit appears, and begs forgiveness for Max., saying that even the good in a moment of weakness can stray. The prince relents and exiles Max only for a year, after which he may marry Agathe, and the opera ends in general rejoicing.
You'll enjoy Weber's melodious score with its spooky elements, but unfortunately your chances of seeing a live performance outside of Germany, where it has been popular for almost 200 years are pretty slim. There are a number of CD recordings. The best-known and admired is the one conducted by the late Carlos Kleiber on Deutsche Grammophon with the Dresden Stae orchestra, and such well-known singers as Peter Scvhreier and Gundula Janowitz as Max and Agathe. There is at least one DVD I know of from the Hamburg State opera, but this updates the action to the present day. Try it anyway. Check arkivmusic.com. Happy Halloween !
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Harmony is one of the most important elements in classical music; it's part of other kinds of music too, but nowhere else is it so important and complex.
Harmony involves simultanous tones combining to form progressions of chords. These combinations of tones can be consonant, that is pleasant and stable sounding, or dissonant, that is , clashing combinations which require resolution to consonance. Dissonance has also come to mean harsh, unpleasant harmonies, and much 20th century music has made use of pungent dissonant harmonies.
In earlier periods, dissonance did not necessarily mean harsh harmonies, but simply ones that need to resolve to consonant ones. When I studied harmony in college, I learned how to resolve chords with notes considered mildy dissonant to consonant ones. Dissoanance is to music what spice is to food, bland without it. In the 19th century, as harmonies became more complex, and great composers such as Wagner experimented with unprecedented harmonies, music was considered by conservatives to be too harsh , unstable and "dissonant". Chromaticism, or use of more complex harmonies made from notes outside the simple scales, such as c,d,e,f,g,a,b,c, but using c#,d#, f#, g# etc, became more common, leading to the ultimate abandonment of music being in any key at all, and the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg and other 20th century composers. Chromatic comes from the Greek word for color ; it adds color to music.
Before , dissonant or clashing harmonies had to be "prepared", that is starting from consonance, leading to dissonance and being resolved to consonance. Now composers would just use any combination of notes. Stravinsky's famous ballet score "The Rite Of Spring" was revolutionary in this respect. Its harmonies were considered unspeakably harsh and ugly by many when it was new, after the 1913 premiere in Paris, which caused a scandal and a near riot ! Instead of the pleasing combination of chords in Bach, Mozart or Haydn, anything goes here. Chords of clashing notes are piled up like football players.
Many composers no longer used simple chord of c, e, g etc, made up of thirds, but chords made up uf fourths, that is, c, f, b flat. Music consists of intervals, that is, the distance between one note from another on the scale. There are intervals of the second, c-d or c-c# , the third, c-e or c- e flat, fouths, c- f or c-f#, fifths, c-g, sixths, c-a or a flat, sevenths, c- b , and the octave c-c. The intervals can be analyzed on a note to note basis, melodically, or in combination,chordally. The tritone, or augmented fourth, c-f# instead of c-f, used to be known as Diabolus in Musica- the devil in music ! It's an unstable, harsh -sounding interval , and was considered the ultimate no-no in music theory for centuries. Later, it became common ,harmonically and melodically.
Some conservative concertgoers actually do find the complex, dissonant harmonies of the 20th century as unpleasant as trying to eat a lemon whole, or vinegar , and some wouuld rather have root canal surgery than listen to some contemporary music. Some years ago, I attended an orchestra concert where the suite from the ballet scoore "Fall River Legend" by American composer , pianist and conductor Morton Gould (1913 -1996 ) was played. The ballet tells the story of the notorious Lizzie Borden and her supposed ax murder of her parents, and starts with a dissonant chord. A few people in the audience sitting near me actually winced , and were startled by the chord. But this was not a very way out, avant-garde piece at all.
So dissonance isn't necessarily unpleasant or ugly ; it's an integral part of classical music.
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Loudness levels are not a big issue in Rock or pop music in general. We take it for granted that a Rock concert will be really loud, and all the pop singers use microphones. But it's very different with classical music. Here, there are many different gradations of loudness and softness, and they are a very important factor in both composing, performing and listening to this kind of music.
Dynamics is the name for these many gradations of volume. The terminology used in classical music is Italian, and the name of the piano comes from the Italian. Piano means soft and quiet, and Forte means loud; there are many degrees of this. The way harpsichords are built makes them unable to vary the dynamics. So in the early 18th century, an Italian maker of keyboard instruments invented a new one "Col Pian E Forte" - with soft and loud. It took about a century for the instrument to evolve into the familiar piano of today.
If you go to an orchestral concert or an opera performance, you will notice that things are not an unvarying level of loudness and softness, and that sometimes a work may start quietly and end loudly, or vice versa. Classical music would be boringly monotonous without these contrasts.
There are variations of piano - marked p in the sheet music. mp or mezzo piano; medium soft. pp or very soft, pianissimo. and even ppp, almost inaudible. F is forte or loud. There is MF, mezzo forte, or medium loud, FF vor very loud, and occaisionally FFF.
Then there are crescendos and diminuendos, or gradually getting louder or softer, and even sudden changes from soft to loud. The symphony no 94 by Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809 ) is nicknamed the "Surprise" symphony because of what may be a joke on the composers part. The second, and slow movement opens very quietly, and after a while, there is a sudden loud thud, which apparently startled some listeners when it was new. Rossini, composer of the Barber of Seville, became famous for the crescendos in his music, and came to be known as "Signor Crescendo".
In Haydn's marvelous but not very scientifically accurate oratio "The Creation", based on Genesis, there is a description of the world being formed out of chaos. At the point where God declares "Let There Be Light!", there is a sudden and dazzling outburst by the whole orchestra and the chorus.
Most symphonies end loudly and sometimes jubilantly, but there are exceptions. The famous "Pathetique" symphony of Tchaikovsky, his last work, and premiered only days before his untimely death in mysterious circumastances, is a work of tragedy; the final movement is a despairing slow movement and ends by dying out into nothingness. The French term Pathetique does not mean pathetic as in English; it refers to unabashed emotionalism. The symphony is anything but a pathetic piece of music !
The final movement of Gustav Mahler's 9th symphony, written while the composer was suffering from a heart ailment which guaranteed that he would soon die, fades out gently, almost in relief. The opening of Beethoven's 9th symphony begins in a mysterious and enigmatic manner with tremulous strings and has been compared to a depiction of creation, and the great Austrian symphonist and organist Anton Bruckner, whom I covered previously, begins all of his nine symphonies in a somewhat similar manner, even though he has a distincive voice of his own.
An important part of a conductor's job is to see to it that dynamic markings are faithfully observed by the orchestra, and it's sometimes necessary to adjust the markings in rehearsal. If all the instruments are marked F or above, it's often necessary to have the brass section to play more softly to avoid drowning out the other instruments, for example.
Opera singers must often have voices that can project above a large orchestra in a large opera house. They don't have the luxury of microphones. Some great Wagnerian singers, such as the Scandinavians Kirsten Flagstad, Birgit Nilsson and Lauritz Melchior, had voices of enormous power and had no trouble rising above the huge Wagner orchestra. One of the most important roles of an opera conductor is to make sure that the orchestra is not too loud , or the singers can easily be drowned out. This does happen sometimes.
The famous sunken orchestra pit at the Wagner festival theater in Bayreuth , northern Bavaria is designed to prevent the orchestra from overpowering the singers. The large and mighty Wagnerian brass section is 17 feet below the stage , and the strings are at the top. This makes things very difficult for the conductor to hear everything and coordinate the performance, but the acoustics are said to be miraculous. There are many recordings of performances from the festival available on CD, and some on DVD.
In some ways, dynamics are to music what spice is to food; they add so much to music.
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There's an interesting interview with distinguished American composer Ned Rorem, who just turned 85, in the South Florida Classical Review on the internet.
As usual, Rorem is extremely gloomy about the state of classical music today, lamenting the overall "dumbing down" of culture today, the hackneyed programming of our symphony orchestras, the reluctance of audiences to hear new music, and the unhealthy influence on classical music of avant-garde composers who write thorny atonal or"serial" music, which alienates audiences. His name for these composers is "serial killers".
Rorem is an interesting character. He has steadfastly adhered to writing music that avoids complex atonality and has always aimed to write music that will please audiences, and is greatly admired for his extensive output of songs, many of which are available on CD. Some of today's leading American opera singers have regularly done his songs at recitals, and he has written a variety of orchestral works and operas, most recently his recentad a several productions. setting of the famous Thornton Wilder play "Our Town", which has had several productions.
He has written a number of best-selling books about his life , including his years living in trendy Paris, and his friendship with all the most fashionable people, including famous copmposers, performers and other celebrities, making him something of a musical Truman Capote.
But his comments in the recent interview and elsewhere show that he is actually rather out of touch with what is actually going on in classical music today, both in the US and Europe. He fails to realize that, despite the lasting popularity of music from the past, there is absolutely no lack of new music today. There are actually many composers who can't say that their music is being neglected, not just conservative ones. New works by many,many composers have been popping up everywhere, some with considerable success.
It's true that a fair number of concertgoers are hostile to new music, and want to hear their beloved masterpieces by Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky etc. But this stilll hasn't prevented an enormous number of new works being heard lately. And in opera, despite the lasting popularity of repertoire staples by Verdi, Puccini, Mozart and Bizet etc, a considerable number of new operas have been premiered recently.
There is actually greater diversity of repertoire being performed today than ever before in the history of classical music. We can hear ancient music by composers from 500 or more years ago, and the latest works by living composers, and a vast amount inbetween, also. Rorem points out that in the past"All music was new", implying that there is something wrong with classical music today because of the popularity of music from the past. Other composers and critics has pointed this out also.
But what they fail to realize is that condiitions were vastly different then. In the time of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven etc, the symphony orchestra as we know it was a relatively new thing. They simply did not have the vast accumulations of repertoire available today. Most operas were new, too, but some had already achieved lasting popularity.
Also, performances were far scarcer than today. There were only a tiny fraction of all the orchestras, opera companies and other groups which exist now. Only people who lived in major cities in Europe which had an active concert life could attend performances, and only if they had the means, such as in Vienna, London, and Paris. If you were just Joe Schmo in some remote, rural Austrian village, your chances in the late 18th century of ever hearing Mozart perform his music were non-existent.
But look how different things are today. You don't have to live in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna or Amsterdam etc to hear great music. We now have access to an incredible variety of classical music on CD, and ever increasingly on DVD. We can hear classical music on PBS, the internet, radio stations, opera at our local movie theaters, etc . We're spoiled for choice. It's an embarrasment of riches. We're ot limited to music by the most famous composers, but can hear vast amounts of music by obscure ones,too. What's all the complaining about? You can visit Rorem's website, nedrorem.com.
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Some great composers have lived to ripe old ages, and others died tragically young, depriving the world of what could have been masterpieces. Others have left prolific outputs of music, and others produced only a handful of works. Some have composed in a wide variety of genres, orchestra, operatic, chamber music, songs, piano music etc, and others concentrated on only one or two of these.
The eminent American composer Elliott Carter will turn 100 this December, and has been composing productively up to the present day, and shows no signs of retiring. Mozart died at 35, and Schubert at only 31, and still managed compose about 1500 works between them in their tragically short lives. Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 - 1767 ) , a contemporary of Bach and Handel, not only lived a long life, but is believed to written more music than any other composer, literally thousands of works. Antonio Vivaldi. of Four Seasons fame, wrote an enormous amount of music also, including hundreds of concertos, amny for his instrument the violin. He also wrote many long neglected operas, some of which have been recorded recently.
Jean Sibelius, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Ralph Vaughan Williams of England, and others lived into their 80s or even reached 90. American composer Ned Rorem, famous for his songs, just turned 85. But the early 19th century Spanish composer Juan Crisostomo Arriaga showed great promise as a child, but died at 20, and Italian Giovanni Pergolesi (1701 - 1736) was starting to achieve fame and died at 26, and England's Henry Purcell (1659- 1695 ) also died young.
Some of these died of illnesses caused by poverty or syphillis etc; French composer Ernest Chausson (1855 -1899), was killed in an accident while riding his bycicle.
American composer Carl Rggles (1876 - 1971 ), a close friend of Charles Ives, lived past 90, but only produced a handful of works, the best known being the austere and powerful orchestral piece "Sun Treader". He was constantly revising and polishing his tiny handful of works, and was also an accomplished painter. French composer Paul Dukas (1865 - 1935 ) , famous for the Sorceror's Apprentice, allowed only a handful of his works to survive, and destroyed most of his manuscripts because he was not happy with the music. A story goes that he was going to destroy a ballet score called "La Peri", based on middle eastern legend, but was persuaded to spare. I've heard the music, and it's definitely worth hearing, so this leaves one with the distressing feeling that he might have destroyed some first-rate works ! It's not all that uncommon for composers to destroy manuscripts, buut Dukas carried this to an extreme.
Mozart wrote symphonies, concertos, serenades, piano music, operas, masses, miscellaneous church works, etc for many different instruments. Giacomo Puccini, famous for his lush melodious operas such as La Boheme, concentrated almost entirely on opera, and left a small number of other works, such as songs and choral works, and a few juvenile orchestral pieces.
Composers with prolific outputs have often been accused of writing music of uneven quality, writing some genuine masterpieces plus many uninspired ones or even hackwork. Mozart produced nearly 600 works in his short life, and even though few composers are as revered, not everything he wrote is great. His earliest works show amazing promise for a child and teenager, but lack the greatness of his mature works . His early operas are hardly equal to such great ones as Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute.
You can easil;y find biographies of all the great composers, and even lesser-known ones , and just put the name of any composer on your search engine, and you can find a wealth of information on the internet.
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Many, but far from all operas have overtures, which set up the mood for the action to proceed. Other have what is called a prelude, which is usually shorter than an overture and leads directly into the curtain opening without coming to a full close where the audience can applaud. Other operas, usually 20th century ones, start immediately, without any orchestral introduction.
Overtures and preludes often make use of melodies or recurring themes from the opera, and many are staples at orchestral concerts, where they are, so to speak, the appetizer before the longer works on the program, but not always. In the 18th century, what we now call the overture was called the Sinfonia, and usually consisted of thre parts; fast, slow and fast. This is how the symphony as we know it started. The operatic Sinfonia took on an independent life in the concert hall, and composers such as Mozart and Haydn wrote many. In some cases, overtures which lead without pause to the action have been given concert endings by composers for independent performance.
Probably the most famous opera overture is the one to William Tell by Gioacchino Rossini (1792 - 1868 ), famous for his Barber of Seville. This overture achieved fame, or perhaps notoriety by its use on the Lone Ranger on television. Hi Ho Silver ! But the overture is from a rarely performed and very long opera by Rossini about the medieval Swiss freedom fighter William Tell, who fought against the tyrannical occupation of Switzerland by Austria, and gained fame by supposedly shooting an apple off his young son's head, to save his life. Other popular opera overtures by Rossini are those to the Barber of Seville, La Cenerentola (Cinderella), Semiramide (Sem-ir-ah-mee-day ), The Thieving Magpie, and The Italian Woman in Algiers.
The overtures and preludes to Wagner's operas are very popular at concerts, ranging from the one to his rarely performed early opera Rienzi, and the Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Tristan and Isolde, and the prelude to his mystical final work Parsifal. Wagner's great Italian contemporary Verdi wrote popular overtures to the operas "La Forza del Destino"(The force of Destiny), I Vespri Siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers), and Luisa Miller.
Other popular opera overtures are to Der Freischutz(The Freeshooter), Oberon and Euryanthe (Oy-re-an-teh), by German composer Carl Maria von Weber, (1786 - 1826 ), whose music greatly influenced the young Wagner, The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai (1810- 1849), Ruslan and Ludmilla by Russian composer Mikhail Glinka , the father of 19th century Russian music, an opera based on ancient Russian legends, and Le Roi d'Ys, by Frenchman Edourad Lalo, based on Breton legends from northern France.
Many fanous conductors have recorded these overtures and preludes , and also on complete recordings of them. There are many fine albums of Rossini overtures by Riccardo Muti, Riccardo Chailly, Claudio Abbado and Neville Marriner, to name just a few, and Wagner orchestral excerpt CDs by such greats as Sir Georg Solti, Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer, and Daniel Barenboim etc, and all sorts of miscellaneous collections of overtures and preludes. Check arkivmusic.com
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To quote Charles Dickens, these are the best of times and the worst of times for the classical recording industry, and the multitiude of different record labels currently in existence.
Whatever is going on, things have certainly changed from the past. For complex economic reasons, most of America's top orchestras are no longer going into the recording studio and turning out recordings for such major labels as Decca, EMI, RCA, Sony Classical, Deutsche Grammophon, Phillips etc., under such world famous conductors as Seiji Ozawa, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Daniel Barenboim, Riccardo Muti, Charles Dutoit, Bernard Haitink and others.
In past decades, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia orchestra, Sir Georg Solti , Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra etc had profitable recording contracts with labels such as RCA ,Decca and Columbia records (now Sony Classical) etc. But unfortunately, these days are gone. Virtually none of the top US orchestras has a recording contract with any label, though here and there, a few live recordings of certain works have been issued on other labels. For union reasons, commercial studio recordings have always been much more expensive to make than in Europe and elsewhere.
The Cincinnati and Atlanta symphonies have contracts with a label called Telarc, which has many excellent things, and the Minnesota Orchestra in Minneapolis also records for the enterprising Swedish labe BIS, but these are rare exceptions now.
But a number of orchestras have started their own record labels recently, and have been issuing their own live recordings made at concerts. The San Francisco Symphony under its music director Michael Tilson Thomas has recorded a cycle of the Mahler symphonies and other works, and the Chicago Symphony has recently started its own record label. In Europe, the London Symphony orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw orchestra of Amsterdam have been issuing recordings of live performances. You can easily obtain these at websites such as arkivmusic.com.
Complete recordings of operas made in the recording studio and put together like edited films were once common. Every Summer, great opera singers such as Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Birgit Nilsson, Luciano Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland, Marilyn Horne, Sherill Milnes and Nicolai Ghiaurov would record a wide variety of operas under such great conductors as Solti, Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, James Levine, and others. But now, this kind of recording is just too expensive to produce. Some have cost up to a $ million to record !
So now, many operas are recorded live, as has also been done in the past at times, and there are many live pirated recordings on smaller labels. Now, the big thing in opera is DVD; labels such as Decca, EMI and Deutsche Grammophon have been putting out a wide variety of live performances in this rapidly expanding format.
Independent labels such as Chandos and Naxos are still making some studio recordings of operas, often intriguing rarities. Naxos is now the world's most successful classical record label, because it is able to cut costs and put out a high quality product at relatively low prices. It started 21 years ago when a German entrepreneur and music lover named Klaus Heyman started producing inexpensive recordings with little-known but excellent orchestras in Poland and Slovakia etc at dirt cheap prices. The feisty little record label took off, and now records major orchestras and musicians, produces DVDs and publishes books and other things. Visit their website naxos.com for more information.
The major classical labels may not be flourishing as they used to, but there is a wealth of smaller independent labels, and classical music fans have an embarassment of riches to choose from. You can hear ancient music by composers centuries ago such as Palestrina, Monteverdi, Dufay, Machaut, Heinrich Schutz, Josquin DesPrez, and many other once famous composers of bygone eras, and you can hear music by important contemporary composers such as Carter, Boulez, Henze, Maxwell Davies, Glass, Tan Dun, Saariaho, Bolcom, and others, and countless works from inbetween periods. Classical music fans have never had it so good.
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As I've pointed out before, many of the most famous composers have been active as conductors, such as Berlioz, Wagner, Mendelssohn, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and others, some limiting themselves to their own music, and others with wide-ranging repertoires.
Gustav Mahler spent ten legendary and fruitful years ,from 1897 as director of the Vienna Court opera, now the Vienna State opera, and then the New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan opera until his untimely death at 50 in 1911. Wagner was director of the Royal Saxon opera in Dresden during the 1840s, but had to leave Germany because he got involved in the 1848 revolution in Germany, but continued to conduct all over Europe afterwards. Richard Strauss had a long association with the Vienna Philharmonic and the State opera, and recorded his music with the orchestra.
In our time, Leonard Bernstein, as well as being a world renowned conductor, and first native-born American conductor to become music director of a major US orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, wrote such popular works as musical Candide, based on the satirical story by Voltaire, West Side Story, On The Town, and symphonies, etc, and one full fledged opera, "A Quiet Place" etc.
The French avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez (1925 -) succeeded Bernstein as music director of the New York Philharmonic and writes vastly different music that is anything but easy listening. He has also been music director of the B.B.C. symphony orchestra in London, and regularly conducts leading orchestras in Cleveland, Chicago, Vienna and Berlin, as well as opera. He is an aloof and austere inteellectual musician, a sort of Albert Einstein of classical music.
Lorin Maazel, (1930-) currently in his last season with the New York Philharmonic, has also written a variety of works, most notably his recent first opera, 1984, based on the famous novel by George Orwell, premiered not too long ago at the Royal opera in London with the composer conducting. The opera was rather controversial, and is now available on DVD.
Many other eminent conductors, such as Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer, Victor de Sabata, Antal Dorati, Sergiu Celibidache, Rafael Kubelik, Jean Martinon, Paul Paray, Yevgeny Svetlanov, and Felix Weingartner to name only a handful, were composers, and some of it has even been recorded. Among present day conductors, Andre Previn, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Leonard Slatkin, Nichael Tilson Thomas, Michael Gielen, and others have composed.
In the past, the professions of composer and conductor were pretty much inseparable, but conducting gradually evolved into a separate profession; many composers, conductors and experts believe that composing is important for conductors, because it gives them insight into how music is put together, and actually makes them better conductors.
Also, in recent years, many famous pianists, violinists, cellists, and other instrumentalists, and even singers have taken up conducting, with variable results. Being a great pianist or violinist does not automatically make you a great conductor, but this has happened. Pianists such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, Philippe Entremont, violinists such as Yehudi menuhin, David Oistrakh, Itzhak Perlman, and cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and others have achieved considerable acclaim as conductors. The great Spanish tenor Placido Domingo has been a regular conductor at the Met and elsewhere, such as the Washington and L.A. Operas, as well as the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.
This is actually nothing new. Sergei Rachmaninov, (1873-1943), aside from being a very popular composer and great pianist, was also a conductor, and even recorded his 3rd symphony with the Philadelphia orchestra, which I have on an R.C.A. CD. The legendary Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt (1811 -1886), was also active in conducting, as well as the legendary Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876 - 1973 ).
This might be compared to the way that famous actors today have often taken up directing movies, such as Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood. Many musicians have found it difficult to avoid being bitten by the conducting bug; there's something irresistable about it!
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