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Giving special attention to contemporary recordings and performances which show Mozart's symphonies in their best light, this study explains how his individual sound is achieved, considers problems of eighteenth-century instrumentation, and advances new theories on the composer's life.
Bespreking van de verschillende symphonieën van de Russische componist (1906-1975).
In the years spanning from 1800 to 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven completed nine symphonies, now considered among the greatest masterpieces of Western music. Yet despite the fact that this time period, located in the wake of the Enlightenment and at the peak of romanticism, was one of rich intellectual exploration and social change, the influence of such threads of thought on Beethoven’s work has until now remained hidden beneath the surface of the notes. Beethoven’s Symphonies presents a fresh look at the great composer’s approach and the ideas that moved him, offering a lively account of the major themes unifying his radically diverse output. Martin Geck opens the book with an enthrallin...
A History of the Symphony: The Grand Genre identifies the underlying cultural factors that have shaped the symphony over the past three hundred years, presenting a unified view of the entire history of the genre. The text goes beyond discussions of individual composers and the stylistic evolution of the genre to address what constitutes a symphony within each historical period, describing how such works fit into the lives of composers and audiences of the time, recognizing that they do not exist in a vacuum but rather as the products of numerous external forces spurring their creation. In three parts, the text proceeds chronologically, drawing connections between musical examples across regi...
Andrei Bely is best known for the modernist masterwork Petersburg, a paradigmatic example of how modern writers strove to evoke the fragmentation of language, narrative, and consciousness. In the early twentieth century, Bely embarked on his life as an artist with texts he called “symphonies”—works experimenting with genre and sound, written in a style that shifts among prosaic, poetic, and musical. This book presents Bely’s four Symphonies—“Dramatic Symphony,” “Northern Symphony,” “The Return,” and “Goblet of Blizzards”—fantastically strange stories that capture the banality of life, the intimacy of love, and the enchantment of art. The Symphonies are quintessent...
Central to the repertoire of Western art music since the 18th century, the symphony has come to be regarded as one of the ultimate compositional challenges. In his five-volume series The Symphonic Repertoire, the late A. Peter Brown explores the symphony from its 18th-century beginnings to the end of the 20th century. In Volume 1, The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, 22 of Brown's former students and colleagues collaborate to complete the work that he began on this critical period of development in symphonic history. The work follows Brown's outline, is organized by country, and focuses on major composers. It includes a four-chapter overview and concludes with a reframing of the symphonic narrative. Contributors address issues of historiography, the status of research, and questions of attribution and stylistic traits, and provide background material on the musical context of composition and early performances. The volume features a CD of recordings from the Bloomington Early Music Festival Orchestra, highlighting the largely unavailable repertoire discussed in the book.
More than 170 symphonies from this repertoire are described and analyzed in The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony, the first volume of the series to appear.