A Birthday: Lorin Maazel
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Lorin Maazel, Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, was born seventy-five years ago today. We hear from him as both a conductor and a composer this evening...
James Galway solos on his golden flute while Lorin Maazel conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony in his own “Music for Flute and Orchestra.” But first, we hear the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform Papa Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp Minor, the “Farewell.” It’s too bad we can’t watch a reenactment of the original performance way back in 1772, when, one by one, the members of the orchestra stopped playing during the last movement (it’s written into the score), blew out the candles lighting their music, and left, until only the leader Tomasini and Haydn himself were left, playing a violin duet. It was Haydn’s latest symphony, written as a reminder to his boss at the Eszterhazy summer palace that he had kept the group away from their families for far too long that year. The Prince got the point, and the happy players got to travel back to their homes for a well-deserved rest. And that’s how the symphony got its nickname.)
After some Bach, Rachmaninoff, Dowland, and other goodies, the evening heads towards its close with Zoltan Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta,” a 1933 work composed for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. Kodaly, who died this day in 1882, said he “passed the finest seven years of his childhood” in Galanta, a small maket town in Northern Hungary (now Slovakia). The Budapest Festival Orchestra brings these musical memories to life under the baton of Ivan Fischer.
James Galway solos on his golden flute while Lorin Maazel conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony in his own “Music for Flute and Orchestra.” But first, we hear the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra perform Papa Haydn’s Symphony No. 45 in F-sharp Minor, the “Farewell.” It’s too bad we can’t watch a reenactment of the original performance way back in 1772, when, one by one, the members of the orchestra stopped playing during the last movement (it’s written into the score), blew out the candles lighting their music, and left, until only the leader Tomasini and Haydn himself were left, playing a violin duet. It was Haydn’s latest symphony, written as a reminder to his boss at the Eszterhazy summer palace that he had kept the group away from their families for far too long that year. The Prince got the point, and the happy players got to travel back to their homes for a well-deserved rest. And that’s how the symphony got its nickname.)
After some Bach, Rachmaninoff, Dowland, and other goodies, the evening heads towards its close with Zoltan Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta,” a 1933 work composed for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Budapest Philharmonic Society. Kodaly, who died this day in 1882, said he “passed the finest seven years of his childhood” in Galanta, a small maket town in Northern Hungary (now Slovakia). The Budapest Festival Orchestra brings these musical memories to life under the baton of Ivan Fischer.
