Enlarge Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore in an undated recital rehearsal.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore in an undated recital rehearsal.

• This week has ended on a very sad note with the passing of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died earlier today in Bavaria at age 86.
• Anne Midgette has a remembrance of her friend and co-writer Herbert Breslin, who managed Luciano Pavarotti's career for more than 35 years and who died yesterday in Nice. He was "a man who routinely screamed expletives into the telephone before slamming it down, cut various financial corners, and made gleeful use of his star client's fame to manipulate journalists and other artists ... But there was a lot more to Herbert's story than that."
• And yesterday, the French pianist France Clidat died at age 79. She won the Liszt Prize in Budapest in 1956. (link in French)
• Der Spiegel has the story behind Dietmar Machold, the "Stradivarius man" going on trial this summer in Vienna for embezzlement, bankruptcy fraud and grand commercial fraud, with criminal complaints also coming from the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Prosecutors' efforts "have pieced together a picture of a businessman who was probably cash-strapped for years and sold violins he had taken in commission for millions — often failing to pass on the proceeds to the instruments' owners or to banks, allegedly using the money to pay off other debts instead."
• Remember that planned partnership between Kid Rock and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra? Well, it happened: "There was a lot of entertainment, energy and even a few moments of enlightenment."
• The Sacramento Philharmonic has raised enough cash to sustain itself through at least one more season.
• Speaking of cash, the Wall Street Journal has a look at the New York City Opera's current financial standing: "City Opera scheduled only four performances of Orpheus, which seriously limits its income-producing potential. Indeed, this season, only 8% of the company's $15.3 million budget was met through ticket sales. ... By contrast, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., has less than half City Opera's budget, does 40-plus performances of four operas in a 900-seat theater, and last year earned about 34% of its budget in ticket income (42% in earned income when you add in rentals, T-shirts, and the like)."
• After the first year of partnering with Carnegie Hall in the "Achievement Program" teaching standards program, the Toronto Conservatory has doubled its enrollment. (Famous alums: Glenn Gould, Jon Vickers, Diana Krall.)
• Have you heard about the hot young Venezuelan conductor who's come out of El Sistema? No, it's not Dudamel (for once) — it's 32-year-old Rafael Payare, who has just won the very prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen.
• I don't speak Mandarin, but this fight between the (Russian) Oleg Vedernikov, the principal cellist of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, and a random female passenger on a Shenyang-Beijing train is kind of bananas. Vedernikov has apologized, but in the meantime he's been suspended from the symphony and is awaiting further disciplinary action from his employer.
• Here's a completely subjective list of the 10 most musical American presidents. (Me, I would have picked Thomas Jefferson over Warren Harding.) Interesting tidbits gleaned: Jefferson practiced three hours a day! Chester Arthur played the banjo!
• And the snarky and yet widely beloved (actually, probably in part widely beloved due to the snark) blog "Proper Discord" blog is back at long last. The not-so anonymous author has revealed himself to be Andy Doe, the former classical buyer for iTunes and until recently the COO of Naxos.
• Van-tiques Road Show Results. Last week we mentioned that more than 150 items belonging to piano icon Van Cliburn were up for grabs May 17 at Christie's auction house. The event was a success, bringing in $4.3 million. The top lot of the sale was a pair of George II Giltwood Mirrors, attributed to Matthias Lock, dating from around 1570. The final price was $464,500.

Enlarge Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera

Got an idea for a classical cartoon, or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Enlarge Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau — often cited as one of the greatest and most influential singers of the 20th century — died near Starnberg, Germany this morning at age 86. His wife, soprano Julia Varady, announced his death from undisclosed causes.

Fischer-Dieskau's lyricism and sensitivity to the words he was singing made him unmatched among song interpreters. His repertoire was said to include more than 3,000 songs by composers including Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Wolf, and he made hundreds of recordings over the course of his 50-year career. When he made his American debut in 1955 (singing Schubert's Winterreise), the New York Times cheered, "The performance left no doubt that last night's listeners were in the presence of a singing artist." In Richard Wigmore's 2007 biography Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: The Baritone of Our Age, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf hailed her frequent colleague as "a born god who has it all."

Reached this morning by phone, critic and author Tim Page said, "What makes Fischer-Dieskau such a significant artist, especially when it comes to lieder, is just the way he throws himself completely into the music. You have the sense that he's examined it from every possible angle and he's chosen this way to go with it. The shading and the sensitivity with which he works with words, not only their meaning but the way he caresses their phonemes, is quite remarkable."

Fischer-Dieskau was also widely respected on the opera stage, with roles that ranged from the Count in Mozart's Nozze di Figaro to the title roles of Verdi's Rigoletto and Paul Hindemith's Cardillac. After his retirement from the stage in 1992, he continued to be a vigorous presence in master classes.

The baritone was born May 28, 1925 in Berlin. By his own figuring, he tried to start singing somewhere around age 2. His mother supported his fascination by taking him to concerts even when he was barely school-aged. By the time he was a teenager, he was already becoming a force to be reckoned with.

He first sang Winterreise in public at age 17, in 1943. He was singing at the town hall of Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. The performance was interrupted by an RAF bombing. In an interview he gave to The Guardian upon turning 80, the singer recalled, "The whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two-and-a-half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed."

One of his most frequent collaborators, the pianist Gerald Moore, wrote in his memoirs: "He had only sung one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master." (At the time, Moore was 52 years old, while Fischer-Dieskau was just half the pianist's age.) As time went on, the admiration only increased for this musician's musician: Fischer-Dieskau partnered with such pianistic legends as Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, Daniel Barenboim and Alfred Brendel.

The baritone's very first recording, of Brahms' Four Serious Songs, was made in 1949. Within two years, he was giving his first concert in London and made his first recording with Gerald Moore — the first of no less than three recorded traversals of Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin with Moore, along with other recordings of the same cycle with Alfred Brendel and other pianists.

The Second World War defined a large part of the singer's youth. Conscripted into the German army, he was captured in Italy by the Americans in 1945 and spent almost two years as a POW; while there, he gave recitals of Schubert songs. Once the Nazis were defeated, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Berlin and began singing professionally.

In a gesture suffused with symbolism, it was Fischer-Dieskau whom English composer and conductor Benjamin Britten requested to sing in the premiere of Britten's War Requiem in 1962 at the shattered and then rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Britten's choice of wording speaks volumes about Fischer-Dieskau's immense reputation among fellow artists: "With great temerity," Britten wrote in his letter, "I am asking you whether you would sing the baritone."

Enlarge Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images

A lone bugler stands at attention in the rain at Wilmington National Cemetery in North Carolina, in 2009.

Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images

A lone bugler stands at attention in the rain at Wilmington National Cemetery in North Carolina, in 2009.

This Saturday, 200 buglers will assemble at Arlington National Cemetery to begin playing "Taps," a call written 150 years ago this year.

Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Jari Villanueva, a bugle player, says he started out as a Boy Scout bugler at about age 12. He went on to study trumpet at the Peabody Conservatory before being accepted into the United States Air Force Band — where one of his duties over the next 23 years was to sound that call at Arlington National Cemetery.

Villanueva says "Taps" has taken him on a wonderful journey. "During the Civil War," he says, "in late June and July of 1862, the Union Army is camped all along the James River, and especially at a place called Harrison's Landing. Within that big army is a brigade commanded by Gen. Daniel Butterfield. Butterfield doesn't like the regulation call for 'lights out' — that call, like most calls in the Army manual at that time, was derived from the French.

"So Butterfield calls his brigade bugler," continues Villanueva, "a 22-year-old private by the name of Oliver Wilcox Norton. Butterfield gives him music to a new call, and asks him to play it that night. The next morning, Norton is approached by different buglers from other brigades who asked, 'What was that you played last night?' He then furnishes copies of the music to the other buglers, and pretty soon everyone is now sounding this new call" — the 24 notes of "Taps."

Buglers, Veterans And The Lonely Yet Comforting Sound Of Taps

Over the past few weeks, supporters of the London Symphony Orchestra (and a mysterious gent in the back of a car) have been busy teaching Londoners one of the trickiest and most compelling rhythms in all music: the famously jerky 32 beats in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that usher in the wild "Augurs of Spring."

Once this syncopation is in your head and body, it's there for good — particularly if you go in without expectations of where the beats "should" fall. (And as for unraveling Stravinsky's incredible tonalities in this section, that's another matter.)

In any case, don't worry if you don't get it on the first go-around. You've got a whole year until the 100th anniversary of the Rite's premiere.

Enlarge Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a dedicated advocate of classical music.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a dedicated advocate of classical music.

This is a big week for classical music at the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg provided Alex Ross at The New Yorker with a list of her favorite records. Not only does Justice Ginsburg have impeccable taste in opera — from Placido Domingo's classic Otello to the Nathan Gunn/Ian Bostridge Billy Budd — but her son, James Ginsburg, has become an important force in promoting Chicago-area musicians via his record label, Cedille.

Meanwhile, Justice Ginsburg has also invited one of the true giants among pianists, Leon Fleisher, to play for the Court today. In previous years, she has invited such current opera favorites as Stephanie Blythe and Anthony Dean Griffey, extending a musical tradition at the Court formerly fostered by Justice Harry A. Blackmun.

To top it off, Justice Ginsburg — who has made cameo appearances in Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Fledermaus at the Washington National Opera — hosted last year's NEA Opera Awards. In her remarks, she observed that Wagner's Ring cycle "centers on a breach of contract — Wotan's repudiation of the agreement he made to compensate the giants for building Valhalla. What better illustration of the well-known legal maxim pacta sunt servanda; in plain English, agreements must be kept."

Decca

The English contralto Kathleen Ferrier had a voice like no other. She was born 100 years ago.

One hundred years ago, a musical marvel was born. She grew up in a tiny hamlet in the North of England, but made a huge impression on the world of classical music.

"Unique" is an overused word, yet it truly fits the sound of Kathleen Ferrier's voice. If you've never heard it, prepare to be amazed — stop reading now and click on the link below.

Her voice was a true contralto, radiant and rich with velvety purple tones reaching deep into a manly range. In addition to the sheer beauty of her sound, there's a palpable sense of communication. All the greatest singers have it — from Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf to John McCormack and George Jones — and when you hear them, it sounds like they are singing to you and you alone. Ferrier had it in spades.

To mark the 100th anniversary of her birth on April 22, 1912, Decca has issued a 14-CD Ferrier box set that includes an hour-long documentary on her life and career. It's a treasure-trove of incredible singing, from a complete recording of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice to British folk tunes to riveting live broadcasts of songs by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms from the 1949 Edinburgh Festival.

Ferrier was an unlikely candidate to become one of classical music's most extraordinary singers. She had no upper level institutional musical training. She excelled at the piano as a kid, but her only singing took place in the bathroom of her Lancashire home. At age 14, her parents, worried by finances, took her out of school and she landed a job at the telephone exchange of the local post office.

Later she met and married a bank manager. In 1937, on a lark, she took him up on a bet that she wouldn't dare enter a regional singing competition. She took home first prize and along with it the confidence to start accepting singing engagements around Northern England.

In just a few short years, while World War II was ripping Europe apart, Ferrier's career bloomed. By war's end, she had moved to London, hired an agent, signed a recording contract and begun attracting leading figures in music, including conductors Bruno Walter and John Barbirolli and composer Benjamin Britten, who wrote for her the lead role in The Rape of Lucretia. She made her stage debut in Britten's opera at Glyndebourne in 1946.

Of all of these men Ferrier probably cherished most her time with Walter. "To learn with him the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler, is to feel that one is gaining knowledge and inspiration for the composer himself," she wrote in a letter. "It is very exciting and sometimes almost unbearably moving."

With Walter, Ferrier found herself on the forefront of a Gustav Mahler revival. The composer's music was banned during the war in countries occupied by Germany, and Walter, as a personal friend of the composer, was keen to bring it back.

Kathleen Ferrier: A Voice Not Forgotten

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied" (excerpt)

• Artist: Kathleen Ferrier
• Album: Centenary Edition: The Complete Decca Recordings
• Song: Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied"

• Add to Playlist
• Purchase Music

close

Purchase Featured Music

• "Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied""
• Album: Centenary Edition: The Complete Decca Recordings
• Artist: Kathleen Ferrier
• Label: Decca
• Released: 2012

• Amazon »

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

 

Perhaps the greatest of the Ferrier-Walter-Mahler projects was the 1952 recording in Vienna of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). When Mahler wrote the work's final movement, "Der Abschied" (The Farewell), he showed it to Walter, who said, "I was profoundly moved by that uniquely passionate, bitter, yet resigned and benedictory sound of farewell and departure, that last confession of one upon whom rested the finger of death." Mahler, only in his 40s, had been recently diagnosed with a heart condition that would eventually lead to his early death.

What makes this particular recording special, beyond the riveting performance by Ferrier, is the fact that she was dying of breast cancer while singing Mahler's soaring, valedictory music. Ferrier died peacefully in her sleep Oct. 8, 1953 at just 41.

It was a huge loss for Britain. Ferrier had become almost as beloved as the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. It was an even bigger loss for music, as a voice like Ferrier's appears only very rarely. Her friends and colleagues remember her as a simple, warm person, radiant with life, obsessed with music and equipped with a bawdy sense of humor — all attributes that leap from these recordings.

Enlarge Dániel Vass/ECM Records

On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.

Dániel Vass/ECM Records

On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.

Garth Knox was born to play the viola. As a youngster, he already had two sisters who played violin and a brother who played cello. "So for the family string quartet," Knox says, "it was very clear from the start which instrument I would play."

On his new album, Saltarello, Knox traverses almost 1,000 years of music history, playing not only the viola but also the medieval fiddle and the viola d'amore, a forgotten member of the viola family with an extra set of strings vibrating underneath the fingerboard. Knox says the instrument appeared and then disappeared in musical history.

"A lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water," he says in an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel. "And I thought the viola d'amore was a particularly big baby that had been thrown away by mistake. I and others are trying to bring it back and show just how beautiful it can be."

Hear The Music

Hildegard Von Bingen / Guillaume De Machaut: 'Ave, Generosa' / 'Tels Rit Au Matin'

• Artist: Garth Knox
• Album: Saltarello

• Add to Playlist
• Purchase Music

close

Purchase Featured Music

• "Work(s) [Ave, Generosa - Tels Rit Au Ma[T]In Qui Au Soir Pleure]"
• Album: Saltarello
• Artist: Garth Knox
• Label: ECM
• Released: 2012

• Amazon »
• Amazon MP3 »
• Itunes »

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

 

Kaija Saariaho: 'Vent Nocturne (Dark Mirrors)'

• Artist: Garth Knox
• Album: Saltarello

• Add to Playlist
• Purchase Music

close

Purchase Featured Music

• "Vent Nocturne, for viola & electronics [I. Sombres Miroirs [Dark Mirrors]]"
• Album: Saltarello
• Artist: Garth Knox
• Label: ECM
• Released: 2012

• Amazon »
• Amazon MP3 »
• Itunes »

Your purchase helps support NPR Programming. How?

 

The instrument appears in the album's opening track — "Black Brittany," an arrangement of a traditional Irish song — and in a stripped-down version of a Vivaldi concerto. Instead of the standard orchestral accompaniment, Knox arranged the work for just two instruments: the viola d'amore and a cello.

"I noticed over the years that baroque players like to lighten things up and make it clearer by reducing the number of people playing," Knox says. "And I thought it would be nice just to see how far I could go, and in this Vivaldi piece I think we've reached the limit. I think it gains something. I think it's exciting to hear it played like this."

The oldest music on Saltarello is by the 12th century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen; Knox plays it on the medieval fiddle, an instrument that he says looks like what you see depicted in Renaissance paintings.

"You usually see angels playing them," Knox says. "They usually have five strings, and their bridge is flat and you can play all the strings all the time, which is the idea. It's a very beautiful instrument, and it has a very earthy sound."

Immediately following the ancient sounds, Knox jumps more than 900 years to a new piece, Vent Nocturne (Dark Mirrors), written for him by Kaija Saariaho. It's all part of Knox's musical journey.

"I thought it would be very interesting to put things together which normally you don't hear together," Knox says, "and see just what the differences are."

Enlarge Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

At 101, Roman Totenberg was teaching students up to the very end of his life.

Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

At 101, Roman Totenberg was teaching students up to the very end of his life.

[Roman Totenberg was a child prodigy who became a violin virtuoso, as well as a master teacher who passed along his command of craft and his love of music — and life — to thousands. He was also the man you wanted to sit next to at the table because he was so funny. Totenberg died this week at the age of 101, surrounded by loving family, friends and students. We asked his daughter, Nina Totenberg, for this remembrance. — Scott Simon]

My father's death was as remarkable as his life. Last week, as word spread through the music community that he was suddenly dying, his former students began flocking to his home, driving sometimes hours through the night to get there. We even had to dissuade a Polish violinist and composer from hopping a plane for the States.

There's no crying in baseball, or in music. And so he told these amazing musicians to play for him. No matter how accomplished they were, he was still their teacher. Eyes closed, he listened, conducting with his right hand, slowing the tempo here and there for better phrasing, or clapping to keep the tempo up, and even asking for the violin to demonstrate a piece of fingering. One former student, playing the Brahms Violin Concerto at his bedside, couldn't hear his whispered words, so she gently put her ear to his lips. With elegant distinctness, he said quite clearly, "The D was flat."

As they left, the former students all said some version of the same thing. "He changed my life." Soloist Mira Wang, who came from China at age 19 to study with him decades ago, said simply, "My parents gave me life. He taught me how to live it. "

My father's career really began on the streets of Moscow during a famine, when he played for bread and butter that fed his family.

"Invariably, the people give us white bread and butter and other things to eat, which we'd take home," my father recalled. "And that was actually the first impression of the value of the art — what can it bring to you to survive, so to say."

Roman Totenberg made his debut as a soloist with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was 11. Over the course of time, he would solo with every major orchestra in the U.S. and Europe, playing all the classics and premiering new works by many of the great contemporary composers, all of whom were his friends. Once, Benny Goodman even called him up onstage to jam with the band.

His American debut came in 1935 with the National Symphony Orchestra, playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which he recorded decades later.

The U.S. debut was such a sensation that he was invited to the White House to play for President Roosevelt. Just weeks before, my father had played for the king of Italy at a concert so formal, he had to back off the stage so as to keep facing the monarch. At the White House, the artists were invited to the president's private residence after the performance, where Mrs. Roosevelt served each of them dinner. Reflecting on the difference, my father thought to himself, "This is the country for me."

Shortly after that, he began a tour across the country, traveling by train. In one story, he recalled how he was anxious to practice his English.

Roman Totenberg's Remarkable Life And Death

"I went to the dining room and was seated next to a rather charming young lady who was obviously a Texan with a nice drawl," he said. "And after a while, she would ask me to repeat some things and so on. And finally she said, 'I have such hard time understanding you Yankees.' "

In the past three days, I found myself listening to some of Dad's recordings — there were hundreds of them over the years, and about a dozen issued on CD. They are, quite simply, astonishing in their breadth and emotion — from the technical wizardry of Paganini to the heart-wrenching and powerful Bach "Chaconne."

Once, after a big concert when he was in his 90s, we came home with armloads of flowers, basking in the glow of stomping, standing ovations. "You know, Ninotchka," my dad said with a twinkle in his eye, "when you are very young and can do it, they scream and yell, and when you are very old and can do it, they scream and yell. I have been lucky enough to do it at both ends."