A Birthday: Jan Ladislav Dussek
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
It’s Jan Ladislav Dussek’s birthday (1760), so we hear from him twice this evening, in his guise as a composer of music for harp (his wife Sophia Corri was a famous harpist).
Widely traveled and famed as a pianist, teacher, and composer in his own time, Dussek met Sophia in London, where he joined her father in the music publishing business. Ever since, harpists have been performing his sonatas, sonatinas, and concertos—works that benefited greatly from having been tried out under a harpist’s hands from their inception. We open with Isabelle Moretti’s performance of his Harp Sonata in C Minor; our second hour features harpist Roberta Alessandrini and the Orchestra di Mantova under Vittorio Parisi’s direction in the Harp Concerto in E-flat, Op. 15. Both works reveal the charm and craft of this not-so-well-known contemporary of Mozart.
We will also enjoy an excerpt from Carl Orff’s “Carmina burana,” as well as a selection from very early anonymous music set to texts from the same Latin verses used by Orff.
Meanwhile, the Vlach Quartet of Prague bring us Dvorák’s “American” String Quartet, the No. 12 in F, so called because it was composed while Dvorak was in America and spending a holiday in the Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa.
Widely traveled and famed as a pianist, teacher, and composer in his own time, Dussek met Sophia in London, where he joined her father in the music publishing business. Ever since, harpists have been performing his sonatas, sonatinas, and concertos—works that benefited greatly from having been tried out under a harpist’s hands from their inception. We open with Isabelle Moretti’s performance of his Harp Sonata in C Minor; our second hour features harpist Roberta Alessandrini and the Orchestra di Mantova under Vittorio Parisi’s direction in the Harp Concerto in E-flat, Op. 15. Both works reveal the charm and craft of this not-so-well-known contemporary of Mozart.
We will also enjoy an excerpt from Carl Orff’s “Carmina burana,” as well as a selection from very early anonymous music set to texts from the same Latin verses used by Orff.
Meanwhile, the Vlach Quartet of Prague bring us Dvorák’s “American” String Quartet, the No. 12 in F, so called because it was composed while Dvorak was in America and spending a holiday in the Bohemian settlement of Spillville, Iowa.
