Siegfried's Birthday
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Siegfried, Richard Wagner’s youngest with Cosima von Bulow was born this day in 1869. We hear a work by him and two with Siegfried in the title from his dad.
In our first hour we honor Birthday Baby Aram Khachturian (1903) as we bring you his “Gayane Ballet Suite” in a Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performance, Alfred Newman conducting. Later, Emanuel Ax is the pianist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, backed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Sir Charles Mackerras. Our third hour offers an unusual version of Beethoven’s String Trio in D, opus 8an arrangement for guitar, flute, and clarinet conceived by Ludwig’s contemporary, Wenzel Matiegka. JoAnn Falletta exchanges her conducting baton for a guitar, joining flutist Alexa Still and clarinetist Robert Alemany.
Ending the evening are the three works by two Wagners. Siegfried’s youthful symphonic poem, “Sehnsucht,” was based on a Schiller poem by the same name. The 26-year-old Wagner wrote to a publisher in 1896 that he had no plans to publish his first work, and it disappeared from sight until a (later) published version was discovered in 1979, markedly different from the autograph fragments in the archives. We hear Werner Andreas Albert conducting the Hamburg Philharmonic. Two works by his dad followworks featuring Siegfried’s name: ‘Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’ from “Götterdämmerung,” and a Liszt take on ‘Forest Murmurs’ from “Siegfried,” played by pianist Wilhelm Backhaus.
In our first hour we honor Birthday Baby Aram Khachturian (1903) as we bring you his “Gayane Ballet Suite” in a Hollywood Bowl Orchestra performance, Alfred Newman conducting. Later, Emanuel Ax is the pianist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1, backed by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Sir Charles Mackerras. Our third hour offers an unusual version of Beethoven’s String Trio in D, opus 8an arrangement for guitar, flute, and clarinet conceived by Ludwig’s contemporary, Wenzel Matiegka. JoAnn Falletta exchanges her conducting baton for a guitar, joining flutist Alexa Still and clarinetist Robert Alemany.
Ending the evening are the three works by two Wagners. Siegfried’s youthful symphonic poem, “Sehnsucht,” was based on a Schiller poem by the same name. The 26-year-old Wagner wrote to a publisher in 1896 that he had no plans to publish his first work, and it disappeared from sight until a (later) published version was discovered in 1979, markedly different from the autograph fragments in the archives. We hear Werner Andreas Albert conducting the Hamburg Philharmonic. Two works by his dad followworks featuring Siegfried’s name: ‘Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’ from “Götterdämmerung,” and a Liszt take on ‘Forest Murmurs’ from “Siegfried,” played by pianist Wilhelm Backhaus.
