Casimir Gide News
French choreographer, composer and editor (1804-1868)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Casimir Gide)
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- choreographer, composer, editor, bookseller
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2024-04-25
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2021-12-13 08:37:54
Dancing a pas de deux with Tchaikovsky and holidaying in North Africa: rumours swirled around Saint-Saens even before his death
[…] the Ottoman Empire, the use of boys for sexual purposes had become an acceptable part of society; Europeans would go to coffee houses and pleasure gardens to see dancing boys it would be perfectly acceptable to have a more intimate performance with them if they wished. This stopped in 1830 when Algeria became a French colony, but continued behind closed doors; French authorities knew it went on but turned a blind eye. The novelist Andre Gide would travel to Algiers in the 1890s and it was there he came to accept that he was attracted to young men, and in 1895 Gide met Oscar Wilde there. And Saint-Saens would die in Algiers in December 1921. According to Benjamin Ivry in a 2000 biography of Maurice Ravel, Saint-Saëns "was plagued by blackmailing letters from North African men he paid, apparently too little, for sex"; Ivry cites no authority for the statement, […]
2020-09-02 12:43:25
A distinct voice: a new disc from Resonus explores Florent Schmitt's Mélodies, a wide-ranging survey of song by an under-rated composer
[…] still does not have a strongly defined profile. Ever since the 1970s, when performances of his large-scale setting Psaume XLVII began to appear in concert halls and on disc, individual works or groups of works have come to the fore without Schmitt's career being in strong focus, most recently and most intriguingly in 2017 the BBC Symphony Orchestra performed Schmitt's Antoine et Cléopâtre Suites, music from a 1920s production of Shakespeare's play translated by Andre Gide.Now a new disc from Resonus Classics gives us a chance to explore Florent Schmitt's Mélodies and of the 25 songs on the disc, 17 are world premiere recordings. The performers are soprano Sybille Diethelm, mezzo-soprano Annina Haug, tenor Nino Aurelio Gmünder, bass-baritone René Perler, pianist Fabienne Romer and pianist Edward Rushton, and the disc includes not only six groups of songs but also Schmitt's Chansons à quatre voix for four singers and two pianists. […]
2018-08-16 14:00:08
Staples/Cheviller/Finnish National Opera/Salonen(Pentatone) Radiant beauty is not a quality that is automatically associated with Stravinsky’s music. But in Perséphone, the “melodrama” for tenor, female narrator, chorus, children’s chorus and large orchestra that he completed in 1934 to a text by André Gide, he composed one of the most radiant and lyrically beautiful scores to be found anywhere in 20th-century music. It’s one of Stravinsky’s greatest achievements, and alongside his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, one of the high points of his neoclassical period, though perhaps because of the forces it requires and its curious hybrid nature – part ballet, part cantata – performances and recordings have always been rare. Perséphone was written for the dancer
2018-07-09 03:39:14
Respighi and Diamond, 2018
[…] we’ve never written about the American composer David Diamond. Diamond was born on July 9th of 2015 in Rochester, NY. His Jewish parents immigrated from Austria and Poland. Diamond studied the violin and music theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music before moving to New York to study with Roger Sessions at the New Music School. He won a scholarship to go to Paris; there, he met Ravel, Milhaud and Roussel, and the writers André Gide and James Joyce. While in Paris, he studied with Nadia Boulanger. He returned to the States at the outbreak of WWII, in 1939. The next 12 years were difficult, as Diamond didn’t have a permanent position, but productive: he wrote four symphonies and several other orchestral compositions, a violin concerto and a number of vocal pieces. In 1951 Diamond returned to Europe, this time as a professor at the University of Rome. A year […]
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