Elisabeth von Herzogenberg News
singer, pianist, composer
- piano, voice
- Kingdom of Prussia
Last update
2024-03-26
Refresh
2024-01-29 04:30:00
The Muse (Piano Music by Brahms)
by Bill Heck Brahms: Händel Variations & Fugue op. 24; Rhapsodies Op. 79; Intermezzi Op. 117; Clara Schumann: Three Romanzes, Op. 21 (No 1). Challenge Classics CC 72970 Long-time readers may recall that I favorably reviewed an earlier album of Schumann works played by the Georgian pianist Nino Gvetadze (see review here). In the current album, Gvetadze takes on a set of works by Brahms, along with an "epilogue" piece by Clara Schumann. First – and I am summarizing from the interesting liner notes in what follows – the works presented here are in some sense inspired by two muses: Clara Schumann and Elisabet von Herzogenberg. We don’t have space here to repeat – or even start – the topic of Johannes’s complex relationship with Clara (wife of Brahms champion and friend Robert Schumann and virtuoso pianist in her own right), but there can be little doubt of the depth […]
2021-11-10 07:00:57
Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto: An Intimate Colossus
I don’t mind telling you that I have written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo. This is how Johannes Brahms jokingly described the newly completed Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major in a letter to his friend and former student, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, dated July 7, 1881. In another letter, written around the same time, he referred flippantly to “some little piano pieces.” In fact, ...
2021-05-24 12:14:14
A Life On-Line: reinventing Machaut, exploring harmoniemusik and Ethel Smyth's teacher
[…] with its combination of oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano. Here we had a wonderfully immediate and engaging account of the work, with lots of interplay between the instrumentalists. It was lovely to catch the players from the orchestra in the spotlight for once. Whilst Mozart's quintet seems to have inspired Beethoven's work for the same line-up, the programme went for something a little more unusual, the 1888 work by the Austrian composer, Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Von Herzogenberg and his wife, Elisabet, were friends of Brahms and she was one of Brahms' pupils. Von Herzogenberg is often seen as a pale imitation of Brahms, but on the showing of this quintet he was certainly not just that. The music had a certain Brahmsian cast in places, but a lot of the time there was the sense of the presence of a very definite personality and certainly the performance made me […]
2020-12-11 01:02:00
Dame Ethel Smyth’s "The Prison" Nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, on Chandos Records; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone
[…] work that deserves to be heard throughout the world. The moment I heard that first note in the rehearsal hall, I got shivers up and down my spine, and my life has not been the same since.” Ethel Smyth left home at age 19 (against the wishes of her military father) in order to compose music in Leipzig. In the company of Clara Schumann and her teacher Heinrich von Herzogenberg, she met and won the admiration of composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Dvorak, and Grieg, and became the first woman to have an opera performed at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, in 1903. (The second was not until Kaaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin in 2016). Her work The Prison is a 64-minute symphony in two parts, “Close on Freedom” and “The Deliverance.” Sometimes called an oratorio or […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe). Lyrical singers (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): H...