Julius Rietz News
German musician
- cello
- symphony, opera
- Kingdom of Prussia
- conductor, composer, university teacher, cellist
Last update
2024-04-20
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2020-12-22 15:57:03
Felix Mendelssohn began the composition of his Octet, the first indisputable masterpiece of his artistic maturity, in the autumn of 1825. The work was completed on October 15, 1825, two days before the composer presented the autograph score as a birthday present to his violin teacher, Eduard Rietz. Rietz returned his student’s compliment by copying out instrumental parts by hand which were used in the work’s first performance. From contemporary accounts of those in attendance at that performance, the Octet apparently delighted and amazed its audience, a reaction that this work has been evoking ever since. Mendelssohn’s personal views conformed ideally to the
2020-09-12 17:37:46
Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), was one of the most extraordinary composers in the history of music. He was just midway between his sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays when he composed the Octet for strings. He wrote it as a birthday gift for his friend and violin teacher, Eduard Rietz, and the challenging first-violin part stands as a compliment to that musician’s abilities. The string octet was in no way a classic chamber music genre. Louis Spohr had produced the first of his four “double quartets” in 1823, but despite their identical combination of instruments they adhere to a fundamentally different concept from
2020-06-08 04:20:00
Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto in D Minor (CD review)
[…] concerto was composed, Mendelssohn composed twelve string symphonies. At the age of eleven, he had written a trio for strings, a violin and piano sonata, two piano sonatas, and the beginning of a third, three more for four hands, four for organ, three songs (lieder), and a cantata." And, of course, it would only be a few more years before he wrote the Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Mendelssohn wrote the concerto for Eduard Rietz (eldest brother of Julius Rietz), a beloved friend and teacher." However, "nobody ever performed it in Mendelssohn's own day, and it was only in 1952 that Yehudi Menuhin exhumed and premiered it." Today, we have several recordings of it, although I doubt that any of them, including this one under review, will help usher the concerto into the basic classical repertoire. While it is certainly pleasant and has much to commend it, it never […]
2020-02-19 12:40:00
[…] here – using the second version of the final chorus, which I do not think I had heard before. Each of the three performances I have heard in the flesh has brought something different to the task of bringing Schumann’s score to life. Schumann did not live to hear the work performed in full, although partial performances were heard for the 1849 Goethe centenary in Weimar, conducted by Liszt; in Leipzig, by Julis Rietz; and in Dresden, by Schumann himself. Much was added thereafter, and it is hard to believe that those three performances were not in themselves very different. It is probably fair to say that this is one of those works that offers more possibilities, some of them at least on the verge of the contradictory, than can be reconciled in a single performance. Daniel Harding, with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, proved the most dramatic in […]
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