Paul Abraham News
Jewish-Hungarian composer (1892–1960)
- cello
- opera, operetta
- Hungary, Austria-Hungary, United States of America, West Germany
- composer, conductor
Last update
2024-03-19
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2024-01-24 07:29:00
Norfolk-based arts writer, Tony Cooper, enjoys a musical heritage tour to Leipzig, a relaxing and inviting city to visit awash with so much musical history.
[…] the post of Thomaskantor, director of St Thomas’ Boys Choir. The first choice fell to Georg Philipp Telemann, at the time working as a music director in Hamburg. However, his employers upped his salary as an incentive to keep him. Money talks - and that, of course, did the trick! The same scenario fitted the next favoured candidate, too, Saxon-born composer, Johann Christoph Graupner. In a slip of the tongue, though, the chairman of the recruitment committee, Abraham Christoph Plaz, infamously said: ‘If you can’t have the best, we shall have to settle for second best.’ And one of the ‘mediocre’ candidates in contention for the job was none other than JSB, working at the time in Köthen as director of the court orchestra. Graciously, he accepted the job thereby becoming the 17th Thomaskantor of this most important and great musical post established in 1518 while Herr Plaz redeemed himself to some […]
2023-11-20 15:01:17
Spaniards and Genealogy, 2023
[…] of the few Jews with full Prussian citizenship, had 13 children; Sara was born in 1761. She was a brilliant keyboardist and commissioned and premiered several pieces by Wilhelm Friedeman and CPE Bach. Sara married Salomon Levy in 1783 and had an important salon in Berlin. One of her sisters, Bella Itzig, married Levin Jakob Salomon; they had a son, Jakob Salomon, who upon converting to Christianity, took the name Bartholdy. His daughter Lea married Abraham Mendelssohn, son of the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Lea and Abraham had two children, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn; their full name was Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Sara had a big influence on the musical education of her grandnephew Felix. Bella gave a manuscript of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion to her grandson in 1824; Felix conducted the first 19th-century revival of the Passion in 1829. So, there’s a line, quite convoluted but fascinating, going […]
2023-11-05 13:53:00
The Triptych Singers premiere Awake! my soul
A lovely concert last night at St Mildred's Church, Croydon in aid of their organ fund given by the Triptych Singers, conductor Jim Jelley. As part of the choir's 50th anniversary celebrations, my anthem Awake, my soul! was commissioned for them and it received its first performance as part of the concert. The evening also included a terrific performance of Ginastera's Danzas Argentinias by the church's organ scholar, Ben Abraham. A lovely evening all round, and many thanks to everyone for their hard work.The organ fund is aiming to raise money to rehome a fine, 1906 Lewis & Co organ, originally from St Paul's United Reformed Church in Croydon, to St Mildred's. The Lewis organ is one of only two in Croydon to hold an Historic Organ Certificate (the other being the Hill organ at Croydon Minster). Find out more and donate at the project website.
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-09-16 21:24:53
Just Arrived on the Shelves
[…] I heard the story from Milton Babbitt. Craft is well remembered as the assistant and sidekick, like a faithful son, to Igor Stravinsky between their first meeting, in 1948, and the composer’s death in 1971 (at age 88). Four discs in the set represent works by Stravinsky that the composer himself did not conduct for recording, or conducted or supervised in part after Craft rehearsed them — these are chiefly works of Stravinsky’s last years (Abraham and Isaac, Huxley Variations, The Flood, Requiem Canticles). But the bulk of the set features the Second Viennese School, especially works of Schoenberg, which Craft began to record in 1962 in two-disc sets that included large-scale items never recorded before — Die glückliche Hand, the Orchestral Songs op. 22, the opera Von Heute auf Morgen, Cello Concerto, Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G Minor). There was also a two-disc set of Alban […]
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