Last week, in my post about George Butterworth, I mentioned several times Ralph Vaughan Williams, their friendship and their common interest in folk English music. Their careers were parallel until the war; Vaughan Williams was thirteen years older than Butterworth but started to compose later and their early works came just about together. I just wonder if Butterworth would have been as successful as his friend If he had not died so young.

 

George Orwell says in his essay Inside the Whale (1940): "Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad by heart." This quote tells us about the popularity of A Shropshire Lad, a volume of poetry published by Alfred Edward Housman in 1896. Housman didn't consider himself a poet; he was a scholar, a man devoted to research on classical languages. Nevertheless, previous years had been hard for him and he felt compelled to write that poetry collection which talks about loneliness, loss, unhappy love and premature deaths, while evoking an idealized landscape, a kind of [...]

 

Symptoms of baritonophilia are clear. You suffer from baritonophilia when you hear about Pikovaya Dama, you think of Prince Yeletsky, or hear about Die tote Stadt and think of Pierrot; you even think of Riccardo when someone mentions I Puritani. If a tenor sings Pelléas, you complain and you would rename Don Carlo as Posa. If you identify with those symptoms, you should know that it's a quite common disorder (not as much as tenoritis and sopranitis, though) and it's not serious. Just accept it. And enjoy it. And thank Mozart again, this time, because of his Don Giovanni, Leporello, Count Almaviva, Figaro, Guglielmo, Papageno and all of his baritone guys.

 

Today, the Schubertiade Vilabertran 2016, the 24th festival, has been presented. That's why I'm posting later than usual; I wanted to talk about the programme, especially regarding the song recitals. First of all, the dates: the SV16 will take place from 18th August to 3rd September and the format will be arranged as some years ago: the fifteen concerts are concentrated in three long weekends. The first one, from Thursday 18th to Sunday 21st; The second one, longer, from Thursday 25th to Monday 29th and the third one, the shortest, from Thursday 1st to Saturday 3rd. Six song recitals are scheduled; two in the first weekend, four during the second one and one at the third, plus three talks related to three recitals, one each week. This year, the predominance of the German language is overwhelming: Schubert (a lot of him, as you can imagine), Schumann, Brahms, Mendelssohn, [...]

 

Terezín is a town in the Czech Republic, infamous for the Nazi concentration camp which was set there between November 1941 and May 8th, 1945; Camp figures vary according to the sources but there are chilling ones in any case. The Terezín Memorial website indicates that there were about 140,000 prisoners; Terezín was not an extermination camp but the living conditions were so harsh that 35,000 people died (hereafter where it says "died" please read "were murdered "). When the Soviet army liberated the camp there were only 19,000 survivors; during the previous months, 87,000 people were deported to Auschwitz to be executed and only 3800 among them survived. The Terezín camp was kind of "special" to the Nazis, who wanted to present it as an example of their beneficial influence on the Jews. Their cynicism came to such an extent that they organized [...]