Eduard Hanslick News
Austrian musician and musicologist
Commemorations 2024 (Death: Eduard Hanslick) 2025 (Birth: Eduard Hanslick)
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- musicologist, writer, music critic, professor, composer, aesthetician, critic, opinion journalist
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2024-04-25
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2021-11-01 06:00:32
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto: Oistrakh, Milstein, Heifetz
Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major has long held a cherished position in the musical canon. Yet, the value of this popular work was not always appreciated. Following the premiere on December 4, 1881, performed by the Russian violinist Adolph Brodsky with Hans Richter leading the Vienna Philharmonic, the influential critic Eduard Hanslick wrote savagely, “Tchaikovsky is surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an inflated one…lacking discrimination and taste.” He continued, “The same ...
2021-09-27 22:14:00
[…] opus numbers, the Symphony stands on the cusp of the composer’s unquestionably ‘late’ period and puzzled certain early listeners, though it has been long since assimilated into the repertoire. Few symphonies speak with a voice and direction so unambiguous in its Classical tragedy: Mozart’s 40th, Mahler’s Sixth, perhaps a handful of others. Brahms’s Fourth it seems, will always stand among them; defiant, unbending, if no longer incomprehensible as it initially seemed to some listeners, Eduard Hanslick and Clara Schumann among them. The wistfulness of the first theme perhaps suggests the E minor opening of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. We can sense the melancholy shadows cast by those falling thirds, even when they rise to foretell added sixth harmonies that will colour the entire work. What follows, though, is tighter of structure – no criticism of Mendelssohn, for he and Brahms attempt and accomplish very different things. This was not Brahms’s first […]
2020-09-25 06:00:27
Composed in 1892, the three Intermezzi for solo piano, Op. 117 are among the final works of Johannes Brahms. Filled with wistful nostalgia, they were written two years after Brahms’ formal retirement at the age of 57. The critic Eduard Hanslick described these brief autumnal works as “monologues” of a “thoroughly personal and subjective character…pensive, graceful, dreamy, resigned, and elegiac.” Brahms once described them as “three lullabies to my sorrow.” Along with ...
2020-06-27 08:31:54
Renowned as a pedagogue & the Royal Academy of Music's first cello professor, there is a lot more to Alfredo Piatti: I chat to cellist Adrian Bradbury about rediscovering Piatti's forgotten operatic fantasies
[…] and comments that some of the operatic fantasies by Piatti's contemporaries are far less musically rewarding. When playing an operatic fantasy, how aware do you need to be of the way singers would perform the music? Adrian feels that this sort of awareness is very necessary in this style of music, and he points to the fact that Piatti was very aware of singers himself and modelled his tone on that of singers. Eduard Hanslick (the 19th century critic) commented that Piatti did not use a sickly sweet vibrato all the time, but used a real cantabile to delight. Another critic said 'Piatti delights as much as he dazzled'. And from a young age, Piatti worked with all the great singers. Another writer said of him that he 'formed his cantabile on the singers from his own country'. In the operatic fantasies that Piatti published, such […]
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