Giovanni Guicciardi News
Italian singer and opera singer
- baritone
- Kingdom of Italy
- opera singer
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2024-04-23
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2020-02-14 15:37:00
Happy Valentine's Day, Ludwig...
[…] protect the identity of his Immortal Beloved that musicologists spent around 200 years trying to find out who she was. It is still disputed today.Something else vital was missing from the letter: a date. Beethoven wrote on it only ‘July 6’. No year. Through matching days of the week with the date, possible years were narrowed down to a shortlist and watermark identification finally settled upon 1812. From that flowed several possibilities...Antonie Brentano? Julie ("Giulietta") Guicciardi? Bettina Brentano? Therese Brunsvik von Korompa? Or her sister Josephine?RTR here: https://www.udiscovermusic.com/classical-features/beethoven-immortal-beloved/Immortal, meanwhile, is with editorial, so I'm biting my nails a bit; not many people have read it and I am too close to it to have much sense of how it will really go over. Happily, I now know it is to have the same editor as Ghost Variations, who was fantastic, and I'm looking forward to polishing it up into final form […]
2017-07-28 21:30:36
I figure that if Ludwig van Beethoven had been around today, he’d have been a shred-metaller. You know – a guitar virtuoso who churns out 500-note-a-minute solos on top of complex polyrhythmic backings built around augmented minor chord progressions. Think Yngwie Malmsteen. That’s basically how Beethoven’s stuff was viewed back then by a generation bought up on Mozart. (“Ach, this new music! Such clatter! Vot has Napoleon done to Europe’s culture?”) Besides which, Beethoven sounds best today as shred metal. Want proof? Get this. Way back when I was studying piano I tried learning Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor – ‘Sonata quasi una Fantasia’. He wrote it in 1801-02 and dedicated it to a pupil, Julie Guicciardi. It got the name ‘Moonlight’ in 1832 when Ludwig Rellstab likened the first movement to moonlight shimmering over water. Each movement is harder than the last, though they’re all challenging […]
2015-05-14 07:00:07
UW-Madison’s Pro Arte Quartet to perform Beethoven, Mozart and Kirchner this Friday to kick off the 25th season of Midsummer Music in Door County.
[…] most typical and expressive key.) Its composition dates from 1800 and is contemporaneous with his First Symphony and his Third Piano Concerto, both also in the key of C, plus the Septet for Winds and Strings in E-flat Major, which endured as one of his most beloved compositions during his lifetime. This quartet also comes from a time in Beethoven’s life when the 30-year-old composer fell deeply in love with a younger woman, Countess Giulietta Guicciardi — only to be rejected, perhaps because she had higher social status than he did. (You can hear the dramatic opening movement in a YouTube video at the bottom.) Following the Beethoven will be the String Quartet No. 4 by Leon Kirchner (below). Kirchner is one of America’s finest composers. He died in 2009 at the age of 90, only three years after completing his String Quartet No. 4, which was […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2015-03-18 18:46:43
Don’t expect this airline to play fair with your instrument
[…] I explained that my husband (a violist) had flown with Vueling without problems before, and that I had never flown on any commercial planes so small that the violin wouldn’t fit. These include small 40-seat planes with 3-per-row seating. I even offered to go onboard, and if there really was no space for the instrument, to fit in the overhead compartment, to purchase another seat. The gate agent, though appreciative that my instrument (a 1970 Guicciardi) and bows were very expensive, fragile, and irreplaceable, insisted once again that the airplane was small, full, and that there would be no place because the instrument did not fit in overhead compartments. Having no other choice, and not wishing to miss my flight, I purchased a second ticket, checked in, and went onboard. I was quite surprised that the airplane was a standard Airbus A320-200 (the only model plane that the airline has, […]
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