Giuseppe Viganoni Video
tenore italiano (1757-1822)
Commemorazioni 2024 (Nascita: Giuseppe Viganoni)
- tenore
- cantante lirico
Ultimo aggiornamento
2024-05-11
Aggiorna
Verdi Anna Leese Amitai Pati Pati Wade Kernot Viganoni Gioacchino Rossini 1868 1869 1873 1874 1919
with Anna Leese (soprano), Kristin Darragh (Mezzo-soprano), Amitai Pati (Tenor) and Wade Kernot (Bass). The Aorangi Singers and Aorangi Symphony Orchestra, Sarah Bisley Schneider (Conductor). Live recording by Franco Viganoni, in our fourth World War One commemorative concert entitled "In Search of Peace - 100 years on", honouring the Treaty of Versailles (1919) which marked the end of the Great War. After Gioacchino Rossini's death in 1868, Verdi suggested that a number of Italian composers collaborate on a Requiem in Rossini's honour. He began the effort by submitting the concluding movement, the Libera me. However, on 4 November, nine days before the premiere (which was scheduled for 13 November 1869, the first anniversary of Rossini’s death), the organising committee abandoned it. In the meantime, Verdi kept toying with his Libera me, frustrated that the combined commemoration of Rossini's life would not be performed in his lifetime. On 22 May 1873, the Italian writer and humanist Alessandro Manzoni, whom Verdi had admired all his adult life and met in 1868, died. Upon hearing of his death, Verdi resolved to complete a Requiem - this time entirely of his own writing - for Manzoni. Verdi travelled to Paris in June, where he commenced work on the Requiem, giving it the form we know today. It included a revised version of the Libera me originally composed for Rossini. While the Requiem is essentially a dramatic work, an inevitability considering the composer’s intimate links with the theatre throughout his career, this in no way detracts from the emotional sincerity that is in fact one of its outstanding characteristics - together with its general vitality, the skill of the choral writing and the vivid orchestral colours. It seems probable that today, the value of Verdi’s Mass is greater than that claimed for it in the year 1874, when it received its first performance at the Church of St Mark, Milan. The selection of highlights is as follows: I.Requiem - II. Dies Irae - Mors stupebit - Quid sum miser - Rex tremendae majestatis - Ingemisco - Confutatis - Dies Irae - Lacrymosa III. from the Offertorio: Hostias - quam olim Abrahae - Libera animas V. Agnus Dei - V. Lux aeterna - VII. Libera me
Shostakovich Viganoni Yevgeny Mravinsky Mahler Volkov Bode Bolshoi 1917 1936 1937 1961 2016
Conducted by Sarah Bisley Schneider, recorded live by Franco Viganoni on November 20th 2016 in the Auckland Town Hall, New Zealand. Notes on the work: Shostakovich was old enough – at the age of 11 – to compose a funeral march for the victims of the February revolution that overthrew the Tsar in 1917 as a result of the crisis the world war had brought to Russia. In the second world war, he was famously to compose his seventh symphony to mark the heroic resistance to the Germans of his home city, then called Leningrad. The fifth symphony belongs to the period of Stalinist Terror that preceded the war. In some sense the criticism of Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that erupted after Stalin, Molotov and others went to see it at the Bolshoi on 26 January 1936 marked the opening of that terrifying phase. Pravda published an article ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, denouncing ‘formalism’, the code word for the opposite of ‘socialist realism’. Shostakovich was rightly alarmed. He finished his fourth symphony, but its premiere, scheduled for 11 December, did not take place. ‘Fear was all around.’ The composer asked to speak to Stalin in person, but the phone did not ring. He asked Marshal Tukhachevsky to write a letter on his behalf, though the military hero was himself to be arrested, tortured and executed in 1937. Shostakovich survived, but his music was not performed. Putting the fourth symphony in a drawer – it was not performed till 1961 – Shostakovich started on the fifth in April 1937 at a resort in the Crimea. The short score was completed in Leningrad on 20 July. He played the work to his colleagues in October, and chose Yevgeny Mravinsky to conduct it. It was premiered in the Philharmonia Hall on 21 November. The symphony was in classic four-movement form and moved from tragic opening to apparently triumphant finale. The first movement, a vast span, enormously varied, ends with an inconclusive phrase on the celesta. A grotesque, rather Mahler-ish, scherzo follows. The slow movement – drafted in three days – was at the heart of the work and seems like some kind of requiem, ending with a form of Amen. The finale, which appears to renew a sense of hope and survival, may not be quite what it appears. In the quiet section the composer quotes from his recent setting of Pushkin’s ‘Regeneration’: ‘An artist-barbarian with a drowsy brush Blackens over the painting of a genius And senselessly draws on top of it His own illegitimate designs. But over the years the foreign paint Flakes away like old scales… Thus do delusions vanish From my worried soul And in their place visions arise Of pure, original days.’ According to Simon Volkov Shostakovich himself insisted that the finale was not exultant. ‘The rejoicing is forced, created under threat, as in Boris Godunov.’ The applause for the work was tremendous. Shostakovich’s friends realised that such applause might be taken as a provocation. The chairman of the Leningrad Union of Composers indeed said that the symphony did ‘not bode well for the future of Soviet symphonic music’. But it survived, and so did its composer, endorsing the remark that it was ‘the practical creative answer of a Soviet artist to just criticism’. That endorsement itself may be ironic. Life under such a regime had to be full of irony, spoken or unspoken. ‘He could not disregard the inner deception of our existence’, Bobrovsky wrote of Shostakovich; ‘the pain he experienced for us all, for our spiritual impurity, for the daily desecration of the truth, this was what summoned his muse to life.’ Nicholas Tarling
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