12-24: John Dunstaple ( Dunstable ) / Orlando Consort 1995 - Bernard Hermann Film Music / Salonen 1996 - Alban Berg Chamber Concerto Boulez / Barenboim 1967 | Violin Concerto Boulez / Zukerman 1984 - Alec Wilder : Hansel & Gretel / Barbara Cook | Rudy Vallee 1958

Not shown: Friedrich Klose, Francisco Pujol & Alan Fluck

1453 – John Dunstaple [Dunstable] (English composer, astronomer, astrologer & mathematician)
1823 – Philipp Christoph Kayser (German pianist, composer & poet, friend of Goethe)
1862 – Joseph Funk (American music publisher, composer & teacher)
1898 – Eugeniusz Pankiewicz (Polish composer & pianist, brother of Józef)
1908 – François-Auguste Gevaert (Belgian composer & organist)
1930 – Oskar Nedbal (Czech violist, composer & conductor)
1932 – Eyvind Alnæs (Norwegian composer, pianist, organist & choirmaster)
1935 – Alban Berg (Austrian composer)
1941 – Siegfried Alkan (German composer)
1942 – Friedrich Klose (German composer)
1944 – Joseph Gustav Mraczek (Czech-born German composer & conductor)
1945 – Francisco Pujol (Spanish choirmaster, musicologist & composer)
1961 – Guy de Lioncourt (French composer)
1966 – Gaspar Cassadó i Moreu (Spanish cellist & composer)
1972 – César Geoffray (French composer, violinist & conductor)
1975 – Bernard Herrmann (American film & concert composer & conductor, associated in particular with the films of Alfred Hitchcock)
1980 – Alec Wilder (American multi-genre composer)
1980 – Siggie Nordstrom (American model, actress, socialite & lead singer of The Nordstrom Sisters)
1987 – Betty Noyes (American actress & singer, dubbed singing voice of Debbie Reynolds in Singin' in the Rain)
1992 – Bobby LaKind (American conga player, backup drummer, singer & songwriter, The Doobie Brothers)
1994 – Rossano Brazzi (Italian actor & singer, Three Coins in the Fountain, South Pacific)
1997 – Alan Fluck (English music teacher, Farnham Grammar School, pupils included Jeffrey Tate)
1997 – Anthea Joseph (English manager of London folk music venue The Troubadour & co-producer at Witchseason Productions)
2000 – Nick Massi (American bass singer & bass guitarist, The Four Seasons)
2002 – Luciano Chailly (Italian composer & music administrator in radio & television, father of Riccardo & Cecilia)
2002 – Jake Thackray (English folk singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet & journalist)
2006 – Braguinha aka João de Barro [Carlos Alberto Ferreira Braga] (Brazilian composer & singer of sambas & marchinhas)
2006 – Kenneth Sivertsen (Norwegian multi-genre composer, singer, guitarist, poet & comedian)
2010 – Eino Tamberg (Estonian composer)
2011 – Johannes Heesters (Dutch actor & singer)

Here we have some notable composers who worked in multiple genres... one of the all-time great film composers... and two important figures in the British folk-music renaissance of the 60s & 70s. But most prominently, we have the earliest truly great English composer; and the composer who more than any other represents the point of continuation between the Austro-German Romantic tradition that ended with Mahler and Strauss and the atonal modernism of the 20th century.

Both Dunstaple and Berg can be thought of as transitional composers. With Berg, it's easy to hear why. Berg's highly expressive 12-tone music recalls the overripe Romanticism of the late music of Mahler to a greater extent than does that of Schoenberg, and to a far greater extent than does that of Webern - those other two main representatives of the Second Viennese School.

With Dunstaple, one has to put on 14th- and 15-century ears to appreciate how his late-Medieval music anticipates an important feature of Renaissance music. In medieval Britain, musical practice had developed in a more independent fashion than it had on the continent, one salient result of this being that the interval of a 3rd is far more prevalent in it, lending it a greater sweetness than is found in French and Italian music of the period.

Starting in the late 14th century, that sweet sound of 3rds starts to catch on outside of England. As the decades wear on - and thanks in no small measure to the popularity of Dunstaple and other English composers of his day - we find more and more that those 3rds start being treated as stable sonorities. It's when the 3rd starts finally being admitted all over Europe as a true consonance alongside the perfect 5th and octave that we can say the transition from Medieval harmony to Renaissance harmony is complete. Or something like that.

11-27a: RODZINSKI / REEDER ROUNDUP! Mussorgsky | Tchaikovsky | Sibelius | Richard Strauss | Shostakovich AND MORE...

The main post for 11-27 will follow, but first here are a bunch of transfers of Columbia 78s featuring the work of Artur Rodziński (d. Nov. 27, 1958), all made by the trusty F. Reeder over at the Internet Archive. A few of these I believe we've seen already, but at least a couple dozen we haven't, and I found it too difficult to choose from them... so I'll leave that up to you!

Rodziński is most famous for his legendary decade with the Cleveland Orchestra, from 1933 to 1943. Much of the credit usually given to the tyrannical George Szell for transforming that orchestra into the world-class organization it is today should really be reserved for Rodziński; for without the prior groundwork he laid the Clevelanders would not have been up to Szell's exacting demands. Rodziński also had four great seasons in New York with the Philharmonic, and as guest conductor for Toscanini's NBC Symphony, which Rodziński had helped to organize in 1936–37.

Rodziński's later years, first in New York, and then in an abortive stint at the Chicago Symphony in 1947–48, were characterized by a lot of personal wrangling with orchestra management. His reputation as a conductor was such that his resignation from the New York Philharmonic was actually a cover story for Time magazine in February 1947:

After Chicago, Rodziński had no further long-term positions in his career; he did do quite a bit of freelance work, especially in the opera pit, both in the United States and in Europe. And it's perhaps because of this somewhat sour end to his professional life that he isn't remembered as well as some of his contemporaries, even though he was certainly at least their equal as a musician.

He was tall; he used a big baton; he preferred brisk tempi; he was renowned wherever he mounted the podium for his muscular yet refined interpretations. Enjoy these recordings by this too-little-lauded master of the orchestra!