01-12a: Szymanowski Violin Concertos : Zehetmair / Rattle 1996 - Wagner Parsifal : Windgassen / Knappertsbusch Bayreuth 1951 - Stravinsky Chamber Works - Carissimi Oratorios / Roland Wilson 2003

Not shown: John Eccles, Michael Gottard Fischer, Koos van de Griend & Hervey Alan

1674 – Giacomo Carissimi (Italian composer & priest)
1735 – John Eccles (English composer)
1765 – Johann Melchior Molter (German composer & violinist)
1829 – Michael Gottard Fischer (German organist & composer)
1893 – Karl Hill (German baritone, creator of Alberich in the Ring cycle & Klingsor in Parsifal)
1921 – Gervase Elwes (English tenor)
1933 – Václav Suk [Вячеслав Сук] (Czech violinist, conductor & composer, active in Poland, Ukraine & Russia)
1934 – Paul Kochanski [Paweł Kochański] (Russian-born Polish violinist, composer & arranger, active also in the U.K. & U.S.)
1950 – Koos van de Griend (Dutch composer)
1953 – Simeón Roncal (Bolivian composer)
1958 – Arthur Shepherd (American composer & conductor)
1962 – Richard de Guide (Belgian composer)
1982 – Hervey Alan (English bass-baritone, creator of Mr. Redburn in Britten's Billy Budd)

The presence of the Szymanowski disc is thanks to his close friend Paweł Kochański, who performed the composer's works for violin and piano with him many times, collaborated with him on the violin parts of both his concertos, and was the dedicatee of those works and several others Szymanowski wrote for him.

The link above will take you to a scholarly article detailing Kochański's various collaborative efforts with composers. These efforts also produced works such as Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, and violin sonatas by Arnold Bax and Ernest Bloch. Works dedicated to Kochański also include the violin/piano version of Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, which consists of material from Pulcinella, Stravinsky's 1920 ballet based on music (at the time thought to have been written) by Giovanni Pergolesi.

When Kochański was helping Szymanowski with his Second Concerto, he was already sick with the cancer that would cut his life short at the age of 47. Still, he forged ahead and gave the premiere of the work. Szymanowski's score, published after his friend's death, contained a moving dedication to him. The pall-bearers at Kochański's funeral, held at the Juilliard School, included Arturo Toscanini, Frank and Walter Damrosch, Jascha Heifetz, Vladimir Horowitz, Serge Koussevitzky, Efrem Zimbalist, Sr., and Leopold Stokowski.

No less affecting was the passing of the great concert and recital tenor Gervase Elwes, who perished hours after a horrific accident at a railway station in Boston when he leaned over too far as he attempted to return to the conductor an overcoat which had fallen off a train. His death was mourned all over Britain, and concerts in his memory took place across the nation. Edward Elgar wrote "my personal loss is greater than I can bear to think upon, but this is nothing - or I must call it so - compared to the general artistic loss - a gap impossible to fill - in the musical world."

10-17a: Chopin Bonanza! Cortot | Lipatti | Rachmaninoff | Richter - Janácek / Haas / Szymanowski Quartets arr. Tognetti 2002 - Hummel Mandolin & Trumpet Concertos : Stephens / Agnes / Shelley 2001

1825 – Peter Winter (German opera composer & violinist)
1837 – Johann Nepomuk Hummel (Austrian composer & pianist)
1849 – Frédéric Chopin (Polish composer & pianist)
1890 – Prosper Sainton (French violinist))
1910 – Julia Ward Howe (American abolitionist, author & poet, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic")
1944 – Pavel Haas (Czech composer, pupil of Janáček, perished at Auschwitz)
1972 – Billy Williams (American R&B & pop singer)
1979 – Karel Reiner (Czech composer & pianist, the only classical composer to survive Theresienstadt)
1981 – David Guion (American composer & arranger, inspired by soundscape of the American West)

Another uncanny coincidence, in that Karel Reiner should have died on the 35th anniversary of the day the promising composer Pavel Haas was murdered at Auschwitz. Both of them had been been housed at Theresienstadt, a somewhat less hellish concentration camp, which the Nazis had established in a Polish Jewish ghetto, in part to make a propaganda film demonstrating that their musically gifted "detainees" were being treated well and allowed to flourish musically (in fact, the orchestra in the film were surrounded by flowerpots to hide the fact their shoes had been taken away). Reiner was the only classical composer at Theresienstadt to survive the war. But the story of Haas's untimely demise was later related by another survivor, conductor Karel Ančerl, who claimed he was standing next to Haas at Auschwitz the day they both arrived (many of the Theresienstadt prisoners having been transported there as soon as the filming was finished), and that originally it was he, Ančerl, who had been among those chosen for the gas chambers, but that Haas had a bad cough which caused the commanding officer to change his mind and send him instead. Ančerl went on to have a brilliant career with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. We can only guess at what great things Haas would have accomplished had he lived a full life, as Reiner and Ančerl did.

Well, Chopin is one of those composers it's hard to have too much of in your record collection. His works are open to so many interpretive possibilities, making it difficult to decide on just one version of the Ballades, or the Mazurkas, or the Scherzi, or what have you. Plus, all his works are so gorgeous, so emotionally satisfying, and so amazingly well-crafted - all things that make Chopin perhaps the piano composer par excellence. The only others who might come close are Schumann, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, but even they seem to fall short of the almost universal appeal of Poland's greatest composer. And Chopin's life was a good six years shorter than Pavel Haas's was. Tuberculosis, you know. So, he was also coughing shortly before the end. How many more of those perfect little masterpieces he might have had inside him. Keep reading about him!