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Alfredo Casella
Alfredo Casella (25 July 18835 March 1947) was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor. Life and career Casella was born in Turin, the son of Maria (née Bordino) and Carlo Casella. His family included many musicians: his grandfather, a friend of Paganini, was first cello in the São Carlos Theatre in Lisbon and eventually became soloist in the Royal Chapel in Turin. Alfredo's father, Carlo, was also a professional cellist, as were Carlo's brothers Cesare and Gioacchino; his mother was a pianist, who gave the boy his first music lessons. Alfredo entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1896 to study piano under Louis Diémer and composition under Gabriel Fauré; in these classes, Lazare Lévy, George Enescu and Maurice Ravel were among his fellow students. During his Parisian period, Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla were acquaintances, and he was also in contact with Ferruccio Busoni, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Casella developed a deep admiratio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Turin
Turin ( , ; ; , then ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The city is mainly on the western bank of the Po (river), River Po, below its Susa Valley, and is surrounded by the western Alpine arch and Superga hill. The population of the city proper is 856,745 as of 2025, while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat to be 1.7 million inhabitants. The Turin metropolitan area is estimated by the OECD to have a population of 2.2 million. The city was historically a major European political centre. From 1563, it was the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia (1720–1861), Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy, and the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1865. Turin is sometimes called "the cradle of Italian liberty" for having been the politi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (; ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his Tone poems (Strauss), tone poems and List of operas by Richard Strauss, operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early Modernism (music), modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmony, harmonic style. Strauss's compositional output began in 1870 when he was just six years old and lasted until his death nearly eighty years later. His first tone poem to achieve wide acclaim was ''Don Juan (Strauss), Don Juan'', and this was followed by other lauded works of this kind, including ''Death and Transfiguration'', ''Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks'', ''Also sprach Zarathustra'', ''Don Quixote (Strauss), Don Quixote'', ''Ein Heldenleben'', ''Symph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Player Piano
A player piano is a self-playing piano with a pneumatic or electromechanical mechanism that operates the piano action using perforated paper or metallic rolls. Modern versions use MIDI. The player piano gained popularity as mass-produced home pianos increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sales peaked in 1924 and subsequently declined with improvements in electrical phonograph recordings in the mid-1920s. The advent of electrical amplification in home music reproduction, brought by radios, contributed to a decline in popularity, and the stock market crash of 1929 virtually wiped out production. History The first practical pneumatic piano player, manufactured by the Aeolian Company and called the "Pianola", was invented in 1896 by Edwin S. Votey, and came into widespread use in the 20th century. The name "pianola", sometimes used as a generic name for any player piano, came from this invention. The mechanism of this player piano was all-pneumatic: foot-operated ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paganiniana (Casella)
''Paganiniana'' Op.65, is a Divertimento for orchestra composed in 1941/42 by Alfredo Casella and based on themes by Niccolò Paganini. The piece was commissioned in January 1941, to honor the centenary of the Vienna Philharmonic, which gave its premiere in Vienna, Großer Musikvereinsaal, 14 April 1942, under the direction of Karl Böhm. It is scored in four separate movements: # Allegro agitato # Polacchetta (Allegretto moderato) # Romanza (Larghetto cantabile, amoroso) # Tarantella (Presto molto) The first movement is meant to portray the "satanic spirit of the great violinist", and uses four main themes, taken from Paganini's Caprices Nos.5, 12 and fragments from Nos.16, 19. The second, more melancholy, movement is derived from the final movement of Paganini's ''Guitar Quartet No.6 in D minor, Op.5/3'', for violin, viola, cello, and guitar MS 33 (1815c). The third movement takes its subject from the section ''Larghetto cantabile amoroso'' of ''"La primavera" Sonata with Var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Domenico Scarlatti
Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (26 October 1685 – 23 July 1757) was an Italian composer. He is classified primarily as a Baroque music, Baroque composer chronologically, although his music was influential in the development of the Classical period (music), Classical style. Like his renowned father Alessandro Scarlatti, he composed in a variety of musical forms, although today he is known mainly for List of solo keyboard sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, his 555 keyboard sonatas. He spent much of his life in the service of the Portuguese and Spanish royal families. Life and career Scarlatti was born in Naples, Kingdom of Naples, then belonging to the Spanish Empire. He was born in 1685, the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. He was the sixth of ten children of the composer and teacher Alessandro Scarlatti. His older brother Pietro Filippo Scarlatti, Pietro Filippo was also a musician. Scarlatti first studied music under his father. Other composers who ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rodman Wanamaker
Lewis Rodman Wanamaker (February 13, 1863 – March 9, 1928) was an American businessman and heir to the Wanamaker's department store fortune. In addition to operating stores in Philadelphia, New York City, and Paris, he was a patron of the arts, education, golf, athletics, a Native American scholar, and of early aviation. In 1916, he served as a presidential elector for Pennsylvania, and was appointed Special Deputy Police Commissioner of New York City under Richard Enright in February 1918. In this capacity, he founded the world's first police aviation unit and oversaw reorganization of the New York City Reserve Police Force. In 1916, Wanamaker originated the proposal for the Professional Golfers' Association of America. Early life and education Wanamaker was born on February 13, 1863, in Philadelphia, to John Wanamaker and Mary Erringer Brown. He entered Princeton University in 1881, graduating in 1886. In college, he sang in the choir, and was a member and business ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (; ; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italians, Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art". Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian language, Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. Biography Early life Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in Girgenti (now Agrigento), Sicily, near the poor suburb of Porto Empedocle. His family's surname had originally been the Greek language, Greek "Pirangelos" (Greek language, Greek: ), which had been phonetically corrupted. Pirandello was of Greeks, Greek descent, as he noted himself in an interview to Kostas Ouranis in 1934. The area of his birth was called "Caos", from , Sicilian language, Sici ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Fiedler
Arthur Fiedler (December 17, 1894 – July 10, 1979) was an American Conductor (music), conductor known for his association with both the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony and Boston Pops Orchestra, Boston Pops orchestras. With a combination of musicianship and showmanship, he made the Boston Pops one of the best-known orchestras in the United States. Fiedler was sometimes criticized for over-popularizing music, particularly when adapting popular songs or editing portions of the classical repertoire, but he kept performances informal and sometimes self-mocking to attract a bigger audience. Life and career Fiedler was born in Boston, Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Johanna (née Bernfeld) and Emanuel Fiedler (1859–1944). His parents were Austrian Jewish immigrants. His father was a violinist who played in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and his mother was a pianist. He grew up in Boston, and attended Boston Latin School until his father retired in the e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boston Pops Orchestra
The Boston Pops is an American orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts, specializing in light classical and popular music. The orchestra's current music director is Keith Lockhart. Founded in 1885 as an offshoot of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), the Boston Pops primarily consists of musicians from the BSO, although generally not all of the first-chair players. The orchestra performs a spring season of popular music and a holiday program in December. For the Pops, the seating on the floor of Symphony Hall is reconfigured from auditorium seating to banquet and cafe seating. The Pops also plays an annual concert at the Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade every Fourth of July. Their performances of Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" and Sousa's " The Stars and Stripes Forever" are famous for howitzer cannons firing and fireworks exploding during the former and the unfurling of the American flag that occurs near the end of the latter. Identified with its longtime direc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rome
Rome (Italian language, Italian and , ) is the capital city and most populated (municipality) of Italy. It is also the administrative centre of the Lazio Regions of Italy, region and of the Metropolitan City of Rome. A special named with 2,746,984 residents in , Rome is the list of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, third most populous city in the European Union by population within city limits. The Metropolitan City of Rome Capital, with a population of 4,223,885 residents, is the most populous metropolitan cities of Italy, metropolitan city in Italy. Rome metropolitan area, Its metropolitan area is the third-most populous within Italy. Rome is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, within Lazio (Latium), along the shores of the Tiber Valley. Vatican City (the smallest country in the world and headquarters of the worldwide Catholic Church under the governance of the Holy See) is an independent country inside the city boun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conservatorio Santa Cecilia
The Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia is a state conservatory in Rome. History The institution has its roots dated back to the Congregazione de' musici di Roma named after Saint Cecilia in 1565 (now Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia). Since the early 19th century there had been the need for a music school in the institution. It was only due to the pianist Giovanni Sgambati that led to the opening of the musical institute on 23 May 1870. In 1911, the Liceo Musicale became an independent entity and was nationalized in 1919. Only after, it assumed its current name. Since the 2008/09 academic year, the conservatory also operates at the Parco della Musica Villa Battistini in Rieti. The branch at Sant'Andrea delle Fratte was inaugurated on 1 October 2013. In February 2019 the Conservatory celebrated the bestowing of the Honor Degree to the Former Minister of Education Luigi Berlinguer and the Award of the two best Alumni Francesco Marini (cello) and Gregorio Maria Paone (cl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
