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Contemporary Harpsichord
The harpsichord was largely obsolete, and seldom played, during a period lasting from the late 18th century to the early 20th. The instrument was successfully revived during the 20th century, first in an ahistorical form strongly influenced by the piano, then with historically more faithful instruments. The revival was the joint work of performers, builders, and composers who wrote new harpsichord pieces. However the harpsichord never completely disappeared from the public eye as it was used through the mid-19th century for basso continuo because despite its low volume, it had considerable power to "cut through" the orchestra. The earliest revival efforts began in the mid-19th century due to its increasingly infrequent usage and there was concern that the instrument could become a forgotten relic of the past. Instruments In the earlier stages, 20th-century harpsichords were heavily influenced by the technology of the modern piano, and usually included metal framing (which was ent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Violet Gordon-Woodhouse
Violet Gordon-Woodhouse (23 April 18729 January 1948) was a British keyboard player. She specialised in the harpsichord and clavichord, and was influential in bringing both instruments back into fashion. She was the first person to record the harpsichord, and the first to broadcast harpsichord music. Family Violet Kate Eglinton Gwynne was born at 97 Harley Street, St Marylebone, London, into a wealthy family with an estate in Sussex, England. She was the second daughter and fourth of seven children of James Eglinton Anderson Gwynne (1832–1915), an engineer, inventor, and landowner, and Mary Earle Purvis (1841–1923). Her mother was a friend of soprano Adelina Patti. Violet became a pupil of the country's leading piano teacher, Oscar Beringer, a German émigré, and by the age of sixteen she was one of his most promising pupils. Violet's maternal grandfather, Royal Navy officer and merchant William Purvis (1796–1854) from Dalgety Bay, Scotland, married Cornelia Louisa Intve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Igor Kipnis
Igor Kipnis (September 27, 1930January 23, 2002) was a German-born American harpsichordist, pianist and conductor. Biography The son of Metropolitan Opera bass Alexander Kipnis, he was born in Berlin, where his father was singing with the Berlin State Opera. Although Jewish, the elder Kipnis was popular in Germany during Nazism's rise to prominence. Employing the stratagem of a vocal injury, the elder Kipnis fled Germany for Austria. When the Nazis annexed that country, the family was touring Australia. From there they moved to the US in 1938. He learned the piano with his maternal grandfather, Heniot Levy; attended the Westport School of Music, and received his B.A. from Harvard University, where he served as the program director of WHRB, Harvard's undergraduate radio station. He studied harpsichord with Fernando Valenti, and made his concert debut in New York in 1959. He was an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa (Harvard, 1977), and in 1993 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zuzana Růžičková
Zuzana Růžičková () (14 January 1927 – 27 September 2017) was a Czech harpsichordist. An interpreter of classical and baroque music, Růžičková was the first harpsichordist to record Johann Sebastian Bach's complete works for keyboard, in recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s for Erato Records. As a teenager, Růžičková was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps of Terezin and Auschwitz and transported to the Bergen-Belsen death camp. After the camp's liberation in April 1945, she returned to Plzeň later that year. Růžičková was the wife of Czech composer Viktor Kalabis. The couple both refused to join the Czechoslovak Communist Party which held power from 1948 to 1989, and faced political persecution as a result. Růžičková performed across the world for 50 years, recorded over 100 records, and taught such prominent musicians as Christopher Hogwood, Ketil Haugsand, Jaroslav Tůma, and Mahan Esfahani. Early years Růžičková was born in Plzeň in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fernando Valenti
Fernando Valenti (New York, New York, 4 December 1926 - Red Bank, New Jersey, 6 September 1990) was an American harpsichordist. After studying with José Iturbi and Ralph Kirkpatrick and débuting in 1950, he recorded extensively, especially in the 1950s, and taught for forty years until his death. One of his most-noted students was Igor Kipnis. His recordings of Bach (two outstanding early ones for the Lyrichord Discs label) and Scarlatti (29 LPs with 346 sonatas for Westminster Records, recorded 1951 - 1961, another 8 sonatas for Music Guild in 1962, and a final set of 12 previously recorded sonatas for the Musical Heritage Society in 1964) were highly regarded, and he was regularly mentioned in the pages of National Review by William F. Buckley Jr. In one of the odder musical pairings of the 1960s, Valenti was on the same bill as Jimi Hendrix on Thanksgiving night, November 28, 1968, at New York's historic Philharmonic Hall. In 1982 he published the well-received harpsichord m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thurston Dart
Robert Thurston ("Bob") Dart (3 September 1921 – 6 March 1971), was an English musicologist, conductor and keyboard player. Along with Nigel Fortune, Oliver Neighbour and Stanley Sadie he was one of Britain's leading musicologists of the post-World War II generation. From 1964 until his death he was King Edward Professor of Music at the University of London, based at King's College London. Early life Dart was born on 3 September 1921 in Surbiton, then part of Surrey. His father, Henry Thurston Dart, married his mother, Elisabeth Martha (née Orf) in 1915. Dart attended Hampton Grammar School and he sang in the choir at Hampton Court. Dart studied keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music in London from 1938 to 1939, and then studied mathematics at University College, Exeter, being awarded his degree in 1942. He served as a Junior Scientific Officer and then as a statistician and researcher for the RAF Strategic Bombing Planning Unit under Air Vice Marshall Basil E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Malcolm (musician)
George John Malcolm CBE KSG (28 February 191710 October 1997) was an English pianist, organist, composer, harpsichordist, and conductor. Malcolm's first instrument was the piano, and his first teacher was a nun who recognised his talent and recommended him to the Royal College of Music at the age of seven, where he studied under Kathleen McQuitty FRCM until he was 19. He attended Wimbledon College, and went on to study at Balliol College, Oxford in the 1930s.Obituary . Retrieved 22 September 2014. During the |
Isolde Ahlgrimm
Isolde Ahlgrimm (31 July 1914 in Vienna – 11 October 1995 in Vienna) was an Austrian harpsichordist and fortepianist. In 1975 she was awarded the Austrian Gold Medal. Musical education Ahlgrimm pursued her early piano studies from 1922 at the Musikakademie, Vienna (now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), under the instruction of such notable teachers as Viktor Ebenstein (perhaps now best remembered as the piano soloist in ''Eroica (1949 film)''), Emil von Sauer and Franz Schmidt. Revival of early music Together with her husband, instrument collector Erich Fiala (1911–78), Ahlgrimm played a central role in the revival of interest in the use of period instruments for the performance of Baroque and Classical music. Ahlgrimm and Fiala presented their long-running series of ''Concerte für Kenner und Liebhaber'' ("Concerts for connoisseurs and amateurs") in Vienna between 1937 and 1956; this involved 74 different programs of music from the 16th to the 20th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Kirkpatrick
Ralph Leonard Kirkpatrick (; June 10, 1911April 13, 1984) was an American harpsichordist and musicologist, widely known for his chronological catalog of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas as well as for his performances and recordings. Life and work Kirkpatrick was born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1911 and began studying piano at a young age. He continued his piano studies in Cambridge while studying art history at Harvard University. He became interested in the harpsichord at Harvard and gave his first harpsichord recital there in 1930. After graduating in 1931, he traveled to Europe on a John Knowles Paine Fellowship. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and harpsichord revival pioneer Wanda Landowska in Paris, with Arnold Dolmetsch in Haslemere, Heinz Tiessen in Berlin, and Günther Ramin in Leipzig. In January 1933 he made his European debut in Berlin performing Johann Sebastian Bach's ''Goldberg Variations''. In 1933 he also performed several concerts in Italy, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nancy Salas
Nancy Evelyn Salas MBE (28 July 1910 – 18 December 1990) was an Australian music teacher and musicologist. Biography Salas was born in Coolgardie, Western Australia, to Annie ( Maguire) and Godfrey Dowling Salas. Her father was of Hungarian descent. Career Salas learned piano from a teacher in Kalgoorlie, and gained her licentiate in music from Trinity College London in 1929. She moved to Sydney in 1934 and began working as a music teacher, from 1938 also studying under Alexander Sverjensky at the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music. Salas was appointed to the staff of the conservatorium in 1955, teaching piano and harpsichord. She performed both the instruments with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Eugene Goossens, and also made recordings for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). A devotee of Béla Bartók, Salas formed the Bartók Society of Australia in 1955, and in 1963 went to Hungary to study his archives, meeting with his wi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frank Pelleg
Frank Pelleg ( he, פרנק פלג; September 24, 1910 – December 20, 1968) was an Austro-Hungarian Empire-born Israeli composer. References 1910 births 1968 deaths Musicians from Prague People from Haifa Czechoslovak emigrants to Mandatory Palestine Israeli people of Czech-Jewish descent Israeli composers {{Israel-bio-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yella Pessl
Yella Pessl (originally Gabriella Elsa Pessl; January 5, 1906 – December 9, 1991 Bach Cantatas Website. Retrieved February 27, 2019.) was an American harpsichordist, pianist and organist. Life She was born in Vienna in 1906; she studied there at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, State Academy of Music, and later performed in Europe."Yella Pessl, 85, Dies; Concert Keyboardist". ''The New York Times'', December 10, 1991. In 1931 she moved to the USA, and was resident in New York.Percy A. Scholes. "Pessl, Yella" in ''The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music''. OUP, 1964. She toured extensively, giving solo recitals and playing with orchestras. In 1938 she accompanied the Trapp Family Singers, whom she had known in Vienna, at their debut in New York at The Town Hall (New York City), the Town ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
