Tara Kamangar Playing Schubert, Busoni, Hossein and Tjeknavorian

FRANZ SCHUBERT, considered one of the greatest composers of the 19th century, was born in a suburb of Vienna in 1797. He studied at the Vienna Court Choir from the age of eleven to sixteen and then worked as an elementary school teacher for two years, before deciding to devote his life to music. He had no regular employment and depended on the support of his friends and the occasional sale of his compositions. During his lifetime his musical works were unappreciated by the general public, primarily because he was not a concert performer, and most of his works were written for intimate gatherings rather than for the concert hall. His 634 lieder (songs) demonstrate an equal partnership of piano and voice which subsequent composers would follow. He died at the age of 31, almost certainly of syphilis.

The Fantasy in C Major, written in 1822, is one of Schubert's best known piano works. The first movement opens with a dactylic pattern (long-short-short)-the main rhythmic feature of the work, which will recur in each of the movements. In the slow second movement, there is a quote from Schubert's song Der Wanderer, composed in 1819--hence the nickname of the work, Wanderer Fantasy. In the third movement-a Scherzo-the dactylic pattern emerges as a playful, dotted rhythm. In the fourth movement, the original dactylic pattern returns to form the fugue subject of the finale. The Wanderer Fantasy is Schubert's most virtuosic work, and he was unable to play it himself. He is reported to have given up in the middle of a performance of this work, storming away from the piano and exclaiming: 'The devil may play this-I can't!"' Franz Liszt was a great admirer of this work, and the cyclic structure of the four movements greatly influenced his own Sonata in B Minor.

FERRUCCIO BUSONI was born in Empoli, Italy in 1866. His father was an Italian clarinettist, and his mother a German pianist. Busoni was a child prodigy, making his public debut on the piano at the age of seven. He studied in Graz and held several teaching posts in Helsinki, Moscow, and the United States, before settling in Berlin as a pianist and conductor. Busoni believed that composers should distil the essence of past music to create something new (his own influences included Bach, Mozart, and Liszt,) and many consider him to be an originator of neoclassicism in music. In his visionary and controversial 1907 publication, Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music - he correctly foresees current interest in electronic and microtonal music. During World War I, Busoni refused to perform in any countries involved in the war. He died in Berlin of a kidney disease in 1924. He was remembered as a piano virtuoso and an arranger of Bach for the piano, and around the 1980s there was a revival of interest in his compositions. Two of his best-known works are his operas Turandot (he came to this story several years before Puccini) and Doktor Faust.

The Carmen Fantasy - published in 1920 as the Piano Sonatina No. 6 'Fantasia da camera super Carmen' - is based on themes from Bizet's opera Carmen, including the 'death' theme, Flower Song, and Habanera. Busoni was an admirer of Bizet, and (like Nietzsche) he saw this opera as the Latin counterfoil to the Wagnerian aesthetic. The opera's familiar themes are presented in unexpected guises, and in the final section the death theme is combined with a suggestion of Carmen's Habanera in an ending of sadness.

AMINOLLAH HOSSEIN was born in 1905 in Samarkand. He initially studied medicine in Germany, on the insistence of his father -- simultaneously studying the piano with the legendary Arthur Schnabel, and composition with W Klatt at the Stuttgart Conservatory. He settled in France in 1927 and entered the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition and orchestration with Paul Vidal. As a composer, Hossein was greatly inspired by traditional Persian music. He played the tar-ancestor to most string instruments-as a child, and was considered one of the great tar players of his time. A prolific and acclaimed composer, his orchestrated works include Symphonie des Sables (1946), Symphonie Persepolis (1947), Symphonie Arya (1976), and three concertos for the piano. He also composed some twenty film scores, mostly for films directed by his son, Robert Hossein, the popular French actor and director. He died in Paris in 1983.

As a composer trying to find expression in Western music for ideas derived from Persian impressions, Hossein must be considered as one of the pioneers whose music was by and large well received. Others, both before and after Hossein, have tried to make use of Persian melodies in classical music, but none received as large an audience as he did. The Three Etudes and Mosaiques in tonight's program were composed and published in the 1930s in Paris, with sponsorship from the Iranian Ministry of Culture.

LORIS TJEKNAVORIAN was born in Iran in 1937. He studied the violin and piano at the Tehran Conservatory of Music, and later studied composition at the Vienna Music Academy. He has served as Director of the National Music Archives in Tehran, in charge of collecting and researching traditional Iranian folk-music and national instruments. Tjeknavorian's compositions have been performed by countless major orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, and the American Symphony Orchestra. In 1989, Tjeknavorian was appointed Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra (APO) and held this post for a decade. He has conducted major orchestras throughout the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Vienna State Opera, etc. In the course of his career, he has made about 100 recordings (with RCA, Philips, EMI, ASV, etc.) and written more than 75 compositions (symphonies, operas-including Rostam and Sohrab and Pardis and Parisa, a requiem, chamber music, concerto for piano, violin, guitar, cello and bipa -- Chinese lute, ballet music, choral works, an oratorio, and over 45 film music scores.).

The Danses Fantastiques was composed during Tjeknavorian's final years in the Vienna Academy, from 1959-60. He later orchestrated this work for three pianos, celesta and percussion. Its melodies are all original (not based on Armenian folk songs), and sound distinctively Armenian.