Marc Antoine Charpentier
Te Deum, Prelude
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William Byrd - Mass for five voices
The Mass for Four Voices is a choral Mass setting by the English composer William Byrd (c.1540–1623). It was written around 1592-3 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and is one of three settings of the Mass Ordinary which he published in London in the early 1590s.
It consists of the text of the Mass (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus & Benedictus, Agnus Dei) set for a four-part choir. The works is a noted example of English Renaissance music from the Tudor period.
Following the religious conflict of the English Reformation, settings of the Catholic Mass were highly sensitive documents and might well have resulted in the arrest of anyone caught with them. It is probably for this reason that Byrd chose not to publish the Masses as a set but individually in single bifolia which were easy to conceal. To make them more difficult to trace, the partbooks are undated, with no title-pages or prefatory material, and the printer Thomas East is not named. The project was almost certainly suggested (and financed) by Byrd's circle of friends among the nobility and gentry in the Elizabethan Catholic community. Together with the two sets of Gradualia (1605, 1607) the Masses represent a grandiose scheme to provide a comprehensive repertory of music for the Catholic liturgy, to be sung at clandestine Mass celebrations in recusant households. These would have included Thorndon Hall and Ingatestone Hall, the two Essex country houses owned by Byrd's main patron in the later stages of his career, Sir John Petre (later Baron Petre of Writtle) who was a close neighbour of Byrd.
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Dietrich Buxtehude - Prelude in C major, BuxWV 137
Dieterich Buxtehude (1637/39 – 9 May 1707) was a Danish-German organist and composer of the Baroque period. His organ works represent a central part of the standard organ repertoire and are frequently performed at recitals and in church services. He composed in a wide variety of vocal and instrumental idioms, and his style strongly influenced many composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach, his student. Today, Buxtehude is considered one of the most important composers in Germany of the mid-Baroque.
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Leopoldo Miguez
Noturno Op. 10
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Marin Marais - The Bells of St Genevieve
Marin Marais (31 May 1656, Paris – 15 August 1728, Paris) was a French composer and viol player. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully, often conducting his operas, and with master of the bass viol Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe for six months. In 1676 he was hired as a musician to the royal court of Versailles and was moderately successful there, being appointed in 1679 as ordinaire de la chambre du roy pour la viole, a title he kept until 1725.
He was the father of the composer Roland Marais (c. 1685 – c. 1750).
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Otto Nicolai - The Merry Wives of Windsor
Carl Otto Ehrenfried Nicolai (9 June 1810 – 11 May 1849) was a German composer, conductor, and one of the founders of the Vienna Philharmonic. Nicolai is best known for his operatic version of Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor as Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor. In addition to five operas, Nicolai composed lieder, works for orchestra, chorus, ensemble, and solo instruments.
Nicolai, a child prodigy, was born in Königsberg, Prussia. He received his first musical education from his father, Carl Ernst Daniel Nicolai, who was also a composer and musical director. During his childhood his parents divorced, and while still a youth, early in June 1826, Nicolai ran away from his parents' "loveless" home, taking refuge in Stargard with a senior legal official called August Adler who treated the musical prodigy like a son and, when Nikolai was seventeen, sent him to Berlin to study with Carl Friedrich Zelter
After initial successes in Germany, including his first symphony (1831) and public concerts, he became musician to the Prussian embassy in Rome. When Verdi declined the libretto of Il proscritto by the proprietors of La Scala in Milan, it was offered instead to Nicolai. Later, Nicolai refused a libretto by the same author, and it went to Verdi, whose Nabucco was his first early success. All of Nicolai's operas were originally written in Italian, the sole exception being his last and best known opera, The Merry Wives of Windsor, written in German. At one time he was even more popular in Italy than Verdi.
During the early 1840s, Nicolai established himself as a major figure in the concert life of Vienna. In 1844 he was offered the position, vacated by Felix Mendelssohn, of Kapellmeister at the Berlin Cathedral; but he did not reestablish himself in Berlin until the last year of his life.
On 11 May 1849, two months after the premiere of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and only two days after his appointment as Hofkapellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper, he collapsed and died from a stroke. On the very same day of his death, he was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts.
Nicolai was portrayed by Hans Nielsen in the 1940 film Falstaff in Vienna.
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Conradin Kreutzer - Grand Septet, E flat major, Op 62
Conradin Kreutzer or Kreuzer (22 November 1780 – Riga, 14 December 1849) was a German composer and conductor. His works include the opera Das Nachtlager in Granada, and Der Verschwender (Incidental music), both produced in 1834 in Vienna.
Kreutzer abandoned his studies in the law (University of Freiburg) and went to Vienna about 1804, where he met Joseph Haydn and may have studied with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, while he tried his hand unsuccessfully at singspielen. He spent 1811–12 in Stuttgart, where at least three of his operas were staged and he was awarded the post of Hofkapellmeister. He was from 1812 to 1816 Kapellmeister to the king of Württemberg. Once he was successful, he became a prolific composer, and wrote a number of operas for the Theater am Kärntnertor, Theater in der Josefstadt and Theater an der Wien Vienna, which have disappeared from the stage.
In 1840 he became conductor of the opera at Cologne. His daughters, Cecilia and Marie Kreutzer, were sopranos of some renown.
Kreutzer owes his fame almost exclusively to Das Nachtlager in Granada (1834), which kept the stage for half a century in spite of changes in musical taste. It was written in the style of Carl Maria von Weber. The same qualities are found in Kreutzer's part-songs for men's voices, which at one time were extremely popular in Germany. Among these "Das ist der Tag des Herrn" ("The Lord's Day") may be named as the most excellent. His Septet for winds and strings, Op. 62, remains in the chamber music repertory. He was one of the 50 composers who wrote a Variation on a waltz of Anton Diabelli for Part II of the "Vaterländischer Künstlerverein" (published 1824).
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Pietro Locatelli
Cello sonata in D, from 12 Sonatas, Op 6
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Scott Joplin -Magnetic Rag
Scott Joplin (November 24, 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the King of Ragtime. During his brief career, he wrote over 100 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first and most popular pieces, the "Maple Leaf Rag", became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.
Joplin grew up in a musical family of railway laborers in Texarkana, Arkansas, and developed his own musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. While in Texarkana, Texas, he formed a vocal quartet and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s he left his job as a railroad laborer and travelled the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897.
Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri, in 1894 and earned a living as a piano teacher. There he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. He began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899 brought him fame. This piece had a profound influence on writers of ragtime. It also brought Joplin a steady income for life, though he did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems. In 1901 Joplin moved to St. Louis, where he continued to compose and publish, and regularly performed in the community. The score to his first opera A Guest of Honor was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings for non-payment of bills, and is now considered lost.
In 1907, Joplin moved to New York City to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form that made him famous, but without much monetary success. His second opera, Treemonisha, was never fully staged during his lifetime.
In 1916, Joplin descended into dementia as a result of syphilis. He was admitted to Manhattan State Hospital in January 1917, and died there three months later at the age of 48. Joplin's death is widely considered to mark the end of ragtime as a mainstream music format; over the next several years, it evolved with other styles into stride, jazz, and eventually big band swing.
Joplin's music was rediscovered and returned to popularity in the early 1970s with the release of a million-selling album recorded by Joshua Rifkin. This was followed by the Academy Award-winning 1973 film The Sting that featured several of Joplin's compositions, most notably "The Entertainer", whose performance by pianist Marvin Hamlisch received wide airplay. Treemonisha was finally produced in full, to wide acclaim, in 1972. In 1976, Joplin was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
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Ludwig Spohr
Quartet Concerto Op. 131
I. Allegro moderato
II. Adagio
III. Rondo
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