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Frederic Mompou i Dencausse (Barcelona, 16 d’abril de 1893 – 30 de juny de 1987) fou un compositor català, conegut sobretot per les seves peces per a piano sol. Les seves partitures estan disponibles a la nostra biblioteca online.

Frederic Mompou i Dencausse, conocido como Federico Mompou (Barcelona, 16 de abril de 1893-30 de junio de 1987), fue un compositor catalán, famoso principalmente por sus obras para piano solo. Sus partituras estan disponibles en nuestra biblioteca online.

Frederic Mompou Dencausse  16 April 1893 – 30 June 1987) was a Catalan composer and pianist. He is remembered for his solo piano music and, to a degree, his songs. His sheet music is available in our online Library.

Mompou is best known as a miniaturist, writing short, relatively improvisatory music, often described as “delicate” or “intimate”. His principal influences were French impressionism, Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré, resulting in a style in which musical development is minimized and expression is concentrated into very small forms. He was fond of ostinato figures, bell imitations (his mother’s family owned the Dencausse bell foundry and his grandfather was a bell maker), and a kind of incantatory, meditative sound, the most complete expression of which can be found in his masterpiece Musica Callada (or the Voice of Silence) based on the mystical poetry of Saint John of the Cross. He was also influenced by the sounds and smells of the maritime quarter of Barcelona, the cry of seagulls, the sound of children playing and popular Catalan culture. He often dispensed with bar lines and key signatures. His music is rooted in the chord G♭-C-E♭-A♭-D, which he named Barri de platja (the Beach Quarter).

Selected works

Piano solo

• Impresiones íntimas (Intimate impressions), 9 miniatures, written 1911–1914
• Pessebres (1914–1917) (Nativity Scenes)
• Scènes d’enfants (1915–1918) (Scenes of children; later orchestrated by Alexandre Tansman)
• Suburbis (1916–1917) (Suburbs; later orchestrated by Manuel Rosenthal)
• Cants màgics (1920) (Magic Songs)
• Fêtes lointaines (1920–1921) (Distant Celebrations)
• Charmes (1920–1921)
• Cançons i danses (1921–1979) (Songs and dances)
• Dialogues (1923)
• Préludes (1927–1960)
• Variations on a Theme of Chopin (1938–1957) (based on Chopin‘s Prelude No. 7 in A major)
• Paisatges (1942–1960) (Landscapes)
• El Pont (1947)
• Cançó de bressol (1951) (Lullaby)
• Música callada (Silent music or Voices of silence) (Primer cuaderno – 1959, Segundo cuaderno – 1962, Tercer cuaderno – 1965, Cuarto cuaderno – 1967)

Voice and piano

• L’hora grisa (1916) (The grey hour)
• Cuatro melodías (1925) (Four melodies)
• Comptines (1926–1943) (Nursery Rhymes)
• Combat del somni (1942–1948) (Dream combat)
• Cantar del alma (1951) (Soul Song)
• Canciones becquerianas (1971) (Songs after Bécquer)

Ballets

• Don Perlimpin (1956; written with Xavier Montsalvatge)

Choral

• Los Improperios (The Insults), for chorus and orchestra (1964; written in memory of Francis Poulenc)
• L’Ocell daurat (The Golden Bird), cantata for children’s choir (1970)

Guitar

• Suite Compostelana for guitar (1962; composed for Andrés Segovia)
• Cançó i dansa No. 10 (Sobre dos Cantigas del Rei Alfonso X), originally for piano (1953), transcribed for guitar by the composer (undated manuscript)
• Cançó i dansa No. 13 (Cançó: El cant dels ocells; Dansa (El bon caçador)) for guitar (1972).

Recordings

Mompou himself recorded a few of his piano pieces for EMI in 1950 and then a much larger portion of his piano output, including the Musica callada, for Ensayo in 1974, when he was over 80 years old. The later recordings have been released in a boxed set of 4 CDs by Brilliant Classics. For decades, other pianists rarely recorded his works, with major figures such as Arthur Rubinstein, Guiomar Novaes, Magda Tagliaferro, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli recording just a handful of his pieces. In the late 1950s, Mompou’s wife, Carmen Bravo, recorded some of his works for EMI. The Spanish specialist Alicia de Larrocha recorded a larger selection, and more recently, Mompou’s works have received greater attention. Acclaimed contemporary pianists such as Stephen Hough in 1997 and Arcadi Volodos in 2013 have released full CDs devoted to his pieces, and Jordi Masó has recorded a cycle of Mompou’s piano works for Naxos Records.

Other contemporary pianists who have recorded Mompou’s pieces include Daniil Trifonov, Alexandre Tharaud, Herbert Henck, Jenny Lin, Aaron Krister Johnson,^[10] and Javier Perianes, among others. British pianist Martin Jones has recorded the complete piano works of Mompou for Nimbus, including those unpublished in Mompou’s lifetime, many of which were discovered when his apartment was cleared out in 2008. The great Spanish soprano Victoria de los Ángeles recorded Mompou’s haunting song cycle El combat del somni, and a video from 1971 survives of her singing one of these songs in her living room with the composer as her accompanist. Also, Spanish guitar great Andrés Segovia recorded Mompou’s Suite Compostelana, which was dedicated to him.

Links: Frederic Mompou wikipedia

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Schubert, Trio No. 2, Op. 100, Andante con moto | Ambroise Aubrun, Maëlle Vilbert, Julien Hanck

Schubert spent the majority of his brief but prodigious life writing and performing music within the intimate and convivial company of family and friends. Almost entirely without patrons, commissions nor aristocratic associations, he flourished within a small, cultured middle-class Viennese community where the majority of his music would remain, unknown to the larger world until after his death. Schubert wrote reams of music ideal for the setting: over six-hundred songs, numerous piano works for two and four hands, and a sizable canon of chamber music. In his final decade, Schubert produced a mature series of highly original chamber music that ranks among the greatest ever created including the Trout Quintet, the last four String Quartets, two Piano Trios and a breathtaking final work, the String Quintet in C major. Despite his rapidly declining health, his final year yielded the Piano Trios, the Quintet, three Piano Sonatas and a towering Symphony in C major. It would seem that Schubert’s music just got better and better right until the end. Dying at the age of only thirty-one, Schubert may have departed with still “fairer hopes”, but the music he left behind could easily occupy a much longer life in the service of appreciating it all.

The last Piano Trio in E-flat major, Op. 100, D.929, is a gigantic masterpiece that, with Beethoven’s Archduke, could be considered among the few greatest piano trios in the traditional repertory. It is gigantic in length and breadth, wealthy in thematic ideas, constant transformations and ingenious details of construction. A typical performance runs to nearly forty-five minutes and this without taking the repeat in the first movement, and, after Schubert’s edits in the finale, removing its repeat as well as some one hundred additional measures. “Heavenly lengths”, as Schumann would write. Like much of Schubert’s “late” music, it is grand and profound in a way that goes well beyond the relatively modest context in which he wrote. It was among the few pieces performed in the only public concert featuring Schubert’s music held during his lifetime, the only work published outside Austria before his death. Schumann wrote, “a Trio by Schubert passed across the musical world like some angry comet in the sky”. More intense than its worthy companion, the Piano Trio in B-flat major written around the same time, it flairs with passion, pathos, perhaps even anger, but it is equally saturated with joy, grace and triumphant beauty.

The first movement sonata in moderate tempo is full of Schubertian lyricism and energy, with as many as six separate thematic ideas in the exposition alone. Careful inspection reveals that they are related. Swept along within Schubert’s typical flow of songlike themes, it is easy to overlook the ways in which he equally excels with a set of key motives that interrelate and recur throughout the trio in a wonderful organic unity. While vast, the trio is also highly integrated. The development is concerned chiefly with the last theme working this generous sonata into surprising dramatic heights.

The slow movement begins with a somber, poised march with a singing cello lament in a minor key. A second theme melts the chill into a tender, bright warmth of smooth motion, a contrast that generates another unexpected epic, the most memorable movement of the trio. Twice, it swells into a blinding heat of monumental passion before cooling again into the restrained, unforgiving march. The Scherzo delights with sparkling play and clever invention: it is a canon throughout with piano and strings imitating each other in a variety of shifting combinations interlacing two and three-part textures in a genial dance like so many Schubert wrote for his Viennese friends. The trio section is more rustic and bold with heavy accents and a recall of one of the troubled, rhythmic themes from the first movement charmed into dance through a loving contrapuntal embrace.

The finale is combination of rondo and sonata forms with no less than three additional melodies, as though Schubert had an inexhaustible font of new music pouring out of his racing, mortal imagination. Midway through, Schubert reintroduces the march theme from the second movement, reminding us of something important we may have forgotten. Now, at least four distinct themes weave in an out of a tapestry of dazzling color and virtuosity with music that perhaps exceeds even Mozart with its lyrical bounty. For a final transformation of tremendous effect and compelling unity, Schubert returns to the march theme yet again, this time reborn in a final triumphant major key.

A casual listen to Schubert sometimes provokes the reaction that he is a bit long-winded, maybe even a bit repetitive. A more attentive listening reveals that Schubert never says the same thing twice. With his masterful handling of an ever-changing texture, his uncanny use of color within a chamber ensemble, his expert rhythmic sense and his exotic, emotionally keen harmonic modulations, Schubert always invests his recurring thematic material with new meaning, ultimately building a large-scale narrative where nothing is redundant and everything necessary. His music demands from the listener only an equivalently generous presence of heart and mind.

The Trio No. 2 in E-flat major for piano, violin, and violoncello, D. 929, was one of the last compositions completed by Franz Schubert, dated November 1827. It was published by Probst as opus 100 in late 1828, shortly before the composer’s death and first performed at a private party in January 1828 to celebrate the engagement of Schubert’s school-friend Josef von Spaun. The Trio was among the few of his late compositions Schubert heard performed before his death. It was given its first private performance by Carl Maria von Bocklet on the piano, Ignaz Schuppanzigh playing the violin, and Josef Linke playing cello.

Like Schubert’s other piano trio, this is a comparatively larger work than most piano trios of the time, taking almost 50 minutes to perform. The second theme of the first movement is based loosely on the opening theme of the Minuet and Trio of Schubert’s G major sonata (D. 894). Scholar Christopher H. Gibbs asserts direct evidence of Beethoven’s influence on the Trio.

The main theme of the second movement was used as one of the central musical themes in Stanley Kubrick‘s 1975 film Barry Lyndon. It has also been used in a number of other films, including The Hunger, Crimson Tide, The Piano Teacher, L’Homme de sa vie, Land of the Blind, Recollections of the Yellow House, The Way He Looks, Miss Julie, the HBO miniseries John Adams, The Mechanic, two episodes of American Crime Story, and as the opening piece for the ABC documentary The Killing Season.

The piano trio contains four movements:

I. Allegro

The first movement is in sonata form. There is disagreement over the break-up of thematic material with one source claiming six separate units of thematic material while another source divides them into three themes each with two periods. There is to an extent extra thematic material during the recapitulation. At least one of the thematic units is based closely on the opening theme of the third movement of the earlier Piano Sonata in G major, D 894. The development section focuses mainly on the final theme of the exposition.

II. Andante con moto

Principal theme in the second movement

The second movement takes an asymmetrical-double-ternary form. The principal theme is based in the Swedish folk song Se solen sjunker, which the composer had heard in the Fröhlich sisters’ house, sung by the tenor Isak Albert Berg.

III. Scherzo: Allegro moderato

The scherzo is an animated piece in standard double ternary form.

IV. Allegro moderato

The finale is in sonata-rondo form. Schubert also includes in two interludes the opening theme of the second movement in an altered version. Schubert also made some cuts in this finale, one of which includes the second-movement theme combined contrapuntally with other material from the finale.

https://www.earsense.org/chamber-music/Franz-Schubert-Piano-Trio-No-2-in-E-flat-major-Op-100-D-929/

https://freesheetmusicpdf.sheetmusiclibrary.website/selected-classical-sheet-music/

Khachaturian – Masquerade Suite – Waltz

Richard Wagner: Prelude to «Lohengrin», Simon Rattle

Rachmaninoff – Suite in D minor, Lento-Allegro 1891 (piano arrangement from a lost orchestral).

While studying in the Conservatory Rachmaninoff created a score which could not be performed because of the lack of instruments in the Conservatory orchestra. The composer performed the piano version himself and passed the script to Tchaikovsky, which was mentioned in a letter dated 1981. The trace of the score was lost for more than a century and was found only in 2002 in the archive of the Glinka museum, in the collection of professor Siloti, Rachmaninoff’s professor. The manuscript bore the name neither of the composition, nor of the author. But the experts established that it was made by Rachmaninoff and that it was the very lost piano suite D minor. The suite is in four movements: Lento: Allegro moderato in D minor, Lento in B minor, Menuetto in F-sharp major, and Allegro in D major.

Khatia Buniatishvili – Das Waldkonzert

Khatia Buniatishvili – Das Waldkonzert 2013.
Programme: Johann Sebastian Bach – “Schafe können sicher weiden”
Aus der Cantata BWV 208 “Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd”
• Frédéric Chopin – Scherzo Nr. 2, op 31
• Claude Debussy – Clair de lune, Nr. 3 aus der Suite Bergamasque
• Giya Kancheli – “Wenn Mandeln blühen”
Lied aus dem Film von Lana Gogoberidze
• Johannes Brahms – Intermezzo op, 117 / 2
• Peter Tschaikowsky – Oktober, Nr. 10 aus “Die Jahreszeiten” , op. 37b
• Maurice Ravel – La Valse
• Alexander Skrjabin – Etude op. 2 / 1
• Frédéric Chopin – Etude op. 25 / 7
• Traditional / Khatia Buniatishvili – Vagiorko mai / Liebst du mich nicht?
• Antonín Dvorák – Slawischer Tanz op. 72 / 2, (Allegretto grazioso)
• Johannes Brahms – Ungarischer Tanz Nr. 1
• Astor Piazzolla – Improvisation des Libertango

Berlioz : Symphonie Fantastique

L’Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France dirigé par Myung-Whun Chung interprète la “Symphonie fantastique” d’Hector Berlioz. Enregistré le 13 septembre 2013 à la Salle Pleyel (Paris). 00:35 1er mouvement: Rêveries – Passions. Largo – Allegro agitato e appassionato assai – Religiosamente 15:08 2eme mouvement: Un bal. Valse. Allegro non troppo 22:09 3eme mouvement: Scène aux champs. Adagio 39:53 4eme mouvement: Marche au supplice. Allegretto non troppo 00:00 5eme mouvement: Songe d’une nuit de sabbat. Larghetto – Allegro La Symphonie fantastique a été créée en 1830, en plein courant du romantisme, l’année de la bataille d’Hernani. Première “musique à programme”, qui fait éclater le cadre strictement classique de la symphonie, elle est un chef d’oeuvre en avance sur son temps, influençant bien des compositeurs romantiques, Liszt, Wagner ou Mahler. Narration à la fois autobiographique et fantasmée de son amour pour l’actrice Harriet Smithson, l’oeuvre tourne autour d’une “idée fixe” qui revient de façon obsessionnelle dans les différents mouvements. Après une Introduction lente et incertaine, l’idée fixe est exposée puis développée dans le premier mouvement Allegro. Une valse légère et célèbre retentit dans le deuxième mouvement “ Un bal”, qui s’achève dans une coda effrénée. L’Adagio de la Scène aux champs commence avec un duo hautbois / cor anglais dressant un paysage champêtre, avant une série de variations rappelant Beethoven. La Marche au supplice, d’une durée courte, est une vision d’horreur où le héros s’imagine avoir tué sa bien-aimée. Le dernier mouvement , Songe d’une Nuit de Sabbat est sans doute celui qui va le plus loin dans les innovations musicales, l’annonce du Dies Irae par deux cloches sonnant dans le vide est sans doute le passage le plus effrayant.