GEORGE BALANCHINE

Choreographer

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, George Balanchine (1904-1983) is regarded as the foremost contemporary choreographer in the world of ballet. He came to the United States in late 1933, at the age of 29, accepting the invitation of the young American arts patron Lincoln Kirstein (1907-96), whose great passions included the dream of creating a ballet company in America. At Balanchine’s behest, Kirstein was also prepared to support the formation of an American academy of ballet that would eventually rival the long-established schools of Europe.

PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

Composer, Ballet Imperial

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in Kamsko Votkinsk in the district of Viatka on May 7, 1840, was the son of a mining engineer. Although he began piano instruction at the age of five and showed signs of musical precociousness, a musical career was not anticipated at that time. In 1850, he was enrolled in the preparatory class of the School of Jurisprudence when his family moved to St. Petersburg. He was admitted to the School of Jurisprudence in 1852, and while he was still a student there, he composed a canzonetta that became his first published work. In 1859, he completed his course of study and took a post as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice, but he continued to pursue musical studies, including voice, thorough bass and composition. He resigned from his post in l863 and became a full-time student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, directed by Anton Rubinstein. It was during this period that he made his debut as a conductor and composed The Storm, his only student composition to be heard with any frequency today. In it, he already exhibited stylistic elements prominent in his later works, including the influence of Russian folk-melody, a command of Western compositional techniques and a flair for brilliant orchestration. Even before his graduation in 1865, he was offered a position as teacher of harmony at what was to become the Moscow Conservatory.

GEORGE GERSHWIN

Composer, Who Cares?

George Gershwin was born in New York City on September 26, 1898, as “Jacob Gershvin” – a child of a Russian immigrant whose original name was Gershovitz but adapted to the Americanized “Gershwin”.

He grew up in New York City and his precocious talent for music started early on a piano bought for his older brother Ira. After attending New York City public schools, he dropped out of high school to become a musician. At the age of 16 he worked as a song plugger for a Tin Pan Alley publisher and soon after he was hired as the rehearsal pianist for a new musical Miss 1917 by Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert. By 1919, he had a huge hit song of his own, “Swanee” with a lyric by Irving Caesar. Al Jolson sang it in a show called Sinbad and the song took off, selling more than a million copies of sheet music and more than two million phonograph recordings. And from there on, he moved from success to success, producing a catalog of over a thousand songs, most of which have achieved status as standards in American Popular song.

HERSHY KAY

Arranger, Who Cares?

Hershy Kay, the American composer, orchestrator and arranger, was born in Philadelphia in 1919. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1936-1940, where his classes included composition taught by Randall Thompson. Self-taught as an orchestrator, he went to New York and had a successful career orchestrating Broadway musicals and ballets.

In 1940 his first professional project was to orchestrate several songs for Brazilian soprano Elsie Houston’s show at the Rainbow Room. When Leonard Bernstein commissioned Kay to do the orchestration for his musical comedy On the Town in 1944, Kay became one of the most sought after orchestrators on Broadway. Later collaborations with Berstein include Peter Pan (1957) and Candide (1956). Other collaborators were Marc Blitzstein, Harvey Schmidt, Cy Coleman and Andrew Lloyd Weber.

In 1954, George Balanchine commissioned Kay to compose the score for his ballet Western Symphony, a toe-tapping take on the American West. He later also wrote the score for Balanchine’s Stars and Stripes, based on Sousa’s music. Kay created ballet scores for several companies: New York City Ballet; Joffrey Ballet; Royal Ballet and Royal Danish Ballet. Kay’s reconstruction of Gottschalk’s Grande Tarantelle for piano and orchestra, later choreographed by Balanchine as Tarantella, led to a renewed interest in Gottschalk’s music.

Source.

GEORGES BIZET

Composer, Symphony in C

Georges Bizet was was registered with the legal name Alexandre-César-Léopold Bizet, but was baptized Georges Bizet and was always known by the latter name. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music a fortnight before his tenth birthday.

Georges Bizet’s first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written there when he was seventeen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about it himself, and it was not discovered again until 1935, in the archives of the Conservatory library. Upon its first performance, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. A delightful work (and a prodigious one, from a seventeen-year-old boy), the symphony is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the music of Franz Schubert, whose work was virtually unknown in Paris at that time (with the possible exception of a few of his songs). A second symphony, Roma was not completed.

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