Elgar's Cello Concerto:
Sir Edward William Elgar (1857-1934) was an English composer who wrote pieces such as Pomp and Circumstance Marches, Enigma Variations, and The Dream of Gerontius.
One of his more famous pieces is the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op85, which was composed in 1919 near Fittleworth, Sussex.
Boyle was born in 1889 in Bushey Park, near Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow Ireland, and spent her entire life in her family home there. Her body of work was quite diverse in that she wrote orchestral scores and chamber music, opera choral music, ballet scores and songs for voice and piano. Boyle's compositions bare resemblance to the lyrical symphonic landscapes created by her composition teacher, and famous composer of the time, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although she was a prolific composer, she never became widely famous, most likely due to the fact that she was somewhat isolated for most of her life.
Arcangelo Corelli was one of the most influential composers of the Baroque period. Born in 1653 in Fusignano, Italy. Corelli was named after his father who died just five weeks before his birth so he was raised by his mother and four older siblings. Corelli first studied in Bologna which at the time was a major center for music. At the age of 17 he was accepted into the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna. He traveled to Paris and Germany before establishing himself in Rome in the 1670s where he remained a prominent musical presence for the next 30 years.
Zoltán Kodály (1882 -1967) was a famous Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist and pedagogue who was known internationally for having created the Kodály Method of teaching music. Kodály was born in Kecskemét, Hungary (formely Austria) and learned to play the violin as a child. In 1902 he began studying composition at a university in Budapest and in 1905 he traveled to remote Hungarian villages to collect folk songs and record them on phonograph cylinders. He wrote a thesis titled: “Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong. “ A year later he met and befriended Béla Bartók, whom he introduce to his method in collecting folk songs and with him published editions of folk songs between 1906 and 1921.
Henryk Wieniawski was a Polish violinist and composer. He began playing the violin when he was young and was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at age nine, despite not being French. After graduating from the Conservatoire, he toured extensively and published his first piece of music at the age of twelve. He moved to St. Petersburg in his mid-twenties, where he taught violin and performed as well. A decade later, he took a position as a violin professor in Brussels. Throughout his career as a composer, he wrote many works for violin, including a book of 10 études that has become a standard work of study for aspiring violinists. His legacy lives on in many ways, including a violin competition named for him, the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition.
On July 24th, we will celebrate the 136th birthday of Swiss composer Ernest Bloch! Bloch was a violinist from the age of nine, studying in Brussels with teachers such as Eugène Ysaÿe. Soon after, he began his composition studies and published his first work, Historiettes au Crépuscule for mezzo-soprano voice and piano, in 1903. However, he soon found that his Jewish roots distinctively resonated within him in his musical endeavors. Bloch composed a number of works that have come to be known as his “Jewish Cycle”. These pieces now constitute some of his most well-known works since these compositions contain tremendous forces of expression and personal significance. Bloch admitted, at one point, that he could not distinguish within his music where his Jewish influences ended and where his self began.
