Ignaz Schuppanzigh (July 20, 1776 – March 2, 1830) was a violinist, friend and teacher of Beethoven, and leader of Count Razumovsky's private string quartet. Schuppanzigh and his quartet premiered many of Beethoven's string quartets, and in particular, the late string quartets. The Razumovsky quartet, which Schuppanzigh founded in late 1808, is considered to be the first professional string quartet. Until the founding of this quartet, quartet music was played primarily by amateurs or by professional musicians who joined together on an ad hoc basis.

Schuppanzigh was born in Vienna, son of a professor of Italian at the Theresian Military Academy. After abandoning his early preferences for the viola, he established himself before his 21st birthday as a virtuoso violist and violinist, as well as a conductor. He gave violin lessons to Beethoven, and they remained friends until Beethoven's death.

Schuppanzigh's dedication to quartet playing played a pivotal role in the transition of quartet performance and composition. Prior to Beethoven, the quartet repertoire could be performed competently by good quality amateurs and by professionals with few rehearsals. Beethoven's quartets introduced many new technical difficulties that cannot be completely overcome without dedicated rehearsal. These difficulties include synchronized complex runs played by two or more instruments together, cross-rhythms and hemiolas, and difficult harmonies that require special attention to intonation. When Schuppanzigh complained to Beethoven about a particularly difficult passage, Beethoven is said to have remarked, "Do you believe that I think about your miserable fiddle when the musestrikes me?"

Razumovsky's quartet also premiered works by other composers. Franz Schubert dedicated his "Rosamunde" quartet to Schuppanzigh. Schuppanzigh was reported to be a handsome youth, but in adult life became seriously obese. Beethoven often joked about his corpulence, calling him 'My Lord Falstaff', and composed a short, comic choral piece dedicated to him, "Praise to the Fat One" ("Lob auf den Dicken"). Toward the end of his life, Schuppanzigh's fingers reputedly grew so fat that he was unable to play in tune. He died of paralysis.

Charles Ives Sonata No. 2 for Piano »Concord, Mass., 1840-60« (00:59:31)

Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata is probably the most monumental conceptual design of a piano sonata of the 20th century. The work’s world premiere by renowned pianist John Kirkpatrick in 1939 helped the composer, who until then was to a large extent unknown, achieve his breakthrough.

As Ives explains in his extensive commentary Essay Before a Sonata, the spiritual world of the work, which lasts about 50 minutes in performance, is situated in the context of American transcendentalism, which experienced its heyday in the small New England town of Concord, Massachusetts between 1840 and 1860. Four movements are dedicated to four outstanding figures of the antimaterialist and antirationalist movement. Time and again the main theme from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is quoted – music of the composer who more than anyone else stands for the large-scale musical project of the sonata.

The second movement, a scherzo that not infrequently touches on the limits of what can be performed, reflects on utopian short stories by the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne – with sudden breaks like cuts in a film and motor rhythms with a ragtime inflection. The last movement is dedicated to the nature mystic Henry David Thoreau, who himself played flute and, according to Ives, was a “great musician”. With its many-layered piano writing, often notated on three staves, the Concord Sonata achieves a complexity that confronts any interpreter with the greatest of challenges. Beyond a doubt: Pierre-Laurent Aimard will master it brilliantly.

KWLT Presents John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera"

KWLT

Aristophanes

 Aristophanes
 (English pronunciation: /ˌærɨˈstɒfəniːz/; Ancient Greek: [aristopʰánɛːs]; Ἀριστοφάνης, ca. 446 BC – ca. 386 BC).

Son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his 40 plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are used to define the genre. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander contributing to the trial and execution of Socrates although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. His second play, The Babylonians (now lost), was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. It is possible that the case was argued in court but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights, the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through the Chorus in that play, "the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all."

Born	ca. 446 BC
Years active	427 BC — 386 BC
Known for	Playwright and director of Old Comedy
Notable work(s)	The Acharnians, 425 BC The Knights 424 BC The Clouds 423 BC The Wasps 422 BC Peace 421 BC The Birds 414 BC Lysistrata 411 BC Thesmophoriazusae 411 BC The Frogs 405 BC Ecclesiazusae c. 392 BC Wealth II 388 BC

paganini