by Daniel Hathaway
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1986, French composer Maurice Duruflé (pictured) died in Paris. Appointed titular organist of St-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris in 1929 while he was still Louis Vierne’s assistant at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Duruflé held the post for the rest of his life, eventually sharing it with his wife, Marie-Madeleine.
A severe self-critic, Duruflé wrote only a few pieces which he kept revising, and only played some of them in public. Listen here to his own performance of the Prélude et Fugue sur le nom de Alain, which encodes the name of fellow composer Jehan Alain (Duruflé plays the Cavaillé-Coll organ of the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles in 1953).
The most famous of Duruflé’s works is his 1947 Requiem, which reveals his lifelong commitment to Gregorian Chant. Watch a performance by Matthew Robertson and The Thirteen from 2018, recorded at the Church of the Epiphany in Washington, DC, with Jeremy Filsell at the organ.
Belgian violinist, composer, and conductor Eugène Ysaÿe was born on this date in Liège in 1858. After graduating from the conservatory there, he became principal of the orchestra that later morphed into the Berlin Philharmonic.
Ysaÿe has two interesting links to Ohio, having taught Josef Gingold, concertmaster of The Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell, and having served as conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony from 1918-1922 after turning down the directorship of the New York Philharmonic.
César Franck wrote his Sonata in A as a wedding present for Ysaÿe, and the violinist’s Ysaÿe Quartet premiered Claude Debussy’s String Quartet. His six solo violin sonatas are widely admired and performed. Yura Lee played two movements from the fifth sonata on her 2016 ChamberFest Cleveland “Fiddle Tales” concert at Transformer Station. And Augustin Hadelich recorded Ysaÿe’s third sonata live at Deutschlandfunk in Köln in 2015. Watch that performance here.
Born on this date in 1929, experimental composer James K. Randall grew up in Cleveland, where his mother taught violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music. A prodigy, at the age of 17 he wrote a piano sonata that Leonard Shure premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York. He continued his education at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton, where he met up with the music of electronic composer Milton Babbitt. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1957.
Randall dedicated his 2013 electronic work The Way it Was (for MB) to Babbitt’s memory. Listen here.
