Musicatlas
News for Rózsa
- Miklós Rózsa CD to be released soon
(4 July 2007)(by Jeffrey Dane)
Scheduled for release on the Naxos label in September, 2007 is a CD
recording of performances of the following works by Miklós Rózsa:— Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, op. 24 (1953), and
— Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Cello & Orchestra, op. 29 (1966).
The CD will be released simultaneously in the United States and England, and elsewhere.
It was my privilege to have been given a preliminary copy of the recordings of these works, and the performances by all artists are in every sense superlative.
Both works, recently recorded in Moscow, are performed by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. The cello soloist in the Sinfonia Concertante is Andrey Tchekmazov. The violin soloist in both works is Anastasia Khitruk. The originality of her playing is, in a word, phenomenal. The lucidity, precision, and note-for-note articulation in her performances actually transcend advanced technical achievement: they bring to her readings an absolutely extraordinary maturity and cohesive integrity of interpretation, her meticulous playing is riveting, and the clarity of her intonation is positively astounding. A new prose vocabulary would have to be invented to properly describe her music-making. She gives these two major Rozsa works new life and in a very real way makes them her
own.Anastasia Khitruk will also be performing in a recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall on October 1, 2007, in which the music of Miklós Rózsa will be on the program.
Parenthetically, this is the composer's centenary, and my book about him, A composer's Notes: Remembering Miklos Rozsa, is a recollection of the man as I knew him, and was published by iUniverse, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.
[source: Jeffrey Dane; e-mail: Jeffdane43
aol.com] - Just published: A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa
(19 October 2006)Just published:
A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa
by
Jeffrey Dane
(with a Foreword by Leonard Pennario)
A special Recollection, written to commemorate
the 2007 centenary of the composer’s birth on April 18, 1907.
In this book, the author shares his own remembrances of the composer, the
private vignettes he witnessed, specific anecdotes, personal photos, and
facsimiles of Rózsa’s manuscripts. The author also presents some of the private
correspondence between him and the composer over a more than 20-year period,
including photographic copies of the innumerable handwritten letters and notes
he received from Dr. Rózsa during the decades of their friendship. These
missives outline the evolution of the camaraderie and rapport that developed
between the two men, offer insight into the kind of relationship between them, and
reveal features of the composer's own character. The author began his
connection with Rózsa as a fan but ultimately became an earnest student first of
Rozsa's film music (specifically his score for Ben Hur) and then of his concert
music -- and, eventually, a friend.
Paperback; 332 pages; illustrated, with photos & facsimiles of the composer's letters and manuscripts.
Publisher:
iUniverse, Lincoln, Nebraska USA / New York, NY USA. Available now. ISBN Number.: 0-595-41433-8
You can buy it here: A Composer's Notes: Remembering Miklós Rózsa
Music
Miklós Rózsa is mainly know as film composer, but he also composed other symphonic works, a ballet and violin concertos.
Life
Rózsa started playing the violin at the age of five. In 1926 he studied in Leipzig, where his violin concecrto was performed in 1929. From 1931 Rózsa lived in Paris. His "Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song" and his "Symphony and Serenade for Small Orchestra" were performed there. He moved to London in 1935, where he wrote the ballet "Hungaria". He then also started to write film music. In 1940, while working on "The Thief of Bagdad" he travelled to Los Angeles, where he also died in 1995. [Source: www.imdb.com]