Missouri Classical Music News and Notes

America has lost one of its great composers, George Rochberg, a controversial and insightful musician who helped lead contemporary classical music back to more “listenable” idioms.

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Some called Rochberg the father of musical postmodernism, though he resisted the label. He was loved and reviled in the academic environment in which he thrived, mainly at the University of Pennsylvania.

Born in Paterson, N.J., in 1919, he fought in World War II and went on to study music in a musical world gripped by Schoenberg's 12-tone dogma, as Rochberg came to view it.

He became an atonal disciple of the great revolutionary and wrote some of the most dramatic, ingenious and richly hued 12-tone music we've heard from an American.

Rochberg didn't turn his back on aggressive modernism because he simply changed his mind, although in the early 1960s he was already questioning modern music's increasing tendency toward ugliness.

Instead he was forced out of his dodecaphonic shell by a horrendous blow of fate. In 1964 his son Paul developed a brain tumor and died at age 15. Rochberg's grief was staggering, and he found that his musical idiom didn't allow him to express the depth of his feeling.

In his darkest hour he began to pound out music on his piano that sounded like late Beethoven, or Brahms, or Mahler. But it was his.

It was beautiful music, too, though it defied the rules of academic political correctness. He was considered an impostor.

"We have lost one of the greatest musicians of our time," Esa-Pekka Salonen, music director of the Philharmonic, said Wednesday. "He had an almost uncanny ability to transform the sound of an orchestra, any orchestra, into a dark and intense glow, which became his trademark over the years."

Martin Bernheimer, music critic of the Los Angeles Times while Giulini was on the podium at the Philharmonic, called him "one of the major conductors of his period."

"Giulini was from the old school; he was calm, subtle, a thinker," Bernheimer said. "He wasn't interested in easy effects or splash. He brought a mellowness to the orchestra."

Researcher Michael Maul found the aria, dated October 1713, in May in the eastern city of Weimar, the Bach Archiv foundation said on its Web site.

There was no doubt about the authenticity of the handwritten, two-page score, the Leipzig-based foundation said.

Maul said it was the first Bach work to come to light since 1975, when a copy of the "Goldberg Variations" in a private collection was found to contain extra canons for piano in the composer's own handwriting.

Cortot is dead, of course. He was not present in physical form, nor was anyone else sitting at the keyboard of the Yamaha Disklavier Pro as the keys rose and fell. But this was his performance come back to life: his gentle touch, his luminosity, even his mistakes, like the light brush of an extra note at the periphery of the final chord.

So, at least, claimed Dr. John Q. Walker, the president of Zenph Studios in Raleigh, which sponsored the event and created the software that allowed Cortot to return.

Download all nine of Beethoven's symphonies here the day after they are broadcast. All the symphonies are performed by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda.