In Brief: Hurricane Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to good things in Blogville and Beyond.

• Chant Grégorien d'Aquitaine, Schola Hungarica St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Two Medieval Offices, Schola Hungarica

  The news came from Budapest this week that Prof. László Dobszay, one of the giants in the field of Gregorian chant scholarship, has died at the age of 77. He was a specialist in central European folk song, in the tradition of Bartók, and he brought that approach to a primarily oral form of music to his equally thorough and valuable research in Gregorian chant, specializing in the manuscripts and melodic tradition of Hungary and central Europe. With David Hiley, Ruth Steiner (my mentor in graduate school), and others he founded the Cantus Planus study group, a collection of international chant scholars who met regularly and opened up the field of Gregorian chant research. He taught, since the 1970s, at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, and among his many achievements was the publication of an enormous study of central European chant known as Corpus Antiphonalium Officii Ecclesiarum Centralis Europae (CAO-ECE). With his colleagues Benjamin Rajeczky and Janka Szendrei, Dobszay founded the Schola Hungarica, a choir of adults and, most strikingly, children devoted to the performance of Hungarian and other central European forms of chant. Their many recordings remain some of the most beautiful and most convincing interpretations of Gregorian chant ever made. How they ever taught children to sing Latin chant so well never fails to amaze me. [New Liturgical Movement]


• Ride out the effects of the hurricane with some online listening: this week, the Sixteen sing Allegri and Les Talens Lyriques perform oratorios by Carissimi and Charpentier, both at the Utrecht Early Music Festival; David Fray plays Mozart's 25th piano concerto and Yefim Bronfman play's the Emperor concerto, both with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra; Adam Laloum plays a recital and soprano Julie Fuchs sings, both at the Festival de Chambord; the Ensemble Zefiro plays Baroque music at the Festival Itinéraire Baroque en Périgord Vert; Handel's Rinaldo with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from the Proms; the Zemlinsky Quartet from the Festival de Saintes. [France Musique]


• In London David Fray plays the same Mozart concerto with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra; David Robertson leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with Yo-Yo Ma playing a new cello concerto by Graham Fitkin and Christine Brewer in Beethoven's ninth symphony; Zubin Mehta with the Israel Philharmonic; the Budapest Festival Orchestra; the BBC Singers in Tavener and Gubaidulina; an organ recital by Thierry Escaich; and Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra in Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. [BBC Proms]


• In online video, concerts from the Festival international de musique classique à Annecy all this week -- including performances by Renaud Capuçon, Valery Gergiev, the Apollon Musagète Quartet, and Denis Matsuev. [Medici.tv]


• Oh, yes, and someone named Irene came to visit yesterday, and she was not a pleasant guest. Winds took down a large tree in front of a neighbor's house: miraculously, it fell across the street and did not hit anything or anyone. Just as miraculously, the dead tree that has been darkening our doorstep for months lost some branches but somehow remained standing. Everyone at Ionarts Central is safe, we still have power after a harrowing night, but headquarters did sustain some heavy water damage overnight, after some bad wind gusts took off a section of our roof (and those of our two neighbors). As a result, transmissions from Washington will likely be affected this week, but you should be able to enjoy more reports from Salzburg. [Capital Weather Gang]