3.1.13

Did You Hear What I Heard, 2012

As a year-in-review exercise, Mark Berry at Boulezian recently counted what music he had heard in the past year, ordered by composer. The results were interesting, in a cross-section of the classical music world sort of way, so here is the same tabulation for my listening in 2012 -- with concerts and operas considered together (plus dance, if the music was performed live) , just my reviews, in Washington and elsewhere. If a performance featured at least one piece by a composer (not including encores), that composer scored a point.

The process of making the tabulation was tedious, but it did reveal some interesting things. I had assumed most of these things were true, but here it is in cold, hard data. First, many thanks to all of the musicians in Washington and those who visit Washington, for feeding me an extensive and varied diet of music. The numbers give me an awareness of just how well nourished I am. Classical composers fared the best in my year, with Ludwig van Beethoven (23) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (19) leading the pack, backed up by Joseph Haydn (10). After that, again no surprise, were the Romantics, led by Franz Schubert (15), Johannes Brahms (11), and Frédéric Chopin (10), with representation from Robert Schumann (6), Antonín Dvořák (6), Franz Liszt (5), Pyotr Tchaikovsky (4), Richard Wagner (3), Felix Mendelssohn (3), Georges Bizet (3), Anton Bruckner (3), Gabriel Fauré (3), Camille Saint-Saëns (3), Giuseppe Verdi (2), César Franck (2), Jules Massenet (2), Vincenzo Bellini (2), Jean Sibelius (2), and Bedřich Smetana (2).

Baroque composers were next in line, led by J. S. Bach (15) and George Frideric Handel (7), with Antonio Vivaldi (3), Georg Philip Telemann (2), François Couperin (2), Louis Couperin (2), and Domenico Scarlatti (2) in the mix. Composers of the 20th century were at the end of the list as far as individual popularity, but there were strong showings from Richard Strauss (11), Béla Bartók (8), Claude Debussy (8), Dmitri Shostakovich (7), Maurice Ravel (7), and Igor Stravinsky (7). A centenary festival pushed the dark horse John Cage (5) up even with Sergei Rachmaninoff (5) and beyond Benjamin Britten (4), with smaller showings from Samuel Barber (3), Philip Glass (3), Leoš Janáček (3), Sergei Prokofiev (3), Henry Cowell (2), Charles Ives (2), Lori Laitman (2), György Ligeti (2), Roger Reynolds (2), and Kurt Weill (2). I believe that what they call the honor roll of composers above, with a few exceptions, is a classical canon.

No less striking to me was the vast array of composers whose music I heard on at least one concert program during 2012, rounding out a list of 204 names (!) in all. They range from the very prolific and generally quite venerable Anonymous up to babes in arms like Sean Shepherd (b. 1979). They are listed below in alphabetical order. The worst omission, and it is shocking, is that I apparently heard not a single work by Gustav Mahler.
Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco
Carl Friedrich Abel
Adolphe Adam
Thomas Adès
Isaac Albéniz
Jean-Henri d'Anglebert
Steve Antosca
Robert Ashley
Claude-Bénigne Balbastre
Francisco Barbieri
Alban Berg
Irving Berlin
Hector Berlioz
Leonard Bernstein
Oscar Bianchi
Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber
Chester Biscardi
Ernest Bloch
Roger Boutry
Frank Brickle
Lew Brown
Ferruccio Busoni
William Byrd
Thomas Campion
André Campra
Pablo Casals
Alfredo Catalani
Jehan Chardavoine
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Ernest Chausson
Carlos Chávez
Frederic Chopin
Johannes de Ciconia
Francesco Cilea
David Claman
Anna Clyne
Aaron Copland
Arcangelo Corelli
Armand-Louis Couperin
Céleste-Thérèse Couperin
George Crumb
Mario Davidovsky
Jon Deak
Léo Delibes
Josquin Desprez
Gaetano Donizetti
John Dowland
Henri Duparc
Jacques Duphly
Marcel Dupré
Maurice Duruflé
Jan Ladislav Dussek
Henri Dutilleux
Rinde Eckert
Edward Elgar
Gerald Finzi
Diarmid Flatley
Carlisle Floyd
Antoine Forqueray
David Fulmer
Francesco Geminiani
George Gershwin
Detlev Glanert
Alexander Glazunov
Osvaldo Golijov
Charles Gounod
Charles Griffes
Georg Friedrich Haas
Reynaldo Hahn
Jake Heggie
Ray Henderson
Ferdinand Hérold
Hildegard von Bingen
Peter Hilliard
Anthony Holborne
Tobias Hume
Engelbert Humperdinck
Jacques Ibert
Carl Jacobi

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre
Leon Kirchner
Zoltán Kodály
Dina Koston
Fritz Kreisler
Friedrich Kuhlau
David Lang
Ana Lara
Ramon Lazkano
Sébastien Le Camus
James Legg
David Leisner
Fred Lerdahl
George Lewis
Peter Lieberson
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Witold Lutosławski
Charles Macdowell
Guillaume de Machaut
Steven Mackey
Louis Marchand
Pietro Mascagni
Missy Mazzoli
Mediolano
Harold Meltzer
Olivier Messiaen
Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny
Claudio Monteverdi
Paul Moravec
Moritz Moszkowski
John Musto
Michael Oberhauser
Mark O'Connor
Julián Orbón
Niccolò Paganini
Giovanni Paisiello
Giovanni da Palestrina
Arvo Pärt
Thomas Pasatieri
Scott Perkins
Douglas Pew
Amilcare Ponchielli
David Popper
Cole Porter
Francis Poulenc
Giacomo Puccini
Henry Purcell
Jean-Philippe Rameau
Jean-Féry Rebel
Licinio Refice
Ottorino Respighi
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Ned Rorem
Gioachino Rossini
Albert Roussel
Giovanni Battista Sammartini
Giuseppe Sammartini
Ahmet Saygun
Arnold Schoenberg
Gustav Schreck
Sean Shepherd
Adam Sherkin
Stephen Sondheim
Gaspare Spontini
Johann Strauss, Jr.
Josef Suk
Jacob Sundstrom
Jenő Takács
Ambroise Thomas
Paolo Tosti
Jan Václav Voříšek
Liam Wade
Carl Maria von Weber
Jörg Widmann
Randall Woolf
Carolyn Yarnell
Eugène Ysaÿe
Efrem Zimbalist


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