Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1862, an 18-year-old Russian named Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov graduated as midshipman from the Russian Naval Academy and prepared for a two-year’s training cruise around the world. Nicolai’s uncle was an admiral and a close friend of the Czar, and in his autobiography Rimsky-Korsakov admits he, too, at first thought it might be a good idea—he loved reading travel books, after all.

But then Rimsky-Korsakov was seduced by music. He'd made the acquaintance of the eminent Russian composers of his day, lost interest in a naval career, and dreamed of composing music himself.

The young midshipman’s tour of duty did enable him to hear a lot of it and to sample opera performances in London and New York. But what made the biggest impression on the budding composer was the sky below the Equator. “Wonderful days and nights,” he wrote. “The marvelous dark-azure of the day would be replaced by a fantastic phosphorescent night. The tropical night sky over the ocean is the most amazing thing in the world.”

It’s perhaps not too fanciful to believe that such impressions helped Rimsky-Korsakov develop into one of the most inventive and masterful painters of symphonic colors and instrumental effects.

Olivier Messiaen (1908 – 1992) Turangalila Symphony Tristan Murail, Ondes Martenot; Philharmonia Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, cond. Sony 53473

• 1881 - Russian composer Nikolai Miaskovsky, in the fortress of Novo-Georgiyevsk (now Modlin), Poland (Julian date: April 8);

• 1869 - German song composer Karl Loewe, age 72, in Kiel;

• 1910 - Ravel: "Ma Mère l'oye" (Mother Goose) for piano four-hands, in Paris, by two young female pianists, at the first concert of the newly-formed "Société musicale indépedante"; On the same program was the premiere of Gabriel Fauré's "Le Chanson d'Eve" with the composer at the piano;

• 1979 - George Perle: Concertino for Piano, Winds, and Timpani, by Morey Ritt and the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, Ralph Shapey conducting;

• 1983 - Thomas Oboe Lee: "Quartet on B-flat" for string quartet, at the Harvard Music Association in Beacon Hill, Mass., by the Manhattan String Quartet;

• 2001 - Danielpour: String Quartet, in Kansas City, Mo., by the American String Quartet;

• 2002 - Michael Torke: "Song of Isaiah"for voice and chamber ensemble, at the Milwaukee Art Museum by the Present Music Ensemble, with the composer conducting;

• 1759 - Burial of Handel in Westminster Abbey, London;

• 1928 - In Paris, the first public demonstration of an electronic instrument invented by Maurice Martenot called the "Ondes musicales"; The instrument later came to be called the "Ondes Martenot," and was included in scores by Milhaud, Messiaen, Jolivet, Ibert, Honegger, Florent Schmitt and other 20th century composers.

• On the "Ondes Martenot"