Born in Los Angeles in 1979, Benjamin Shwartz, was raised between the United States and Israel. He attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and received the Institute’s Shanis Fellowship to study conducting. While at Curtis, he worked closely with maestro Christoph Eschenbach preparing the Curtis Orchestra for concert performances. He also studied composition with James Primosch at the University of Pennsylvania, with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany and at IRCAM in Paris. In 2013 Shwartz was appointed Music Director of the Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra, where he served until 2016. Previous positions include, Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, where he assisted Michael Tilson Thomas, and led numerous concerts. There he also served as the Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Shwartz has received numerous awards for his work, including the Presser Music Award, and was a prize-winner in the 2007 Bamberg Symphony Orchestra’s International Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition. As an advocate of new music, Shwartz has led many world premieres of works by his contemporaries. He also works as the conductor of Mercury Soul, a new music project which he curates together with composer Mason Bates and the visual artist, designer and director Anne Patterson. The ensemble presents new music for acoustic and electronic instruments in clubs and other unconventional locations, effectively blurring the lines between classical, experimental and electronic music.
The manuscript of Franz Schubert’s B minor Symphony is dated October 30, 1822. The first performance was given on December 17, 1865, in Vienna. There was no mention of the composition while Schubert was alive. The composer had written as much as he could that year, but restrained by other commitments, he moved on to the creation of the “Wanderer” Fantasy and the Mass in A-flat. He had begun the composition in appreciation of his friend Joseph Hüttenbrenner’s brother, for his assistance in obtaining an honorary membership for the composer in the Music Society of Graz. Thus the work remained buried in Anselm Hüttenbrenner’s study until the 1860s, more than thirty years after the composer’s death. The “Symphony in B minor,” is nicknamed the Unfinished because only two movements are fully realized, a lyrical Allegro moderato and a poignant Andante con moto. It is also widely accepted that Schubert had plans to complete the piece. Piano sketches have been uncovered for a third (Scherzo) movement and there is evidence that the first B-minor entr’acte from his incidental music to Rosamunde is based on what may have been the final movement.
Béla Bartók’s only opera, Bluebeard's Castle, was written in 1911 and had its first performance on May 24, 1918, at the Budapest Opera. Bartók had entered the production, as soon as the score was completed, in a national competition, which he lost, because the jurors felt the opera was unperformable. It was not staged for another seven years. Shortly after which it was banned from Hungary because its librettist, Balázs, was forced into political exile. Ultimately, the composition has been recognised as a work of remarkable brilliance, but the difficulties Bartók experienced in getting it produced vexed him to the point that he never wrote for the stage again. The opera is one of three stage productions in his repertoire, the other two being the ballets The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin.
Bluebeard's Castle is not often encountered in the opera house, partly because its performance time is a mere fifty-nine minutes, and partly because its true impact does not depend on stage effects. The modest action of the opera takes place in just one room, a dark chamber in the bowels of a damp Castle. Although the composition is based on Charles Perault's Mother Goose tales, there was an actual Bluebeard, a fifteenth-century chap, Gilles de Retz, who dyed his beard blue, dressed in silks and jewels, and is said to have been a criminal. In fact, in the two hundred years between Perault and Bartók, the legend has had many iterations.
The story of Bluebeard is an emotional and psychological drama focused on the relationship between man and woman. The myth revolves around a curious bride, a series of locked doors, and the blood-encrusted remains of five former wives. The opera begins and ends in total darkness, with music based on a pentatonic scale and is thoroughly Hungarian in mood and manner. Bartók was determined to create an idiomatically Hungarian work, which he wrote by letting the text determine the flow of his music, working in the “parlando rubato” style that he refined during his study of Hungarian folk music.
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator
