Word: cui
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...make Russian music Russian-genial, bush-bearded Nikolai Andreievich Rimsky-Korsakov. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of his birth. The composer of Scheherazade and 15 operas (Coq d'Or, the Snow Maiden, etc.) was the most scholarly member of the famed "Five" (the others: Mussorgsky, Balakireff, Borodin, Cui) who in the '60s weaned Russian music from the influence of German Romanticism and Italian opera. He was also the author of important treatises on harmony and orchestration, the teacher of a whole generation of other Russian composers, the tireless performer of countless editorial and ghostwriting jobs...
...some 80 years Russian music had been strongly influenced by "The Five"- César Cui, an engineer; Modest Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov), a government clerk and famed tosspot; Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor), a doctor; Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer; Mily Balakirev, a professional musician. In opposition to the international style of Tchaikovsky, "The Five" believed that the source of Russian music should be Russian-folk songs and church music. Igor Stravinsky (Petrouchka, The Fire Bird) continued this nationalist tradition, though he later abandoned it for severe and arid abstractions...
Tchaikowski's Second Symphony was more worth bothering about than the Mahler Symphony, although the fact that its melodies are weaker, less distinguished, and less surehanded than those of the later symphonies will probably cause its rejection. But in no way does it merit Cui's contemptuous epithets of "rough and commonplace. . . . pompous and trivial . . . neither good nor bad." It is fun to listen to, and that is more than can be said for a good deal of the stuff that is perpetrated in concert-halls today...
...first performance in St. Petersburg in 1876, Cesar Cui reported that "the composer was enthusiastically recalled"; and Laroche, better pleased, wrote: "The importance and power of the music, the beauty and variety of form, the nobility of style, the originality and rare perfection of technique, all contribute to make this symphony one of the most remarkable works produced during the last ten years...
...talent for medicine which his family regarded as a more respectable profession. He served two years in a military hospital, struggled with chemistry until he became a professor at the St. Petersburg Academy of Medicine. Chemist Borodin was 28 before he joined the powerful coterie composed of Balakirev, Cui. Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky, united in an ideal to restore to Russian music its nationalist essence. Borodin had less time than the others. His home adjoined the medical school. He would work a bit at the piano, then race through the corridors to see how a test tube was behaving. Daytimes...