John Hamilton Warrack (born 1928, London) is an English music critic, writer on music, and oboist.

Warrack is the son of Scottish conductor and composer Guy Warrack. From 1954 until 1961 he was music critic for The Daily Telegraph, and from 1961 until 1972 he was music critic for The Sunday Telegraph. From 1978 until 1983 he served as the Artistic Director of the Leeds Festival. From 1984 until 1993 he taught on the music faculty at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Carl Maria von Weber (Hamish Hamilton, 1968, 2nd ed. Cambridge UP, 1976), the standard study of von Weber in English; German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (2001) and the co-author of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera (1964, with Harold Rosenthal) and The Oxford Dictionary of Opera (1992, with Ewan West).^[1]

References[link]

Claudio Abbado, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI^[1] (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudio abˈbaːdo]; born June 26, 1933), is an Italian conductor. He has served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra from 1989 to 2002, when he retired from the position for health reasons.

Claudio Abbado.

Biography[link]

Born in Milan, Italy, Abbado is the son of the violinist and composer Michelangelo Abbado, who was his first piano teacher, and the brother of musician Marcello Abbado. After studying piano at the Milan Conservatory,^[2] in 1955 Claudio Abbado studied conducting with Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Academy of Music. In 1958 he won the international Koussevitsky Competition for conductors,^[2] which resulted in a number of operatic conducting engagements in Italy, and in 1963 he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize for conductors,^[2] allowing him to work for five months with the New York Philharmonic.

Abbado recalls desiring to become a conductor for the first time as a child, when he heard a performance of Claude Debussy's Nocturnes. He had the opportunity to attend many orchestral rehearsals in Milan led by such conductors as Arturo Toscanini and Wilhelm Furtwängler and has told interviewers that Toscanini's tyrannical and sometimes abusive manner towards musicians in rehearsal repelled him, and that he resolved to behave in the gentler manner of Bruno Walter. Abbado is known to exhibit a friendly, understated, and non-confrontational manner in rehearsal.

He made his début at La Scala in his hometown of Milan in 1960 and served as its music director from 1968 to 1986, conducting not only the traditional Italian repertoire but also presenting a contemporary opera each year, as well as a concert series devoted to the works of Alban Berg and Modest Mussorgsky. Abbado also founded the Filarmonica della Scala in 1982, for the performance of orchestral repertoire in concert.

Abbado conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for the first time in 1965 in a concert at the Salzburg Festival. He served as music director for the Vienna State Opera from 1986 to 1991, with notable productions such as Mussorgsky's original Boris Godunov and his seldom-heard Khovanshchina, Franz Schubert's Fierrabras, and Gioacchino Rossini's Il viaggio a Reims.

From 1979 to 1987 he was principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and from 1982 to 1986 he was principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. With both orchestras, Abbado made a number of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon.

In 1989, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra elected him as their chief conductor, to succeed Herbert von Karajan, a post he held until 2002.^[3] In 2004 he returned to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic and performed Mahler's Symphony No. 6 in a series of recorded live concerts. The resulting CD won Best Orchestral Recording and Record of the Year in Gramophone Magazine's 2006 awards.^[4]

The Orchestra Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic established the Claudio Abbado Composition Prize in 2006 in his honour.^[5]

Claudio Abbado has performed and recorded a wide range of Romantic works, in particular Gustav Mahler whose symphonies he has recorded several times. He is also noted for his interpretations of modern works by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Giacomo Manzoni, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Thomas Adler, Giovanni Sollima, Roberto Carnevale, Franco Donatoni and George Benjamin.

In 1988, he founded the music festival Wien Modern, which has since expanded to include all aspects of contemporary art. This interdisciplinary festival takes place each year under his direction.

Abbado is also well known for his work with young musicians. He is founder and music director of the European Union Youth Orchestra (1978) and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (1986). He is also a frequent guest conductor with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe with whom he recorded a cycle of Franz Schubert symphonies to considerable acclaim. More recently, he has worked with the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar of Venezuela.^[6]

He was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2000 and the treatment led to the removal of a portion of his digestive system. After recovery he formed the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2003^[7] and their concerts have been highly acclaimed.^[8] Abbado is scheduled to remain as the orchestra's music director and chief conductor through 2010.^[9] He also serves as music director of the Orchestra Mozart of Bologna, Italy.

In September 2007 he announced that he was cancelling all of his forthcoming conducting engagements for the "near future" on the advice of his physicians^[10] but two months later he resumed conducting concerts with an engagement in Bologna.^[11] In July 2011, aged 78, he declared himself to be in good health.^[12]

Abbado's son is the opera director Daniele Abbado. From his relationship with the violinist Viktoria Mullova, he is the father of her oldest child, Misha.^[13] His nephew, Roberto Abbado, (the son of his brother Marcello, born 1926, who is a composer and pianist) is also a conductor.

Awards[link]

Claudio Abbado has received many awards and recognitions among which the Grand cross of the Légion d'honneur, Bundesverdienstkreuz, Imperial Prize of Japan, Mahler Medal, Khytera Prize, and honorary doctorates from the universities of Ferrara, Cambridge, Aberdeen, and Havana.

In 1973, he won the Mozart Medal awarded by Mozartgemeinde Wien,^[14] and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1994.

He has won 1997 Grammy Award in the Best Small Ensemble Performance (with or without conductor) category for "Hindemith: Kammermusik No. 1 With Finale 1921, Op. 24 No. 1" and 2005 Grammy Award in the Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance (with Orchestra) category for "Beethoven: Piano Cons. Nos. 2 & 3" performed by Martha Argerich.

In April 2012, Abbado was voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame,^[15] and in May of the same year, he was awarded the conductor prize at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards.^[16]

See also[link]

• Berlin Philharmonic
• Vienna Philharmonic
• La Scala

References[link]

External links[link]

• Claudio Abbado at Allmusic
• Claudio Abbado at Deutsche Grammophon
• Claudio Abbado at Sony BMG Masterworks
• Claudio Abbado discography
• Claudio Abbado at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by or about Claudio Abbado in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Claudio Abbado collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Claudio Abbado collected news and commentary at The New York Times

(Giuseppe) Mario Sammarco (December 13, 1868, although some sources say 1867 - January 24, 1930) was an Italian operatic baritone noted for his histrionic ability.

Biography[link]

Sammarco was born in Palermo, Sicily, and studied locally with Antonio Cantelli. He made his operatic début in Palermo as Valentine in Faust in 1888. He subsequently sang to acclaim in Milan (at La Scala, Italy's most celebrated theatre), Buenos Aires and London. Between 1904 and 1919 he appeared intermittently, in 26 different roles, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

In New York City, he was hired by Oscar Hammerstein I for his Manhattan Opera Company as a replacement for the great French singing-actor Maurice Renaud. He sang with the Manhattan company in 1908-1910, becoming its principal Italian baritone, but he never 'graduated' to the rival Metropolitan Opera.

Sammarco next joined the Chicago–Philadelphia opera company. His career there continued smoothly enough until 1913 when he encountered a disapproving Mary Garden in a Chicago production of Tosca. The soprano requested that he be replaced; but after he named some of his former distinguished (and uncomplaining) Tosca partners, notably Emmy Destinn, the performances proceeded to be given to critical success.

His final operatic appearances were at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples in 1919.

Apart from Scarpia (his debut role at Covent Garden), he was a famous Rigoletto, Marcello, Germont, Renato, Enrico and Amleto, appearing opposite some of the finest singers of his day. No bel canto specialist, he was at his best in ardent verismo works, creating the roles of Gerard in Giordano's Andrea Chénier in 1896 and Cascart in Leoncavallo's Zazà in 1900.

Sammarco was active during an era that was thronged with Italian baritones of exceptional ability. It was no small achievement for him to carve out a lucrative international career in the face of powerful competition from the likes of Mattia Battistini, Antonio Magini-Coletti, Giuseppe Campanari, Mario Ancona, Giuseppe Pacini, Antonio Scotti, Eugenio Giraldoni, Riccardo Stracciari, Titta Ruffo, Domenico Viglione-Borghesi, Pasquale Amato and Carlo Galeffi.

He taught singing after retiring from the stage and died in Milan.

Recordings[link]

Sammarco possessed a strong voice with a powerful upper register; but, on disc at least, the technical quality of his singing disappoints and the timbre of his voice can sound rough. He impresses most when delivering declamatory passages in verismo operas (see Scott, cited below). Many of the numerous 78-rpm gramophone records that he made prior to World War I for the Fonotipia, Victor and Pathé companies—and for the forerunner of HMV—are now available on CD reissues from various labels.

Sources[link]

• Celletti, Rodolfo (1964). Le Grandi Voci. Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale (Rome)
• Kutsch, K. J. and Riemens, Leo (1969). A Biographical Dictionary of Singers. Chilton Book Company (New York)
• Warrack, John and West, Ewan (1992), The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5
• Scott, Michael (1977), The Record of Singing (Volume One). Duckworth (London), 243 pages, ISBN 0-7156-1030-9