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Nikos Skalkottas (Greek: Nίκος Σκαλκώτας) (21 March 1904 – 19 September 1949) was one of the most important Greek composers of 20th-century classical music. A member of the Second Viennese School, he drew his influences from both the classical repertoire and the Greek tradition.

Biography[link]

Commemorative plate in Berlin.

Skalkottas was born in Chalcis on the island of Euboea, to a poor family said to have been folk musicians and marble carvers.^{[weasel words]} He started violin lessons with his father and uncle Kostas Skalkottas at the age of five, three years after his family moved to Athens because Kostas had lost the post of town bandmaster in 1906 due to political and legal intrigues (Thornley 2001). He continued studying violin with Tony Schulze at the Athens Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1920 with a diploma of high distinction.The following year a scholarship from the Averoff Foundation enabled him to study abroad.^{[citation needed]} From 1921 to 1933 he lived in Berlin, where he first took violin lessons at the Prussian Academy of Arts with Willy Hess (Thornley 2001). Deciding in 1923 to give up his career as a violinist and become a composer, he studied composition with Robert Kahn, Paul Juon, Kurt Weill and Philipp Jarnach.^{[citation needed]} Between 1927 and 1932 he was a member of Arnold Schoenberg's Masterclass in Composition at the Academy of Arts (Thornley 2001), where his fellow pupils included Marc Blitzstein, Roberto Gerhard and Norbert von Hannenheim.^{[citation needed]} Skalkottas had been living for several years with the violinist Matla Temko (Thornley 2001); they had two children, though only the second, a daughter, survived infancy,^{[citation needed]} and the end of their relationship increased his already-present feelings of self-doubt and insecurity (Thornley 2001). In 1930 Skalkottas devoted considerable effort to having some of his works performed in Athens, but they were met with incomprehension, and even in Berlin his few performances did not make much better headway. In 1931 he seems to have had a personal and artistic crisis: his relationship with Temko came to an end and he is also reported to have fallen out with Schoenberg, though the nature of their disagreement is unclear and Schoenberg continued to rate him highly as a composer.^{[citation needed]} In any event Skalkottas seems to have composed nothing for at least two years.

In March 1933 he was forced by poverty and debt to return to Athens, intending to stay a few months and then return to Berlin. However, he suffered a nervous breakdown and his passport was confiscated by the Greek authorities (Thornley 2001) (apparently because he had never done military service)^{[citation needed]} and in fact remained in Greece for the rest of his life. Among the various possessions he left behind were a large number of manuscripts; many of these were then lost or destroyed (although some were found in a secondhand bookshop in 1954).^{[citation needed]} According to another account, his manuscripts were sold by his German landlady shortly after he left Berlin (Thornley 2001). In Athens Skalkottas sought other means of funding through scholarships or paid work as an orchestral player, but he was quickly disillusioned with the state of musical affairs in Athens at the time. Until his death he earned a living as a back-desk violinist in the Athens Conservatory, Radio and Opera orchestras. In the mid-1930s he worked at the Folk Music Archive in Athens, and did transcriptions of Greek folk songs into western-music scores for the musicologist Melpo Merlier.

As a composer he worked alone, but wrote prolifically, mainly in his very personal post-Schoenbergian idiom that had little chance of being comprehended by the Greek musical establishment. He did secure some performances, especially of some of the Greek Dances and a few of his more tonal works, but the vast bulk of his music went unheard. During the German occupation of Greece he was placed in an internment camp for some months. In 1946 he married the pianist Maria Pangali; they had two sons. In 1949, at the age of 45 and shortly before the birth of his second son, he died of what appears to have been the rupture of a neglected common hernia, leaving some symphonic works with incomplete orchestration, and many completed works that were given posthumous premieres.

Music[link]

Skalkottas' early works, most of which he wrote in Berlin, are lost, as are some of those written in Athens. The earliest of his works available to us today date from 1922–24; these are piano compositions as well as the orchestration of Cretan Feast by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Among the works written in Berlin are the sonata for solo violin, several works for piano, chamber music and some symphonic works. Although during the period 1931-1934 Skalkottas did not compose anything, he resumed composing in Athens and continued until his death. His output comprised symphonic works (36 Greek Dances, the symphonic overture The Return of Ulysses, the fairy drama Mayday Spell, the Second Symphonic Suite, the ballet The Maiden and Death, works for wind orchestra and several concertos), chamber, vocal and instrumental works including the huge cycle of 32 Piano Pieces.

Besides his musical work, Skalkottas compiled an important theoretical work, consisting of several "musical articles", a Treatise on Orchestration, musical analyses, etc. Skalkottas soon shaped his personal features of musical writing so that any influence of his teachers was soon assimilated creatively in a manner of composition that is absolutely personal and recognizable.

Skalkottas's short life seems to symbolise the special vulnerability of the Schoenberg pupil whose musical roots lay a little outside Austro-Germanic traditions. Throughout his career Skalkottas remained faithful to the neo-classical ideals of Neue Sachlichkeit and 'absolute music' proclaimed in Europe in the 1925. Already in Berlin he was taking an interest in jazz and at the same time developing a very personal form of the twelve-note method, making use of not one but several tone-rows in a work and organizing these rows to define different thematic and harmonic areas. (For example, the Largo Sinfonico employs no less than 16 twelve-tone rows.) Like Schoenberg, he persistently cultivated classical forms (such as sonata, variations, suite), but his worklist is divided between atonal, twelve-tone and tonal works, all three categories spanning his entire composing career. Such apparent heterogeneity could have been intensified by a love of Greek folk music. The most striking example of his commitment to Greek folk music is the series of 36 Greek Dances composed for orchestra between 1931 and 1936, arranged for various different ensembles in the ensuing years and in part radically reorchestrated in 1948-49. About two-thirds of these dances are based on genuine Greek folk themes from different parts of the Greek mainland and islands, but the other third use material of Skalkottas's own composition in folk style.

Nevertheless, he remained sceptical of the attempts of his Greek contemporaries to integrate folk music into the modern symphonic style, and only juxtaposed and mixed folk, atonal and 12-note styles in a few works such as the incidental music to Christos Evelpides's 1943 fairy-tale drama Mayday Spell. Skalkottas was evidently reluctant to deploy the kind of structural and stylistic tensions that would have betrayed the integrationist ideals of his Schoenbergian inheritance. This could be seen (in terms of a comprehensive connecting impulse) as a link between the Second Viennese, Busoni, Stravinsky and Bartókian schools. Around 1945 he seems to have reappraised his aesthetic direction to some extent and written several works in a more conventionally tonal idiom - many of these have key signatures, for instance. Yet the general level of dissonance is not significantly lessened. Skalkottas was able to draw diverse and in some ways conflicting threads together and not to compromise, rather to enhance, his own originality, range and power of expression.

Posthumous reputation[link]

It was only after his death that Skalkottas' music began to be played, published or critically estimated to a great extent, partly due to the efforts of friends and disciples such as John G. Papaioannou.

In 1988 a short documentary (60 mins) about his life and work was filmed with funding from the local authorities of Skalkottas' birthplace (the isle of Euboea) as well as the Greek Ministry of Culture.

In recent years,^[when?] the Swedish record label BIS records has been recording and releasing his works on CD and SACD.

Partial list of works[link]

Orchestral Works[link]

• Symphonic Suite No. 1 (1929)
• 36 Greek Dances (1931–36; new orchestrations of many dances made 1949, and individual numbers arranged for other ensembles – see e.g. String Orchestra)
• Overture (often called Symphony) The Return of Ulysses (c.1942)
• Symphonic Suite No. 2 (1944-6; 1949; orchestration unfinished; the movements listed have been performed as separate works)
  • 1. Overtüre Concertante
  • 4. Largo Sinfonico
  • 5. Tema con variazioni (orchestration unfinished)
• Classical Symphony for wind orchestra (1947)
• Ancient Greek March (1947) (not orchestrated)
• Four Images (1948; orchestrated from movements of ballet The Land and sea of Greece)
• Sinfonietta in B flat minor (1948-9)
• Greek Dance in C minor (1949? – unrelated to the 36 Greek Dances)

Concertos[link]

• Concerto Grosso for wind orchestra (1928–31) (lost)
• Concerto for violin, piano and chamber orchestra (1930)
• Piano Concerto No.1 (1931)
• Concertino for 2 pianos and orchestra (1935)
• Piano Concerto No.2 (1937)
• Violin Concerto (1938)
• Cello Concerto (1938) (lost)
• Piano Concerto No.3 (for piano and 10 wind instruments) (1939)
• Concerto for violin, viola and large wind orchestra (1940–42)
• Double Bass Concerto (1942)
• Concerto for 2 violins (1944-5) (not orchestrated)
• Piano Concertino (1948-9)
• Nocturne-Divertimento for xylophone and orchestra (1949)

Ballets[link]

• The Maiden and Death (1938, revised 1946)
• The Gnomes (1939) (partly based on piano pieces by Bartok and Stravinsky)
• Island Images, ballet suite (1943) (not orchestrated)
• The Beauty with the Rose (1946)
• The Land and the Sea of Greece (1947-8) (not orchestrated except first four movements as Four Images)
• The Sea (1948–49)

String Orchestra[link]

• 3 Greek Dances (1936)
• 7 Greek Dances (1936)
• 10 Sketches (c.1940)
• Little Suite for strings (1942)

Incidental Music[link]

• Mayday Spell, a Fairy Drama for soprano, speakers and orchestra (1944; 1949)
• Henry V, incidental music for Athens Radio (1947-8)

Chamber Music[link]

• Sonata for solo violin (1925)
• String Quartet (1926) (lost)
• String Trio (1926) (lost)
• String Quartet No.1 (1928)
• Sonatina No.1 for violin and piano (1929) (partly lost)
• Sonatina No.2 for violin and piano (1929)
• String Quartet No.2 (1929–30) (lost)
• Easy Music for string quartet (c.1930) (lost)
• Octet (1931)
• String Trio No. 2 (1935)
• Sonatina No.3 for violin and piano (1935)
• Sonatina No.4 for violin and piano (1935)
• String Quartet No.3 (1935)
• Piano Trio (1936)
• Little Chorale and Fugue for violin and piano (c.1936)
• March of the Little Soldiers for violin and piano (c.1936)
• Nocturne for violin and piano (c.1937)
• Rondo for violin and piano (c. 1937)
• 8 Variations on a Greek Folk Tune for piano trio (1938)
• Gavotte for violin and piano (1939)
• Concertino for Oboe and Piano (1939)
• Scherzo for violin, viola, cello and piano (1936–40)
• Scherzo for violin and piano (c.1940)
• Largo for cello and piano (c.1940)
• Menuetto Cantato for violin and piano (c.1940)
• 10 Sketches for string quartet (or string orchestra) (c. 1940)
• String Quartet No.4 (1940)
• Duo for violin and viola (1939–42)
• Quartet for oboe, trumpet, bassoon and piano (1940-3)
• Concertino for trumpet and piano (1940-3)
• Tango and Foxtrot, for oboe, trumpet, bassoon and piano (1940-3)
• Sonata for violin and piano (1940-3)
• Sonata Concertante for bassoon and piano (1943)
• Petite Suite No.1 for violin and piano (1946)
• Petite Suite No.2 for violin and piano (1946)
• Duo for violin and cello (1947)
• 3 Greek Folksong arrangements for cello and piano (c. 1942-48)
• Bolero for cello and piano (1948-9)
• Tender Melody for cello and piano (1948-9)
• Serenata for cello and piano (1948-9)
• Sonatina for cello and piano (1949)
• Gero Dimos for string quartet (1949)

Vocal Music[link]

• Choral work (R. Stein) on the Unknown Soldier (1930) (lost)
• Doe for voice and piano (1931)
• 16 Melodies for mezzo-soprano and piano (1941) (texts by Hrissos Esperas)

Piano Music[link]

• Greek Suite (1924-5)
• 15 Little Variations (1927)
• Sonatina (1927)
• Suite No.1 (1936)
• 32 Piano Pieces (1940)
• 4 Etudes (1941)
• Suite No.2 (1941)
• Suite No.3 (1941)
• Suite No.4 (1941)
• Berceuse (1941)
• Echo (1946)
• Procession to Acheron (c.1948)

References[link]

• Keller, Hans: 'Nikos Skalkottas: An Original Genius', in The Listener, no. 52/134, 9 December 1954, p. 1041
• Thornley, John. 2001. "Skalkottas, Nikos [Nikolaos]". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.

External links[link]

• The Friends of Nikos Skalkottas`s Music Society, official site (webarchive from 3 July 2010, accessed 25 April 2012)
• Feinberg-Skalkottas Society
• article in Greek newspaper, Ta Nea (Greek)
• Free scores by Nikos Skalkottas at the International Music Score Library Project

Dimitri Mitropoulos (Greek: Δημήτρης Μητρόπουλος) (1 March [O.S. 18 February] 1896^[1] – 2 November 1960), was a Greek conductor, pianist, and composer. He received international fame, in the classical music world, both as a major conductor and composer of the 20th century. Also known as Dimitris Mitropoulos.

Life and career[link]

Dimitris Mitropoulos Bust, Athens

Mitropoulos was born in Athens, the son of Yannis (John) and Angelikē (Angelica) Mitropoulos. His father owned a leather goods shop at 15, St. Mark Street, in downtown Athens. He was musically precocious, demonstrating his abilities at an early age. From the ages of eleven to fourteen, when Mitropoulos was in secondary school, he would host and preside over informal musical gatherings at his house every Saturday afternoon. His earliest acknowledged composition - a sonata for violin and piano, now lost - dates from this period.

He studied music at the Athens Conservatoire as well as in Brussels and Berlin, with Ferruccio Busoni among his teachers. From 1921 to 1925 he assisted Erich Kleiber at the Berlin State Opera and then took a number of posts in Greece. At a 1930 concert with the Berlin Philharmonic, he played the solo part of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 and conducted the orchestra from the keyboard, becoming one of the first modern musicians to do so.

United States[link]

Mitropoulos made his U.S. debut in 1936 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and he later settled in the country, becoming a citizen in 1946. From 1937 to 1949 he served as principal conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (forerunner of today's Minnesota Orchestra).

In 1949 Mitropoulos began his association with the New York Philharmonic, the peak of his orchestral career. He was initially co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski and became the sole music director in 1951. Mitropoulos recorded extensively with the Philharmonic for Columbia Records and sought to reach new audiences in the city through appearances on television and by conducting a week of performances at the Roxy Theatre, a popular movie theatre. Mitropoulos expanded the Philharmonic's repertoire, commissioning works by new composers and championing the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. In 1958, he was succeeded as the Philharmonic's conductor by a protégé, Leonard Bernstein. In January 1960, he guest conducted the Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler's fifth symphony, which was recorded.

Work in Opera[link]

In addition to his orchestral career, Mitropoulos was an equally important force in the operatic repertoire. He conducted opera extensively in Italy and from 1954 until his death in 1960 was the principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, although the Met did not officially use that title at the time. His musically incisive and dramatically vivid performances of Puccini, Verdi, Richard Strauss and others remain models of the opera conductor's art. The Met's extensive archive of recorded broadcasts preserves many of these fine performances.

Mitropoulos's series of recordings for Columbia Records with the New York Philharmonic included a rare complete performance of Alban Berg's Wozzeck. Many of these have been reissued by Sony Classics on CD, including most recently his stereo recordings of excerpts from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. For RCA he recorded with the Minneapolis Symphony during the 78-rpm era. He was also represented on the Cetra label, most notably with an early recording of Richard Strauss's Elektra.

Mitropoulos premiered many contemporary works. The interpretation of Cemal Reşit Rey's Concerto chromatique with Orchestre de Paris is one of them.

He was noted for having a photographic memory (which enabled him to conduct without a score, even during rehearsals) and for his monk-like life style due to his deeply religious, Greek Orthodox beliefs.

Mitropoulos never married. He was "quietly known to be homosexual" and "felt no need for a cosmetic marriage".^[2] Among his relationships reportedly was one with Leonard Bernstein.^[3]

He died in Milan, Italy at the age of 64 of heart failure, while rehearsing Gustav Mahler's 3rd Symphony. One of his very last recorded performances was Verdi's La forza del destino with Giuseppe Di Stefano, Antonietta Stella and Ettore Bastianini at Vienna on 23 September 1960. A recording exists of the performance of Mahler's 3rd Symphony given by Mitropoulos with the Cologne Radio Symphony on 31 October 1960, just two days before his death.

Impact on the music profession[link]

Mitropoulos was noted as a champion of modern music, such as that by the members of the Second Viennese School. He wrote a number of pieces for orchestra and solo works for piano, and also arranged some of Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works for orchestra. In addition he was very influential in encouraging Leonard Bernstein's interest in conducting performances of Mahler's symphonic works. He also premiered and recorded a piano concerto of Ernst Krenek as soloist (available on CD), and works by composers in the U.S. such as Roger Sessions and Peter Mennin. In 1952 he commissioned American composer Philip Bezanson to write a piano concerto, which he premiered the following year. His compositions include a piano sonata, the opera "Soeur Béatrice" (1918), and other works.

References[link]

Ambrose King Yeo-chi, SBS, JP (Chinese: 金耀基; born 14 February 1935) is a Hong Kong sociologist, educator, writer and academician. He was formerly vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

Personal life[link]

Ambrose King received most of his education in Taiwan. He graduated from Taipei Municipal Chenggong Senior High School, earned a B.A from National Taiwan University and M.A. degree in political studies from National Chengchi University. Then he went to the United States and earned his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1970.

Career[link]

After earning his PhD, he joined the Department of Sociology of CUHK in 1970. In 1974, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer, in 1979 to Reader and in 1983 Professor of Sociology in CUHK. From 1977 to 1985, he served as Head of New Asia College and in 1989 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the university before succeeding Arthur Li. In 2002 he was appointed Vice-Chancellor of CUHK, and retired in 2004. He is now a Professor of Sociology in the CUHK, teaching the course Individual and Society.

King has written essays; Cambridge Musings (1977), Heidelberg Musings (1986) and Ever in my Heart (2005). He is also a calligrapher.

Research focus and contributions[link]

His research interest are modernization and modernity of China, and the role of tradition in social-cultural transformation. He employed the theoretical framework of Max Weber to study the development of Chinese culture in the process of modernization. He also tried to measure the costs and benefits of modernization after the break-down of the old Chinese dynastic orders and clan systems in the late 19th century.

He wrote theses on Hong Kong society, including The Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong (1975), Social Life and Development in Hong Kong (1985), The Special Character of Hong Kong’s Polity and its Democratic Prospects (1987), One Country, Two Systems: An Idea on Trial (1995), and Hong Kong: A City with the Most Traits of Modernity in Chinese Societies (2000). He held that in order to understand Hong Kong, one cannot overlook two important threads, namely, colonial rule and capitalism. He is famous for the administrative absorption politics model (行政吸納政治) he introduced in 1975.

When he visited Cambridge University in 1975, he wrote his first essay on university education, entitled Two Cultures and Technological Humanism.

In 1983 he published The Idea of a University, a work that was the fruit of many years of reflection and study. In 1994, he was elected a Fellow of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and in the following years he has been honoured by many universities.

Selected works[link]

• The Idea of University (大學之理念), 2001, London: Oxford University Press
• Chinese Politics and Culture (中國政治與文化), 1997, London: Oxford University Press
• State Confucianism and Its Transformation: The Restructuring of the State-Society Relation in Taiwan and The Transformation of Confucianism in the Post-Confucian Era: The Emergence of Rationalistic Traditionalism in Hong Kong
  "Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity", 1996, edited by Tu Wei-ming. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
• Chinese Society and Culture (中國社會與文化), 1992, London: Oxford University Press
• From Traditional to Modernised (從傳統到現代), 1992, London: Oxford University Press
• Administrative Absorption of Politics in Hong Kong: Emphasis on the Grass Roots Level, Asian Survey, Vol. 15, No. 5 (May, 1975), pp. 422-439, University of California Press

Award[link]

• Silver Bauhinia Star (1998)

See also[link]

• Chinese University of Hong Kong

References[link]

• Department of Sociology, CUHK website
• Conferment of the Degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa to Prof. Ambrose King Yeo-chi
• Professor Ambrose King Yeo-chi

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