Benjamin Britten’s centenary is Friday, and while WQXR gives you five ways to celebrate, NPR.org reminds us that the composer spent time in Brooklyn and gives us a Britten cheat sheet.

In his home country, the Guardian has been streaming performances all week from Aldeburgh Music, the festival that Britten founded. 

If you like Wes Anderson, you probably know Britten. Moonrise Kingdom featured a lot of Britten’s music, as Russell Platt of the New Yorker discussed, including the second movemenbt of Simple Symphony (start below around 3:20):

Pointing out the lack of attention paid to Debussy’s 150th birthday (which is today), Anthony Tommasini thinks we take him for granted:

We like to think we know and admire Debussy. Ah, Debussy the great Impressionist! For painting there is Monet. For music, Debussy. “La Mer,” how gorgeous. There are the inventive piano pieces, with their watery textures and evocative titles like “Estampes” and “Images.” And of coures the diaphanous orchestral beauties of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun.” 

Pierre-Laurant Aimard, who has a recording of Debussy’s Preludes coming out in October, thinks we don’t really know him at all–and probably never will:

We don’t always know what it (Debussy’s music) is about …. because things are mixed, they are also not completely said. Things remain hidden.

Case in point for Aimard is Jeux:

Debussy wrote Jeux on commission from the Ballets Russes; audiences didn’t take to Nijinsky’s choreography at its premiere in 1913, and the music even today can be daunting. As Aimard puts it, “we can’t find any more rules in terms of orchestration, of form, of harmony, of music-making.”

There’s a particular moment in the opening of the piece where Debussy repeats a short gesture three times. It’s done with such unexpected suddenness, that at first you think it must be a mistake in the recording (like a record skipping). Hearing it live for the first time, in 1913, must have been completely disorienting.

For Tommasini, Debussy’s innovation was in downplaying the role of pulse, in writing “whole stretches of static music.” With its twists and turns, Jeux shows that what’s really special about Debussy is not that his music stops time, but that it moves us through it in so many novel, mind-blowing ways.

Back in 1999, the Rochester Academy of Medicine commissioned Lorenzo Palomo to write a piece commemorating its centennial. The result was Andalusian Divertimento, which Rebecca Pennys and herNew Arts Trio performed at the 2001 anniversary celebration:

Through this project, the Spanish composer met Sid Sobel, a Flower City oncologist with a particular passion for The Sneetches. They hit it off, and Sobel proposed another commission, this one to set his favorite Seuss story to music.

Tomorrow, the Oberlin Orchestra gives the world premiere of Palomo’s Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches, fulfilling Sobel’s dream of using a new medium to convey the story’s message of tolerance, and showcasing Palomo’s flair for orchestral writing.

Unlike so much of Palomo’s other music, Sneetches has little of that characteristic (some might say stereotypical) Spanish sound; it does, however, have a strong enough rhythmic flow to move the story along, and lots of catchy melodic hooks to complement the recitation of the story (it’s a melodrama).

Sneetches makes its way to Rochester on May 5 and 6 when the RPO and Arild Remmereit perform it with John de Lancie. Everyone at work knows de Lancie as Q, but I’ll remember him as the air traffic controller on Breaking Bad. I really don’t like Star Trek.

Her husband gets more attention today, but back in the 19th century Clara Schumann (1819-1896) was the star in the family.

With a performance career spanning six decades (she made her solo debut in Leipzig at the age of 11), Clara was Germany’s reigning “Queen of Pianists” throughout most of the 1800s. Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn dedicated works to her, and no less a cultural kingpin than Goethe was an enraptured fan of her playing.

She also served as Brahms’s confidant, musical adviser, and muse from the time they met in 1850, when Brahms was an up-and-coming twenty-year-old, until her death.

She was a first-rate composer, although she was personally insecure about her skill at writing music. Clara’s most popular piece during her lifetime was the Piano Trio, which she wrote in 1846. Only months later, her husband completed his inaugural work in the genre, and she often paired the pieces in concert. Here’s the last movement, which includes a fugato section much admired by Mendelssohn:

Berio’s Italian, but he has some strong connections to the US and New York City in particular. He wrote Sinfonia for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic in 1968. This was no commission to an out-of-towner: Berio had been teaching at Juilliard since 1964, and before taking the Juilliard job he had taught at Mills College in Oakland for two full school years. He studied at Tanglewood in 1952 with Luigi Dallapiccola and then returned as an instructor in 1960.

As the second movement of Sinfonia, Berio included a version of his 1967 piece O King, an elegiac tribute Martin Luther King, Jr.

Originally scored for a small ensemble and one singer, O King (here in its symphonic arrangement) projects the individual syllables of the phrase “O Martin Luther King” into the surrounding musical landscape; gradually they coalesce to sound out the slain civil-rights leader’s name at the end of the piece.

Even if you can’t hear this, it’s a beautiful, powerful piece. And for all its avant-garde pretensions, it’s general form–slow and steady progress toward a definite endpoint–is pretty conventional.

I recently posted a note on the Carnegie Hall blog about Mozart’s Zaide, which in the version that Ensemble ACJW is performing on Thursday really isn’t Mozart’s at all. Throughout the unfinished singpspiel is music that Luciano Berio (1925-2003) wrote back in 1995: the show starts and ends with it; it interrupts the action at two points during of the opera. Whether you like it or not, Berio’s music asserts itself and–as a recurring comment on the action–hijacks the event.

Berio showed a penchant throughout his career for this kind of appropriation, and people who know his music will compare the Zaide music to the third movement of Sinfonia (1968).

Spoken texts from Beckett’s The Unnamable–and Berio’s own writings–uncomfortably intermingle with Mahler’s scherzo movement from the Second Symphony, and quotations of Schoenberg and Debussy (for example). Here, things are not cut and dry: although Mahler is the clear focus, all the borrowed material works together–and gets worked upon. Nothing appears whole and unmolested, as it does in the Zaide commentary.

Although Berio was Italian, he had strong connections to New York and the US (click here for more).