Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]
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Novaës, Guiomar(b São João da Boã Vista, São Paulo, 28 Feb 1895; d São Paulo, 7 March 1979). Brazilian pianist. One of the youngest children in a very large family, she studied with Antonietta Rudge Miller and Luigi Chiafarelli in São Paulo before being accepted as a pupil of Isidore Philipp at the Paris Conservatoire in 1909. She remained with him for two years and received a premier prix for piano in 1911, having made her orchestral début with the Châtelet Orchestra under Pierné earlier the same year. In 1915 she gave a highly successful recital at the Aeolian Hall, New York, which marked her US début, and in subsequent years she won acclaim there as one of the most spontaneous and poetic pianists of her generation. She was married in 1922 to a civil engineer, Octavio Pinto, also a pianist and composer. Novaës's career continued into the 1970s, a recital at Hunter College in 1972 marking her last New York appearance. Although she made a number of discs for Victor in the 1920s, as well as piano rolls, she was most extensively recorded by Vox in the 1950s, leaving interpretations of Chopin's F minor Concerto (with Klemperer) and Schumann's Carnaval that bear witness to an irrepressible individuality and eloquence. BIBLIOGRAPHYM.S. Orsini: Guiomar Novaës: uma arrebatudora história de amor (São Paulo, 1992) J.A. Gillespie: Notable Twentieth Century Pianists (Westport, CT, 1995) JAMES METHUEN-CAMPBELL Novák, Jan(b Nová Říše na Moravě, 8 April 1921; d New-Ulm, 17 Nov 1984). Czech composer. His musical talent was evident from childhood in his abilities in violin and piano studies, and later in his attempts at composition during his school years. After completing a classical education in Brno, he entered the Brno Conservatory in 1940 and joined Petrželka’s composition class, having previously taken a brief course with Theodor Schaefer. Forced to interrupt his conservatory studies for two and a half years during the Nazi occupation, Novák completed his course only in 1946, submitting a string quartet and the Taneční suita (‘Dance Suite’) for orchestra. He then studied briefly with Bořkovec at the Prague Academy (AMU) and in 1947 left for the USA on a study trip financed by a Ježek Foundation scholarship that he won for his Serenade for small orchestra. He completed a summer course with Copland in Tanglewood and for five months studied with Martinů in New York. On 25 February 1948, the date of the communist takeover in former Czechoslovakia, Novák returned home and settled in Brno, where he would earn his living from composition. In 1963 he was one of the founders of ‘Toůrčí skupina A’ (Creative Group A) or ‘Parasiti Apollonis’, which brought together Brno theoreticians and composers united by a common view of the role of contemporary music and an interest in new compositional techniques. His liberal views and uncompromising attitude, however, brought him into conflict with the communist authorities; he was discriminated against in a number of ways and in 1961 he was expelled from the Union of Czechoslovak Composers. It was partly this that made him leave Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion of 1968. With his family he lived in exile in Denmark, in Italy (1970–77) and finally in the Federal German Republic. He is buried in Rovereto, Italy. Even Novák’s student compositions display an acute musicianship which, when disciplined by a growing technical mastery, placed him among the most talented representatives of the young postwar generation. His early works received concert and broadcast performances. The Dance Suite contains a number of characteristic traits: clear construction, transparent orchestration and a feeling for clearcut rhythms. These elements were strengthened still more by his studies with Martinů, with whom Novák formed a close personal and artistic friendship. The late 1940s and the early 50s saw the composition of a number of chamber and piano works which Novák later suppressed. One exception was his song cycle Carmina sulamitis (1947) on the Latin text of the Song of Songs, which also demonstrates his exceptional sensitivity to the voice. His aim, fully realized in this cycle, was to create a vocal style which would be clearly intelligible, unsentimental in quality, but also eminently singable. The alternation of long melismas, supported by the pulsing rhythms of the orchestra, with declamatory passages allows the singer to show off all aspects of her voice. In this early phase, this successful song cycle remained however an isolated experiment. Novák concentrated on chamber pieces and concertos, among which the first representative work is the Oboe Concerto (1952), a composition of neo-classical formal clarity which exploits the virtuoso possibilities of the solo instrument. These elements can be seen as a legacy from Czech music of the 17th and 18th centuries. The work’s sense of humour, its musical wit and playfulness, reflect Novák’s basically optimistic character. The Oboe Concerto was followed by the Concerto for two pianos and orchestra (1955). At its first performance the composer played in the duo part with his wife Eliška, a graduate of the Brno Conservatory; the Nováks often appeared in piano duet recitals. The enthusiastic reception of the concerto by the Brno audience was in sharp contrast to official reaction, which branded Novák’s style as foreign to the spirit of Czech music. With uncompromising obstinacy Novák in the early 1950s defended his right to his own, modern-orientated path. His music upset the arbiters of the dogmatic, aesthetic norms; his wit and humour were often taken as ridicule, cynicism and deliberate provocation. Novák’s talent was established beyond dispute by his composition for nonet, entitled Baletti à 9, in which he again demonstrated his sense for rhythm and for timbre combinations, timbre being treated as an essential element of the music. The composition, which brought a new dimension and a folklike tunefulness to what were essentially dance forms, preserved, like all Novák’s works of the period, a basically tonal character. With the ballet Svatební košile (‘The Spectre’s Bride’), composed in 1954 on the subject of the ballad by Karel Jaromír Erben, Novák came into contact with the theatre for the first time. Nevertheless, the ballet demonstrated a sophisticated dramatic flair, and it was followed by incidental music for many plays and films. The climax of this activity came in 1965 with the Brno première of Komedie o umučení a slavném vzkříšení Pána a spasitele našeho Ježíše Krista (‘Play of the Passion and Glorious Resurrection of the Lord Our Saviour Jesus Christ’), in which Jan Kopecký’s adaptation of the folk Passion play was in close sympathy with Novák’s musical conception of the subject. Novák’s first creative period, characterized by Martinů’s obvious influence, began with his piano Variace na téma Bohuslava Martinů (1949) and closed with the orchestral version of ten years later. These seven variations and double fugue on an 11-bar theme from the closing section of Martinů’s Field Mass are proof of the technical mastery of form and instrumentation that Novák had achieved by this time: he had proved himself a composer of rich invention with a wide range of expression. A new creative period began with the Capriccio for cello and orchestra (1958), a virtuoso concerto work making striking use of jazz elements. In the middle movement, ‘Circulus vicioso’, he first employed a 12-note series as thematic material. He also used 12-note techniques in the lyrical Dulces cantilenae (1961), in which he returned for his text to the Song of Songs, this time in a different Latin version by the Czech humanist Campanus Vodňanský. The use of dodecaphony did not however mean a basic change of attitude towards form. As is shown by the composer’s gently ironic introduction to these songs and to the following work, Passer Catulli (1962), he saw these compositional techniques as a musical game. During the 1960s the strength of tonality in Novák’s work gradually diminished. Most of Novák’s works from this period are settings of the composer’s own Latin texts, the Latin of medieval codices or classical Latin. The rhythm of the Latin hexameter became an ostinato motif in the large-scale oratorio Dido (1967) for mezzo, speaker, male choir and orchestra. This three-part work brought together Novák’s dramatic flair, his individual vocal style and his predilection for the Latin language. Other scores using unusual Latin texts include Apicius modulatus (1971), a humorous piece based on the cookbook by Apicius, and the opera Dulcitius (1974), based on a miracle play by Roswitha von Gandersheim. For his basic rhythmic material Novák drew increasingly on the verses of Virgil during this final period. An analytical study of Latin texts, their metres, lengths of syllables and the intonation of correctly declaimed Latin informed the rhythm of his music and its melodic outline also, particularly in works such as Odarum contentus (1973). Through this most universal of languages Novák succeeded in creating a highly individual musical expression. WORKS(selective list) dramatic
vocal
instrumental
BIBLIOGRAPHYP. Blatný: ‘Baletti à 9 Jana Nováka’, HRo, ix (1956), 971–4 P. Blatný: ‘Koncert pro dva klavíry a orchestr Jana Nováka’, HRo, x (1957), 491–4 J. Trojan: ‘Tvůrčí profil Jana Nováka’ [Profile of Novák as a creative artist], HRo, xvii (1964), 822–5 J. Fukač: ‘Jana Nováka pokus o slavné vzkříšení hudebního divadla’ [Novák’s attempt at the glorious resurrection of music theatre], HRo, xix (1966), 16 only A. Piňos: ‘Návrat Jana Nováka’ [The Return of Novák], HRo, xliii (1990), 272–6 A. Němcová: ‘Prohibited Czech Music: Jan Novák’, Music News from Prague (1991), nos.5–6, pp.2–5 A. Němcová: ‘Jana Nováka cesta domů’ [Novák’s way home], OM, xxiii (1991), 13–20 A. Němcová: ‘Vítězslava Kaprálová a Jan Novák: dva moravští žáci Bohuslava Martinů’ [Kaprálová and Novák: two Moravian pupils of Martinů], OM, xxiii (1991), 190–93 ALENA NĚMCOVÁ Yüklə 10,2 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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