There are not too many composers who were called ‘prodigy composers’ and those that we know most often lived many centuries ago. Let’s admit it – the number of outstanding musicians, and I mean REALLY outstanding whose genius can be put in the same line as Mozart’s, is way lower than it used to be in, let’s say, Baroque period. It’s not at all about blaming the nature or announcing the talentless-ness of the younger generation but is rather an attempt to fix on those prodigies that we still have a chance to encounter.
One of such remarkably noticeable figures in music composition is Ernst Levy (1895-1981), the pride of Swiss music heritage. He was not just a composer with style but with a style that musicologists still can’t relate to any of the existing schools – so unique it is. Ernst Levy was also an extended pianist and pedagogue who taught both in his mother country and in the United States. He publicly performed his first piece – D major Concert by Handel – at the early age of 6. Levy strongly believed in the viability of tonality unlike most of his contemporaries who stuck to dodecaphony. His music heritage includes about 460 works, among them 15 symphonies and numerous choral and chamber pieces.
If earlier all these precious manuscripts could be found only in the library of Basel University, now they accessible for the wide public all over the world. The full collection of Ernst Levy sheet music has been digitized with the help of his son Frank Ezra Levy (who is an acknowledged composer and cellist himself) and put online for people to enjoy.
Aaand here’s one of my favorite performances by Mr. Levy: Brahms’ Intermezzo in master’s curious interpretation.
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