Saturday, May 4, 2024

VIOLINIST OLGA RUDGE : CONTEMPORARY VIOLINISTS and THE NEW MUSIC EXPERIMENTS OF PARIS IN THE 1920's : OLGA RUDGE, EZRA POUND.

Alas!  Research Ezra and much comes up.  Olga  - not so much.  But musical compositions that she did play as a violinist in Paris do come up, and this series from Arizona State University circa 2015 in which violinist Hannah Leland did her final performance as a Doctoral Candidate, is exciting. Aimee Fincher is the pianist.  According to the information about this video, George Antheil wrote three sonatas between 1923 and 1924 as commissioned by Ezra Pound for Olga Rudge to perform. Here is the musical innovations that happened a hundred years ago.  (On another such video it says that Ezra played drums on a composition that Olga also played on.)


From the book by Anne Conover Carson :  pages 6-7 (circa 1923)   Ezra soon introduced Olga to Margaret Anderson's protege, George Antheil, a young pianist and composer from New Jersey who had arrived in Paris to attend the premier of Igor Stravinsky's  Les Noces on June 13.  With his Romanian belle amie Boski Marcus, he took rooms above Sylvia Beach's landmark Left Bank bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Short and slight, with clipped blond bangs that made him look even younger than his twenty-three years, Antheil met avant-garde composer Erik Satie and "that Mephistophelian red-bearded gent, Ezra Pound," at a tea honoring Anderson and the actress Georgette Leblanc.

Ezra began to take Antheil to Olga's flat to practice. ....  Antheil soon set to composing a violin sonata for Olga, determined to make the music, he wrote for Ezra, "as wildly strange as she looked, tailored to her special appearance and technique.  It is wild, the fiddle of the Tziganes ...totally new written music...barbaric, But I think Olga will like it... it gives her more to do ad show off with than other sonata.

... The Antheil-Rudge collaboration at Olga's flat continued on an almost daily schedule in the all.  Antheil praised Olga's mastery of the violin:"I noticed when we commenced playing a Mozart sonata ...  (she) was the consummate violinists.... I have heard none with the superb lower register of the D and G strings that was Olga's exclusively."  On October 4 at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the three short Antheil sonatas that premiered as the curtain raiser fr opening night of the Ballet Suedois became the most controversial musical event of the season.  A corespondent of the New York Herald compared the evening the the premier of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printempts: "a riot of enormous dimensions occurred when George Antheil... played several piano compositions... Antheil is a new force in music ... of a sharper and more breath-taking order that Stravinsky."

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