Alexandre Tansman
On January 8, 1919, Tansman won the first composers' competition held in independent Poland, and gave a series of concerts at the Warsaw Philharmonic in the following months.
In the fall of 1919, encouraged by his mentors Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Henryk Melcer-Szczawinski and Zdzisław Birnbaum, Tansman decided to continue his musical career in Paris.
In Paris, his musical ideas were appreciated, influenced and favoured by composers Maurice Ravel, Albert Roussel, Jacques Ibert, Igor Stravinsky, musicologists and critics Émile Vuillermoz, Boris de Schloezer, Alexis Roland-Manuel, Arthur Hoérée, conductors André Caplet, Gaston Poulet, Vladimir Golschmann.
He was also one of the most respected members of the international music group École de Paris, along with Bohuslav Martinů, Tibor Harsányi, Alexander Tcherepnin, Marcel Mihalovici, Conrad Beck.
[6] From the 1920s Tansman's rise to fame was meteoric, with works conducted and championed by such world-famous baton masters as Arturo Toscanini, Tullio Serafin, Willem Mengelberg, Walter Damrosch, Sir Henry Wood, Serge Koussevitzky, Pierre Monteux, Otto Klemperer, Rhené-Baton, Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, Walther Straram, Hermann Abendroth, Leopold Stokowski, Erich Kleiber, Sir Adrian Boult, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Frederick Stock, Eugene Ormandy.
Tansman's works started to be frequently performed in programs with pieces by Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky and Gian Francesco Malipiero on the one hand, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Carl Maria von Weber and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov on the other.
[2] In 1932–1933, Tansman made an unprecedented artistic tour around the world – starting with the United States, through Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Ceylon, India and Egypt, to Italy.
[6][11] As Marcel Mihalovici noted, Tansman was one of the most prominent contemporary representatives of the centuries-old tradition of École de Paris: "This included musicians at Notre-Dame Cathedral during the Renaissance, and later Lully, Mozart, and Wagner.
In 1941 he could join there the circle of famous emigrated artists and intellectuals that included Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Alma Mahler, Franz Werfel, Emil Ludwig, Aldous Huxley, Lion Feuchtwanger, Man Ray, Eugène Berman, Jean Renoir.
[11][13] During his American years Tansman toured extensively as pianist and conductor and wrote a wealth of music, e.g. three symphonies, two quartets, works for piano.
In 1944 he accepted Nathaniel Shilkret's invitation to co-create Genesis Suite, alongside Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
His works, with performances at times reaching over 500 a year, were performed by the best orchestras and conductors, such as Jascha Horenstein, Rafael Kubelik, André Cluytens, Carlos Chávez, Paul Kletzki, Charles Munch, Bruno Maderna, Paul van Kempen, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Ferenc Fricsay, Charles Bruck, Øivin Fjeldstad, Eugène Bigot, Franz André, Jean Fournet, Franz Waxman, Georges Tzipine, Pedro de Freitas Branco, Alfred Wallenstein, Eduard Flipse, Robert Whitney, Manuel Rosenthal, Roger Wagner, Jean Périsson, Vassil Kazandjiev.
[9] As a ballet composer, for decades Tansman collaborated with the most eminent choreographers like Olga Preobrajenska, Rudolf von Laban, Jean Börlin, Adolph Bolm, Kurt Jooss, Ernst Uthoff, Françoise Adret.
In 1977, in recognition of his contribution to European culture, Tansman was granted membership (after the late Dmitri Shostakovich) of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.
What has often escaped attention is the significance of Edvard Grieg in the development of Tansman's earliest musical thought, which gave him the notion of "purity of design and bequeathed to him heed for folk tunes", and later on – the influence of Albert Roussel and on the other hand of Paul Dukas, which was sometimes even more distinctive than that of Igor Stravinsky, who helped him recover an absolute music form and traditional pre-Romantic aesthetics.
[8] However, both influences, that of Ravel and at the same time that of Schoenberg, were noticed by Alexis Roland-Manuel in Tansman's Little Suite (1919), a piece already stamped with a clear mark of the composer's ever stronger personality.
[6] Despite his accession to the musical avant-garde, Tansman's style was never characterised by any particular radicalism, though he applied polytonality as early as 1916 (The Polish Album) and in the following years strongly contributed to its popularization worldwide.
2 (1922) – was often characterised as a combination of expressive colouring, intense lyrical qualities and prolific melodic inventiveness with the ideal clarity, aristocratic elegance and precision of structure.
A number of French, Belgian, Dutch, German, Austrian, Italian, Spanish and American critics admired his mastery in orchestration, instrumentation and the use of counterpoint.
Moreover, Tansman became the first composer in the history of Polish music to combine an overt and predominantly classicist orientation with such a wide output and substantial achievements in contemporary art.
[20] For these works, which ranged from light-hearted miniatures to virtuoso show-pieces, Tansman drew on traditional Polish folk themes, adapted them to his style, thus enriched melodic and harmonic means of modern music language,[9] as well as its instrumental colour and rhythmic variation.
However, he did not write straight settings of the folk songs, but followed the path of Bela Bartók and Manuel de Falla, as he states in an interview: I did not use popular themes per se.
Although the discrepancy between Tansman's composing practice and the basic principles of neoclassicism could be observed in the 1940s, the signs of such an attitude were clearly present in his earlier works.
[11][15][18] When reviewing Tansman's oratorio Isaiah, the Prophet in 1955, Alfred Frankenstein and Herbert Donaldson considered it "should be counted among major works of religious music" and admired "the composer's genius".
He is also known for his guitar pieces, mostly written for Andrés Segovia – in particular the Mazurka (1925), Cavatine (1950), Suite in modo polonico (1962), Variations sur un theme de Scriabine (1972).
[22][23] Tansman's music has been performed by such artists as singers Marya Freund, Jane Bathori, Madeleine Grey, Fanély Revoil, Suzanne Danco, Jean Giraudeau, Denise Duval, Freda Betti, Xavier Depraz, Jane Rhodes, Andrée Esposito, flautists Louis Fleury, Maxence Larrieu, clarinetist Louis Cahuzac, harpsichordist Marcelle de Lacour, pianists Marie-Aimée Roger-Miclos, Léo-Pol Morin, Mieczysław Horszowski, Walter Gieseking, Youra Guller, Jan Smeterlin, Robert Schmitz, Dimitri Tiomkin, Nicole Henriot-Schweitzer, José Iturbi, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Alicia de Larrocha, violinists Stefan Frenkel, Bronisław Huberman, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, Joseph Szigeti, Alexander Mogilevsky, Henri Temianka, Jascha Heifetz, cellists Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky, Maurice Maréchal, Enrico Mainardi, Gaspar Cassadó, organist Marie-Louise Girod, quartets Pro Arte, Burgin, Budapest, Calvet, Paganini, Pascal, Parrenin, trio Pasquier.
