Henri Tomasi

Henri Frédien Tomasi (pronounced [ɑ̃ʁi fʁedjɛ̃ tomazi]; 17 August 1901 – 13 January 1971) was a French classical composer and conductor.

His father Xavier Tomasi and mother Josephine Vincensi were originally from La Casinca, Corsica.

Pressured by his father, he played for upper-class families, where he felt "humiliated to be on show like a trained animal."

World War I delayed his entrance into the Paris Conservatoire, so he played piano in Marseille to earn money.

[1] In 1921, he commenced his studies at the Conservatoire de Paris with a scholarship from the municipality of Marseille and a stipend from a lawyer, Maitre Levy Oulman.

His friend Maurice Franck described Tomasi as a hard worker: "He showed up with a fugue a week, he was indefatigable - an inveterate workaholic.

"[1] In 1925, his first piece, a wind quintet called 'Variations sur un Theme Corse', won the Prix Halphen.

His teachers at the Paris Conservatoire included Gaubert, Vincent d'Indy, Georges Caussade, and Paul Vidal.

In 1927, he won the second Grand Prix de Rome for his cantata, 'Coriolan', and a First Prize for Orchestral Conducting, which were both awarded unanimously.

During the 1930s he was one of the founders of a contemporary music group in Paris entitled Triton along with Prokofiev, Milhaud, Honegger, and Poulenc.

He made his most memorable recording in 1936 with the extraordinary French mezzo-soprano Alice Raveau in Gluck's Orfeo, which was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque.

In 1939 Tomasi was drafted into the French Army and was named marching-band conductor at the Villefranche sur Mer fort.

In 1944, his son Claude was born and Tomasi started composing a Requiem dedicated to "the martyrs of the resistance movement and all those who have died for France.

In May 1956 at Bordeaux, his opera Sampiero Corso was premiered, with the Australian tenor Kenneth Neate in the title role.

His last piece for the theater, "In Praise of Madness (the nuclear era)", is a cross between opera and ballet and contains references to Nazism and napalm.

During his last period of composition he was motivated by political events and wrote pieces such as the Third World Symphony and Chant pour le Vietnam.

Later, to celebrate the centennial of his birth, his ashes were moved to the village of his ancestors in Penta di Casinca, Corsica.

He thought that the inherent danger in electronic music was that it was devoid of the human factor: "...the end of the heart -a world filled with nothing more than the sound of machines!"

The slow section evolves to a poco pui agitato interlude followed by a short cadenza marked a piacere (freely).

The initial tempo returns and the song ends in calm repose with an unusual closing chord: the C minor seventh.

The original instrumentation was for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, tuba, tympani, a battery of percussion, piano, and string quintet.

Chords move in parallel motion as in Debussy's writing, but are more dissonant, The work concludes with assai lento marked con malinconia.

Sonatine Attique is for solo clarinet and is, reputedly, a "poetic recollection of a night spent by Henri Tomasi under the Greek sky near the Parthenon in Athens."

It is dedicated to the foremost French clarinetist of the time, Ulysse Delecluse, who premiered it in Rennes, France.

The first movement is marked Giocoso (playfully) and Tomasi makes chords out of the arpeggiated figures in the clarinet.

Usually a conventional concerto has an exposition in the orchestra, but here the clarinet starts unaccompanied with a similar figure to Bach's E Major Partita for Solo Violin (Lerner 7).

He says of the first movement, "of odd and burlesque pace, the principal topic must be interpreted like an improvisation, with some lyric and dark abandonments rather discrete.

A significant rate of frightening difficulty will bring us back little by little to a tempo first more stressed, to lead to final giocoso…" He says of the Nocturne (Night): "Mysterious recalls of the first principal theme will be like a romantic daydream.

Then, a song of extreme softness, pointing out the atmosphere of night will rise out of this tumult to create an idyllic environment.

The furious agreements of the beginning will bring back to reality soloist and orchestra for an increasingly disheveled final conclusion."