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Andre Navarra

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[1]

Grove Music Online

"Navarra, André(-Nicolas) (b Biarritz, 13 Oct 1911; d Siena, 31 July 1988). French cellist. He received his early training at the Toulouse Conservatoire, where he was awarded a premier prix at the age of 13. In 1926 he graduated to the Paris Conservatoire as a pupil of Jules Loeb for cello and Charles Tournemire for chamber music; there he again won a premier prix (1927). From 1929 to 1935 he played with the Krettly String Quartet. His début as a soloist took place in 1931 at the Concerts Colonne in Paris, with Pierné conducting. He appeared in most European countries, in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Japan, the USSR, Australia and India. His British début was at the 1950 Cheltenham Festival, when he played Elgar’s concerto, a work with which he was much associated; in 1957 he recorded it with Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra. Navarra taught at the Paris Conservatoire from 1949 to 1979, and he held other important teaching posts at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, Siena, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, and the Detmold Musikhochschule. He was an Officier of the Légion d’Honneur and Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Navarra’s thoughtful, refined yet ardent playing was equally suited to solo work and chamber music."

RONALD CRICHTON

Arco

[2]

Arco, Annie d' (b Marseilles, 28 Oct 1920; d Paris, 5 March 1998). French pianist. She studied the piano first in her native city and then with Marguerite Long at the Paris Conservatoire, where she received a premier prix in 1938. She then served as pianist for the Conservatoire's classes in violin, voice and wind instruments for several years, and in 1946 won second prize at the Geneva Competition. Although she often played as a soloist in the major cities of Europe, she is perhaps best remembered for her activities as chamber musician. She performed frequently with Henryk Szeryng, Jean-Pierre Rampal and especially with the cellist André Navarra, with whom she recorded sonatas by Schubert, Chopin and Saint-Saëns. Her outstanding recordings as a soloist include Mendelssohn's complete Lieder ohne Worte and the major works of Chabrier. She taught at the Paris Conservatoire and the Ecole Normale de Musique.

CHARLES TIMBRELL

Coin

[3] Coin, Christophe (b Caen, 26 Jan 1958). French cellist, viola and conductor. He studied music in Caen and the cello under André Navarra in Paris, where he won a premier prix at the Conservatoire in 1974. He continued his studies with Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Vienna and Jordi Savall in Basle. He has played with the Vienna Concentus Musicus, Hesperion XX and the Academy of Ancient Music, and founded his own group, Ensemble Mosaïques, in 1984. It was dissolved in 1985, when he invited the leaders of its string section to form the Quatuor Mosaïques. In 1991 Coin was appointed musical director of the Ensemble Baroque de Limoges. His fine technique and insight into music of the Baroque and Classical periods have made a significant contribution to the revival of interest in historically aware performance practice in France. His recordings include acclaimed performances of Haydn string quartets with the Quatuor Mosaïques, concertos and sonatas by Vivaldi, the cello concertos of Haydn and Schumann, and, as director, cantatas by Bach, French vocal music of the 17th and 18th centuries and Nerba's zarzuela Viento es la dicha de Amor.

NICHOLAS ANDERSON

Hubeau

[4] Hubeau, Jean (b Paris, 22 June 1917; d Paris, 19 Aug 1992). French pianist and composer. He studied piano with Lazare Lévy at the Paris Conservatoire, receiving a premier prix in 1930, and also studied harmony with Jean Gallon and composition with Paul Dukas. He won second prize in the Prix de Rome in 1934, and in 1935 won the Louis Diémer Prize. In 1937 he studied conducting in Vienna with Felix Weingartner, and in 1942 was appointed director of the Versailles Conservatoire. From 1957 to 1982 he taught chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire, where his students included Catherine Collard, Michel Dalberto and Katia and Marielle Labèque. He performed with Pierre Fournier, André Navarra and Paul Tortelier and made notable recordings of Fauré’s two piano quartets (with the Gallois-Montbrun Quartet) and two piano quintets (with the Via Nova Quartet). He also recorded the complete piano works of Fauré and Dukas. Hubeau’s compositions include a violin concerto (1939, recorded by Henry Merckel), chamber music and songs.

CHARLES TIMBRELL

Sancan

[5] Sancan, Pierre (b Mazamet, 24 Oct 1916). French pianist and composer. After early piano studies in Morocco and Toulouse, he moved to Paris and studied with Yves Nat at the Conservatoire, where he received a premier prix in 1937. Subsequently he won premiers prix in harmony, fugue, accompaniment and composition, and studied conducting with Charles Münch and Roger Désormière. In 1943 he was awarded the Prix de Rome, and for a time was active equally as a composer and a performer. An international soloist and chamber musician, Sancan was also a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire (1956–85), where he became one of the leading teachers; among his students were Michel Béroff, Jean-Philippe Collard, Jean-Bernard Pommier and Jacques Rouvier. His recordings include brilliant accounts of Ravel’s two concertos, conducted by Dervaux, and Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano, with André Navarra. Sancan’s compositions, many of them published, include an opera Ondine (1962) and two ballets, a symphony for strings, two piano concertos (1955, 1963), chamber music, songs and pieces for piano.

BIBLIOGRAPHY C. Timbrell: French Pianism (White Plains, NY, and London, 1992, enlarged 2/1999) CHARLES TIMBRELL

Schiff

[6] Schiff, Heinrich (b Gmunden, 18 Nov 1951). Austrian cellist and conductor. The son of two composers, he began playing the piano at six and the cello at ten. He studied with Tobias Kühne at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik and André Navarra in Detmold and made his Vienna and London débuts in 1971. He gave the first Polish performance of Lutosławski's Cello Concerto at Warsaw in 1973, conducted by the composer. Schiff is a powerful yet refined player whose playing of unaccompanied Bach – on a cello with modern set-up – has attracted much praise, many critics finding it a valid compromise between period instrument and modern styles. He has all the major cello concertos at his command and has introduced works by Henze, Richard Rodney Bennett, Eder, Killmayer, Casken and Bialas. In chamber music he has collaborated with the Alban Berg and Hagen Quartets and such colleagues as Christian Zacharias, Ton Koopman and Frank Peter Zimmermann. He has recorded much of the cello repertory including the Vieuxtemps, Lutosławski and Shostakovich concertos and Prokofiev's Sinfonia concertante. He plays a 1698 Stradivari. Schiff made his conducting début with the Vienna SO in 1984 and since 1990, when the Northern Sinfonia appointed him artistic director, he has split his time between playing and conducting. In 1990–92 he was guest conductor of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and in 1995 he was appointed chief conductor of the Winterthur Musikkollegium and the Copenhagen PO. He has also conducted a number of opera productions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY CampbellGV J. Dorner: ‘Steady Ascent’, The Strad, xcix (1988), 300–02 TULLY POTTER

Isidore Cohen

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Beaux Arts Trio

[7] Beaux Arts Trio. American piano trio. It was formed in New York in 1955 by the pianist Menahem Pressler (b Magdeburg, 16 Dec 1923), the violinist Daniel Guilet and the cellist Bernard Greenhouse. Encouraged by Robert Casadesus, in whose house they rehearsed, the three made a sensational début at the Berkshire Music Festival in Tanglewood; and in autumn 1955 they made their first nationwide tour. Guilet (under his original name Guilevitch) had been a member of the Calvet Quartet of Paris for a decade before the war and had led the Opéra-Comique Orchestra; after emigrating to the USA in 1941, he had led his own quartet and Toscanini's NBC SO. His style of playing, grounded in Franco-Belgian traditions, strongly coloured the trio's early performances and recordings, the latter including works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Dvořák, Fauré and Ravel, as well as outstanding Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert cycles. His younger colleagues, who counted Egon Petri and Pablo Casals among their teachers, played with refulgent tone and deep musicality but – under his influence – always with a light touch. For a time all three taught at the University of Indiana School of Music. When Guilet retired in 1969 he was replaced by Isidore Cohen, a former member of the Schneider and Juilliard Quartets.

This formation of the ensemble toured indefatigably and recorded a vast range of music, including all the trios of Haydn and the Mozart and Brahms piano quartets (with Bruno Giuranna and Walter Trampler respectively). The Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert trios were re-recorded, confirming the impression gained in the concert hall that the group's style had broadened and deepened, but also coarsened to a degree. Its saving grace was the wit it brought to many of its performances, for instance in Charles Ives's Trio. In 1987, on Greenhouse's retirement, Peter Wiley came into the group. In 1990 George Rochberg's Summer 1990 received its première by the Beaux Arts Trio, followed in 1991 by Ned Rorem's Spring Music and then by David Baker’s Roots II. In 1992 Cohen retired, his replacement being Ida Kavafian. This formation proved to have a more combustible chemistry; in the recording studio, it was commemorated by an excellent disc of trios by Hummel. In 1998 both string players withdrew and Pressler was joined by the violinist Young Uck Kim and the cellist Antonio Meneses. The Beaux Arts Trio's ability to renew itself across several generations has owed much to Pressler's sparkling technique, wholehearted involvement and sense of style. The group has been vastly influential and has raised the profile of the piano trio as a form but has left the repertory more or less as it found it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY N. Delbanco: The Beaux Arts Trio: a Portrait (New York, 1985) B.L. Sand: ‘The Beautiful Art of the Trio’, The Strad, cvi (1995), 686–91 TULLY POTTER

Helps

[8] Helps, Robert (Eugene) (b Passaic, NJ, 23 Sept 1928; d Tampa, FL, 1 Dec 2001). American composer and pianist. He attended Columbia University (1947–9) and the University of California, Berkeley (1949–51); he also studied the piano with Abby Whiteside and composition with Roger Sessions (1943–56). He taught the piano at the San Francisco Conservatory (1968–70), Stanford University (1968–9), the University of California, Berkeley (1969–70), the New England Conservatory (1970–72), the Manhattan School of Music and Princeton University (both 1972–7); he was appointed professor of music at the University of South Florida, Tampa, in 1980. His honours include a Naumburg Foundation award for his Symphony no.1 (1957), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1966), awards from the Fromm Foundation (1957, 1971) and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1976), and commissions from the Thorne Music Fund and the Ford Foundation (1975, for the Piano Concerto no.2). A noted interpreter of 20th-century piano music, Helps performed widely as a soloist and in partnership with Bethany Beardslee and Isidore Cohen. His many recordings include important works by Schoenberg, Babbitt, Mel Powell, Perle and Sessions.

In his early music Helps generated pitch centres from a prevailing chromatic context. Gossamer Noons (1977), a setting for soprano and orchestra of four poems by James Purdy, features instrumental contexts and vocal contours that sensitively reflect and enlarge upon the verbal sonorities and rhythms of the text. Helps’s later music does not conform to any doctrinaire harmonic or organizational principles.

WORKS (selective list) Inst: Str Qt, 1951; Pf Trio, 1957; Sym. no.1, orch, 1957; Serenade: Fantasy, vn, pf, 1963; Postlude, vn, hn, pf, 1965; Nocturne, str qt, 1966; Conc. no.1, pf, orch, 1969; Conc. no.2, pf, orch, 1976; Qnt, fl, cl, vn, vc, pf, 1976; Second Thoughts, fl, 1978; A Mixture of Time, gui, pf, 1990; Pf Qt, 1997; Pf Trio no.2, 1997 Pf: 3 Etudes, 1956; Images, 1957; Starscape, 1958; Recollections, 1959; Portrait, 1960; Solo, 1960; Saccade, 4 hands, 1967; Qt, pf, 1971; 3 Hommages, 1973; Nocturne, 1973; Music for Left Hand, 1974; Valse mirage, 1977; Eventually the Carousel Begins, 2 pf, 1987; Shall We Dance, 1994; Berceuse, 2 pf, 1995 Vocal: 2 Songs (H. Melville), S, pf, 1950; The Running Sun (J. Purdy), S, pf, 1972; Gossamer Noons (Purdy), S, orch, 1977 Principal publishers: Associated, Edward B. Marks, Peters, American Composers Edition

BIBLIOGRAPHY E.W. Flemm: The Solo Piano Music of Robert Helps (diss., U. of Cincinnati, 1990) RICHARD SWIFT/STEVE METCALF

JSQ

[9] Juilliard String Quartet. American string quartet, founded in 1946 by William Schuman, then president of the Juilliard School. The members are Joel Smirnoff (b New York, 1950), who studied at the University of Chicago and at Juilliard, and in 1980 became a member of the Boston SO; Ronald Copes (b Arkansas, 1950), who studied at Oberlin Conservatory and at the University of Michigan, taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a member of the Dunsmuir and the Los Angeles piano quartets as well as appearing as a soloist; Samuel Rhodes (b Long Beach, NY, 1941), who studied the viola with Sydney Beck and Walter Trampler and composition with Earl Kim and Sessions, later becoming a member of the Galimir Quartet (1961–9) and a professor at Juilliard; and Joel Krosnick (b New Haven, CT, 1941), who studied with William D’Amato, Luigi Silva, Jens Nygaard and Claus Adam, was a member of the New York Chamber Soloists and gave the premières of Ligeti’s Cello Concerto and Gerhard Samuel’s Three Hymns to Apollo. At its founding the quartet was lead by Robert Mann (b Portland, OR, 1920), who studied the violin with Edouard Déthier and composition at Juilliard, and who appeared frequently as a soloist; the original second violinist was Robert Koff, who was succeeded by Isidore Cohen (1958–66), Earl Carlyss (1966–86), Joel Smirnoff (1986–97) and Ronald Copes (from 1997); Rhodes replaced the original viola player, Raphael Hillyer, in 1969; the original cellist, Arthur Winograd, was succeeded by Claus Adam in 1955 and by Krosnick in 1974.

The Juilliard String Quartet has been quartet-in-residence at Juilliard, the Library of Congress (from 1962) and Michigan State University (from 1977). Although the quartet is usually identified as specializing in 20th-century music (its repertory of nearly 600 works includes over 150 by 20th-century composers), it has come to devote an equal amount of time to the standard repertory, notably the Beethoven quartets, of which it has presented numerous complete cycles and which it has recorded. The quartet’s efforts on behalf of American composers are incalculable; its more than 60 first performances of American works include the Quartets nos.2 and 3 of Elliott Carter, the Quartet no.1 of Leon Kirchner and works by Schuman, Sessions, Piston, Copland, Babbitt, Foss, Mennin, Diamond and many others. Its many recordings include the complete chamber music for strings of Schoenberg, Webern and Carter, Bach’s Art of Fugue and the quartets of Debussy, Ravel and Dutilleux. It has appeared throughout the world and at most of the international music festivals, and in 1961 was the first American quartet to visit the USSR. Since Mann’s retirement the ensemble sound – once aggressive, impetuous, described as ‘contemporary, urban-American’ – has become sweeter in tone and more elegant in execution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY H. Gay: The Juilliard String Quartet (New York, 1974) HERBERT GLASS/R