LOUIS AUBERT, COMPOSER & ISIDOR PHILLIPP, PIANIST **SIGNED PHOTOGRAPH (1956)

	£		70
	$		93

BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPH

** SIGNED BY **

LOUIS AUBERT

MUSIC, FRENCH COMPOSER 

** SIGNED ON THE BACK BY **

ISIDOR PHILLIPP

FRENCH PIANIST & COMPOSER

Date: July 1956

Size: 5.5" x 3.5"

Louis Aubert (1877-1968) was a French composer. Born in Paramé, Ille-et-Vilaine, Louis Aubert was a child prodigy. His parents, recogniing their son's musical talent, sent him to Paris to receive an education at an early age. He became recognised for his voice, primarily for his renditions of the Pie Jesu from Gabriel Fauré's Requiem at the Église de la Madeleine. The young Aubert met Fauré at the Paris Conservatoire, and he regularly attended at his composition classes, which greatly influenced his development.

Aubert became an excellent pianist. In 1911, he premiered Maurice Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, which were written for and dedicated to him. He also worked as a piano and composition teacher, both privately and on the faculty of the Conservatoire de Paris. He counted among his students Henry Barraud, Jean-Marie Beaudet, Jean Berger, Marinus Flipse, and Georges Savaria.

He composed music for the church, several ballets, mélodies, and incidental music for the stage. Although Breton by birth at a time of intense Breton nationalism, he was little inspired by his home region, although he was a founding member in 1912 of the Association des Compositeurs Breton. Aubert wrote popular songs, notably for Marie Dubas. He also contributed to the magazines Chantecler, Paris-soir, Le Journal and Opéra.

Aubert wrote one opera in three acts based on classic fairy tales by Charles Perrault to a libretto by J. Chenevière entitled La fôret bleu ("The Blue Forest"). The work was composed between 1904 and 1911, and individual acts were performed while the work was in progress. The first complete staged performance took place in Geneva on 7 January 1913. The enchanting characters and delightful plot enabled the work to achieve popular success in other theaters, including Boston later the same year. The work did not appear in Paris until 1924, where it was staged at the Opéra-Comique (Salle Favart). The opera was recorded for French radio in 1954, conducted by Eugène Bigot, with Raymond Malvasio, Martha Angelici, Claudine Collart, Jacqueline Brumaire, Louis Noguéra and Lucien Lovano in the cast .

Isidor Philipp (1863-1958) was a French pianist, composer, and music teacher of Jewish Hungarian descent. Isidor Philipp studied piano under Georges Mathias (a pupil of Frédéric Chopin and Friedrich Kalkbrenner) at the Conservatoire de Paris and won First Prize in piano performance in 1883. Other teachers included Camille Saint-Saëns, Stephen Heller (a pupil of Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven's students) and Théodore Ritter (a pupil of Franz Liszt). At the Conservatoire, he met fellow student Claude Debussy. They remained lifelong friends, and Philipp often played his compositions. After Debussy's death, Philipp was regarded as the leading authority on his piano music. After graduating from the Conservatoire, Philipp commenced a career which took him to various European countries, and he was a regular performer at the Colonne, Lamoureux and Conservatoire concerts in Paris. He was able to hear concerts, recitals or master classes by many of the leading pianists of the day, including Liszt and Anton Rubinstein. He knew Charles-Valentin Alkan and was a pall-bearer at the latter's funeral in 1888; he subsequently edited many of Alkan's works for republication.

In 1890, Philipp formed a trio with Loeb and Bertelier which toured for about a decade. He revived the Société des Instruments à Vent from 1896 to 1901. However, he eventually curtailed his concertizing, as he found lasting satisfaction in teaching. He returned to the Conservatoire de Paris, where he was a pre-eminent professor of piano from 1893 to 1934, one of the youngest ever appointed to that institution. From 1921 to 1933, Philipp was also the head of the piano section at the American Conservatory of Fontainebleau, which became famous for starting the careers of many notable American composers. His home in Paris contained many ancient and unusual instruments and other musical artifacts. When the Nazis entered Paris in World War II and Philipp fled to the United States in 1940, the Nazis confiscated the contents of his apartment.

He left for the United States in 1941 and taught in New York and the L'Alliance Francais in Louiseville, Quebec, Canada. During the war, he taught piano in New York City and at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal. While he was in New York, he gave recitals with the violinist John Corigliano, Sr. (Corigliano was the longtime concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic).[2] After the war, he spent the rest of his life between New York City and Paris.

On 20 March 1955, aged 91, he played the piano part in both Saint-Saëns' D minor Sonata and César Franck's Violin Sonata in New York, returning to Paris a year later. He gave his farewell recital at the age of 92, in Paris. He died there in 1958 after a fall on the Paris metro.

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