So for the last while I’ve been wondering why nobody comments on anything here anymore…and then Roger emails me to say, “Hey, I’m leaving comments and they never clear moderation, so are you getting the notifications emailed to you?”
Guess what! I have NOT been receiving notifications of comments, so I had a pile in my “Awaiting Moderation” queue. I’ve just released them all (save one that was spam), and I’ll try to remember to check that on a regular basis now. For anyone who was seeking to engage conversation, my apologies!
I discovered this work the other night purely by chance, thanks to YouTube’s “suggested video” algorithm thing. I gave it a try…and then I listened to it three times in succession. What a wonderful, magical, lyrical work! It’s full of exuberance and good cheer. I haven’t been able to find out a whole lot of information about the work in question, and I had never even heard of Sergei Lyapunov before seeing this work suggested. Lyapunov was a Russian Romantic who fled Russia after the Revolution, settling in Paris and eventually dying of a heart attack in 1924. He appears to have been fairly prolific, and he falls into the category of those composers whose work was not original or unique enough to warrant a lasting place in the standard repertoire, but who was also too good to languish in unfortunate obscurity.
Here is Sergei Lyapunov’s Rhapsody on Ukrainian Themes, for orchestra and piano. There is some scintillating stuff here–take the sixteen minutes and listen to it!
I’ve been slowly developing a greater appreciation for the music of Jean Sibelius over the last few years. He always left me cold in my younger years (Finlandia excepted), but I’m understanding him more and more of late. This work, the Karelia Suite, is one of his youthful works, reflective of his early expressive and outgoing Romanticism. Sibelius is a fascinating figure, a man whose artistic visions eventually failed to maintain pace with the world, resulting in an inward turn that itself led to a nearly permanent stilling of his pen. This work, though, is warm and genial and exciting.
Taken at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora, NY. One of my favorite locations. This lonely tree in the middle of a hayfield struck me as a Little House kind of visual.
I heard part of this on the radio yesterday, in honor of all the fireworks going on for the 4th of July, and it’s a work I don’t hear often enough, so here it is! I’m developing a better appreciation of the Baroque Era over the last few years, but I’ve always enjoyed the music of George Fredric Handel, particularly this piece. Here is the “Music for the Royal Fireworks,” written for wind instruments to accompany fireworks for King George II on…some occasion or another. (Look it up yourselves, folks!)
This particular ensemble plays on period instruments (note the valveless trumpets in particular), and take note of the colorful and charismatic conductor.
I knew that it would be this way, but damn, America is really making me work for it right now. I keep thinking, not of American things, but of this moment in a movie made by New Zealanders adapting a nearly 80-year-old fantasy novel written by an Englishman:
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here, but we are.
It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
