Here’s some wintry music, as we here in The 716 are gearing up for the first big lake-effect snow event of this season (and what might be the biggest one we’ve had since Snowvember in 2014): “Journey to Blofeld’s Hideaway”, from John Barry’s score to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This is the music that accompanies James Bond’s trek into the Alps via helicopter as he, disguised as Sir Hilary Bray (a prominent genealogist), goes to the lair of the secretive Count de Bleuchamp, whom he believes to actually be his archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The sequence itself is one of many gorgeous sequences in the film, alternating stunning vistas of Alpine winter with darker, more suspenseful music that accentuates that Bond is very much not sight-seeing.
We may not have the mountains, but we’re sure about to have the snow!
Sticking with Alfred Schnittke, to whom I introduced myself last week, we have extracts from a film score of his. The Story of an Unknown Actor is a Soviet film from 1977 for which Schnittke provided the music. I have turned up very little information about the film at this point, save its year and its director, one Aleksandr Zarkhi. I’m wondering if the film isn’t best known now precisely for its score by Schnittke, which has shown up on several recordings.
The score is mainly monothematic, as far as I can tell, but the arrangement here into a series of extracts casts it as a theme-and-variations work, and it ends up being a fairly interesting listen, particularly when Schnittke does different things with his orchestrations. Even in an obscure score to a very obscure film from a nation that no longer exists, Schnittke is an interesting composer.
A long and busy day with no time for thinking about posting means, as always, that when I get home I throw up a quick post with an overture by Franz von Suppe.
This time I’ll change it up a little, though: no orchestra this time! Just a pianist, playing the Poet and Peasant Overture.
One of the eternal questions in relating to art is how to separate one’s feeling for the art from one’s feelings for the artist. This is not the least bit new; it’s a problem that is probably as old as art itself. There have been so very many artists whose own lives and statements fall well short of the art they produce. I find myself thinking anew, as one of the oldest and yet most irritatingly persistent of hatreds, anti-Semitism, just keeps arising again like the very worst of pennies, of Richard Wagner.
You can barely read a biography of Wagner that covers the man’s life in any depth beyond “He was born in 1813, died in 1883, and wrote operas” without confronting what a staggering boor he was, a fact which…
…[shit]…
You know what, to hell with that. I love Wagner’s music, but I don’t want to write about Wagner right now, not when my country’s discourse is once again mainstreaming awful crap about the Jews again.
Let’s talk about Jewish composers instead. We’ll start with Alfred Schnittke.
Schnittke, of whose music I am mostly ignorant, was a Russian composer of Jewish and German ancestry. I’m sure that particular blend of ethnicities and nationalities made for some strife in his life. He was born in 1934 in Russia, and started his musical education in 1946, after the war and after the Holocaust. Not long after, he moved along with the rest of his family back to Russia, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Thus he had to toil in the air of state control that was the artistic scene in Soviet Russia, until he finally left for good in 1990. Schnittke died in 1998.
His music–and I am going on reference here, rather than my own personal insight–is influenced early on by the great Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but later on in his life, as great artists do, he developed his own sound and voice. It’s a voice I know little about. So many voices to hear, so little time!
This work is a ballet called Sketches. In a sequence of twenty-two short pieces, Schnittke puts on display a great deal of sardonic wit, seemingly poking fun at the entire proceedings. He even goes so far as to quote or reference other classical composers along the way, and his use of rhythm and color are infectiously amusing. One of the segments even utilizes a spoken-voice part, which threw me off the first time I heard it; at first I thought one of my other open tabs had stumbled upon a voice recording.
Producer Jules Bass died the other day. If the name isn’t immediately familiar, it’s because people are probably more familiar with his name in the context of his partnership with Arthur Rankin, Jr, known as Rankin-Bass. Those two produced some of the classics of animation in the mid-to-late 20th century, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. For me, the best thing they did was their animated adaptation of The Hobbit, in 1977. I remember watching it on teevee, and then a year or two later going to a screening of it with my sister at our local library. (This, I believe, was when we lived in Hillsboro, OR.)
I’ve watched a lot of Rankin-Bass stuff over the years, but that adaptation of The Hobbit ranks with Star Wars in its influence on my tastes after I saw it. I suspect that my love of epic fantasy starts right there, with that film; a few years later I would read the actual book and notice all the material left out: Beorn, the whole matter of the Arkenstone, and the foreboding stuff regarding Gandalf and his concern about “the Necromancer” (who would later turn out to be Sauron, a.k.a., Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film). But that animated film really does The Hobbit justice in a lot of ways: it gets the tone and feel right, capturing Bilbo Baggins’s reluctance to go with these thirteen dwarves and one wizard on “an adventure”: Hobbits just don’t do that sort of thing! And yet, on some level, Bilbo actually not only wants to go on the adventure, he’s excited by it, and before long the various travails have Bilbo turning out to be the most resourceful person in the entire party.
It’s interesting to me, looking back, to note the very short length of time–just a few years long–in which I was exposed to so much of what would guide me in all the days since. In just a handful of years came Star Wars, Tolkien via the animated The Hobbit, Superman: the Movie, and at the end of that run, in 1981 or so, I read John Bellairs’s The House with a Clock In Its Walls. In the middle of that was Moonraker, and my introduction to James Bond. And through all that, my sister was a burgeoning musician, so I heard a lot of classical music in that period…and John Denver was a huge star…and on and on and on. An entire life of tastes and obsessions, kindled within three, four, five years or so. Jules Bass was a big part of that.
In his memory, here is the title song from The Hobbit, “The Greatest Adventure”. It’s really quite a fine song, in that late-70s folkish kind of way; it’s somehow both wistful and optimistic at the same time.
I know I’ve been doing “autumnal” music this year instead of “spooky” or “scary” music, but this one really does fall into both categories, and it’s one that I post every year this month anyway, so here we are: that wonderfully brooding The Isle of the Dead, by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This piece is so wonderfully magical in Rachmaninoff’s downbeat way, starting from the very opening when the 5-4 time feels like the oars rising and falling awkwardly. Then the rocking of the waves starts…and the work’s real drama and emotion kick in, leavened with Rachmaninoff’s trademark lyricism and the way he can make musical passages yearn and yearn and yearn before they finally reach a kind of resolution, not unlike the mustering of the sea before the waves break upon the cold sand.
I love this piece. Here is The Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninoff.
I ended up going down a small rabbit hole not about piano music, but about pianists specifically. What’s how I found this comedic video, which I found pretty funny.
