The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Elmer Bernstein, one of the most consistently delightful of all film composers, was born one hundred years ago today. Bernstein died in 2004, after a long and prolific life of making our cinematic world better. Here’s a sampling of his work. Thank you, Elmer Bernstein!
From Westerns to science-fiction films to comedy scores to character dramas to sword-and-sandal Biblical epics…and more. Elmer Bernstein was one of the greats.
I was going to spend this month writing about, among other things, composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who was born on April 1, 1873. Then I did the math and realized that a whole month-long focus on Rachmaninoff might be a better idea for next year, Rachmaninoff’s sesquicentennial.
Meantime, I can’t let this great composer’s birth date go unmentioned, so here’s a wonderful performance of his Piano Concerto #2 in C minor, performed by Khatia Buniatishvili and the Filarmonica Teatro Regio Torino, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. This is one of the finest performances of this work I have heard. Ms. Buniatishvili is an amazing musician. Note her attentiveness to the orchestra during the passages when she is not playing. (The music starts around the 1:45 mark; there’s some introductory stuff.)
If you’ve seen the great movie Amadeus, you may recall a scene toward the end when Salieri, having driven poor naive Mozart to his literal deathbed, takes him home after he collapses during a performance of The Magic Flute, and then–under the guise of friendly helpfulness–grabs some paper to help Mozart compose a section of his Requiem (because Salieri is actually planning to pass the Requiem off as his own composition once Mozart is dead).
Of course the scene is utter fiction–Salieri and Mozart had no such adversarial relationship, and while a local noble did scheme about stealing Mozart’s work and claiming it as his own, it wasn’t Salieri, who lived a long and productive life after Mozart’s death and certainly did not end up in a sanitarium–but it’s an interesting piece of drama anyway, because it depicts how even adversaries can find themselves working collaboratively on a shared goal (no matter why the goal happens to be shared), and it underlines the film’s main theme of Salieri being a gifted professional musician who still can’t grasp the depths of Mozart’s genius, even when Mozart himself is sitting in the same room, talking him through it.
Someone took that scene from the movie and cut it together with a very clever animation of the actual score of the Confutatis (the section of the Requiem on which Mozart and Salieri are working). I love this kind of thing: when someone takes a piece of great filmmaking and uses it as a starting point for more terrific filmmaking.
William Grant Still wrote a suite for solo piano called Three Visions, consisting of three short movements. A program of sorts exists for the work, according to Still’s daughter:
“Three segments of the suite, Dark Horsemen, Summerland and Radiant Pinnacle, tell the story of the human soul after death: the body expires, and the soul goes on to an apocalyptic judgement. If it is seen that the past life has been a good one, the soul may enter ‘heaven’ or ‘Summerland’. After a period of time, the soul may reincarnate to learn additional earthly lessons on the human plane. Some souls reincarnate many times in a constant circular progress toward Godly perfection.”
“Dark Horsemen” is a brief burst of rhythmic dissonance that ends quickly, in favor of “Summerland”, a lyrical and optimistic portrayal of the afterlife that will be enjoyed by those who lived well.
Here is the Three Visions suite, played by pianist Umi Garrett:
(By the way! When I was watching Ms. Garrett’s performance the first time, I didn’t take much note of the fact that she’s playing from sheet music, because pianists do. Not everybody plays from memory all the time…but then I looked closer. The sheet music is actually displayed on a tablet. This had me thinking, “I’ll bet that makes page-turning easier!” After all, reaching up to flip a page without breaking the musical phrase isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, and many times in performance pianists will actually have a page-turner sitting nearby. I figured a tablet would be easy: she just has to reach up and tap the screen on the right side and the page will flip. However, if you watch, she does not do this! The tablet turns the page automatically! Which means that there must be a music display app that listens to the performer and tracks them along with the score, and turns the page accordingly? That kind of blows my mind, I must admit. And for all I know, they’ve been doing it this way for years!)
The center movement, “Summerland”, has taken on a life of its own as a standalone work, even being arranged for wind symphony. It’s always interesting to hear the way a work changes depending on a change in performance instrument or group. It’s still the same work…and yet it is also a completely different work.
Yup, missed a day. And here it is, a day later, and I still don’t know what to post! So, here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to sign onto my SiriusXM account, see what the first song comes up on whichever of my favorite stations loads first, and that’s what I’ll post here. Here we go!
[clicks a few times]
Huh. Well, OK, here it is! (And I solemnly swear that this really is what came up first. I did not choose this song for any particular meaning!)
I’m going to take a break for the weekend as I try to do some catch-up stuff. See y’all on Monday!
I’ve never been a big fan of composer Reinhold Gliere. I don’t know how fair that is, given my small sample size of his work with which I’m familiar, but he usually doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I suspect a part of this is that when I was in 10th grade, we played in high school band a band arrangement of a specific excerpt from a ballet of Gliere’s called The Red Poppy. The excerpt, which might be Gliere’s most famous piece, is called “The Russian Sailors Dance”, and it’s pretty clear when listening to it that it’s meant to be a showpiece for the male dancers of the company. Problem is, it’s not that interesting to listen to; it basically plays the same melody over and over again, without enough variation to even call it a set of variations.
Adding to that is the fact that in this particular year the band director decided to let one of the fellow students, a senior who was going to be studying music, act as student conductor, so this kid led us in what felt like three months of rehearsals of “The Russian Sailors Dance”. Over, and over, and over again. It got to the point that I just simply hate the damned thing, to this day. (You can listen to it here; I’m not featuring it for this post. The guy who conducted us? He was a very talented musician who is a teacher someplace now, I think. He wasn’t the best conductor then, but sheesh, dude was 17!)
As for Gliere in general, as noted, I haven’t listened much to him. He’s a capable composer who hasn’t ever really captured me, though I will admit that I enjoyed a recent hearing of his first symphony. (His third, a gigantic programmatic work called Ilya Muromets after a popular hero of Russian legend, is something of a cult piece with people actually making substantial travel arrangements to attend live performances.) Gliere was of German descent and was born in Kiev, which makes him Ukrainian as well; and he became a particularly prized musical voice in Soviet Russia, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich.
This piece is a wild orchestral showpiece of considerable energy and verve. It is called Holiday at Ferghana, and other than the fact that is a concert overture in D major, that’s about all I know about it. It’s quite a wild listen, and it has spots where it’s almost catchy in its rhythmic thrust. It’s a frankly swashbuckling kind of piece that makes me wonder what kind of film music Gliere might have produced had he emigrated to the west.
I’m still not sure that I’m ever going to love Gliere–but I may be warming on him a bit.
My whole life, I’ve never been able to decide which version of this song I prefer. I should default to The Supremes, because it’s the original, but I actually heard Mr. Collins’s cover (which is pretty faithful) first, back in the 80s, so I have an attachment to it.
I dunno, I guess I don’t really have to pick a favorite, do I? My world is big enough for both versions.
Here is “You Can’t Hurry Love”.
And, here is “You Can’t Hurry Love”.
Svitlana Azarova is a composer of Ukrainian and Dutch descent, born in 1976. She has written an impressive body of work, and she currently resides in The Hague.
This modernistic piece is deeply expressive and makes impressive use of orchestral colors, particularly in the percussion section.