Category: music

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Sometimes I need to go back to the beginning of my classical music roots. I had heard a lot of classical music as a kid, thanks to my parents’ music-listening habits and my sister’s piano lessons, and then later my horn, trumpet, and piano lessons; my initial love of movie music also primed the classical pump for me. But when did I really start to turn the corner toward classical music? I’m not entirely sure when I’d date that, but 1984’s Amadeus has to be a big signpost on that early stretch of road. I didn’t get parts of the movie, but much of it was utterly spellbinding to me, and of course…there was the music.

Here is the overture to The Magic Flute, which would a few years later become the first opera I ever saw, and has remained a favorite of mine ever since. Mozart sets the stage in just six minutes here. Amazing!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

It’s August! I think August would count at “Midsummer”, right? Thus, here is some Mendelssohn: the overture to his suite of incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

 

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Sinead

What a voice she had. What a musician she was. Too hard was her life.

On the musical collaboration above:

And back through the glen I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see more
But to and fro
In my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled
Oh, glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew

Sheila O’Malley:

It’s hard to describe what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived on the world stage. She came from seemingly nowhere. Her voice was eerie and transcendent. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her head was shaved. She covered a Prince song. She arrived fully formed into a world that had no place for her. She created her own place. The second she arrived, you couldn’t imagine what it was like before she got there. That’s what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived.

It seems a particularly cruel curse of this world that often great art seems to require great pain to give it voice.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Technically, this isn’t a tone poem; it’s right up-front about being a concerto. But what a concerto it is, and it’s a masterpiece of tone painting as well. It is also a programmatic work, intended to tell a story.

The work is the Butterfly Lovers Concerto for violin and orchestra, by He Zhanhou (who composed the main melody) and Chen Gang (who wrote the development sections). The work purports to tell the story of an old Chinese folktale:

The concerto illustrates the folktale of the star-crossed lovers Zhu Yingtai and Liang Shanbo, known as the “Chinese Romeo and Juliet.” Yingtai, the only daughter in her family, breaks with the convention prohibiting women from studying and attends classes disguised as a man. At school she falls in love with another scholar, Shanbo, but is recalled home to be married to a wealthy merchant. Shanbo dies of heartbreak. On the way to her wedding, Yingtai passes Shanbo’s grave and begs for the ground to swallow her up. The grave splits open and Yingtai throws herself into it. Yingtai and Shanbo’s spirits transform into a pair of butterflies that fly away together.

The Butterfly Lovers Concerto is a deeply gorgeous work, with an East-meets-West flavor as eastern melodies are interpreted in the language of western instrumentations. It is infectiously melodic, and it is as crowd-pleasing a work as you’ll find in all of classical music. Maybe it’s not especially profound…but I’m not at all sure it needs to be.

Here is the Butterfly Lovers Concerto.

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Tony

Thank you for the music, sir. What a life.

I’m not one to appoint “golden ages” of this or that, but…there really is something awfully and uniquely special about the first half of the 20th century in American popular song-writing, isn’t there?

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Tone Poem Tuesday: Farewell, Andre Watts

Pianist Andre Watts has died.

Watts was 77 years old when he died of prostate cancer last week. Born in 1946, Watts was best known for his expressive performances of piano music from the Romantic and early modern eras, which constitute the bulk of his recorded work. His music-making was always fiery and emotional, which I always appreciate; emotional distance and cool temperatures are never what I look for in music. Here is a selection of remembrances of Watts.

In this selection, Watts performs the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, by Camille Saint-Saens. The performance is taken from a live broadcast of the New York Philharmonic, so you actually get to hear Watts discuss the music for a bit prior to the performance itself. Saint-Saens himself was a long-lived French master who was as much a child prodigy as Mozart, but whose work hasn’t quite endured as Mozart’s did; Saint-Saens is represented in the standard repertoire by a number of works, but others sit in relative obscurity due to his occasional lack of attentiveness and depth. The best of Saint-Saens is almost always pleasing music, if not particularly profound; the standard quip about this concerto is that “it starts with Bach but ends with Offenbach”. This concerto’s moods shift from solemnity to playful dance and then to pure minor-key speed, all of this steeped in late-19th century urbane Parisian sophistication. Of particular pleasure is the ending of the second movement, just before the storm of the last erupts; and I challenge anyone to claim to be unexcited by the blaze with which the entire concerto closes.

Here is Andre Watts performing the Second Piano Concerto by Camille Saint-Saens.

 

 

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