Yup, today’s Opening Day for another baseball season! Hope springs eternal…with differing degrees of “hope”, obviously. For fans of, say, the Astros, Dodgers, Mets, and Braves, “hope” is of a World Series win. For fans of, oh…the Pittsburgh Pirates…well, they’re coming off two consecutive 100-loss seasons, so “hope” is them managing to win at least 63 games this season.
But still! Baseball!
Here’s James Horner, from his score to one of the greatest baseball movies of all time:
And if that song’s in your head, here’s the master:
Last week I mentioned the “Big Five” of Russian classical music in the Romantic era: the five composers who dominated musical culture in Russia in the latter half of the 19th century, with their influence and their desire to shape a Russian nationalistic school of composition not indebted to the Western European musical traditions. Four of those composers are well-known to this day, but the fifth, Cesar Cui, is not nearly so well known. Part of this is because he didn’t write much in the large orchestral forms of the day. He was not a symphonist, nor did he write concertos or large-scale orchestral works. Just to find a “tone poem” by him we have to turn to his operas, for one of the overtures. Cui’s output was more strongly oriented to works for smaller ensembles, and to art songs and other vocal works.
Cui’s influence was more as a critic and a writer, and as such he was able to position himself to wield considerable influence in shaping Russian musical life. His biggest impact on Sergei Rachmaninoff would come via a review he penned of the young composer’s Symphony No. 1…but we’ll get to that next month.
Cui left behind a very large body of work, and even though we don’t much hear Cui these days, that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be heard. Here is the overture to The Mandarin’s Son, one of his operas. The opera is a comic opera, so the overture is likewise jaunty and cheerful–hardly what one might expect from a Russian Romantic.
Our focus on Rachmaninoff himself begins Saturday.
Last night we watched an episode of The Repair Shop (wondering what that is? You wouldn’t if you subscribed to my newsletter!), and someone brought in a music box for repair. The box’s tune was a popular song for a movie called Lili, starring Leslie Caron. Composed by Bronislaw Kaper and with lyrics by Helen Deutsch, the song seems to be one of those tunes that you don’t hear all that often, and yet it’s been recorded by just about everybody.
Here’s Jimmy Durante’s version of “Hi Lili, Hi Lo.”
As Rachmaninoff was a young man studying music in a rigorous environment (we’ll get to that in April), he–and just about every other young Russian musician of the day–was influenced heavily by a group of composers called collectively “The Five”. These composers, all giants of Russian music in their day and four of them still giants to this day, dominated Russian music and how it was taught and encouraged amongst the younger generations. Their focus was on a nationalistic school of Russian music that was to be wholly separate from the more dominant traditions from the Germanic nations and France to the west. How successful they were can be debated; certainly they turned out some wondrous music, but their forms are still wholly dependent on the Germanic traditions. As Leonard Bernstein would later write in one of his essays, “All the Russian symphonies are really German ones with vodka substituted for beer.”
The Five consisted of the spiritual leader Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui (more on him next week), Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin (so near to my heart!), and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Each of these composers had strong influence on Rachmaninoff, in some ways and in others, and in negative light and in positive. From Rimsky-Korsakov Rachmaninoff likely learned about drama in music, and an appreciation for the sounds and modes of the Russian church liturgies. Rimsky-Korsakov was not himself a directly religious man, but that particular antipathy of his did not extend to the music, which he embodied in today’s work, the Russian Easter Festival Overture. The melodies of this work are taken directly from Russian Orthodox chants, and Rachmaninoff would later draw from some of this same material himself in several spiritual works of his own, as well as his lifelong fascination with one specific chant, the Dies irae.
We’re coming closer and closer to Rachmaninoff himself. Meantime, here is another of his influences: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture.
As I gear up for All Rachmaninoff All The Time in April, I’ve been listening to a lot of Russian music that pre-dates Rachmaninoff, particularly by composers who rank amongst his prime influences. Tchaikovsky was certainly one of those; Rachmaninoff actually had a number of encounters with the great older composer during his student years, and Tchaikovsky’s rather sudden death from cholera was a heavy blow for young Sergei. It certainly isn’t hard to listen to Rachmaninoff, even in his mature and later work, and not hear the Tchaikovskian influence.
This tone poem, like the earlier Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, is styled after Shakespeare: the subject this time is The Tempest. The structure here is similar to the more famous work, with its tumultuous depictions of the play’s stormier sections (literally, in this case, as the play begins with a shipwreck caused by a magical storm) and its lyrical love music in the central section. I actually find The Tempest preferable to the Romeo and Juliet overture, but that may be a reaction against the other work’s ubiquity over the years. I can also certainly hear the musical connections between this and the music that Rachmaninoff would produce.
Here is Tchaikovsky’s Symphonic Fantasia, The Tempest.
Because the movie has been on my brain since we saw it on Sunday, here is a suite of Max Steiner’s amazing music from Casablanca. The score’s greatness is all the more amazing when you consider yet another bits of this movie’s production lore: Steiner disliked “As Time Goes By” and wanted to do a song of his own, and the only reason he didn’t get his way is because Ingrid Bergman had moved on to her next role and had already had her hair cut for the new picture, rendering any reshoots impossible.
I can not get over all the ways that Casablanca really should not be anywhere near as good as it is.
(BTW, I actually did a Google search for “List of Opus 71s”, and Wikipedia actually does this! Here’s a handy list of Opuses 70. I thought about the Prokofiev, but it’s late in the day as I’m getting around to this, that piece is 35 minutes, and I don’t like to post stuff without hearing it at least once, so the Schumann will have to do.)
Stupid busy days at work! I mean, they do make the days go by faster. But they also make me almost forget to post!
Today would have been the 73rd birthday of Karen Carpenter. I first heard this song not long ago, and at the time I thought it an odd bit of 70s mystical ballad stuff, but it’s grown on me, I must say.
Here are The Carpenters with “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”.
