In amongst my various reading activities, I have a couple of longer reading projects going on. One is a complete re-read of Guy Gavriel Kay’s books, and the other is a partial re-read, coupled with first-time reads, of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. I call the Fleming a partial re-read because going into this project, I had only actually read about half of his Bond material, up to (and including) Dr. No. Now I am onto books I haven’t read, and the one I’m reading now is For Your Eyes Only, which is not a novel at all but a collection of short stories, including two that form the backbone material for the eventual film of the same name.
Which, by the way, happens to contain one of my favorite Bond songs ever. And here it is!
Today, a concerto: specifically, a trumpet concerto. This one was written by the great film composer John Williams, who has somehow over his incredibly busy years of scoring many films and maintaining a hectic conducting schedule managed to find time to compose concert works as well. The man is amazing. He just is!
This concerto is a strikingly dramatic work in a modernistic vein, and as is often the case with Williams’s concert works, the piece doesn’t have the ear-catching melodies that are almost always present in his film scores. This is not a criticism. In his concert music, Williams tends to let melody be more of an emergent thing than an obvious one; there is usually an improvisatory air to his concert music, which may spring from his days as a jazz pianist and a session musician before he fully transitioned to the life of a composer.
Williams’s Trumpet Concerto was written in 1996 for The Cleveland Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Michael Sachs. The work was premiered by Sachs and The Cleveland Orchestra on September 26, 1996, under the direction of then-Music Director Christoph von Dohnanyi. The debut of this significant addition to the trumpet repertoire garnered praise from the local press, with Donald Rosenberg of the Cleveland Plain Dealer noting the concerto’s “dignified personality, soloistic variety and orchestral color.”
Here is the Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra by John Williams. No Haydn concerto this, with a calm classical intro! The soloist is the first thing you hear, in starkly dramatic fashion.
I first heard this song when I first watched The Big Lebowski a number of years ago. I remember looking the song up and being surprised to learn that it was a Kenny Rogers song. It was recorded first by Jerry Lee Lewis, but later Rogers and his band the First Edition recorded it, in 1967. It’s barely recognizable as Kenny Rogers, actually: I’ve listened to this song a lot and I’ve found no hint of the guy who would later become a solo country act and sing about “The Gambler” and “Lucille”. It’s amazing how things can change, isn’t it?
Igor Stravinsky is not a composer i know terribly well, and honestly, that bothers me a bit. More than a bit, really. Stravinsky is considered to be the major bridge composer between the Romantic era and the Modern one. His art has its roots in the 19th century, but most of his work is fully conceived in the 20th, but it’s not generally as hard to crack, in my experience, as is the work of other Modernists like, say, Schoenberg, Berg, and later avant garde voices like Cage. Stravinsky worked in recognizable forms, for the most part, and his ballet music–perhaps his most famous and familiar works–represent some of the most starkly dramatic work for stage dance ever written. The Rite of Spring actually provoked a riot at its premiere, so there’s that.
Written for a ballet that was in turn based on Russian mythology and legend, The Firebird is one of Stravinsky’s most enduringly popular works. It comes fairly early in his career, and thus he was only just starting his life-long evolution into full-on Modernism. (Born in 1882, Stravinsky died roughly five months before I was born in 1971!) The Firebird tells its story with startlingly evocative orchestral writing, and it is by turns exotic and suggestive, weaving a spell with sonic imagery that borders on the purely impressionistic. While I don’t know Stravinsky well as a whole, The Firebird has endured in the repertoire for a reason.
Also popular is one of the three shorter orchestral suites Stravinsky culled from the pages of the entire ballet. This suite, the middle of the three, was put together by Stravinsky in 1919, and despite his later insistence that the score was riddled with errors, it it the 1919 suite that has endured of the three suites he created from the entire ballet. I do recommend the entire ballet; it’s only about 45 minutes long, which does make me wonder why Stravinsky felt the need for abridgements at all.
Some of the moodier music in The Firebird would later serve as partial inspiration for composer Cliff Eidelman, when he was tapped to score Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Anyway, one stalwart conversation starter that comes around social media with amazing regularity is naming one’s favorite cover song, or naming a cover song that’s better than the original. This one most definitely fills the bill for the former, in my eyes. I do not grant that it fills the latter…but this one is so good because it does something so amazing with the original, that there’s no need for this cover song to supplant the original at all.
So here, from the 1980s, are Rod Stewart and Jeff Beck covering Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready”.
Wind ensemble music today, by prolific composer David R. Holsinger. My band director in college formed quite a fascination with Holsinger’s work and programmed something by him each of the years I was there. I don’t think this was one of the pieces, but some of his works are long and complex and involved and I want to give some of those another listen before I feature them here. This shorter piece is titled On an American Spiritual, and it starts off the way one would expect such a piece to start…but then it takes some unexpected turns on the way to its conclusion. Interesting piece!
I wrote yesterday about how we attended the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance to film of the score to Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I noted how impressed I was with the orchestra’s technical precision during the action cues, particularly the Desert Chase sequence, which is an extremely complex and long cue. So I figured today, why not present the actual cue as originally recorded for the film by the London Symphony Orchestra in 1981?
I thought about giving a blow-by-blow accounting of what is happening throughout this entire sequence with the timings, but I decided not to. Instead, note the structure of the cue itself: it starts with the establishing shots of the bad guys and their truck caravan heading out, and then we get some suspense music as Indy and friends watch all this and Indy hatches his plan. Then, it’s all action, all the way out. There’s a lot of back-and-forth action as Indy works to take control of the truck and dispose of the rest of the Nazis, but then there’s a long section of building tension as it looks as if Indy is really about to fail (and die in the process). It’s really an amazing cue from a compositional standpoint; Williams deploys his themes throughout in a way that really works. Too much action music in films is basically unmelodic rhythmic pounding. “The Desert Chase” is very much not that. Enjoy!
At some point in the last ten-fifteen years, orchestras happened upon a new formula for a cash-cow event: performing the entire score to a movie as the movie itself played on a screen above them. These events have proven very popular, and thus have given orchestras a much needed series of events that draw big crowds.
And yet, as much as I adore film music, I had never attended one of these events…until last week, when The Wife and I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Buffalo Philharmonic. I bought the tickets several months ago, for The Wife’s birthday in February. We’ve been trying to give events as gifts more over the last few years, and when I started “event shopping”, this was the nearest one that made me go “Oooooh, yeah, that!” So on her birthday on February 25 I got to say, “Happy birthday! I bought tickets to this thing in twelve weeks!”
Luckily, she didn’t mind.
I don’t have much to say about Raiders as a movie, since it’s one of my favorite movies of all time and I know it as well as I like any movie ever made. It did occur to me that this was the first time I’ve seen Raiders on a big screen since it came out in 1981. The movie’s story pulled me in, to the point that at times I actually forgot that the BPO was right there on the stage.
And how did the BPO do? Brilliantly, as a matter of fact. This isn’t surprising, really. The BPO is a terrific orchestra, and they were more than up to the task at hand. Their sound is really suited to the big, lush romantic sounds of John Williams’s score, especially in the showpiece cues like the Map Room sequence and the “basket chase” in Cairo. They really excelled in the extremely technical action music during the airplane fight and the “Desert Chase”, which is one of the most difficult and complex movie action cues ever written. Here the BPO held up amazingly.
The event was an absolute delight, and I’ll be looking for more such concert-filmscore performances to come!
I’ve featured this before–in fact, it was my Song of the Year for 2015!–but I haven’t featured it here in a while, and lately I’ve been listening to it a bit. You might say that it’s even been wandering on the back road by the rivers of my memory, ever flowin’, ever…gentle on my mind.
Today we’re going to listen to three different versions of the same piece! But don’t worry, the piece is really short. Like, really short. It’s about a minute long. And if you have ever been a viewer of CBS Sunday Morning, you know this piece well.
It’s called “Abblasen” (or “Ablassen”, I have seen both spellings while I’ve been reading up on this piece), and it’s the brief trumpet fanfare that opens the Sunday Morning show each and every week. It’s weird that through all my days as a trumpet player I never learned about the piece at all, since it’s quite probably the most familiar piece for solo trumpet out there, except for “Taps”. But now I’m glad I looked the piece up, because it turns out to have a pretty fascinating route to its current immortality.
“Ablassen” was written by Gottfried Reiche, who was a composer and a trumpet player of great renown in Leipzig during the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. Most of Reiche’s music has been lost, and he is best known now as the chief trumpet player for Bach’s work. Since Bach’s trumpet writing that would have been played by Reiche tends to be very difficult, it’s generally believed that Reiche was an extremely adept player. (To my surprise, it’s highly likely that Reiche was not the trumpeter who played the first performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, which is perhaps the “Mt. Everest” piece of virtuoso trumpet playing.)
I note above that Reiche’s compositions are mostly lost…and it turns out that the only reason we have this one isn’t because a manuscript survived, but because Reiche’s portrait was painted by a very exacting and precise artist, one Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Haussmann is best known for the famous portrait of J.S. Bach, but here’s his portrait of Gottfried Reiche:
As art, I love that painting! It captures a kind of defiant stern-ness in Reiche’s face, and I like that he has his collar open. Portraiture of that era always has a wonderful willingness to not be entirely formal. I wonder if that’s partly borne of an idea that if someone’s going to sit for a portrait for long hours, they should be comfortable while doing it…but I digress. (Also note the trumpet he’s holding: a coiled natural trumpet, from the era before valves. We’ll get back to that in a bit.)
The big focus here is that scrap of music parchment, that little fragment, in Reiche’s left hand. Many artists don’t bother to any sort of fidelity when they include written music in their art, but Haussmann did. It’s all there, mostly…there’s certainly enough there for musicologists to have been able to reconstruct that fragment into the fanfare we now know as “Ablassen”. So apparently the reason we have “Ablassen” at all owes to the meticulous reproduction of written music by a portrait artist. Imagine if Reiche hadn’t sat for this portrait…or if he hadn’t been holding that fragment of music. CBS Sunday Morning would be opening with something else.
Here are three performances of “Ablassen”. First is performed on a “natural” trumpet that has no valves. On a trumpet like this, changes in pitch are made purely with the muscles of what’s called the “embouchure”, which are basically the muscles of the lips and lower face. It’s these muscles that make the “buzzing” in the lips which then sets the air flowing through the trumpet to vibration, making sound. For reasons of musical physics, a natural trumpet can only produce scale-wise notes in its high register, where the overtones are densest; this limitation is why trumpet parts in the Classical era–Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven–are pretty boring. To get this level of chromaticism, you have to write for the trumpet in its very high register, where at the time few players could negotiate, and in any event, a trumpet playing that high tends to pretty much take over.
Second is a performance on a modern piccolo trumpet, played by Wynton Marsalis. Aside from specialists in historical performance, most repertoire like this these days is played on that kind of valved modern instrument. And finally, we have a nifty group performance of the piece. Enjoy!
