The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
A work today by composer Nina Shekhar. The work is called Lumina, and rather than me introducing it, I’ll let the composer herself do it:
And here is Lumina. This is a fascinating listen!
I found this piece suggested in an article about space-themed classical music, which seems appropriate to me leading up to next week’s total solar eclipse. Shekhar herself indicates that her work is a study of contrasting images, light and dark, and if that’s not what we’re all hoping to see next Monday around 3:25pm ET here in WNY, I don’t know what is.
Born this date: Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of my very favorite musical voices in history. Last year was his 150th, and it seemed to me that we did not hear nearly enough about him back then. I wrote quite a lot on Rachmaninoff last year, but I still didn’t finish my project; the big long walk-through post of his Symphony No. 2 is still locked in my mind. But it’s coming. Someday.
Meanwhile, April should always include Rachmaninoff. Every month should include some Rachmaninoff, but particularly April. There’s something in the way Rachmaninoff exudes both optimistic hope and dark brooding, from one minute to the next, that seems particularly applicable to the reluctant Western New York springtime.
Here is the Second Concerto, because…the Second Concerto.
So, there’s a local radio station that every day at noon does what they call a “Beatle Block”. That’s four songs by the Beatles.
Only…not really.
The other day they played this, which is not a Beatles song. It’s a Wings song, by Paul McCartney.
Now, they’ve done this before; they’ve played “Imagine” as part of the Beatles Block, and I suspect they’ve also played “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You” as well. So, my question to you, Dear Readers, is this: If you’re told you’re about to hear a Beatles Block, should that include only songs specifically by the band The Beatles, or can it include any song that may have been written by a member of The Beatles, after The Beatles broke up?
I personally lean to the former. This isn’t a Beatles song. It’s a Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney song, recorded by Wings. (And in truth, I don’t much like this song; most of McCartney’s post-Beatles output leaves me cold. But here it is, anyway.)
When in doubt, go with Berlioz. You can’t go wrong with Berlioz. Here is the Roman Carnival overture, for which Berlioz re-tooled a number of melodies from his first opera, Benvenuto Cellini, which–like many of Berlioz’s works during his lifetime, sadly–failed in its day but has since found much greater acceptance.
The Roman Carnival Overture is something of a showpiece; it’s one of Berlioz’s most overtly crowd-pleasing works, with that gorgeous melody in the first section and the infectious carnival dance that makes up the overture’s second half. It’s one of the most infectious works I know.
Whoops, it is Tuesday, isn’t it? Welp!
Some Borodin, then:
Well, before I get to that, background: the Polovtsian Dances are one of Borodin’s most famous works. It is, in fact, an excerpt from his opera Prince Igor. The opera itself hasn’t endured terribly well since its premiere in 1890, mainly because many singers are not trained in the work’s native Russian, and because it’s not entirely by Borodin at all: Borodin himself died before finishing it, so Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took it on themselves to complete it. The result is a disjointed opera that doesn’t flow as well as it should with musical unity…but also an opera that is full of brilliantly realized moments by Borodin. The Polovtsian Dances are the Act II showstopper that brings the entire company out to perform this exceptionally evocative and exotic music. In the story, Prince Igor has come to the camp of the Polovtsian tribe, who welcome him with this enchanting tableau of song and dance. It’s hard to listen to this and not want to disappear into this story….
Today, a rarity: or something that felt to me like a rarity many years ago, when I was still playing the trumpet (and, I might add, at a pretty high level!). The evolution of the trumpet as an instrument meant that there were certain things that the instrument could do and could not do at first, when the instrument had no valves and could only produce chromatic tones by manipulation of the “embouchure”–that is to say, the lip muscles that produce the buzzing against the mouthpiece that sets the air inside the instrument to vibration. This is why many of the trumpet concertos you hear from the Baroque era pitch the trumpet in a very high register, where it is much easier to produce chromatic notes due to the density of overtones.
Now, there were a few trumpet concertos written in the Classical era, most notably by Haydn and Hummel; these were written for a virtuoso named Anton Weidinger who invented a trumpet with keys (holes in the instrument’s piping that were covered by spring-loaded keys, manipulated by the fingers). This instrument could produce chromatic tones, but aside from Haydn’s and Hummel’s concertos (which are two of the most famous works for trumpet ever written), not much came of the keyed trumpet, due to issues with its sound quality; it took a virtuoso like Weidinger to make the thing sound good at all.
In the Romantic era, though, along came the invention of valves, which finally made the trumpet a truly chromatic instrument. So, you might expect that the trumpet entered a Golden Age of concerted works as the great Romantic composers embraced the trumpet as a solo instrument, capable of much more than just reinforcing tonics and dominants?
Why…no.
It always bothered me, as a young trumpet student, that there was no solo trumpet literature at all between the Baroque and Classical eras and the Modern era, when at last the trumpet’s popularity as a solo instrument exploded. I always wondered, what if a Schumann, a Brahms, a Saint-Saens, a Tchaikovsky, had embraced the trumpet as a solo instrument in a concerto? Alas!
But it turns out that there were works for solo trumpet and orchestra during that era; it’s just that they were written by more obscure composers who lived in obscurity and who are mostly forgotten today. Enter Oskar Boehme.
Boehme was a trumpet virtuoso who was born in Dresden in 1870. He made a good living as a musician, being both a great player and a decent composer; he landed in St. Petersburg, Russia as a young man, where he lived out his life, writing music and performing and teaching. He wrote there his Trumpet Concerto, which I present below. I had never even heard of this work until a recent Facebook ad notified me of an upcoming concert in Charlotte, NC (I think) conducted by the Buffalo Philharmonic’s own JoAnn Falletta, with Boehme’s concerto on the program. Having heard it several times this last week, how I wish I had known about it back in my college days!
Boehme himself came to a bad end. He lived in Russia, after all, during and after the Revolution, until 1938, when he found himself on the bad end of one of Joseph Stalin’s purges. According to his article on Wikipedia, his music is being rediscovered to this day. I hope that’s the case, given the quality of this concerto, with its Romantic sweep and dazzling virtuosic writing for the trumpet.
On the occasion of his 71st birthday, here are The Beatles as channeled through the instrument that was Joe Cocker:
May Roger have another 71 trips around the sun in store, at least!