Tag: A-to-Z 2013

I really don’t know nearly as much about lyric opera as I think I probably should. I’m not sure why that is, as its characteristics really seem to line up with what I look for in art: interesting people in curious circumstances, elevated to statuses larger than life, living lives of overwhelming emotion shot through by melodies that shine like sun through the cracks in storm clouds. Alas, I’ve seen far too few operas in my lifetime, and perhaps it’s time to change that, if not through live performance, then through video.

One opera that I have seen live, though — in college — is Madama Butterfly, by Giacomo Puccini. I suppose that Puccini and Wagner comprise what most people think of, almost stereotypically, when they think of opera: from the latter you have giant sopranos wearing horned helmets and breastplates, while from the former you have tenors belting out soaring arias as they go to their deaths. Butterfly is a well-known story, and a sad one; it was later updated, not entirely successfully, by the Les Miserables team in Miss Saigon.

Today’s selection comes not from Butterfly, but rather from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, during the composition of which Puccini actually died, leaving the work unfinished. He was close enough to the end, though, and had left enough sketches for a student to ‘finish’ the piece, and Turandot has been a standard in the opera repertoire ever since. And part of that is because of arias like this one, which has become one of those works from opera and classical music that have woven their way into the cultural mainstream. This aria is very closely associated with Luciano Pavarotti, who only died a few years ago; Pavarotti performed this aria often in concerts as an encore, and it was a mainstay of his “Three Tenors” concerts.

I honestly don’t know what the dramatic situation is when the tenor sings “Nessun dorma” in Turandot; I should probably hear the aria in the proper context at some point, because as gorgeous and famous as this is, its emotional impact is probably even greater in the context of the story of which it is a part. You can tell that the music is supposed to keep going, as opposed to building up to a huge chord; that chord at the end, designed to close out concert performances, always feels terribly out of place to me.

Pavarotti and the “Three Tenors” turned into quite the classical-kitsch enterprise toward the end, but for all that, I never heard Pavarotti fail to sing “Nessun dorma” without a lot of passion. And in this performance — not from the Three Tenors, but from the closing ceremonies at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino (it’s pre-recorded, actually) — Pavarotti wrings about as much passion from the music as you could want. And well he should have: this was his last public performance.

Tomorrow: I got no idea. I need to research what to do with ‘Q’!

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I really have very little to go on with this piece. I’ve never heard it until as I’m writing this, and I’ve never heard of this composer, either. I got nothin’, folks!

Masao Ohki was a Japanese composer who lived from 1901 to 1971. Here’s the most extensive biographical entry I could find.

The work in question is Ohki’s Symphony No. 5, subtitled Hiroshima. It’s a very modernistic work, often atonal and impressionistic. There is little light or optimism to be found in it, as might be expected from a work so titled. I honestly don’t have a great deal to say about it, other than to note that is an undeniably powerful work.

Tomorrow: An opera hit!

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I like randomness in music. It’s fun to hear works that are literally different each and every time they are played. Of course, there’s a sense in which all works are different each and every time they are played; the exact combination of tempi and specific blend of instrumental or vocal sonorities can never be matched perfectly, but true randomness in music is something that came along with the Modern era: improvisational works, experimental works that use random elements to determine their course, and so on.

One work that employs a random element to startlingly amazing degree is Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5. This work is not atonal, but it is most certainly modern in its sound, approach to even a traditional kind of harmony, and its treatment of melodic material. The symphony is in two movements, and the overwhelming feeling when listening to the work is one of strife and of the orchestra’s efforts to surmount it. It’s almost as if Nielsen’s score is trying to elevate itself above the violent concerns of our world.

This comes to the fore in the second section of the first of the Symphony’s two movements. It sounds like a traditional slow movement at first, but the clouds quickly gather, and then the random strife shows up in the form of the instructions given to the snare drummer. The snare is directed to improvise, wildly and loudly, more and more insistently, as if trying to disrupt the music entirely. The rest of the orchestra swells and swells, even as the snare drum thrashes about, until finally the orchestra overwhelms the percussionist. The effect is one of the most thrilling uses of improvisatory randomness I know.

Carl Nielsen was born and lived in Denmark, and he is generally considered the finest Danish composer. His work is partly a natural evolution of the classically Romantic approach of Brahms and Grieg, but he soon struck out in his own direction, so much so that Nielsen always strikes me as a late-Romantic, early-Modern analog of Hector Berlioz, in that he was a brilliant orchestrator whose music isn’t the easiest to crack into and whose approach can seem indulgent, but who is, in the end, deeply moving and involving.

Here is Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5.

Tomorrow: A side-trip…to Japan!

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I haven’t heard much of Olivier Messiaen’s music. I have a recording of his massive Turangalila Symphony that I haven’t played in well over a decade, and I’m not sure I’ve ever owned a recording of the work on tap for today, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, or in English, Quartet for the End of Time. But I have heard this piece before, so it’s not entirely new to me.

But it sounds entirely new, because this is one of those pieces that you probably have to study closely to really tease out what’s going on. It’s not an easy work, by any means. As a Quartet, it’s obvious that the work is scored for four musicians, but it’s not a string quartet. Instead, it’s scored for a clarinet, a violin, a cello, and a piano. That’s a very odd grouping, to be sure, and it’s partly that which creates this work’s very unusual sound.

Messiaen, as did many of the greatest 20th century composers, tended to engage in a lot of experimentation, going well beyond traditional thought on melody, harmony, and form. He was an incredibly academic composer, in the best sense of the word; he was influenced by travels and studies that took him all over the world. Thus Messiaen’s music is almost truly world music. You can’t pin Messiaen into any simple nationalistic compositional school.

The Quartet for the End of Time has one of the most amazing stories behind its genesis that I’ve ever heard, and I’ll just go ahead and quote Wikipedia here:

Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). While in transit to the camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier, were among his fellow prisoners, and after he managed to obtain some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard, Messiaen wrote a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano. The combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent:Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.

The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on January 15, 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards.[1]Messiaen later recalled: “Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension.”

It’s a difficult, modern work – but it’s also an unmistakably human one, an elegiac meditation on the nature of the Apocalypse. Here is the Quartet for the End of Time.

Tomorrow: to Denmark we go!

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Wow…I’m kind of late to the game with today’s post. Sorry, but I just had a really unmotivated evening. It happens. Anyway, here we go, with another piece that I’ve never heard before, but by a composer that I have: the always-fascinating Czech composer Leoš Janáček. Janáček lived from 1854 to 1928, and while generally considered Czech, he was more properly a Moravian, coming from one of those European ethnic regions that has never had a nation of its own. Moravian folk music forms the backbone of Janáček’s musical output, perhaps even more strongly than Czech music forms the backbone of Dvorak’s.

Living as he did during the end of Romanticism and the beginning of Modernism, Janáček turns out to be one of those fascinating composers whose work seems to straddle the lines between a lot of different categories. As such, his music always has a very fresh sound, like it is at once old and new. The piece I’m using today was first performed just 11 years after yesterday’s Symphony by Andres Isasi, but it sounds so much more fresh and wonderful and exciting and new. Harmonically he is not willing to completely break with tonality as the Schoenbergs and Weberns of the world were in the process of doing, but neither was he interested in continuing the traditions of Romanticism. And he wasn’t interested much in an academic approach to music, either, choosing instead to focus on the folk character of his material and to compose it in ways that are so different from anything else being written at the time. His music is full of passages that churn and heave, with soaring segments of melody rising above ostinati that create an almost hypnotic effect.

Today’s work is Janáček’s Sinfonietta. It is scored for a full orchestra, but with the trumpet section expanded to fourteen trumpets. (Normally, a fully orchestrated work for an entire orchestra will use four trumpets.) As a former trumpet player, this is fascinating and appealing to me just on an instinctive level. But the orchestration is fascinating and subtle, and the piece is on the whole a wonderful and short (about twenty-five minutes long) exercise in musical drama. In his book The Essential Canon of Classical Music, David Dubal says that the Sinfonietta, “once heard, cannot be forgotten”. I’d agree with that. I listened to this work for the first time yesterday, and it’s been on my mind ever since.

This is a wonderful live performance, by the way. As always, pay close attention to the trumpet players. They are the key to everything in music!

UPDATE: Just listened to the piece again, and I must say, the applause from this audience seems awfully tepid in light of the quality of the performance they have just heard. What gives!

Tomorrow: an obscure Russian composer.

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Time for an experiment, as promised yesterday: a work that I have never heard before, by a composer I’d never heard of until yesterday. The composer? Andres Isasi. Who is he? Well, here is the biographical information on Isasi from Wikipedia. As of this writing, this is all that is written on Wikipedia about this composer:

Andrés Isasi Linares (Bilbao 1890-1940) was a Basque composer.[1] He studied with Humperdinck in Germany and was better known there than in Spain.[2] He was made a citizen of honour of Getxo district of Greater Bilbao.

That’s it. He lived fifty years and studied with Engelbert Humperdinck (who is now pretty much known for one work, his opera Hansel und Gretel), and after doing further research, I found the following fleshed out information on Isasi:

Andrés Isasi y Linares (known as Andrés Isasi) was born in Bilbao on 28 October 1890. Towards the end of the first decade of the 20th century he went to study with that ardent Wagnerian, Engelbert Humperdinck in Berlin. He returned to Bilbao in 1914 to a musical scene obsessed with song and the musical theatre. He stuck doggedly with romantic orchestral music and the style he had evolved while in Germany. The public were not supportive. Although his Second Symphony was performed throughout Spain during the period 1915-19, he found it increasingly difficult for his music to makes headway. Like Bax and Vaughan Williams he was not dependent on music to make a living. When his orchestral works found a lukewarm or cold reception he moved to the family home in Algorta where, in addition to acting as a Maecenas to various Basque artists, he continued to write orchestral works that found more success abroad than in Spain. His Second Symphony did well in Budapest in 1931. In total there are two symphonies, three suites, various tone poems, a piano concerto, many songs, choral items and piano solos. He died at Algorta, without the consolation of any musical revival, on 6 April 1940.

So he was basically like a lot of second-tier composers of that era: mildly prolific, and not much remembered today, outside of a few recordings. Composers like Isasi are really well-served by recording labels like Naxos, which put out cheaply-priced CDs by the armload; the ‘premium’ labels aren’t going to put a lot of effort into having the great orchestras of the world record repertoire like this. I doubt very much if Isasi is going to turn up on any program by the Berlin Philharmonic any time soon.

Composers like Isasi represent a long-standing difficulty in classical music. Simply put, there’s been more music written than can really be expected to be heard as much as it deserves to. Many, many composers languish in obscurity, their works either completely forgotten or only dusted off occasionally. That’s a shame, but it’s just the way things are. And it’s not just in music; there is literature that doesn’t deserve to disappear from bookshelves forever except for a few libraries where it only gets read by scholars who then lament its obscurity.

The ‘test of time’ can be a bit on the capricious side. When you dig into the history of classical music, you quickly learn this. The best example is Johann Sebastian Bach, who may well be the Isaac Newton of music, so towering was his genius and so long a shadow does he cast. But the thing is: Bach died in 1750 [edit — error fixed], and then his music went mostly unperformed and unknown until 1830 or so, eighty years later, when Felix Mendelssohn championed a Bach revival. Eighty years, during which Bach was known to musicians but not to the main public. Eighty years have not yet passed since the death of Andres Isasi.

None of this is to argue that Isasi is a neglected genius, but rather just to note that the cream does not rise inexporably to the top. Sometimes it languishes, and after enough time has passed, the ‘top’ has calcified somewhat, which means that there’s just no more room for more cream. This is why many works which people ‘in the know’ agree are works of true greatness never quite find their way into the standard repertoire. And it’s also why it can be frustrating to thumb through the programs of major orchestras and see yet more performances of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and the Wagner overtures and so on. Try some music you’ve never heard before! You never know what you’ll hear.

As for the work in question today, the Symphony No. 2 by Andres Isasi, it’s a perfectly agreeable work. There’s nothing earth-shaking here, and in all honesty, there’s nothing about it to mark its composer’s land of origin. There’s nothing nationalistic here at all; this is just a nicely solid symphony in the Germanic tradition. The most interesting movement, for me, is the Scherzo, which starts with a fascinating segment for pizzicato (plucked) strings. There’s really nothing much ‘new’ here…but I’m glad I’m hearing it, nonetheless.

Here’s the symphony.

Tomorrow: Back to Czechoslovakia!

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No, not the former boy band from the 1990s. We’re talking about composer Howard Hanson (1896-1981), one of the more important American musical figures of the 20th century. A great deal of American musical culture over the last half century owes a huge debt to Hanson, who, in his forty years as director of the Eastman School of Music, presided over an institution that has become one of the premiere music schools in this country.

Hanson was also a noted composer and conductor. I first encountered his work at a summer music camp, when the concert band played a transcription of the second movement of his Symphony No. 1. A few years later, in college, I was blessed with the opportunity to play the Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Romantic”. And Romantic it is: despite living in the age of Modernism in music, Howard Hanson’s heart clearly beat with lyrical Romanticism, and it’s that quality that shines through in nearly everything he wrote.

The Symphony No. 2 in addition to being loaded with gorgeous melodic material, is a dramatic work that employs a cyclic construction. When listening to the work, you’ll hear in each movement references to what has gone before, especially in the third movement, when the entire piece builds to one of the more moving conclusions to a symphony that I know.

And speaking selfishly as a former brass player, I loved this piece from the standpoint of the principal trumpet part. So did our principal horn player, next to whom I sat. Each of us got a lot of cool stuff to do, which is always nice. One of the first things any brass player does when encountering a new piece in an orchestral setting is thumb through their part and say, “What do I get to do on this one?”

Here is Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2. (UPDATE: I replaced the recording that I had used originally, because the third movement of the original recording had so many skips it was like listening to a worn LP.)

Tomorrow: a work I have never heard before. Seriously! I’m not even going to listen to it for the first time until tomorrow morning. That’ll be fun!

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I couldn’t decide which ‘G’ composer to do, so since it’s my blog, I’m doing both!

Percy Grainger was the very first composer I encountered when I got to college. I’d never heard of him before, but there on the music stands on Day One of concert band rehearsal was something called “Irish Tune from County Derry”. Just two bars in, I fell in love with this guy.

At first listen, that sounds like just a lovely setting of a somewhat maudlin tune, but the more you hear it, the more the Grainger touch stands out. By using such a gorgeous melody and by utilizing such a rich sound, Grainger manages to sneak some really wild dissonances right past the listener.

Grainger was Australian by birth, but the major part of his legacy is his exploration and commitment, via settings for orchestra, wind band, piano, and others — of English folk music. He was highly idiosyncratic, and he had a wonderful gift of brevity: there are Grainger pieces that are scarcely more than a minute or two long, and they’re perfect in that scope. Here’s Grainger’s “Shepherd’s Hey”:

In terms of his settings of folk tunes, Grainger’s masterpiece is the Lincolnshire Posy, which sets six different folk tunes over the course of six movements. I was lucky enough to perform this amazing work in my junior year of college. Note how Grainger makes little effort — no effort at all, actually — to push these folk melodies into any kind of regular form. Grainger noticed that regular people singing folk tunes tended to trouble little with things like regular meter or rhythm, so that’s what he tried to recreate in his settings. The result is a work that takes a lot of effort in rehearsal to pull off. I’d have to show you the sheet music to really make it clear, but there are dual entrances that are offset by several beats. There are places where there are no bar lines at all, and the conductor just hammers out each note. And then you have Grainger’s dynamic and tempo instructions: he didn’t like the traditional Italian music terms, so instead of marking ‘Crescendo’, a Grainger piece will direct the performer to ‘Louden Lots’.

I always found something deeply refreshing about Grainger, and it’s probably from him that my fascination with Celtic music began. It’s really a short line from Grainger to the Chieftains, after all.

Finally, here’s an original piece by Grainger. This is not a folk tune, but it has that character. It’s one of my very favorite marches of all time, from the opening, which sounds, to paraphrase Salieri from Amadeus, ‘like a rusty squeeze box’.

And then there’s George Gershwin, with whom I share a birthday. My perception of Gershwin has always been colored by Leonard Bernstein’s writings about him, in which Bernstein opines that Gershwin’s prodigious gifts for melody and the feel for American jazz and its new rhythms were his major gifts, and that Gershwin was just beginning to plumb the depths of his compositional gifts when he died at too young an age. Bernstein’s view was that when it came to composition, Gershwin was lacking; the Rhapsody in Blue, according to Bernstein, is a collection of wonderful tunes that are stitched together loosely and so unconvincingly that the piece can literally be edited and re-edited and not lose much in translation. That’s probably right. As Bernstein says: “What’s good about the Rhapsody is so good that the entire piece is irresistable.”

For Bernstein, the true Gershwin masterpiece was Porgy and Bess, which he viewed as Gershwin starting the process of melding opera and ‘Tin Pan Alley’ into something uniquely American — a truly American music drama, developed here out of American traditions and musical vocabulary and less dependent than ever before on the entire Germanic tradition of musical development that shows up in the transitional passages in earlier works like the Rhapsody.

Here’s the Rhapsody in Blue, performed by Andre Previn and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (a wonderful recording, by the way).

Tomorrow, we’ll stay in America.

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