I haven’t heard a great deal of the music of Gerald Finzi, but what I have heard is always pleasurable, lyrical, and restrained, in the great tradition of the British composers who came to the fore after the Romantic period was winding down. That whole school of composers seems to stand in somewhat of a welcome contrast to the excesses of the full-bore Romantics; their music is generally more introspective than outgoing. Finzi is an interesting composer, who tends to be eclipsed by people like Ralph Vaughan Williams. Part of this is Finzi’s relatively small output, but he labored intensively on his music, and it always shows, at least in what I’ve heard of his.
I’ve chosen Finzi’s Cello Concerto for this post, because the cello is my favorite of the string instruments. Its wide range yields so many musical possibilities, and there are few things in music so beautiful as a cello singing out a lyrical melody set in the middle of its range. The cellos are where a string section gets the richness of its sound. There’s even a kind of nobility in the way the cellist has to hold the instrument, almost enveloping it.
Here’s the Cello Concerto by Gerald Finzi. It was premiered in 1955.
Form in music is a tricky thing. There are many forms, and they all determine how the melodic material is treated. Sonata form, passacaglias, toccatas, canons, fugues, double fugues, waltzes, theme-and-variations – lots and lots of forms, and studying nothing but form can consume a music scholar’s time for years and years.
And then there are pieces like this, which are essentially formless. It’s the Romanian Rhapsody #1 by Georges Enescu, and it’s nothing more than a collection of tunes. That’s it: just one tune after another, in this case, one dance tune after another. And at least one of them is a drinking song. This only goes to demonstrate that the most banal material, in the hands of a gifted composer, can rise well above its musical station.
I could go on for a while, but I won’t. This piece is just pure pleasure from start to finish, even if I have recently learned that it (and its brother work, the Rhapsody #2) eclipsed the rest of Enescu’s output to a degree that really irritated the composer. As for a performance, this one is absolutely scintillating. The video and sound quality aren’t the greatest, as it’s a videotape from 1978, but every single flicker of fire is there. The conductor, Sergiu Celibidache, was a native Romanian who obviously had the requisite affinity for this music, and you can really tell just by watching his conducting. The inspiration to dance is there, and he doesn’t always quite resist it. (And if you listen closely during the more fiery passages, you can hear him shouting. That’s always fun.)
So here is the Romanian Rhapsody #1, by Georges Enescu.
Antonin Dvorak is often cited as Czechoslovakia’s greatest composer. His music is melodic and emotional, without being overly cloying; his orchestrations are always marked by clarity and deftness. He’s not the most profound composer around, but I’ve never yet heard a piece of his that wasn’t rewarding in some way.
His most famous work is likely his Symphony No. 9, which is subtitled “From the New World”, because Dvorak composed it while living for a time in the United States, both in New York City and in a Czech community in Spillville, IA. (Spillville is not too far from Waverly, where I went to college, and I drove through it with my parents a time or two. It’s a lovely small town in the hilly country of Northeast Iowa.)
While the symphony was inspired and influenced by Dvorak’s time in America, it’s overstating things to say that its musical content springs from American music of the day. A lot of the melodies are pentatonic in nature, which is a fact common to many folk regions of the world, not just the Americas, and in any event, Dvorak’s orchestrations and developments of those melodies are purely in the Germanic symphonic tradition. So it’s not really a symphony of “American” music; it’s more of a musical gift to America from a very gifted Czech. And what a gift it is – the “New World” Symphony is one of the most purely pleasurable works to hear in the entire classical repertoire.
A personal story about this symphony: I heard it performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic years ago, under the baton of Semyon Bychkov. During the second movement – the gorgeous slow movement – for some reason the audience seemed to get a collective frog in its throat, and there followed the worst rash of coughing from the audience I have ever heard at a concert. It was astonishing, well and truly astonishing. But even more astonishing was when Maestro Bychkov, after completing that movement, laid down his baton, turned, and admonished the audience for all the coughing. It got a lot quieter in Kleinhans Music Hall after that…and after picking up his baton again, Bychkov added: “For those of you who missed the second movement the first time, we will now perform it again.”
I got Bychkov’s autograph after that concert. He was sitting on a couch smoking, but as soon as he saw me, he jumped up, asked around for a pen, and urged me to continue attending concerts and studying music. He struck me as a very warm and friendly man.
Here’s a fine live performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World”. As you listen, you’ll hear hints of what’s called a ‘cyclical’ structure, when melodic material from previous movements is referenced. Also note that the trumpet players in this European orchestra seem to be holding their instruments on their sides. Those are rotary-valved trumpets, which are common in Europe. Same instrument (albeit with a slightly darker sound), just made slightly differently from the American piston-valved instruments. Anyway, enjoy!
(And by the way: anyone claiming that the opening bars of the fourth movement are obviously where John Williams stole his Jaws theme from will be beaten over the head with a stale baguette. I meanit, folks!)
One part of my character make-up against which I have struggled all my life is my tendency to simply not work that hard at stuff I don’t care as much about as other stuff. I suppose everybody has that tendency to some degree, but in me, it can really get damaging sometimes. This isn’t an example of that, but it is a coming-to-grips of sorts with the fact that I could have been pretty damned good at something, had I not wanted to be pretty damned good at something else.
The something I cared about a whole lot? My trumpet playing. The thing I cared less about? My piano playing.
I just never ever worked as hard at the piano as I did the trumpet. That’s inevitable, as the trumpet was my serious focus back in my musical days. But I have to admit that I could have worked harder at the piano and been better at it. I’m sure that I was a terribly frustrating student for both my piano teachers, first a wonderful woman named Margaret Hooker, and then a fine college prof named Dr. Ted Reuter. There were a number of piano pieces that I was technically good enough to handle, but which I never mastered, simply because I didn’t work hard enough at them.
One such piece is the Polonaise Op. 40 No. 1 in A Major (“Military”) by Frederic Chopin. There’s no reason that I couldn’t have played the hell out of this. I just…didn’t.
Chopin (1810-1849) is generally considered Poland’s greatest composer, and he is one of the greats of the Romantic era. He wrote almost nothing for orchestra, except for a couple of concertos; the vast majority of his output is for piano, which makes his music an absolute staple of piano students all over the world. Nocturnes, etudes, mazurkas, and, in this case, polonaises. A polonaise is a Polish dance, performed in ¾ time, and Chopin wrote quite a few of them. This one, the “Military”, is full of stately grandeur; in my ears it sounds less like a dance and more like a processional. Every time I listen to it, I wish I’d gotten off my arse and learned to play the thing.
I like this video because it shows the score of the piece in time with the performance. This kind of thing is extremely valuable!
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
–Somebody (we’re not really sure who)
Yesterday I indicated that I don’t much care for Baroque music, because of its inherent sanity. But as in all things, there are exceptions, and the major one for me is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whose music transcends nearly everything. Bach is one of the great transformational figures of all time, and there are very few figures in the history of Western music whose influence has been so wide-spread and so lasting.
Why is this? Well, the above quote provides a way in. Writing about music is slippery business, because it’s just plain hard to capture in one medium the essence of another. As Leonard Bernstein once wrote, in discussing a Chopin etude, “If Chopin could have said in words what he was trying to say with the music, why would he have used music at all?” When writing about music, we can only ever get what feels to the writer an approximation of the essence of the work, which is why good music writing is so hard to find and so valuable.
The quote above also pertains to Bach in that, in the course of drawing an absurd metaphor in order to make a point, it uses precisely the word that leaps to mind when I think of Bach’s music. That word is architecture.
Bach’s music is, to me, architectural. It is mathematical. Now, to some that might make it sound like the music is clinical and sterile in emotion, but nothing could be further from the truth. Bach’s music often suggests, more than any other composer’s, something cosmic, and his work springs from the deep connections between music and mathematics. It’s the primal sense of wonder that may well be the very first emotion we all experience, that sense of grandeur before a Universe that is vaster than we can conceptualize and yet we have innate abilities to conceptualize a great deal of it. That’s what Bach means to me.
Architecture. Every great Bach work is an edifice, in which you can sense each musical building block as it is laid into place. In every great Bach work, you can see how each phrase relates to another, how each chord is structured together. The melodies that emerge from the unerring logic of his musical architecture make sense in a way that few other composers’ do, and it’s that emergent quality of his melodies that is so remarkable about them. Bach draws the ear to a certain place just as a great architect, or painter, knows how to draw the eye to a certain place.
Here is one of Bach’s most famous works, and indeed, one of the most famous musical works in the entire history of the world: the Toccata and Fugue in D minor. I’m providing three versions here. First, you can hear the work as it may have originally been heard, as written for church organ. In the second, the Toccata is played as a MIDI recording (surprisingly good-sounding), but with an accompanying visualization that really clarifies the way Bach stitched this astonishing piece together. And finally, you can hear what many purists likely consider an abomination, but which I enjoy a great deal: Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of the Toccata for full orchestra, in the piece’s segment from the Disney film Fantasia (Watching Stokowski here, I always wonder if he was mugging or if that’s really how he conducted, because some of his motions are incomprehensible).
Tomorrow: a piece that chewed up the teenage me and spit me back out.
Welcome to this year’s Blogging A-to-Z Challenge! My topic this year, as I indicated yesterday, is Classical Music. My approach will be generally of a piece with my approach to all such things: personal reflections and whatnot.
So, let’s get started!
As a trumpet player back in the day, I remember with quite a bit of clarity my frustration that a pretty sizeable chunk of the solo repertoire for the instrument sprang from the Baroque era. This frustrated me because, as a general rule, I’ve never been much of a Baroque music fan. I had a trumpet teacher in high school, Mr. Craig Fattey (huh – I wonder if he’s still around? Note to self: look him up), who was of like mind, and he summed it up one night thusly: “There’s a sane-ness to Baroque music that doesn’t lend itself all that well to listening, for me.” I think that’s about right. I’m drawn to music that’s got some insanity in it, and if that’s your thing, you’re not going to find it much in the Baroque.
(Bach is, of course, an exception, because he was such a towering genius that his lack of insanity is totally irrelevant. But that’ll be for another day.)
So if you’re a trumpet student, you find yourself playing a lot of Baroque stuff. And two major concertos of the Classical era, one by Haydn and the other by J.N. Hummel. Both are fine works, but it always bugged me that after those two, music for solo trumpet just doesn’t exist until you get into the 20th century. For the Romantics, the trumpet was pretty much exclusively an orchestral instrument. For the most part I was fine with that, because I always wanted to be an orchestral player anyway, but I still longed for a nice trumpet concerto by a Schumann or a Berlioz or a Dvorak. Alas!
But in the 20th century, the trumpet became more popular as a solo instrument, and the Arutunian Concerto is of that era. And what a wonderful, amazing work it is! Alexander Arutunian (who died just over a year ago, March 28, 2012) was an Armenian composer who was apparently nationalist in his music (which means, he used a lot of Armenian folk melodies or characteristics of Armenian folk music in his work). The Trumpet Concerto is just teeming with wonderful melodies and interesting rhythms, and the orchestration is superb, with the soloist and the orchestra achieving a beautiful partnership. It’s a technically difficult work, but it’s difficult in the musical way, as opposed to being a virtuoso showpiece. This is one of my favorite classical works of all time.
The performance below sounds great, even if the camera work – plunk it on a tripod in one spot and never move it – is strictly utilitarian. The soloist is Tine Thing Helseth, with whom I was unfamiliar until I listened to this. Her sound is fantastic – she has a big, bold sound that meshes perfectly with the orchestra, and in her hands, the Arutunian by turns dances, trots, and sings its heart out. This piece is a great deal of fun for the soloist, with its unusual rhythms and places where you just get to belt out a high note and hold it while the rest of the orchestra does its thing. Listen for the recurring rhythmic motif that binds the entire piece together.
Tomorrow: One of the most famous works in the entire history of music.
Yup, folks, it’s that time again — the A to Z Blogging Challenge! The idea is to simply blog each day in April on a certain topic (excluding Sundays), using the letters of the alphabet as your guide. This year, my theme will be Classical Music. I’m not taking any particularly organized approach here; I’ll just be posting twenty-six different works with a few notes on each. Some will be very well-known to me; some will be very well-known in general. And some will be entirely new to me, which is exciting. (And yes, for long-time readers, some may well have been used in Something for Thursday installments. I’m not searching my archives for each piece as I go.)
The idea? Not to educate or evangelize, just to share a lot of music that I love or might love. (Or hate, if I choose something that makes me crazy.) I had a lot of fun with last year’s A-to-Z Challenge, so I hope I can have similar fun this year. (And hey, if you want to do your own A-to-Z, go ahead and sign up! There’s still time. More the merrier!)
By the way, Something for Thursday will continue to exist this month, but I’ll lay off the classical music for that feature until May. So in general, expect this blog to have a more musical air about it this coming month!
