Tag: Music

 Has anyone noticed that in all the time I’ve been doing Tone Poem Tuesday, I have never once yet discussed any of the works of the composer who is not only best known for his tone poems, but who is actually best known for being the greatest composer of tone poems? I’ve been holding this composer back because aside from a handful of other works (which are also great, such as his operas, his songs, and his horn concertos), this composer is so synonymous with the tone poem that he actually overshadows just about everyone else in this rich, rich form of music.

But, I can’t keep him on the bench forever, so: at long last, let us grapple with Richard Strauss.

Strauss was the last of the line of German Romantics who reached their thundering apotheosis in Richard Wagner. Strauss’s life was long, spanning from 1864 to 1949; he saw the end of German nationalistic Romanticism, the rise of Modernism, and his own reputation falter as musical tastes changed and as he made his own regrettable political choices during his last two decades. Strauss did not actually join the Nazis, but neither did he exactly repudiate them. This might be seen as the sad choice of an old but beloved artist who was reluctant to turn away completely from his homeland, but still…the fact remains.

As an artist, Strauss’s work pushed Wagnerism about as far as it could go without crossing the line that the likes of Arnold Schoenberg would. Strauss’s music, at its best, is profound and evocatively lyrical. He wrote massive orchestral music that still shines with utter clarity in the orchestral writing; his textures are never muddy, never unclear, even when he is clearly indulging himself. Strauss is a great enough artist that his descents into self-indulgence are nevertheless captivating in their enthusiasm. Strauss’s skill at conveying scenes through orchestral tone-painting will be appreciated by anyone with a love of film music, where a lot of his influence can be felt, especially in the work of Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, and Rozsa.

Going back to my high school years, when I was doing my first major explorations of classical music, I entered the world of Richard Strauss not at the beginning of his career, but toward the end. (Some composers I entered through their early works, like Berlioz and the Symphonie fantastique, while others I entered through late works, like Mozart and his 40th Symphony or Beethoven with his 9th.) I knew that Strauss had written a series of works called “tone poems”: not symphonies, not concert overtures, but large scale symphonic works with form determined on an individual basis depending on the composer’s need. The first one of Strauss’s that I heard, via a cassette recording I bought pretty much on a whim (my allowance in those days mostly went to comic books and classical recordings), was a piece called Eine Alpensinfonie. This, I learned, was actually the very last of Strauss’s tone poems. Though he would live another thirty-four years after writing it, and though he would write a great deal of music in that time, never again did he write a tone poem.

Eine Alpensinfonie–“An Alpine Symphony”–is also not generally viewed as one of Strauss’s truly great tone poems, and there is reason for that. It’s almost entirely intended as pictorial music, and the focus is generally on orchestral pyrotechnics. Aside from a few introspective passages, Eine Alpensinfonie is almost entirely a showpiece. There’s a reason why, for a work not generally viewed highly by critics, a recording of Eine Alpensinfonie ended up being the work used on the very first test pressing of a compact disc. (That recording was by Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, and by coincidence it ended up being one of the very first compact discs I ever owned. It only had one track, comprising the entire work. All later recordings separate the work into tracks, played without break, comprising the piece’s twenty-some sections.)

Eine Alpensinfonie is wildy Romantic, thrillingly dramatic, and massively orchestral. It also has moments of melodic grandeur that utterly soar, which is almost entirely why I love it: listening to it is an experience, and since despite the critics it has remained steadily performed and recorded for over a hundred years, I think it’s time to finally grant that it is, in any useful sense of the word, a classic.

“That’s great, but what is it about?” You might be asking…and you’re right to ask! Eine Alpensinfonie is simply a 50-minute musical depiction of a journey up an Alpine mountain peak, over the course of an entire day. The work opens with hushed tones and descending minor scales followed by soft churnings in the bass; a minute or so in we hear, in the low brass, the motif that will represent the mountain. As the orchestra slowly begins mustering its strength (in a passage that is spiritually connected with the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, and its depiction of the Rhine’s deep dark waters), eventually everything culminates in a magnificent passage that is so gloriously resplendant that one almost doesn’t even realize that all Strauss has done is orchestrated, in grand fashion for full orchestra thundering fortissimo, a descending major scale.

What follows is a sequence of segments depicting various aspects of a climber’s ascent up the mountain: The ascent (note the offstage hunting horns), treks through forests and beside wandering brooks; scrambling over rocks beside a waterfall (the music actually glitters here); passages through flowering meadows and Alpine pastures (note the cowbells, inevitably making one wonder if the conductor asks the orchestra for more–well, you know);  tense moments as the climb becomes more difficult; and then an introspective passage before we break through to the work’s grandest moments, depicting the acheivement of the summit. O, to be a brass player in the orchestra during this passage!

After the summit, the music takes on a darker tone as our climbers begin descending. The darkness is gathering, with good reason: the last big bit of musical theatricality that Strauss has in store is the “Thunder and Tempest” segment as a wild storm takes over. Here Strauss goes so far as to supplement the orchestra with a wind machine. After this, calm is restored and the sun returns, but the music grows quieter and quieter and quieter over as night settles. The entire work ends almost exactly as it began: descending soft scales, and the mountain’s motif plays once more before the final chords fade away.

Obviously Eine Alpensinfonie is not a symphony in any traditional sense. Strauss is not the least bit concerned with symphonic development or treatment of musical ideas here; the music is pure show from one of classical music’s great showmen. But really: what a show it is, and surely there’s room in our lives for pure theater, right?

Here are three recordings of Eine Alpensinfonie by Richard Strauss. The first is a magnificent classic performance, released in 1974, by the Staatekapelle Dresden, conducted by Rudolf Kempe (one of the finest Strauss conductors). 

This recording, featuring Herbert Blomstedt conducting the San Francisco Symphony, may be the most technically perfect recording of the work I’ve ever heard. (Admittedly, Eine Alpensinfonie gets recorded a lot, because it’s so popular a showpiece; for all the recordings I’ve heard of it, there are many more I haven’t tried yet!)

Finally, here is the recording that got my attention in the first place, way back in, I don’t know, 1988 or so. This is Sir Georg Solti conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Many “Oh, wowwww” moments in this recording. (This is digitized from vinyl, but it’s a pretty high quality record, and it provides a neat demonstration of a particular problem that used to vex recording engineers back in the days of LPs and cassettes: how to accommodate long works on recording media that had two sides, neither of which could support the length of the work in question. The answer is simple: you have to split the recording in two, requiring the listener to flip the record or the cassette somewhere in the middle. Obviously this isn’t ideal, but it simply could not be avoided. In this case, those recording engineers managed to put the side-flip in a very logical place, musically. You can actually hear the brief gap in this recording, but it’s so well done that you have to know it’s there, almost.)

Finally, here’s a good article on the genesis and background of Eine Alpensinfonie.

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 A strange and small subgenre popped up in the middle of the 20th century, called the “Tabloid Concerto”. These were entire classical works composed specifically for use in film. Not film music per se, with individual tracks written specifically to hew to the rhythm and length of specific scenes, but entire works to be used in the films themselves. The first, and probably best known example of this, is Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, written for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight, which is about a concert pianist and composer who must fight in World War II. Needing a classical work to tie the film together musically, but wanting to avoid the specific associations of pre-existing (and well known) classical works, the producers decided to have composer Addinsell write a single movement, which has gone on to be known as the Warsaw Concerto (the composer in the film is a Pole) and has made the leap to the concert repertoire.

I’ll return to the Warsaw Concerto later on (maybe next week!), but this business of writing concert works for use in a film became a small genre in its own right, and a number of the great composers of the “Golden Age” of film music produced works like this, including Miklos Rozsa’s Spellbound Concerto, written for the Hitchcock film Spellbound. Unlike the Addinsell work, the Rozsa Concerto wasn’t written for specific use in Spellbound but was crafted from the film’s themes and cues later on, but it still falls into that same category: a single-movement work of throbbing romanticism in the great Hollywood style.

This performance is a dated one, but it is thrilling and vibrant, featuring the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra conducted by the composer, and with great pianist (and native Buffalonian!) Leonard Pennario as soloist. Enjoy!

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 In honor of Labor Day, and therefore of the labor movement and the fact that the single biggest contributor to the America that exists is the American worker, here’s a piece that pays tribute to one of the fruits of all that labor: the automobile.

Frederick Shepherd Converse was an American composer who lived from 1871 to 1940, spanning the shift from Romanticism to Modernism. As such, he is known for a handful of works, the best known is the tone poem The Mystic Trumpeter.

The piece before us today is Converse’s tone poem Flivver Ten Million. The word “flivver” was a slang term for Ford automobiles back in the days of the Model T and shortly afterward, and Converse gave his piece the subtitle A Joyous Epic Inspired by the Familiar Legend “The Ten Millionth Ford is Now Serving Its Owner. Quite a long title for such a short work (it’s only twelve minutes!), but there it is. The work does seem redolent of the enthusiasm of 1930s America for the coming of the automobile, and as we all know, the shift to being an automobile culture shifted America in ways that we are still grappling with to this day.

Even though the work is a single movement, Converse divided Flivver Ten Million into sections:

1. Dawn in Detroit (sunrise over the city)

2. The Call to Labor (the auto workers report to work)

3. The Din of the Builders (factory workers)

4. The Birth of the Hero – He Tries His Metal (the car wanders off into the great world in
search of an adventure)

5. May Night by the Roadside – America’s Romance (love music via solo violin)

6. The Joy Rider’s – America’s Frolic (happy have a great time music)

7. The Collision – America’s Tragedy (poignant, sad intonations)

8. Phoenix Americans – The hero, righted and shaken, proceeds on his way with
redoubled energy, typical of the indomitable spirit of America (great fun) 

As an added bonus of civic pride, this performance is a recording of the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Here is Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Shepherd Converse.

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 Another fascinating work today by a composer whose work I’d never heard before: Zhu Jian’er, a Chinese composer who lived from 1922 to 2017. Judging by this piece, I need to hear a lot more of his work. A particular subgenre of classical music that I tend to love a great deal is the intersection of Western and Asian music, when Asian composers write music that blends compositional techniques, thematic material, tonalities, and instruments from both “worlds”. There’s something about the skilled and convincing synthesis of disparate artistic traditions that always excites me.

(This kind of approach to making art, in any form, can easily go awry if the non-native tradition isn’t treated fully and equally with respect as a tradition of its own; this is, I suspect, a part of where what we now call “cultural appropriation” starts. But I digress….)

This work is a four-movement suite called Fisherman’s Ballade Suite No. 1, and it deftly blends the pentatonic sound of Chinese folk music with the kinds of orchestral color that typify French Impressionism. The work sounds almost Ravelian at times, and is thus deeply evocative of a land of seas and rivers. I don’t know if the work quotes a specific folk song, a particular ballad that might be sung by the fisherman of the Yellow or Yangtze Rivers as they cast their nets, but it’s not hard to hear that kind of thing in the piece. In truth, I haven’t been able to find much specific information about this work’s background at all, but that’s not always a bad thing: it forces us to come to a work entirely on its own terms.

Here is Fisherman’s Ballade Suite No. 1 by Zhu Jian’er.

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