Tag: Saturday Symphony

Sir Arthur Sullivan has a hallowed place in the history of classical music for his work in setting the librettos of W.S. Gilbert to music, resulting in the enduring operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which are probably the greatest musical achievement of Victorian England. Sullivan didn’t just write operettas, however. He was a prolific composer who wrote a number of operas, oratorios, various orchestral works, and this single symphony, which he considered titling “the Irish Symphony”. He didn’t officially choose that title, and in fact it didn’t end up being attached to the work on a de facto basis until after his passing.

The symphony is a youthful work and as such it is uneven and in places clearly inspired by Sullivan’s musical models — in this case, Mendelssohn and Schumann. Nevertheless, the piece is an engaging listen. I’m not familiar enough with Sullivan’s more mature work to know if and where you can hear in his Symphony hints of what is to come later on when he writes, say, The Mikado or Iolanthe, but Sullivan’s Symphony is a pleasantly typical Romatic-era symphony, with some moments of pleasing lyricism — particularly in the opening, when a portentous opening in the low brass yields to an almost ethereal chord in the strings.

Here is Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Symphony in E Major, the “Irish”.

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In exploring the world of Alexander Borodin the last few months, I’ve noticed that while his music is as packed with wonderful emotion and lyricism as any of the Russian Romantics, his music doesn’t have the same epic scale. Borodin is more content to say what he has to say in half the time that other Russians often use, and that is in no way a bad thing, because it creates in Borodin an intimacy that might not be found in Tchaikovsky’s bigger symphonies. When I listen to Tchaikovsky, it’s like entering a giant sprawling city; with Borodin, it’s like following two people through just a small part of that city. Sometimes they just talk, other times they kiss, other times they dance. Borodin’s focus seems tighter, more controlled.

The Symphony No. 2 in B minor is a perfect example. Tchaikovsky’s Fifth takes somewhere around fifty minutes, give or take, to hear. Borodin’s Second is done in about half an hour. For all its grand Romanticism and its big orchestra and all that, Borodin’s Second is done in just a little longer than it takes to hear Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.

Like many of Borodin’s important works, the symphony took several years to complete because of constant demands upon the composer’s time. It sprang from roughly the same time period as Prince Igor, Borodin’s unfinished opera that gave us the Polovtsian Dances, and thus the Symphony has some of the same sound. The first movement is heavy and portentous, dominated by a thumping motif that sounds ominously Slavic in nature. In the second movement, Brorodin writes a scherzo that takes place in several different meters and tempi. The third movement is the slow movement, with a wonderful song-like theme for the clarinet (where would clarinetists be without the Russians, I wonder), and the fourth movement is pure triumphant dance, a release of pent-up energy that will be contained no longer.

I find in just about all of Borodin an infectious optimism and warmth, and very little of the typical Russian “brooding” that one hears so often in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov. Borodin’s music is filled with a love of his homeland and a yearning for its legends and heroic tales (stories of which, I must admit, I know almost nothing).

Here is Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 in B minor.

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OK, so I didn’t get my post written on Borodin’s Symphony No. 2 done, so in the meantime, we’ll go back in time and back to good old Ludwig van Beethoven. We heard the mighty Ninth Symphony a while back in a remarkable performance from the BBC Proms, but here’s the work as it well might have sounded around its premiere. This orchestra performs the Ninth on period instruments, using performance techniques and tempi that were likely in use at the time. I’m not always totally excited or satisfied by period instrument performances, but they can be a fascinating exercise in noting how music has changed in ways not just related to compositional styles. Music is an art that lives in time, moreso than any other. A person in 1716 looking on the Mona Lisa likely saw the same thing that we see when we look on the same painting, but a concert hall patron in 1816 (or later, whenever the Ninth was actually written) is most certainly not hearing the same thing that we might hear in 2016.

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Alexander Borodin only wrote two complete symphonies and fragments of a third. In discovering this wonderful composer of late, I’m at the same time heartbroken at his relatively small output, but also amazed at its quality. This is a man who seems to have pulled in so many different directions in his life of only 54 years that he’s lucky to have got any work done at all, much less work this good.

Borodin’s Symphony No. 1 in E-flat was premiered in 1867, after Borodin spent nearly five years working on it, after his initial training by Mily Balakirev. The resulting work shows the seams of an inexperienced artist at work, and various critics have noted a debt to Robert Schumann in terms of style, but Borodin’s melodic gifts and knack for exotic color in his orchestrations is already evident.

Here is Borodin’s Symphony No. 1.

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Let’s back up in time a little bit, shall we? I just heard this captivating piece a week or two ago on the radio. Luigi Boccherini was a cellist and composer during the Classical period, roughly contemporary with Franz Joseph Haydn. He was highly prolific, but his music was neglected for many, many years, overshadowed by the likes of Haydn and Mozart. In all honestly, I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard anything by Boccherini aside from this piece. He composed when the orchestra was still very small and evolving into something more than a large chamber ensemble, which gives this symphony the chamber-like air that it has. In fact, when I joined the work in progress, I wasn’t even sure if it was a symphony at all, or a guitar concerto, or some other chamber hybrid work. It is, however, like all fine works of the classical era, a beguiling and even refreshing listen.

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Good luck is finding a new composer to explore and love! Bad luck is finding out that that composer didn’t compose a whole lot of music, because of insane demands upon his time and because he didn’t live terribly long. Alexander Borodin matches all of these. I’ve been aware of his music for years, but only in the last year have I really started to seize upon how wonderful he is. Sadly, Borodin’s output is relatively small, because he wasn’t just a composer. He was a teacher and a writer and, interestingly, a chemist who actually did some very meaningful work in that field. He was also a feminist for his day, supervising the establishment of medical education for women. Composition was never Borodin’s main focus, and what I’ve heard of his music leads me to wonder just what might have come from his pen had he been able to focus all his energies thusly. Of course, we’ll never know, and it could well be that his limited opportunities for composition are what allowed his existing output to be of the high quality that it is.

Borodin was also not the healthiest of men, and he died suddenly while overexerting himself during a bout of ballroom dancing. His heart gave out on the dance floor and almost just like that, he was gone. He left behind this symphony, his Third, with only two movements that weren’t even complete. A shame, that.

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