Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

NPR has a podcast called the Open Ears Project:

Part mix tape, part sonic love-letter, the Open Ears Project is a daily podcast where people share the classical track that means the most to them. Each episode offers a soulful glimpse into other human lives, helping us to hear this music—and each other—differently.

I’ve been listening for a while, though I’m behind on episodes right now, and the most recent one I’ve heard is the episode with Tom Hiddleston in which he shares a work called Spiegel im Spiegel, by Estonian composer Arvo Part. Part is apparently the most frequently performed composer alive today, after John Williams, which is really saying something. I’ve heard very little of Part’s music, but what I have heard I always find hypnotic in its minimalism, and that’s certainly the case with Spiegel im Spiegel, which breaks from my usual habit of featuring orchestral music here. This is a chamber work featuring solo violin and piano, and it’s simply wonderful.

Spiegel im spiegel translates to “Mirror in the mirror”, and according to the notes on Wikipedia this refers to an “infinity mirror”, where two mirrors face each other and produce infinite reflections into the eternal distance. This makes me remember something as a kid, in all the department stores: the clothes sections had mirrors so you could see how something looked as you tried it on. The nicer stores had a three-mirror set-up so you could see how something looked from several angles. And if you were really lucky, the two angled mirrors on the sides were hinged so you could bring them in around you. I’d go up to one of those and enclose myself in a triangle of mirrors, and this was pretty trippy fun for a seven or eight-year-old kid. (My mother, for some reason, did not approve when I would do this. To this day I don’t see the problem.)

Spiegel im Spiegel is delicate and contemplative, and the sound is open and clear…almost infinite, like a perfectly mirrored pane of glass. Listening to it I can certainly hear an aural version of the imperfect infinity of endless reflections that bend slightly to one side, since you can never get the perfect vantage point to see all the way into infinity because your head is in the way. What a wonderful piece.

(And I heartily recommend The Open Ears Project. I won’t even accuse them of stealing my Tone Poem Tuesday idea for a podcast!)

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We are currently entertaining a visit from my brother-in-law, so posting will likely be light here until the weekend. That being the case, it’s time for Franz von Suppe! Here is the Poet and Peasant Overture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaMg5hLfnx8

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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.

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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.

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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….

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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.

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One of Leonard Bernstein’s main self-appointed missions in life was the advancement of new American music. As comfortable as he was in the orchestral repertoire all the way back to Mozart, Bernstein saw it as his duty to stand up for modern music as well, and particularly modern American music at that. He felt strongly that it was essential for American concert music to move beyond the rigidity of the forms already over a century old that sprang largely from the Germanic symphonic approach, and that American music was, in terms of a nationalistic school, actually in its infancy, roughly on par with where that old Germanic tradition had been not at the end of the 19th century, but at the end of the 18th.

One composer Bernstein championed was William Schuman, an academic and arts administrator who was overwhelmed as a young man by a Toscanini-led concert of the New York Philharmonic; at that concert he decided to be a composer. Over his long life (1910-1992), Schuman generated a large body of work, much of which is highly-regarded.

This piece, the American Festival Overture, was written for a Boston Symphony Orchestra concert of American music led in 1939 by Serge Koussevitzky. Bernstein would later lead this work frequently, and include it in recordings, such as this by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. (The performance of Copland’s Appalachian Spring from this same album is simply the best recording of that wonderful piece I’ve ever heard.)

Of this piece, Schuman himself wrote:

“The first three notes of this piece will be recognized some listeners as the “call to play” of boyhood days. In New York City it is yelled on the syllables “Wee-Awk-Eee” to get the gang together for a game or festive occasion of some sort. This call very naturally suggested itself for a piece of music being composed for a very festive occasion. From this it should not be inferred that the Overture is program music. In fact, the idea for the music came to mind before the origin of the theme was recalled. The development of this bit of “folk material” then, is along purely musical lines.

“The first section of the work is concerned with the material discussed above and the ideas growing out of it. This music leads to a transition section and the subsequent announcement by the violas of a Fugue subject. The entire middle section is given over to this Fugue. The orchestration is at first for strings alone, later for woodwinds alone and finally, as the Fugue is brought to fruition, by the strings and woodwinds in combination. This climax leads to the final section of the work, which consists of opening materials paraphrased and the introduction of new subsidiary ideas. The tempo of the work, save the last measure, is fast.”

(from WiseMusicClassical)

Here is the American Festival Overture by William Schuman, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

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Reinhold Gliere was a Russian composer who lived long enough to stop being a Russian composer and become a Soviet one. He was born in 1875 and lived to 1956, almost exactly contemporary with Joseph Stalin. As the last living exemplar of nationalist Russian classical music, Gliere was able to avoid the various artistic purges and seemingly random shifts in taste handed down by Stalin.

Gliere is, admittedly, not always my cup of tea. Some years ago the Buffalo Philharmonic performed his Third Symphony, a gigantic work purporting to tell the life of a particular Russian hero (“Ilya Muromets”), a work that apparently has its devotees. I couldn’t get through the whole thing. Gliere and I are not on the same page, apparently…but I do like this particular orchestral poem quite a bit. Called The Sirens, it seems to me to have very little Russian character at all; to me this is much more the sound world of French impressionism. I hear, in this piece, not the echoes of the Tchaikovsky’s and the Balakirevs and the Borodins of the world, but rather the Debussys and the Ravels. The work shimmers and seems at times to be approaching a melody without quite getting there, in what must be a simulation of what the sailors heard in those voices luring them off their ships.

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Sometimes it’s interesting to compare performances by the same conductor, but separated by decades. Here we have Leonard Bernstein conducting his own Overture to Candide, which is likely the most enduring of his own works. The first performance is from one of the Young People’s Concerts he did in 1960 with the New York Philharmonic, while the second performance is with the London Symphony Orchestra in late 1989, less than a year before Bernstein died. These kinds of comparisons allow a peek into the development of an artist’s mind from different vantage points of their careers. Which do you prefer?

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