Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Reading Alex Ross’s book Listen to This, a compilation of his columns from The New Yorker, I was reading a chapter on Icelander singer Björk, and I came across this passage:

Modern Icelandic music begins with Jón Leifs, who lived from 1899 to 1968, and whose 1961 work Hekla helped bring Björk and her chorus together…Hekla, which is named after Iceland’s largest active volcano, has been described as the loudest piece of music ever written. It requires nineteen percussionists, who play a fantastic battery of instruments, including anvils, sirens, bells, ship’s chains, a sort of tree-hammer, shotguns, and cannons.

I mean, come on. How could I not want to hear that?

More:

Hekla depicts the 1947 eruption of the volcano of that name, which Leifs witnessed.  The mountain already had a fearsome reputation stretching back to 1104 when a huge eruption led to a belief throughout Europe that Hekla was the gateway to Hell – a belief that only died out at the approach of the 20th century.

…

Characteristically, Leifs thought little about the practicalities of his piece, and called for an array of instruments that were either unobtainable – massive church bells for instance – or unplayable, such as rapidly repeating shotguns.  Rocks that ring with musical pitches were found, and ships’ chains and steel tubing were scrounged from the Reykjavik dockyards.   Whether or not the exact sounds in the composer’s head made it to the concert hall, the effect at its 1964 premiere would have resonated throughout the musical scene in Iceland, liberating a surge of edge-of-the-world originality which has yet to cease.

Here it is. And yes, you need to turn it up…but be careful. This thing is like the last part of the 1812 Overture and the storm from Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie, jammed together, given multiples doses of steroids, and blasted from the heavens.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Another hectic and somewhat draining day…but with the promise of better things to come. Hang in there, y’all!

Meanwhile, you know the drill. Here’s Franz Von Suppe.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

It’s a tone poem by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, a Russian composer whose music has fallen into unfortunate and unfair obscurity over the years since his life. This tone poem is notable for featuring a soprano voice in addition to the orchestra, and it’s a rich tone painting of…something. In all honesty, I have found scant information about this piece so far. I actually sometimes like it when that happens because it means I can attend on the music alone, without any preconceived notions of what it is about or what it means….

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday (Rachmaninoff at 150)

I’ve featured this piece before, and it’s not even by Rachmaninoff. So how does it tie in? Because when it was composed for the film Dangerous Moonlight, a World War II potboiler whose protagonist is a talented pianist and composer, it was as a replacement for the originally planned work: Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (which will be the major topic of my next Substack newsletter). It’s not entirely clear why the Rachmaninoff couldn’t be used–copyright fees, perhaps–and the producers tried commissioning a work from Rachmaninoff directly, but he turned the offer down. So, in the Concerto’s stead, a new work was composed–in pieces, which are heard through the film. The entire work was basically stitched together by the film’s orchestrators, resulting in the work that is fairly well-known today as a single-movement work: the Warsaw Concerto, by Richard Addinsell.

It’s also one of the best intentional pastiches of a specific composer’s style that I’ve ever heard. Here it is:

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday (actually a symphony, but it’s MY blog, and I say it counts)

So April is over and May is upon us! Sergei Rachmaninoff’s birth month is passed…but we’re not going to be turning away from him in my various online outlets, not at all. Stand by for more Rachmaninoff!

But for now, I have to post Tchaikovksy’s Symphony No. 5, because it’s a great work. Really great. How great? Well…apparently one woman at a recent Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of the Tchaikovsky Fifth found it…this great.

As a woman in her thirties, I know how difficult it can be to balance all that is expected of us: spending quality time with friends, self-care, keeping up with the news, a finger on the pulse of art and culture, a finger on our own pleasure points, etc. Well, over the weekend it seems one woman managed to have it all! During a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 5th at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, many concertgoers reported a woman having a “loud full body orgasm.” Multitasking at its finest, if you ask me.

“Everyone kind of turned to see what was happening,” Molly Grant told the Los Angeles Times. “I saw the girl after it had happened, and I assume that she … had an orgasm because she was heavily breathing, and her partner was smiling and looking at her — like in an effort to not shame her,” Grant said. “It was quite beautiful.”

Another concertgoer, Magnus Fiennes, tweeted that after the “loud and full body orgasm” the “band politely carried on.”

As soon as I read this story, my immediate thought was: I wonder what part of that symphony was, um, inspiring to this person? I came up with a few possibilities, either in the second or the fourth movements, and now that an audio clip of the event has surfaced online, I hear that I am right: she, er, arrived during the second movement, which is, after all, one of the most gorgeous slow movements in all of classical music.

Here is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by George Szell.

There is no sonic passion in this recording other than what Tchaikovsky wrote, with one exception: Szell adds a cymbal crash near the end.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday: Rachmaninoff at 150, the many lives of “Vocalise”

There are some pieces of music that take on lives of their own, extending far beyond their origins to become something bigger. Rachmaninoff wrote a song cycle in 1915 called 14 Romances, op. 34. We’ve already noted that Rachmaninoff was one of the great Russian masters of the art song (a facet of his output that is underappreciated by many, including myself), but one of the songs of this cycle transcended the other thirteen and has become not just one of Rachmaninoff’s most well-known works, but one of the most well-known works of classical music…so much so that it is heard far less often in its original setting.

The song is the last in the cycle, called “Vocalise”. It has no words. The singer is instructed to sing the entire melody on the vowel sound of their choosing. The melody’s swirling nature takes over the song to almost hypnotic effect when unfettered by words and their tendency to impose meaning on things. “Vocalise” becomes a tone poem in itself, in which a pianist and a vocalist work together to make something rather magical.

Here’s “Vocalise” in its original form:

The story of “Vocalise” doesn’t end there, though. The melody and feeling of “Vocalise” has proved too tempting to the music world to just leave it to the sopranos of the world, or the pianists. So, this one song has been set and re-set and re-set again, arranged for every combination of musicians you can think of. In this way it’s not unlike Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which everybody has heard in some version or other, but almost never the way Pachelbel originally wrote it. (Does that make you curious? Here you go!)

Some versions expand the piano accompaniment to a string orchestra:

Once you go that far, it’s easy enough to just give the whole thing to the orchestra!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImjVPONGIa8

Or you can make it a piece of chamber music, this time for string quartet:

Or you still do it for string quartet, but differently:

This one is near to my heart, for obvious reasons. I wish I’d known this existed back in my trumpet playing days:

How about a saxophone? Don’t laugh! Rachmaninoff himself appreciated the saxophone, using it to great effect in his Symphonic Dances, one of his last works. I have a feeling he’d appreciate this one.

How about a British brass band?

You can go down quite the rabbit hole looking for new and different renditions of this one song. (Electric guitar, anyone?) But I’ll feature just two more. First, almost bringing it back to the original version, this time keeping the piano all by itself:

And finally, returning to the orchestra arrangement, this time in conducted almost a hundred years ago by Rachmaninoff himself. This video uses old film footage of Rachmaninoff and family, making it something of a time capsule:

Why is “Vocalise” so enormously effective, to the point that everyone wants to play it? I suspect the answer is a simple one: that gorgeous melody, dreamy and slightly melancholy, is just appealing on a gut level, and it’s a long melody that weaves an almost hypnotic spell on the listener. There are a lot of emotions expressed in this short work, and I think that’s at the heart of its appeal to both audiences and performers alike. In the end, I think that many times, if not every time, we want our music to express something, even if we can’t quite put in words just what it is that’s being expressed.

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Tone Poem Tuesday

When Sergei Rachmaninoff was just 20, he wrote his first major orchestral work, a symphonic fantasy called The Rock, or sometimes The Crag. No lesser a musical luminary than Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was impressed with the piece–there was a brief relationship between the younger composer and the old–and Tchaikovsky apparently proposed including The Crag on an upcoming program of concerts he was planning. Unfortunately, Tchaikovsky died suddenly that same year, and nothing came of those plans.

I wonder what might have been had Tchaikovsky lived and had Rachmaninoff been able to really lean on Tchaikovsky as a mentor figure. A great theme of Rachmaninoff’s life was his yearning for a lost Russia, and the death of Tchaikovsky was probably the first such loss he experienced, twenty-four years before he would lose Russia itself, when Russia lost Russia itself.

As for The Crag, it really sets the stage for what Rachmaninoff will sound like pretty much all through his career: fatalistic brooding shot through with moments of nearly incandescent lyricism, achieved with sure-handed command of the orchestra. Rachmaninoff appended an epigraph to the score, a couplet from a poem by Lermontov:

The golden cloud slept through the night
Upon the breast of the giant-rock

Rachmaninoff apparently claimed a secondary “program” for the work, based on a Chekhov short story in which a young girl and an old man meet in an inn on a snowy Christmas Eve, and he tells her of his life and his regrets.

It interests me that Rachmaninoff’s dark imagination, coupled with intense lyricism, was in full flower this early in his life, before his musical gifts really caught up with it. Here is The Crag.

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Last week I mentioned the “Big Five” of Russian classical music in the Romantic era: the five composers who dominated musical culture in Russia in the latter half of the 19th century, with their influence and their desire to shape a Russian nationalistic school of composition not indebted to the Western European musical traditions. Four of those composers are well-known to this day, but the fifth, Cesar Cui, is not nearly so well known. Part of this is because he didn’t write much in the large orchestral forms of the day. He was not a symphonist, nor did he write concertos or large-scale orchestral works. Just to find a “tone poem” by him we have to turn to his operas, for one of the overtures. Cui’s output was more strongly oriented to works for smaller ensembles, and to art songs and other vocal works.

Cui’s influence was more as a critic and a writer, and as such he was able to position himself to wield considerable influence in shaping Russian musical life. His biggest impact on Sergei Rachmaninoff would come via a review he penned of the young composer’s Symphony No. 1…but we’ll get to that next month.

Cui left behind a very large body of work, and even though we don’t much hear Cui these days, that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to be heard. Here is the overture to The Mandarin’s Son, one of his operas. The opera is a comic opera, so the overture is likewise jaunty and cheerful–hardly what one might expect from a Russian Romantic.

Our focus on Rachmaninoff himself begins Saturday.

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