I got nothin’, folks. Today was complete shit. Here, as is my practice in such situations, is Franz von Suppe.
Our conductor here (leading the Vienna Philharmonic in their 1990 (!) New Year’s Day Concert) is Zubin Mehta, who just celebrated his 86th birthday the other day. Mehta, by the way, was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2006, along with Smokey Robinson, Steven Spielberg, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Dolly Parton. What a night that was!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmGJalvsUJs
(If you’re wondering, an emergency hot water heater replacement, news that a guy I knew in high school died (I didn’t know him very well, but well enough to know that he was a nice guy), and, yes, the Supreme Court thing.)
Back in my high school years, I was able to attend a performance of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo. There were three works on the program. I don’t recall the first, sadly, and I was keenly looking forward to the program’s final work, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, which has always been one of my absolute favorite symphonies. There was a third work on the program with which I was completely unfamiliar, but that particular piece hit me between the eyes. It was a work for solo violin and chamber orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams (a composer I was just then discovering), called The Lark Ascending.
This piece absolutely captivated me, to the point where it became an all-time favorite work of mine on the basis of my very first hearing. A hauntingly lyrical suite that evokes the song of a bird as it takes flight into the morning mist, perhaps? At that point I had never heard anything quite like it. The sheer level of musical control needed by the performers to make this work the spell-casting masterwork that it is continues to stagger my imagination to this day.
But–what I did not know, or maybe I did at the time but never really internalized it, is that The Lark Ascending is based on a poem, by English poet George Meredith. I would think this fact had to have been mentioned in the program notes for that evening, but since I knew nothing of the piece, I likely didn’t file that information away at the time. And it disappeared from my mind entirely until a couple of weeks ago when I did a Google search for “music based on poetry”. And there it was: The Lark Ascending.
Meredith’s poem is surprisingly long, given its simple subject; but then, so is Vaughan Williams’s work, isn’t it? Fifteen minutes of impressionistic perfectionism based on the song and flight of a single bird.
Here is The Lark Ascending, in both its poetic and its musical forms. Play the piece while you read the poem: it really works.
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
All intervolv’d and spreading wide,
Like water-dimples down a tide
Where ripple ripple overcurls
And eddy into eddy whirls;
A press of hurried notes that run
So fleet they scarce are more than one,
Yet changingly the trills repeat
And linger ringing while they fleet,
Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear
To her beyond the handmaid ear,
Who sits beside our inner springs,
Too often dry for this he brings,
Which seems the very jet of earth
At sight of sun, her music’s mirth,
As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air
With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day,
And drink in everything discern’d
An ecstasy to music turn’d,
Impell’d by what his happy bill
Disperses; drinking, showering still,
Unthinking save that he may give
His voice the outlet, there to live
Renew’d in endless notes of glee,
So thirsty of his voice is he,
For all to hear and all to know
That he is joy, awake, aglow,
The tumult of the heart to hear
Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear,
And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
By simple singing of delight,
Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d,
Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d
Without a break, without a fall,
Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
Perennial, quavering up the chord
Like myriad dews of sunny sward
That trembling into fulness shine,
And sparkle dropping argentine;
Such wooing as the ear receives
From zephyr caught in choric leaves
Of aspens when their chattering net
Is flush’d to white with shivers wet;
And such the water-spirit’s chime
On mountain heights in morning’s prime,
Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
Too animate to need a stress;
But wider over many heads
The starry voice ascending spreads,
Awakening, as it waxes thin,
The best in us to him akin;
And every face to watch him rais’d,
Puts on the light of children prais’d,
So rich our human pleasure ripes
When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
Though nought be promis’d from the seas,
But only a soft-ruffling breeze
Sweep glittering on a still content,
Serenity in ravishment.
For singing till his heaven fills,
’T is love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes:
The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine
He is, the hills, the human line,
The meadows green, the fallows brown,
The dreams of labor in the town;
He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;
The wedding song of sun and rains
He is, the dance of children, thanks
Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
And eye of violets while they breathe;
All these the circling song will wreathe,
And you shall hear the herb and tree,
The better heart of men shall see,
Shall feel celestially, as long
As you crave nothing save the song.
Was never voice of ours could say
Our inmost in the sweetest way,
Like yonder voice aloft, and link
All hearers in the song they drink:
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.
Yet men have we, whom we revere,
Now names, and men still housing here,
Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
For song our highest heaven to greet:
Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
From firmest base to farthest leap,
Because their love of Earth is deep,
And they are warriors in accord
With life to serve and pass reward,
So touching purest and so heard
In the brain’s reflex of yon bird;
Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
Through self-forgetfulness divine,
In them, that song aloft maintains,
To fill the sky and thrill the plains
With showerings drawn from human stores,
As he to silence nearer soars,
Extends the world at wings and dome,
More spacious making more our home,
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.
Edgar Allan Poe is one of my favorite poets and always has been. In fact, his work partially provides inspiration for my John Lazarus novels; the plan is that each book in this series alludes to Poe or makes reference to him in some way or another. Such is the case with that series’s second book, which I hope to have out in 2023.
“The Haunted Palace” is a beautifully lyrical work of the sadness of beautiful things, lost forever but still leaving behind ghostly remnants of the way they once were.
In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A wingèd odor went away.
Wanderers in that happy valley,
Through two luminous windows, saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne where, sitting,
Porphyrogene!
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And round about his home the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
And travellers, now, within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a ghastly rapid river,
Through the pale door
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.
—
It’s interesting to me, here, that Poe can’t just let his beautiful old palace lapse into memory all by itself; he has to have it happen via an act of violence or a doom applied from without. Is it an invasion by an enemy force? All he says is “evil things in robes of sorrow”, so maybe war comes to this palace…or perhaps a pestilence descends upon the land, or a famine, or a plague. Poe doesn’t tell us any details about the means by which the palace met its end and became haunted, so maybe it doesn’t matter…but why, then, tell us of the evil things in red robes at all?
I had already chosen this poem for today, but then the other morning YouTube prompted me with, among other things, a work by a composer with whom I was unfamiliar: Florent Schmitt. Schmitt was a French composer who lived from 1870 to 1958. He is a more obscure composer, to be sure, but I’ve just read some testimonials that hold his music to be worthy of deeper exploration. Schmitt was fairly prolific, producing work in most of the forms of the day. YouTube presented a piece by Schmitt, and I listened to it a bit and found it interesting.
But what interested me even more was another work, suggested in the sidebar: a piece by Schmitt called Le Palais Hante: “The Haunted Palace”. I did a bit of research and learned that this work is, indeed, inspired by Poe’s poem.
What of Schmitt’s music? It is atmospheric and impressionistic, reminding me most of the sophisticated voice of Ravel. Here is Le Palais Hante by Florent Schmitt.
It’s Spring! Has been for several weeks! But actual signs of spring have been slow in coming, as they always are here in The 716. But we’ve had a few sunny and warm days of late–today is one of them!–and there are some flowers about, here and there, and I read someplace that just the other day was when we reach the point where our average temperature is above 50 degrees.
And as I’ve spent much of my life if not actually in the Appalachian Mountains, I’ve been mostly somewhere near the Appalachains, so here’s Aaron Copland with Appalachian Spring. This piece is such a delight, just pure verdant joy throughout.
As noted in today’s poetry selection, Edward Elgar–once viewed as the United Kingdom’s greatest composer–has suffered mightily for almost a century after his passing, though there has been some more recent reappraisal. Elgar was seen for much of the 20th century as a stuffy reminder of Victorian and Edwardian ideals, the kind of music heard in stuffy oak-paneled halls where the only listeners are old men with thick beards and wool suits as they puff pipes and cigars.
Yes, that’s unfair.
Elgar is also tarred to a certain extent with the same brush as Rudyard Kipling, as being a fossil of the British Empire’s height of excess. Justification for this can be found in today’s selection, a suite culled from the complete score Elgar wrote for a masque (a large theatrical presentation) given on the occasion of King George V and Queen Mary’s crowning as Emperor and Empress of India. This is music of extreme theatricality, and it apparently made quite the impression in its day.
Sadly, the work was almost lost through a series of publication errors and the demolition of a building where the only extant set of orchestral parts was kept. Luckily a piano reduction of the original score survived to be reconstituted into a full orchestral piece, and The Crown of India can be heard again. The entire hour-long work is available on YouTube, but I present here the suite that Elgar culled from various extracts. It’s a brassy, bold, assertive, and dramatic work–not at all unexpected from the man who wrote the Pomp and Circumstance marches.
William Grant Still wrote a suite for solo piano called Three Visions, consisting of three short movements. A program of sorts exists for the work, according to Still’s daughter:
“Three segments of the suite, Dark Horsemen, Summerland and Radiant Pinnacle, tell the story of the human soul after death: the body expires, and the soul goes on to an apocalyptic judgement. If it is seen that the past life has been a good one, the soul may enter ‘heaven’ or ‘Summerland’. After a period of time, the soul may reincarnate to learn additional earthly lessons on the human plane. Some souls reincarnate many times in a constant circular progress toward Godly perfection.”
“Dark Horsemen” is a brief burst of rhythmic dissonance that ends quickly, in favor of “Summerland”, a lyrical and optimistic portrayal of the afterlife that will be enjoyed by those who lived well.
Here is the Three Visions suite, played by pianist Umi Garrett:
(By the way! When I was watching Ms. Garrett’s performance the first time, I didn’t take much note of the fact that she’s playing from sheet music, because pianists do. Not everybody plays from memory all the time…but then I looked closer. The sheet music is actually displayed on a tablet. This had me thinking, “I’ll bet that makes page-turning easier!” After all, reaching up to flip a page without breaking the musical phrase isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, and many times in performance pianists will actually have a page-turner sitting nearby. I figured a tablet would be easy: she just has to reach up and tap the screen on the right side and the page will flip. However, if you watch, she does not do this! The tablet turns the page automatically! Which means that there must be a music display app that listens to the performer and tracks them along with the score, and turns the page accordingly? That kind of blows my mind, I must admit. And for all I know, they’ve been doing it this way for years!)
The center movement, “Summerland”, has taken on a life of its own as a standalone work, even being arranged for wind symphony. It’s always interesting to hear the way a work changes depending on a change in performance instrument or group. It’s still the same work…and yet it is also a completely different work.
Returning to the Ukrainian composer Aleksandr Shymko, I’ll bet you didn’t think an accordion would be a natural instrument to pair with a string orchestra, did you? Why, no, you didn’t. Luckily, Mr. Shymko did.
I’ve never been a big fan of composer Reinhold Gliere. I don’t know how fair that is, given my small sample size of his work with which I’m familiar, but he usually doesn’t really do a whole lot for me. I suspect a part of this is that when I was in 10th grade, we played in high school band a band arrangement of a specific excerpt from a ballet of Gliere’s called The Red Poppy. The excerpt, which might be Gliere’s most famous piece, is called “The Russian Sailors Dance”, and it’s pretty clear when listening to it that it’s meant to be a showpiece for the male dancers of the company. Problem is, it’s not that interesting to listen to; it basically plays the same melody over and over again, without enough variation to even call it a set of variations.
Adding to that is the fact that in this particular year the band director decided to let one of the fellow students, a senior who was going to be studying music, act as student conductor, so this kid led us in what felt like three months of rehearsals of “The Russian Sailors Dance”. Over, and over, and over again. It got to the point that I just simply hate the damned thing, to this day. (You can listen to it here; I’m not featuring it for this post. The guy who conducted us? He was a very talented musician who is a teacher someplace now, I think. He wasn’t the best conductor then, but sheesh, dude was 17!)
As for Gliere in general, as noted, I haven’t listened much to him. He’s a capable composer who hasn’t ever really captured me, though I will admit that I enjoyed a recent hearing of his first symphony. (His third, a gigantic programmatic work called Ilya Muromets after a popular hero of Russian legend, is something of a cult piece with people actually making substantial travel arrangements to attend live performances.) Gliere was of German descent and was born in Kiev, which makes him Ukrainian as well; and he became a particularly prized musical voice in Soviet Russia, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dmitri Shostakovich.
This piece is a wild orchestral showpiece of considerable energy and verve. It is called Holiday at Ferghana, and other than the fact that is a concert overture in D major, that’s about all I know about it. It’s quite a wild listen, and it has spots where it’s almost catchy in its rhythmic thrust. It’s a frankly swashbuckling kind of piece that makes me wonder what kind of film music Gliere might have produced had he emigrated to the west.
I’m still not sure that I’m ever going to love Gliere–but I may be warming on him a bit.
Svitlana Azarova is a composer of Ukrainian and Dutch descent, born in 1976. She has written an impressive body of work, and she currently resides in The Hague.
This modernistic piece is deeply expressive and makes impressive use of orchestral colors, particularly in the percussion section.
Composer Aleksandr Shymko was born in 1977 in Borschiv, Ukraine. He has led a distinguished artistic and academic career, composing prolifically. And that is just about all I know about him. I haven’t even been able to find any substantial information about the work featured here today…but it is an effectively emotional work, about twenty-six minutes long and cast in four movements. The Neoromantic sound has an almost chant-like, liturgical feel to it, and it’s deeply meditative even in its more intense moments.
Much is being lost right now as Shymko’s country finds itself in a war it did not deserve and did not want.
Here is Alcion by Aleksandr Shymko. The movements are titled: “Beyond Words”, “One Hour to Live”, “The End of Sorrow”, and “On the Edge of Everything”.
