Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Ugh! ‘Twas a crazy day at work and a busy evening at home, so I almost forgot entirely about getting this week’s selection posted. In fact, I’m not even posting this week’s selection; I’m saving it for next week. Meanwhile, here’s Mr. Bernstein, conducting Mr. Tchaikovsky. Enjoy!

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I last featured the work of 20th century American composer Ulysses Kay two years ago, which is probably too long to have allowed to lapse without revisiting him. Kay is an important voice in the Neoclassical tradition, but his music represents a broad array of influences, some of which show up in today’s work. Chariots is an orchestral rhapsody in which Kay’s main literary influence was apparently the use of chariots in the poetry of William Blake. The work was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of the composer himself–and that’s the performance featured here.

Enjoy Chariots by Ulysses Kay.

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Every year when I watch the New Year’s From Vienna concert, there are pieces that are new to me. This makes sense! That concert draws from a big body of music, much of which is not heard much these days at all, but which was all once very popular. Once in a while, though, one of those new-to-me pieces lodges in my mind and I have to dig a bit farther into it.

The New Year’s From Vienna concerts focus mostly on the music of the Strauss family, presenting waltzes, galops, polkas, and other dance music from the height of Habsburg Vienna. Sometimes they do feature music by composers who were not Strauss family members: my boy Franz von Suppe is a common one, for example. And this year there was a waltz by Carl Michael Ziehrer, which is my focus today.

Ziehrer, it turns out, was a big name in 19th century Vienna–one of the bigger names outside of the Strauss family, actually. He was a rival of the Strauss family, developing a strong name for himself as a composer and bandleader. Sadly, his musical legacy, like many others, was doomed by the fall of the Habsburgs after World War I. Ziehrer’s work was forgotten and his earlier success disappeared entirely, and it was as a poor man that he died in 1922.

How nice, then, to see this work, a waltz of his, featured in a concert devoted to the Strauss family, but also to the larger heritage of the light dance music of 19th century Vienna, in the centenary of his death.

This waltz is called Nachtschwaermer, which apparently translates to Night Owl or The Night Revelers. I suppose it is therefore a depiction of the people who stay out until the darkest hours, trying to eke out one more drink, one more kiss, one more dance, before the lights go out. It opens with a trumpet fanfare, perhaps signaling the end of the day’s official business, and then a series of typically Viennese melodies spins out, including the orchestra singing as if engaged in a final folk tune and then whistling. It’s easy to listen to this and picture revelers, cavorting a bit drunkenly, staggering with good cheer through cobblestoned streets lit by torches as they sing the tunes they remember from the Viennese woods and hills.

Here is Nachtschwaermer, by Carl Michael Ziehrer, as performed just a few weeks ago by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Barenboim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg8MPokT0aU

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What do you do when you’re a prestigious university and you award an honorary doctorate to one of the greatest composers of your time, and the composer deems to respond with a nice “Thank You” letter? Why, you tell him that won’t do, and that protocol demands that he respond with a musical offering!

And what do you do if you’re said composer and you suddenly find yourself oddly obliged to write a piece for this particular school? Why, you write a sardonically humorous concert overture that collects several drinking songs and the like.

Or, that’s what you do if you’re Johannes Brahms. And if you are Johannes Brahms, the piece you write as almost a joke still becomes–because you’re a genius and your base level is higher than that of most other composers–one of the enduring concert overtures of all time.

Here is the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms.

Brahms himself called this overture a “potpourri a la Suppe”, referring to Franz von Suppe, the composer of popular operettas and light music whose work is mostly forgotten today except for the always-scintillating (and often featured on this blog!) overtures to said operettas. The degree to which Brahms towers over Suppe is quite something to behold.

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Somewhere in my online life, I saw someone recently mention Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu. I don’t remember who or where, though! This is what happens when you scroll too quickly: some things make enough dent that you remember them, but try and give credit, and…nothing. So if you’re the one who clued me in, thank you!

Takashi Yoshimatsu is a Japanese composer, still living, who was born in 1953. I’ve only heard a very small portion of his work, so I’m not really comfortable describing his style, but from what little I’ve read, Yoshimatsu composes in a neo-Romantic style, preferring lyricism and harmony over modernism, atonalism, or avant-gardism. The present work is meditative and evocative, almost impressionistic in nature; its structure reminds me somewhat of Alexander Scriabin, though without that Russian giant’s wild leaps of color and range.

Ode to Birds and Raibow apparently memorializes the composer’s sister, who died in 1994. He does not call it a “requiem”, but rather an “ode to a soul at play” (credit). The work is full of complex chords and deft orchestral writing, with snatches of melody constantly coming and going, almost the way birdsong is always just there but never sounds really complete in our ears. The work is by turns gentle and passionate, but the overall emotional tone is one of warmth.

Takashi Yoshimatsu has a large body of work for exploration, and I look forward to digging into it more. Here is Ode to Birds and Rainbow.

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Here is the last Tone Poem Tuesday until after Christmas! I’m putting this feature on a brief hiatus for reasons that will become clear in a few weeks. Nothing bad, but time for posting will be a crunch for quite a bit of December. I’m scheduling a bunch of posts ahead of time for the month, but this particular feature requires time for me to listen to the works I post before I write about them, and that amount of time may be tough to come by for much of the month. So, it’s easiest to put the Tone Poem Tuesday feature on hiatus until the Tuesday after Christmas.

Onto this week’s feature!

This work, by Arnold Bax, is appropriate for today: it is called November Woods, and it is a surprisingly turbulent and unsettled take on the emotional fabric of autumn. Bax is not conveying the feel of early or mid-autumn here, with cool days and trees aflame with wonderful color; here it feels like Bax is meditating on, well, the cold forests of late November, when the breeze cuts through the leafless trees like a knife and when everything is ice and rock and stone and cold, cold ground.

Apparently Bax’s personal life was a scene of upheaval when he wrote this piece–his marriage was failing and he was having an affair–so it’s clear why he didn’t compose a gentle meditation on fall, but rather a the stormy and windswept feel of a forest in late November. As I write this I’m looking out my back door at just such a scene: it’s snowing and the trees are waving back and forth in the stiff breeze. This piece fits.

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Some weeks I expend effort to engage my curiosity and find a work that I’ve never heard before and try to craft a good essay about a piece that’s new to me.

Other weeks, I figure that old favorites exist for a reason and sometimes that reason is to just throw an old favorite up here and say, “Here, listen to this. Enjoy!”

It’s one of the latter weeks. Lots going on! Much to do! But still…make room for music, would you?

Here’s the Overture to Prince Igor, by Alexander Borodin.

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