No excuse, I just didn’t get to it yesterday. You get what you pay for, folks!
But anyway, a repeat of a favorite work of mine. This twenty-minute concert overture by Edward Elgar is lyrical and exciting. It reminds me of the grand old film scores, in all honesty, with its muscular opening that would accompany the giant “Warner Bros.” shield, followed by a big-hearted opening them that would soar as the film’s title appears onscreen. Remember when movie titles were GIGANTIC and would take up the entire screen? They don’t do that much anymore, do they? And credit montages that set the tone…films nowadays almost never have opening credits at all anymore, saving all credits for the end.
Anyway, Elgar wrote this overture, which he called “In the South (Alassio)”, after a winter’s holiday in Italy and a village called Alassio. The piece is pure sunlight from start to finish (well, there’s a bit in the middle that might be a summer storm, if we’re pushing our musical metaphors farther than perhaps we should), and to me it’s always a wonderful delight. I don’t know why the piece isn’t better known, in all honesty; it’s one of those works that always leaves me feeling like I’ve just spent twenty minutes in the company of a master.
Here is Edward Elgar’s “In the South” overture, subtitled “Alassio”.
Baroque music hasn’t always been my cup of tea, but I’ve made strides in its direction over the years. And even when I wasn’t a big Baroque fan, I’ve always rather liked the music of George Frideric Handel. There’s a flashy ostentatiousness to his work that I find appealing, and never moreso than in this piece, which Handel literally wrote to accompany a fireworks display. King George II of Great Britain commissioned the work for a grand fireworks display that was to take place on 27 April 1749, in commemoration of the end of some war or other, and the signing of some treaty or other. The particulars don’t seem that important now, as back then some war was always starting or ending and some treaty was always being signed or something, and in any event the weather on April 27th was poor enough to make a general mess of the fireworks, with misfires aplenty, a pavilion catching fire, and several spectators actually being set ablaze. Ouch.
Handel’s music, though, provides fireworks aplenty! It starts with joyous drums and fanfares and proceeds from one flourish to another, before we arrive at the more lyrical inner movements and then come back to full-on flourish. If you need a musical boost of enthusiastic pageant in the current crisis, you can’t do much better than Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.
In this particular performance, take note of the ensemble itself. This is a French ensemble called Le Concert Spirituel, and they specialize in the performance of early and Baroque music on period instruments. This is as close as we can get to what the audiences would have heard in April 1749, minus the rain and miscues from the pyrotechnicians. Note the keyed woodwinds, the valveless horns with their bells held aloft, the drums placed smack in the middle of the proceedings as opposed to being stuck in the back or off to the side. And of course, note the trumpets! Valveless natural trumpets, long and regal, and held one-handed as the trumpeters stand with their other hands on their hips.
Note, too, the flamboyant leader of all this! Herve Niquet looks like a man who just stepped out of the pages of history to conduct this work. The video is worth watching just for the ensemble…but also watch it for the music. Here is George Frideric Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.
I could do some historical research on this piece, but…nah. Just enjoy the theatrics. Here’s Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, with chorus! You don’t hear the choral version all that often.
How about some film music today? And some John Williams?
Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can is one of his more underrated movies, it seems to me; it doesn’t come up in conversation all that much, but I think it’s just terrific. It tells the story of a young man named Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) who discovers that he has a gift for larceny and for making people believe whatever he’s telling them. Frank uses this to escape a home life that he thought was normal but is now realizing is very toxic, and as he makes his way through life cashing fake checks and passing himself off as an airline pilot and a lawyer and a doctor, he inevitably attracts the attention of a particularly focused FBI agent named Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). The cat-and-mouse game between Frank and Carl unfolds throughout the movie, and quite brilliantly the movie develops the theme that these two men somehow become dependent on one another. In the end (spoilers, I guess, but the movie’s 18 years old and it’s based on true events, anyway–Frank Abagnale is a very real former thief and con-man who has since made millions as a security consultant), Carl captures Frank and then brings him on board his own team at the FBI.
There’s a wonderful scene in the middle of the movie where, on Christmas night, Frank calls Carl on the phone. Frank is sitting alone in a hotel room somewhere, and Carl is sitting alone at his desk in a deserted FBI office. A somewhat pained conversation takes place; Frank wants to end the chase but he doesn’t want to get caught, either. He thinks he’s calling Carl to taunt him, but Carl is starting to know his man and has a moment of insight:
Carl: I’ll tell you what I am sure of: you’re gonna get caught. One way or another. It’s a mathematical fact. It’s like Vegas: the house always wins.
Frank: …Well, Carl, I’m sorry, but I-I have to go.
Carl You didn’t call just to apologize, did you?
Frank: What do you mean?
Carl: [laughing] You have no one else to call!
That’s a great moment. The relationship between Frank and Carl isn’t so simple as, say, Valjean and Javert. Both Frank and Carl see themselves as Valjean, and both see the other as Javert. It’s quite a brilliant relationship.
John Williams’s score for Catch Me If You Can is something of a departure for the great composer, who at this time was in his Harry Potter and the Star Wars prequel phase. Instead of an orchestral epic, Williams returned to his roots as a studio musician in the 50s and 60s, before he really emerged as a composer in the 70s. The score is full of 60s-sounding jazz, with frequent use of melodic percussion, finger snaps, and prominent work for solo saxophone. He writes two bouncy themes, one somewhat dark and one that’s incredibly fun, highlighting the dual sides of the film’s heist story. But he also leavens all this with some deeply introspective music that draws attention to the loneliness at the heart of each of the two men at the center of the story. The hunter and the hunted are both deeply unhappy, and both realize eventually that all they have is the hunt…until our cop, Carl, the more mature of the two men, realizes that they can work together on a different kind of hunt.
One more thing before the music: Catch Me If You Can has one of the best last scenes I know. Carl and Frank are sitting down, comparing notes over a newly-emerged check fraud case that has landed on Carl’s desk, and as they talk, the camera pulls away, across a bustling FBI field office. Frank gives the movie’s last line, which is fantastic:
FRANK: Now all we gotta do is catch him.
What a great movie.
Back to the music: this performance, which I just found a couple hours ago as I was writing, is a selection of cues from the film, performed by a student orchestra in Poland, almost as a Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra. It’s an absolutely wonderful performance, and as I write these words, I’m listening to it for the third time today. Here is a suite from John Williams’s score to Catch Me If You Can.
It’s well known that Beethoven write only a single opera, Fidelio. A bit less well known is that Beethoven also wrote a single ballet, The Creatures of Prometheus. In Beethoven’s time, ballet was seen mainly as a dance art, and the music was just a framework for the dance. This being the case, it was generally the job of lesser composers to write ballet numbers, while the finer, more serious composers stuck with opera and symphonies and concertos and all the rest. Beethoven was approached in 1801 by Salvatore Vigano, a composer and dancer who was preparing a new ballet based on the legend of Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from the heavens and gave it to humanity. Vigano apparently felt strongly enough about the project to want better music for it than he could himself provide, so he asked his friend Ludwig van Beethoven to compose it for him. Beethoven agreed, perhaps because by this point he hadn’t really composed anything for the Vienna stage yet and wanted to establish his name in that arena (Fidelio was still in the future). His resulting ballet is full of Beethovenian classicism and drama, with good cheer and wit throughout. If you’re looking for the brooding Beethoven of, say, the Pathetique Sonata or the storm of the Third Symphony (which was still three years away from revolutionizing the symphony as a form), you won’t find it here. This is as close as Beethoven probably came to the verve and energy of, say, Rossini.
Here is a suite drawn from Beethoven’s music for The Creatures of Prometheus. The work proper starts about a minute in; what’s heard at first over the gathering of concertgoers in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam is a brief snippet of the larger work that you’ll hear in full later on. I’d never heard this piece before I gave it several listens this weekend past, and it’s an utter delight. It’s always worth remembering that Beethoven could be delightful!
Not so much a tone poem, but rather a concerto with tone poem-like qualities…and a concerto that is a multi-movement work and a collaboration between multiple composers. Whew! It’s the Yellow River Piano Concerto, arranged into a concerto from themes by composer Xian Xinghai for a work called Yellow River Cantata. The work’s history is interestingly messy and problematic, as it was none other than Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who ordered a collection of musicians to adapt the Cantata into the Concerto. The work was extremely popular in China initially, but then disappeared from concert halls in that country for many years until it started being heard again in the 1980s. The piece is in four movements, titled as follows: Prelude: The Song of the Yellow River Boatman, Ode to the Yellow River, The Wrath of the Yellow River, and Defend the Yellow River.
The work is brash and very eager to please, and it feels almost like a guided tour of cliches in East Asian music. But there’s something unquestioningly compelling about the piece, and it always makes for a vibrant and exciting listen, mostly because its melodies are so gorgeous, its orchestral writing is so good, and (this is key) it’s only twenty minutes or so long, so it never overstays its welcome. Here is the Yellow River Concerto.
Carl Maria von Weber is one of those composers who is better known to historians of music than to actual listeners of it, which always seems to me a pity. His work represents a crucial step in the development of German opera between the Classical era of Mozart and Beethoven and the full-blown Romanticism of Richard Wagner. Weber’s final work was an opera called Oberon, for which he worked himself sick (maybe even hastening his own death) to learn English so he could most effectively set the libretto, which was in that language. Oberon has never become an operatic standard the way Weber’s earlier masterpiece, Der Freischutz, did, although several excerpts from Oberon have become commonplace in the concert hall. According to David Dubal’s The Essential Canon of Classical Music, Oberon‘s fate is due to serious deficiencies in its libretto. I honestly have no idea if that’s the case or not, but I do know that plenty of operas see rare stagings because of libretto concerns: either the stories and plots are ridiculous, or the demands on the singers are too bizarre, or the staging demands are so outlandish as to be unfeasible. Quite a few operas exist in this weird nether-state, with wonderful scores written by great composers that sadly languish in obscurity because the non-musical aspects of the operas aren’t up to snuff. One wonders if the current trend to concert performances of operas might help to give some of these works a fresh hearing.
In the meantime, here is the wonderful overture to Oberon. Note its dreamy opening, with that slow horn-call melody, which gradually becomes a vigorous and adventurous piece. If I heard that at the beginning of an opera, I’d certainly be intrigued to hear more!
This year has all manner of potential to be…well, roughly on par with its several immediate predecessors, but let’s try not to focus on that entirely, OK? Let us instead focus occasionally, for the remainder of the year, on the fact that 2020 will see the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of one of the towering figures in all human art, Ludwig van Beethoven.
I’m planning on going down quite the Beethoven rabbit hole this year. I won’t feature him every week in this space; sometimes he’ll appear on Something for Thursday, sometimes he’ll have a post of his own, and sometimes he might not even appear on this blog for a week or two at a time. But I plan to make old Ludwig quite the presence here for the remainder of the year, leading up to his actual birthdate on December 16.
For today, we will lead off Ten Months of Beethoven with the overture to his one and only opera, Fidelio. This opera springs from Beethoven’s eternal concerns about human freedom and liberty, as well as the devotion of love to those causes. In the opera, a woman named Leonore decides to free her husband from his unjust imprisonment, and in so doing, she adopts the costume and identity of a young man named Fidelio. Beethoven’s process in composing this opera was typically strained and tortured; he labored over versions of the opera for years and he eventually produced not one but four overtures for the piece, finally settling on this final version, which is shot through with lyrical excitement and light.
Aaron Copland wrote of Beethoven:
Beethoven brought three startling innovations to music: first, he altered out very conception of the art by emphasizing the psychological element implicit in the language of sounds. Secondly, his own stormy and explosive temperament was, in part, responsible for a dramatization of the whole art of music…Both of these elements–the psychological orientation and the instinct for drama–are inextricably linked in my mind with his third and possibly most original achievement: the creation of musical forms dynamically conceived on a scale never before attempted and of an inevitability that is irresistible.”
Here is the Fidelio overture by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Yup, another really busy week…plus, Tuesday fell on The Wife’s birthday and I didn’t want to bury her post below Tone Poem Tuesday, so here we are.
Interesting piece today, in that there isn’t a single string or wind instrument in it. It’s a work for percussion only! Composer Julia Perry only lived fifty-five years, but apparently she was a very prolific composer, and her dedication was such that when a stroke robbed her of the use of her right hand, she taught herself to use her left in order to keep composing. Perry was hard-working and highly accomplished, winning not one but two Guggenheim fellowships to further her musical study. I’d never heard of her before Googling “Black classical composers,” and once again as I have throughout this exercise, I am led to wonder, “Why have I never heard of this person?”
“Homunculus C.F.” is a short piece for percussion ensemble. Perry wrote the work in 1960 while living in an apartment above her father’s medical office. She specifically winds the piece around the “Chord of the Fifteenth,” hence the initials in the title. The piece is modern and abstract and fresh, sounding almost like it had been improvised yesterday instead of being composed nearly sixty years ago.
You know how when I get hyper-focused on finishing a writing project, I push everything else aside and work only on that? Sure you do! I spent the bulk of this week’s leisure and writing time on finishing second-round edits on The Savior Worlds (The Song of Forgotten Stars, book 4), but I got that done last night, so at long last let’s turn to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
Coleridge-Taylor was English by birth, and he was mixed race: his mother was a white Englishwoman, and his father was a Sierra Leone Creole physician. Coleridge-Taylor quickly achieved success as a musician and was one of the more popular composers of his day. Musicians in New York even referred to him as the “Black Mahler,” so successful was his brand of late Romanticism. Coleridge-Taylor’s most famous works are a trio of cantatas he composed based on Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, and the most successful of those was Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, a work which would have made Coleridge-Taylor a very wealthy man had he not sold the rights for 15 guineas in a moment of financial need. Coleridge-Taylor was far from the only composer to make this mistake; Sergei Rachmaninov would have been extremely wealthy had he retained the rights to his Prelude in C-sharp minor. Alas, the artist must often be concerned with the here and now at the expense of the future, and financial distress may well have contributed to Coleridge-Taylor’s ill health that led to his early death when he was just 37.
A year after the trio of cantatas was complete, Coleridge-Taylor added an overture, which we hear today. It is a thrilling, brooding, and lyrical piece of late Romanticism, most reminiscent of Antonin Dvorak in its melodic feel and its enticing energy. Coleridge-Taylor, as an Englishman, was primarily influenced by the music coming from the continent and not from the early threads that would become jazz in America. He belongs to a tradition that was already shifting in new directions, and one wonders what he might have done had he lived to see the dawning of Modernism.
Here is the Hiawatha Overture by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
