Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Let’s check in on Antonin Dvorak, shall we? He’s always good for a solid listen, and today’s work is no exception. It’s the concert overture In Nature’s Realm, which Dvorak composed as part of a trilogy of concert overtures. The entire trilogy was called Nature, Life, and Love, but Dvorak eventually split the three component works of the trilogy up, resulting in the present work, Carnival, and Othello. We’ll hear the other two in due course, but In Nature’s Realm is a typically wonderful Dvorak work, full of pastoral beauty, natural lyricism, and that ever-typical Dvorakian energy and momentum. Like most of this composer’s works, there is a sense of proportion that hews throughout, and the opening passages with answering motifs that sound like horn calls as they build to the first big statement suggest the magic of a sunrise in verdant hills.

Antonin Dvorak is the type of composer to whom I like to return when the air is coldest and the sky darkest, if that makes sense. He reminds me of warmer and sunnier days. Here is his In Nature’s Realm overture.

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Oddly, given my love of Sergei Rachmaninov, it’s odd that I’ve heard this particular work of his only a couple of times, and not at all in the last five or six years. “The Rock” is a tone poem Rachmaninov wrote early in his career, when he was just twenty years old. The piece is surprisingly impressionistic and colorful for a composer who would later be known for achingly lyrical post-Romanticism, but the work also displays Rachmaninov’s skill for orchestration, all the more surprising for a composer so strongly associated with the piano (contrasting with, say, Franz Liszt, whose orchestrations were occasionally bound by his deep understanding of the piano).

The Rock is partially based on a fragment of poetry:

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

The piece also draws (according to the composer) from a Chekhov short story in which a man, stuck in a blizzard, tells a young woman the story of his life and his struggles. There is certainly that kind of brooding at work here in this piece…but of course there’s brooding. We’re talking about Sergei Rachmaninov here.

Here is The Rock.

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After the month of dark and grim and scary and brooding music, let’s return to something a bit lighter, shall we? This duofold selection is one of the most beloved opera extracts of all time; in fact, this selection is so popular that it has almost completely overshadowed the actual opera from which it comes. The Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper is nine minutes of pure delight. The opera was written by Jaromir Weinberger, a Czech composer who later emigrated to the United States. Weinberger was apparently prolific, but only this particular opera lives on of all his works, and that only occasionally. The Polka and Fugue is a mainstay of concert halls and recordings, though. It’s quite an orchestral showpiece and a complex bit of contrapuntal writing (apparently a particular strength of Weinberger as a composer), and this performance especially puts the “showpiece” aspects of the work on display. You should listen to this with the sound up a bit, if you can; this is vintage Chicago Symphony Orchestra when Fritz Reiner was at the helm. The former trumpet player in me thrills at these old recordings, hearing Adolph Herseth soaring above it all. Just try not to dwell too much on the fact that the photo of Reiner on the video itself shows him as he apparently always looked: as if the joy was a concept completely alien to him. Reiner was by all accounts an absolute tyrant on the podium, and if there are any personal stories about him that show his warmth and humor I’ve yet to read them, but the man was able to pour warmth and joy and humanity into his musicmaking.

Enjoy the “Polka and Fugue” from Schwanda the Bagpiper!

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Time for a departure for this series: instead of an orchestral work, a solo piano work! This is the Piano Sonata No. 9 by Alexander Scriabin, a single-movement work that is highly unsettling and even delirious as it moves through its eight minutes. The piece’s dissonance and reliance on trills throughout creates a strong feel of unsettling unstability, so much so that the work took on the nickname “The Black Mass,” as a counterpart to an earlier of Scriabin’s that was subtitled “The White Mass”.

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My October tradition in this series is to feature works of music that are dark, or macabre, or outright tinged with terror. This one is a melancholy meditation, a brooding work on the journey to death. Here is Sergei Rachmaninov’s epic tone poem, The Isle of the Dead. The work pulses and rocks with the uneasy waves, but as the work progresses, a sad lyricism takes over, and the whole work is punctuated by quotes from the Dies irae, the death-chant that Rachmaninov found uniquely compelling and quoted in a number of his works.

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It’s October, so it’s time to feature spooky stuff here! First up, some film music: A suite from John Williams’s score to The Fury, a Brian De Palma-directed horror movie from 1978. This was right in the middle of Williams’s most notable creative stretch, but this score is generally unfamiliar because the film itself has pretty much vanished into obscurity. (Whether deservedly or not, I couldn’t say; I’ve never seen it.)

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A repeat today, but one I haven’t posted in nearly two and a half years, so I don’t feel so bad about it. It’s a work by Jules Massenet called Visions, and I know nothing more about it now than I did then (see the earlier post for details). It’s a dreamy, meditative, and affecting work. Enjoy!

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It’s always been interesting to me that so few great and enduring works of classical music have been inspired by the Arthurian legends (or “the Matter of Britain”). There’s some crossover in the operas of Richard Wagner, mostly in his use of the Grail in Lohengrin and Parsifal, but that’s really about it, outside of the work of today’s composer, French Romantic Ernest Chausson. I suppose this can be possibly explained by the fact that nationalism in art also arose during the Romantic period, so when composers were most inspired by legend and myth they also tended to be inspired by their own nation’s legends and myths. This, coupled with the fact that very few of the “great” composers of the Romantic era came from Britain, may explain the paucity of Arthurian operas and symphonies and tone poems.

Except for this Frenchman, Ernest Chaussons, who wrote a tone poem and an opera directly inspired by the Arthurian legends. Chausson was a “bridge” figure, connecting the earlier era of French romanticism with the emergent forms of Impressionism that followed the Romantics. Chausson was primarily influenced by Wagner and by Cesar Franck, and even though his output was small, his music is highly individual and deeply felt. In this way–and in his untimely death–Chausson almost seems like a French counterpart to Alexander Borodin.

The tone poem Viviane is inspired by the love affair between Merlin the wizard and the maiden Viviane, which ends tragically in the eternal imprisonment of Merlin inside a cave of crystal. The work is lush and mostly introspective, but with passages of rapturous passion before concluding on a sad note. One can definitely hear in this work the drama of a Wagner but also the atmospheric introspection of the impressionists to come.

Here is Viviane by Ernest Chausson.

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The operas of Giacchino Rossini aren’t performed very much today, but they were once all the rage, and the overtures to those operas have remained mainstays of orchestral music even while the operas themselves have lapsed into some neglect. Rossini’s overtures sparkle with energy, adventure, and lyrical wit, and a few have managed through use in other areas of popular culture managed to become even more well-known now than they were in the composer’s own time. Think of William Tell‘s final section, reused later as the theme for The Lone Ranger, or of the amazing use a Looney Tunes cartoon made of The Barber of Seville.

Today we have a different overture: L’italiana in Algeri, or The Italian Girl in Algiers. The overture starts off quietly before a surprising smash erupts from the orchestra, and then as the overture progresses the tunes and rhythms become more and more dancelike as the overture propels toward its close. As always, the overture is full of Rossini’s sparkle and delight.

Enjoy!

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