Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

I’m not sure what’s in the water over at WNED, the local classical music station, but they seem to be on a kick with this piece. I’ve heard it three times in the last two weeks whilst driving to various points around town. Luckily for them it’s a really good piece! Johannes Brahms’s music isn’t often the most humorous music in the repertoire. Brahms engages a lot of emotions, but sheer humor generally isn’t his thing. But here he is, presenting a collection of student drinking songs in his own wonderful style. It’s the Academic Festival Overture, and this performance is conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who used to relate an anecdote from his own life pertaining to this piece. He was a student and he was auditioning for a conducting class taught by the great Fritz Reiner (one of the canonical “podium dictator” conductors). There was a piano with a score on it, and Reiner asked Bernstein if he knew the piece. Bernstein looked at the page and admitted that he didn’t, but when he began to play he recognized a tune that he’d sung as a boy in school, a German Christmas song with the words:

What clatters on the roof
with a quick, impatient hoof?
I think it must be Santa Claus,
dear old Santa Claus.

Then he remembered recognizing that very tune when he’d heard this work on the radio, which the announcer then identified. Thus Bernstein was able to correctly say to Maestro Reiner, “Yes, I know this piece. It’s the Academic Festival Overture by Brahms,” and thus got into Reiner’s class.

And here it is.

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I post this one every year around this time, because it’s spooky and amazing: “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov.

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Giacchino Rossini’s overture to his opera William Tell is an interesting piece. First, the opera itself is almost never heard anymore, due to its very long performance time and its awkward libretto (from what I’ve read–I’ve never actually heard or seen the entire thing myself). The overture is pretty much all that is ever performed of that opera, but even more interesting is that the overture’s four main sections are each distinct and as one listens to the work, the thing gets more and more familiar. The final section is one of the most famous passages of classical music ever written (owing, partly, to its use in the 20th century as the theme to various iterations of the adventures of the Lone Ranger). Before that is a pastoral segment that is almost as familiar as the finale. Before that is a stormy passage that many listeners may find passingly familiar–and starting off the overture is a slow passage for strings that I’ll wager almost no one who doesn’t regularly listen to classical music knows at all.

Here’s the William Tell overture, in a performance with the score, so if you wish you can follow along!

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Mr. Gershwin:

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Oh wow, you have to listen to this. I’d never heard of it, or its composer, until it popped up on a YouTube sidebar a bit ago. It’s a suite from a ballet called Estancia, by a composer named Alberto Ginastera.

Ginastera, with whom I am completely unfamiliar, was a 20th century Argentinian composer who is apparently viewed as one of the most important composers from the Americas during that age. His music apparently (I’m getting this from Wikipedia) calls on Argentinian folk music, and a common them is that of the gaucho, the itinerant horseman of the South American plains. Listening to this work, I can certainly hear the vibrancy of Argentina, its exotic flavor, and the flamboyance of its dances.

Here is the Suite from Estancia.

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For September 11, Elegy by Mark Camphouse, played by the United States Marine Band.

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I’m in crunch-time on drafting Forgotten Stars IV, which means that I’ve been focusing almost all of my energy there of late. But I don’t mean to leave this space completely fallow as I did this week!

So, here’s a Suppe overture. Because when in doubt, one can always listen to a Suppe overture. This one is Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna, conducted by a very young and spry Zubin Mehta (who is now 82–where does the time go!).

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I still owe him a much longer post, but meantime, this past Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein, one of the greatest musicians this country has ever produced. Here he is conducting the music of another of America’s greatest musicians, Aaron Copland, in his Appalachian Spring ballet. This is still the finest performance of this work I know.

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Remember how in the movie Amadeus Antonion Salieri is presented as a basically competent composer whose music might have been nice at the time but deserved its fade from memory? Well…no, Salieri was no Mozart. But he wasn’t a boob, either. He was prolific and talented…like many a composer, really. And the movie, though great, took significant liberties with musical history. Salieri did not hound poor Mozart to his death, even if their relationship was frosty.

Here is the overture to his opera Les Horaces. This is not the work of “a mediocrity”!

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We did a piece by Vasily Kalinnikov last week, so this week…let’s do another one!

Just as last week I was unable to dig up much actual information about the Bylina Overture, so too am I unable to find a lot out about The Cedar and the Palm, which is a “symphonic picture” written in 1898 (which happens to be the year my maternal grandmother was born). Here it is:

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