Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

Last night we finally watched this year’s New Years From Vienna concert, a new year tradition of mine that dates back to high school when I discovered this wonderful annual program on PBS. We used to watch it on New Years Night, but now we wait a day or two until it becomes available for streaming on the PBS website and then watch it in the comfort of our own bed, usually with an open bottle of something sparkling. (This year it was hard cider, but sparkling is a must.)

Vienna’s New Years concert always features the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing works by the Strauss family, with occasional pieces by other contemporary composers of light music. The telecast always features brief looks at Viennese history and art and architecture, and each year at least two or three of the performed works accompany a performance by dancers from the Vienna Ballet. If you’ve never seen it, I can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s always a bit of music effervescence to bring in the New Year.

This piece, the overture to Johann Strauss’s operetta The Gypsy Baron, opened this year’s program. Now, this performance is actually from the 1992 concert, hence the more dated appearance. Today’s VPO is noticeably younger and also less male than the VPO of yore, but this music still runs through the blood of Vienna. Here, from 1992, is The Gypsy Baron overture. (Note, also, conductor Carlos Kleiber’s somewhat wild range of movement!)

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Transcriptions of works from one medium to another can be especially fascinating, as this orchestral version of Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2 demonstrates. This was originally a work for piano, and to perform it well requires enormous skill from the pianist. The work’s transcription to orchestra makes it into a showpiece as well.

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Some Berlioz this week, and one of his most frequently performed works: the Roman Carnival overture, which is a concert piece comprised of repurposed material from his opera Benvenuto Cellini. Berlioz is not generally considered one of classical music’s finest melodists–his themes tend to be long and require a bit of unpacking to find their emotional center–but the melody of the slow section of this piece, first played by the English horn, is one of the most beautiful creations of Berlioz’s life. The following carnival dance bursts with energy.

This particular performance features Charles Dutoit conducting the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. This particular combo once produced some of the finest performances of Berlioz ever.

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In hopes that tonight begins a rekindling of the possibility of America.

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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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