Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

I’ve long loved the two symphonies that Vasily Kalinnikov wrote, but I’ve been largely unfamiliar with the remainder of his output. Kalinnikov was a talented composer who produced a lot of rich, emotional, and songlike work before his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1901, when he was just 35 years old. Had he been able to live to his seventies, I wonder what rank he might hold in musical history.

I haven’t been able to find much information about this particular work beyond its title: Bylina, an overture. You probably don’t need to know more than that, though. This music is its own reward.

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I discovered this work the other night purely by chance, thanks to YouTube’s “suggested video” algorithm thing. I gave it a try…and then I listened to it three times in succession. What a wonderful, magical, lyrical work! It’s full of exuberance and good cheer. I haven’t been able to find out a whole lot of information about the work in question, and I had never even heard of Sergei Lyapunov before seeing this work suggested. Lyapunov was a Russian Romantic who fled Russia after the Revolution, settling in Paris and eventually dying of a heart attack in 1924. He appears to have been fairly prolific, and he falls into the category of those composers whose work was not original or unique enough to warrant a lasting place in the standard repertoire, but who was also too good to languish in unfortunate obscurity.

Here is Sergei Lyapunov’s Rhapsody on Ukrainian Themes, for orchestra and piano. There is some scintillating stuff here–take the sixteen minutes and listen to it!

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I’ve been slowly developing a greater appreciation for the music of Jean Sibelius over the last few years. He always left me cold in my younger years (Finlandia excepted), but I’m understanding him more and more of late. This work, the Karelia Suite, is one of his youthful works, reflective of his early expressive and outgoing Romanticism. Sibelius is a fascinating figure, a man whose artistic visions eventually failed to maintain pace with the world, resulting in an inward turn that itself led to a nearly permanent stilling of his pen. This work, though, is warm and genial and exciting.

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A bit of film music today, suggested by Sheila O’Malley’s twitter thread from the other day, which she offered in context of much of the discussion about suicide and mental illness following last week’s death of Anthony Bourdain. Basically her friends came together and built the shelves for her books and then unpacked them, after months of their remaining in boxes because Sheila couldn’t handle the job. She blogged about this day many moons ago, in a post that I return to often, but I never knew the very sad backstory behind this whole day. But when she wrote that post I was so enamored of the idea that the day was a barn-raising that I always imagine it with this particular piece of film music by Maurice Jarre. It’s “Building the Barn” from the movie Witness, and it’s one of the most perfect bits of set-piece scoring I know.

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There are times–and lately, they are frequent–when I have to remind myself that despite our flaws, America is still the nation that produced George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein.

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OK, posting a march is probably stretching the definition of “tone poem” to the breaking point. So be it. In honor of the wedding the other day of Prince Harry (who is my favorite royal, likely because of the eternal “Do you believe that this is my life?!” gleam in his eye) to Meghan Markle, here is the Britishest of all British marches*. Seriously, if this doesn’t make you want to do the whole “Stiff upper lip, lads!” thing, there’s just not a drop of British affinity in you.

Here is William Walton’s “Crown Imperial” March, written for the coronation of King Edward VIII. That particular king abdicated the throne before the coronation, however, so the march ended up being used for the crowning of King George VI instead. You know how it is.

* OK, fine, there is a march that’s just slightly more British than Walton’s “Crown Imperial,” and here it is. God Save the Queen!

(Note how the British audience there bobs up and down in rhythm to the music. This is one of the most endearing bits of audience participation in classical music that I know, probably second only to the clapping along with the “Radetzky March” at the New Year’s Concert in Vienna.)

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Not really a tone poem, but it is a rather complete musical statement: “The Flying Sequence” from the score to Superman, by John Williams. This is in honor of the passing of Margot Kidder over the weekend. This music underscores one of the most perfect distillations of pure wonder ever put to film. Superman remains my favorite superhero film yet, and the chemistry between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder is a big reason.

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It’s May Day, so here for the occasion is “A May Day Overture,” by British composer Haydn Wood. Enjoy!

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Stretching the idea of the “tone poem” somewhat, here is Alexander Glazunov again, this time looking back in time rather than east in direction. This orchestral suite is called “From the Middle Ages,” and it is just that: a musical depiction, in Glazunov’s thinking, of the climate of medieval Europe. There are big melodic strokes here, to be sure (this is a Russian Romantic, after all), but there are also intimate expressions of medieval dance, the songs of the troubadours, and the marching of the knights off to Crusade. At times this piece almost evokes for me the finest in film music.

Here is Glazunov’s suite “From the Middle Ages.”

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There is something oddly seductive about the way the Russian Romantic composers, while trained in the musical traditions of the west, often looked eastward for inspiration. That exotic flavor lives so sparklingly in the work of Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin, and is also found in the works of other Russians of the time, such as Alexander Glazunov. This work here, the Oriental Rhapsody, sounds like it belongs on a program of such music alongside Scheherazade and In the Steppes of Central Asia. It’s a musical tribute to an Asia-that-never-was, born in a time when the word “Orient” was used to sum up virtually a third of the entire world and all the peoples therein. There’s no real depiction of an actual Asia here, just an imagined one…but the imagination is powerful.

Here is Glazunov’s Oriental Rhapsody.

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