Tag: Tone Poem Tuesday

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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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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