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.
Tone Poem Tuesday (God Save the Queen!)
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
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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Tone Poem Tuesday
Max Reger was a late-Romantic era composer who isn’t heard a lot these days, owing to his reputation of having written mostly very dense works that aren’t the easiest listens in the world. I’m all for difficult listening, but I’m not sold on Reger, whose work strikes me (based on what little I’ve heard) as very heavy and ponderous. But I’ll let you all be the judge: here is Reger’s Symphonic prologue for a tragedy.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Film music is often rearranged by the composers into suites that make for better performance in concert settings, and this is one of the better ones. I had this performance on a cassette tape many moons ago, but I never was able to track it down on CD…and then I happened to find it on Google Play the other day. Lo and behold, here it is on YouTube: a suite of John Williams’s music to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conducted by Zubin Mehta. This was recorded way back in 1978, before Mehta made his name in a big way as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
Enjoy!
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Tone Poem Tuesday
There’s always something fascinating about obscure Beethoven. You can’t help listening to it, trying to find hints of the staggering genius that would craft some of the greatest works of art in human history, and not just musical art. You can hear Beethoven’s style in this piece, and even though it is fairly obscure (coming from a longer work with choral movements, where only the overture is much heard today), you can still hear the great master within it.
Here is the Overture to King Stephen by Ludwig van Beethoven.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
The business of transcription is an interesting one. This is where works that are written for one instrument or group of instruments (or even voices) is rewritten, usually by a different composer than the original, for a different instrument or group of instruments (or, yes, even voices). There are many examples in the classical literature, so while it might sound vaguely disrespectful at first, in truth it is a very common and very old practice. One famous example is JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, originally written for organ but later orchestrated in a very famous version by Leopold Stokowski (and recorded for the Disney film Fantasia). Pachelbel’s Canon in D has been transcribed for nearly every instrument grouping that you can find, and musicians in wind ensembles and concert bands throughout the country are well acquainted with orchestral transcriptions of music. Some such transcriptions are very fine works in their own right, and provide good opportunities for young musicians to get exposed to some of the great orchestral repertoire or give more honed, experienced musicians something to really dig into.
Here’s a piece I heard on the radio today, but not in the transcription that I heard! Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote in 1957 a piece called Variations for Brass Band. This was to be the main ‘test piece’ at the big competition of British brass bands, which are a pretty unique pleasure in themselves. In addition to their own pieces, there was one work that every band had to perform as part of their overall scoring, and in 1957, it was this by Vaughan Williams. The version I heard today was this same piece rewritten for full orchestra…but the version I’m featuring here is another transcription, this one for full wind ensemble. (A brass band, clearly, has no woodwinds.) The piece was apparently not terribly well-received in its original form, as it is not much of a brass band “showpiece”, with almost no opportunities for a band’s solo performers to shine. But I found its orchestral version fairly compelling, and I was interested to see that there’s yet another version floating around.
Here are the Variations for Wind Band by Ralph Vaughan Williams, transcribed from the original brass band work by Donald Hunsberger.