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.
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.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
In honor of tomorrow being Valentine’s Day, here’s one of the most famous musical treatments of one of the most famous love stories of all time: Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. I just listened to this the other day with fresh ears, after not having heard it in quite some time, and I was struck anew by its raw power in depicting the central conflict in the play (the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets) and the rapturous love of the two young people who think to rise above it all, only to be consumed by it in the end. It’s a grand work, and it is almost the greatest musical treatment that Shakespeare’s play has ever received. (The greatest, of course, is Berlioz’s third symphony….)
Here is the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture.
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I’ve listened to this piece four times tonight in succession, so beautiful did I find it. Karl Goldmark was a Hungarian composer in the Romantic era who lived much of his life in Vienna, and as such his music is highly reflective of the Viennese and the Germanic traditions of the time: there is much of Wagner’s approach to color and orchestration in Goldmark’s work. But this particular piece, the Sakuntala Overture, is full of lyricism and music of high yearning, particularly in the melody that is first heard at the 1:27 mark and which recurs throughout. The overture is a concert overture, not connected to any music drama or opera, and as such it is complete in its meditation upon an Indian legend that is told in the Mahabharata.
Here is Karl Goldmark’s Sakuntala Overture. I hope you enjoy it.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
It’s always worth remembering that classical music isn’t just about dusty old works by composers long dead. British composer Eric Whitacre is still very much alive, and he is actually only a little less than two years older than me. I don’t know a whole lot about him, actually. The work featured here is, to my knowledge, the only work of his that I have heard, but it’s a beautiful piece indeed, for solo cello and strings. Called The River Cam, the work was composed in honor of cellist Julian Lloyd Webber’s sixtieth birthday (and he is actually the featured soloist in this recording), and it is inspired by the titular River Cam in England, which flows through Cambridge. The work is meditative and dreamy in the tradition of Ralph Vaughan Williams, putting me a bit in mind of The Lark Ascending. The music rises and falls and churns, conveying the energy of a river without resorting to brisk tempi or harsh discord. There’s a lot going on here as one listens, with the melodic lines going in different directions and at times creating dissonances that are nevertheless very beautiful to behold.
One thing is certain: I’ll be attending more on the music of Eric Whitacre.
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I heard this frankly amazing piece the other day on the radio, and I promptly listened to it three more times as soon as I got home from driving about. The work is the Russian Overture by Sergei Prokofiev, and it is simply a collection of tunes, some of which are actual Russian folk tunes and some of which are original themes of folkish nature composed by Prokofiev himself. Prokofiev isn’t the type of Russian composer we often think of: he doesn’t pour out songlike melody like a Borodin or a Tchaikovsky or a Rachmaninov. His is a more modern sensibility, a reaction against Romanticism but still without the full-on nods to the modern of a Stravinsky. I found this work an infectious listen, with its occasional singing, its frequent playfulness, and its variability between intimate song and boisterous showmanship.
Here is the Russian Overture by Prokofiev.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Starting off 2018’s musical selections with a short and lovely setting by Percy Grainger: a familiar folk tune from Scotland, “Ye Banks and Braes O’ Bonnie Doon”. Grainger is always worth returning to, for his sonorous settings and his ability to paint an amazing tonal picture in just a few minutes.