Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a number of liturgical melodies and chants throughout the work, giving the piece a feel of being both older and newer than it actually is. Apparently in Russia Easter is called “the Bright Holiday”, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture teems with both a celebration of the Resurrection and a more pagan exultation in the coming of Spring.
Tone Poem Tuesday
Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: “He wrote The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”
Which he did.
The Sorceror’s Apprentice is pretty much the only work by Dukas to enter the standard repertoire, and I couldn’t begin to tell you without Googling what else he might have written. This is partly because apparently Dukas was extremely self-critical, and he actually destroyed a good number of his own works rather than let them be heard. A number of his works have survived, but as of this writing, Dukas remains to me entirely unknown outside of this one tremendously famous piece (which received an assist from Walt Disney when it was included in Fantasia).
Here is The Sorceror’s Apprentice.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
An American in Paris.
Is it a tone poem? You bet! Or rather, a “symphonic poem”, which is really much the same thing. Gershwin intended the work to reflect the energy and rhythms he experienced while traveling in 1920s Paris himself, and the work really does buzz with a certain cosmopolitan energy, at least until the pace slackens and we turn to the plaintive blues sung by the solo trumpet. It’s amazing to me that such an optimistic work could be inspired by a European city so soon after the cataclysm of World War I, but in the roaring twenties, I imagine Paris was a place of amazing energy. I tend to see this work as a companion to the Rhapsody in Blue, but an older, more mature one.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Here’s a strange work by Ludwig van Beethoven, written to commemorate a victory in battle by the Duke of Wellington. The piece is viewed as one of Beethoven’s lesser works, and probably rightly so. Even Beethoven himself admitted as much, saying “What I shit is better than anything you come up with!” Still, it’s worth a fun listen once in a while. It’s basically a potboiler of a piece. Here’s Wellington’s Victory.
Of course, this type of thing would be done a lot more convincingly decades later by Tchaikovsky in the 1812 Overture….
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Here’s a particularly lovely piece of tone painting from the film music world, from a movie you might not expect it from: The Karate Kid Part II. These movies had a “diminishing returns” kind of thing going on, in that the first one was great, the second one was pretty good, and the third was too much. But in the second, there’s a lovely scene toward the end when Daniel and his new Okinawan girlfriend enact a tea ceremony, and this is the music that Bill Conti wrote for that dialog-free scene. It’s impressionistic and beautiful, and it creates its own little tone picture. (It also ends abruptly because in the movie, that’s when the wind from the approaching storm whips up and blows out their candle, alerting them that danger is on the way.)
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
No days start with “R”, so I can’t have “Rhapsody R-day”. Thus I fold rhapsodies in with tone poems.
This work is pretty straight-forward, and it’s one of my favorite pieces of all time. Emmanuel Chabrier composed this work after a visit with his wife to Spain in 1882 during which he became entranced with the rhythms of that country’s folk dances. And the work is pure dance, alternating with ease between lyricism and rhythmic punch (and sometimes both), in the span of about seven minutes.
Here is Espana.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
This is one of the most well-known of all classical works, although I suspect more people recognize it by virtue of its use in cartoons than anything else, and therefore I also suspect that relatively few people can actually name it! It’s the Hungarian Rhapsody #2 by Franz Liszt, which was originally written for solo piano but which we now hear in its orchestral version. As a Rhapsody, the work is mainly a collection of folk tunes, which is partly why it’s such an infectious piece.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Your Daily Dose of Christmas (and Tone Poem Tuesday!)
It’s pretty clear that in this series I’ve stretched the definition of “Tone Poem” to “Any orchestral work that isn’t actually a symphony”, and hey, I can do that because it’s my blog. So here’s an orchestral suite of extracts from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Christmas Eve. This music has nothing at all to do with any traditional Christmas music that we’ve all come to know, but hearing something new is always good, right? Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas are almost completely unknown in the West today, which is a shame. They all deal — like Christmas Eve — with Russian folk stories and legends, which tend to be likewise less than well-known in our land.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
It’s not a tone poem.
It’s also not a piece that I even like.
I’ve never liked this piece.
I didn’t like it when I played it in college. I didn’t like it when Torvill and Dean skated to it. And I didn’t like it this past weekend when I listened to it five times.
But still…well. I don’t know. I’ll say this: the performance here is one of the few that doesn’t have me clocking out at around the eight minute mark, and the video itself is amazing, with some of the best camera work I’ve ever seen in a classical music concert video. (Don’t ask my why Gergiev is using what appears to be a toothpick instead of a baton to conduct.)
The work is a ballet, not a tone poem. I know. And it’s the same damned melody, over and over again, for fifteen minutes. I know. And I’ve never once felt the slightest hint of why so many consider this work the height of eroticism in classical music. But…well. I don’t know.
Here’s Ravel and Bolero.