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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
As much as I love the Russian Romantics, the work of Modest Mussorgsky has always left me a little cold. However, it’s the Halloween season, and Night on Bald Mountain is a staple of scary music, so…here it is.
Kind of.
I was driving home the other day and Night on Bald Mountain was on the radio, but it wasn’t really Night on Bald Mountain. There was a vocal component to it that I had never heard before, and I ended up listening to the entire thing. It turns out that this was an earlier version of the work, called St. John’s Night on the Bare Mountain. Confused, I looked the work up when I got home.
Mussorgsky’s personal life was apparently something of a mess — and by that, I mean, he was an absolute wreck. So much so that when he died young, he left behind piles of manuscripts in various states of completion and/or disrepair, which is why the most famous version of Night on Bald Mountain, the one that everyone knows, is actually an edit made by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. (Also, his famous Pictures at an Exhibition‘s orchestral version is by Maurice Ravel.) At some point, Mussorgsky made a version including child choir, standard choir, and baritone soloist. It’s hard to figure out what is Mussorgsky and what belongs to later editors, but this version of the work is, to my ears, more interesting than the standard Rimsky-Korsakov arrangement.
And as a bonus, here’s another Halloween-appropriate work, Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead.