This week’s selection is stretching the definition of “tone poem” probably past the breaking point, as this piece is not orchestral at all; it was originally written for harpsichord but we’re going to hear it on piano. It’s by Jean-Philippe Rameau, a French Baroque composer and musical writer who lived contemporaneously with J.S. Bach. And with that, you now know as much about Rameau as I do.
I heard this piece on the Open Ears Project podcast (which I highly recommend!). The Open Ears Project is kind of like my “Something for Thursday” series, only it’s a different notable person each week describing a particularly meaningful musical work. In this particular episode, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson discusses his experiences with Rameau in general and with this piece in particular. I really do recommend listening to the podcast for his thoughts. For this post, right here, suffice it to say that the piece is very fast, and very quick; it’s over in about two minutes and it really does seem to capture the energy, if not the exact sound, of a bunch of birds squabbling. There’s even a moment when the music stops, completely stops, for a second, as if the birds have just happened to all stop squawking and chirping at the exact same moment.
This is a tone poem, even if it comes nowhere near an orchestra. Here is Le Rappel des Oiseaux by Jean-Philippe Rameau.
I suppose it’s something of a cliche: the composer who aspires to serious work and yet finds their greatest success in crafting music for the popular world. Such was the fate of Robert Russell Bennett, whose name will be well known to anyone well-schooled in the history of twentieth century American musical theater. Bennett worked for many long years as an arranger and orchestrator for the most famous Broadway composers: George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, and Frederick Loewe, among others. Bennett adapted the melodies written by Rodgers for the acclaimed television documentary series Victory at Sea, with Rodgers later admitting that Bennett “made his music sound better than it was”.
If you’ve ever attended a “Pops” concert where your local orchestra played a medley of selections from one or more of the great Broadway musicals of the mid-1900s, you’ll have heard Robert Russell Bennett’s work, whether you knew it or not. He was deeply skilled at this job, crafting wonderfully dramatic and musically consistent suites from melodies that weren’t his. This particular suite is one that I played in college, and in truth, it was my first real introduction to the music of Frederick Loewe. So much did I love these melodies that I later explored the musicals themselves, and found myself entranced with the particular magic that unfolded when Loewe’s tunes were wed to lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner. We played this piece in the Symphony at the same time that I was becoming mildly obsessed with Arthurian literature, so of course later that year I watched the film version of this particular musical. Camelot is…well, it’s a stretch to call it any kind of a classic, in all honesty. It feels oddly bloated and somehow kind of lifeless on the screen, no matter how gamely Richard Harris throws himself into his work. It’s an odd duck of a film, and I’m told that the stage show was pretty hit-or-miss as well.
But oh, those songs. Those amazing, wonderful songs…and this wonderful suite. Here is the Suite from Camelot, original music by Frederick Loewe, and arranged by Robert Russell Bennett.
Dame Judith Weir is a British composer with whose work I am entirely unfamiliar except for the present work, which I just heard for the first time the other day. But my lack of knowledge of Weir’s music shouldn’t be taken as any kind of statement of her skill, because her work is apparently of sufficient renown in the United Kingdom that Queen Elizabeth II actually named her Master of the King’s Music, a post which is analogous to a Poet Laureate but for composers. Weir held this post for a ten year term which just ended earlier this year. (Her successor, named by King Charles III, is Errollyn Wallen, whom we’ll investigate another time.)
The welcome arrival of rain is a work Weir wrote under commission by the Minnesota Orchestra. Her inspiration was the arrival of the monsoons on the Indian Subcontinent, and the joy with which the rains are seen when they come. Weir writes:
This profuse and exuberant piece arose out of bare beginnings; a scale passage followed by a simple melody. Whilst I composed it, as the notes and the pages multiplied, I began to think of a comparison with the arrival of the monsoon in India, when aridity is pierced by life-giving rain; and humans, animals and vegetation revel in sudden activity and fertility. Although the monsoon is expected yearly, its arrival is always joyously surprising. The music¹s title was inspired by a passage from the 18,000 verse Hindu text, Bhagavata Purana ( quoted in the score.)
A 6-phrase scale pattern is heard at the beginning of the piece in highly compressed forms; in rushing passages for the winds and as chords for the solo strings. Then an 8-phrase melody is heard in a lush and spacious version where strings predominate above horns and trumpets. From here on, these two melodic sources are alternated as the basis of melody and harmony, right up to the utterly energetic culmination where both melodies are heard together with their respective variations; there follows a gentle, rainy coda. A prominent solo for the drum section (rototoms, tomtoms and timpani) starts in the middle of the piece and reinforces the ever-growing energy of the music.
Here is The welcome arrival of rain by Dame Judith Weir.
Charles Tomlinson Griffes was an American composer whose life forms one of the better What ifs of music history. He was one of those composers who, being born in the late 19th century (1884, to be specific), learned and came of age while American music was still struggling to move beyond its European influences. American classical music would not really start to come into its own until European Romanticism was firmly on the wane, and American factors like jazz would arise. Griffes was enormously talented and his own influences seem to have been the kind of mystical impressionism found in the work of composers like Scriabin, as well as the sound world of the French impressionists like Debussy and Ravel. Sadly, Griffes was struck down at the young age of 35 when the Spanish flu pandemic swept the world. The music of his that survives is often fascinating and suggestive of what might have come to be had he lived to the fullness of his gifts.
The current work, The Kairn of Koridwen, is a chamber work intended for an unusual ensemble: one flute, two clarinets, two horns, piano, harp, and celeste. Since Kairn was composed as a “dance-drama”–I assume that means a ballet–it’s surprising how long the work is, but listening to it, it never feels overlong. Griffes gets a lot of color and almost mysticism out of his material and his scoring for that small ensemble. The work is downright dramatic at times, and never less than fascinating. Here is The Kairn of Koridwen by Charles Tomlinson Griffes.
First of all, Happy October! October is the best month, and on this topic I will hear no debate.
Now, onto some music. This one I came upon by happenstance: I’m on vacation today and tomorrow (I’ve been on vacation since last Friday, actually), but The Wife had to work today, so I’m up but I’m staying home while she’s off to the office. But my car was parking her in! So out I went to move my car so she could get out…and this piece was on WNED at that moment. I only heard about ninety seconds of it, but I was intrigued, so I made note of the title and looked it up on YouTube. Now I’m sitting here finishing up my first cup of coffee while I listen to Ouverture bardique by Ferdinand Ries.
Who is that, you ask? Well, Ries is yet another of those common figures I like to feature here: composers of talent whose work may not be good enough to earn a spot in whatever “Musical Pantheon of Greatness” we’re celebrating, but whose work is too good to merit the obscurity into which it has fallen. Ries was a contemporary of Beethoven’s, living 1784 to 1838, but he wasn’t just a contemporary of Beethoven’s: he was an associate of the great master’s, actually serving for a time first as a pupil of Beethoven’s and later as his secretary and copyist. I assume that as a copyist it fell to Ries, at least in part, to decipher Beethoven’s manuscripts and put things in order as to create actually playable sheet music. In the annals of art preservation, not enough credit is given to Beethoven’s copyists. I mean, look at this–we’re talking seriously heroic work here.
Ries turns out to have been one of those composers who didn’t have to really wait for obscurity. He worked hard and had a modestly successful musical life, but he never heard a number of his later works performed, and his own passing at the age of 53 wasn’t even noted by the music publications of his day. But again, I listen to this and think, “Does he really deserve to be forgotten?” This overture, a concert work not written to introduce a dramatic piece, starts off with a typically “muscular” intro, common to the classical overtures of the time, but then it goes to very interesting places. No Rossini-style overture, this–Ries’s piece is thoughtful and exciting, and it’s also orchestrally interesting when you notice the degree to which Ries has given some of his most fascinating material to the harps. So here’s a work that is deeply classical in its conception, but you can feel the Romanticism whispering around the edges.
I liked this piece a great deal, and I hope you will, too. Here is Ouverture bardique by Ferdinant Ries.
Well, an apology of sorts is needed here: I had a new-to-me piece cued up and ready to go, but I wanted to give it a few more listens before I actually posted it, and then I lost track of that during a pretty hectic bunch of days recently. So…if you’ve been around a while, you know what that means. Here’s Franz von Suppe, with his Boccaccio Overture! This actually is one of his overtures that I know quite less well than some of the others, but it’s typical von Suppe, sparkling and delightful.
I’m having a busy week at work, so here’s a piece that might come in emotionally handy by Friday: it’s basically a collection of drinking songs! Here is one of my absolute favorites, the Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 by Georges Enescu, Cristian Macelaru conducting the WDR Symphony Orchestra.
WHOA, hold on!
OK, the above is a great performance, so give it a listen. But also watch this, because this turns it into something really nifty:
I like it when I get in the car and hear just a few minutes of a piece with which I am unfamiliar, and then I either do a music search using Google’s listening and “ID a song” feature, or I take a quick photo of the name of the piece on the screen of my car’s stereo system, if the name is featured there. The problem is that I usually then forget about said piece of music until much later when I’m going through the Screenshots folder on my phone, or looking through my camera roll, and by that point I have no memory of the piece I listened to. So, over the next few weeks, I’m going to feature works that I “discovered” in this way!
We’re starting with a work by composer Jonathan Leshnoff. Leshnoff, based in Baltimore, is apparently a prolific composer whose work has been featured by many orchestras and ensembles in America, and yet, until I heard a few minutes of this particular piece, I’d not heard of him, to my knowledge. From his website:
Distinguished by The New York Times as “a leader of contemporary American lyricism,” GRAMMY-nominated composer Jonathan Leshnoff is renowned for his music’s striking harmonies, structural complexity, and powerful themes. The Baltimore-based composer has been ranked among the most performed living composers in recent seasons with performances by over 100 orchestras. He has received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, Nashville, and Pittsburgh, among others. Leshnoff’s compositions have also been premiered by classical music’s most celebrated soloists, including Gil Shaham, Johannes Moser, Manuel Barrueco, Noah Bendix-Balgley and Joyce Yang.
Of this particular piece, called Elegy, Leshnoff writes:
Elegy is scored for the unusual combination of horns, harp, timpani and strings. These instruments were selected for their darker color, a natural fit for this composition which is introspective and somber. Elegy is written in memory of the thousands of nameless people who suffered under oppression.
Writing a new composition for the Harmony from Discord series, I chose to musically depict these two contrasting moods with two contrasting ideas: a somber, dark theme that dominates the beginning of the work and a hopeful, brighter theme that is heard in the middle. Elegy starts with this lonely and contemplative theme first played by the violins and then slowly spreading throughout the string section, with the harp offering a haunting echo. After a brooding cadence, the hopeful theme is introduced in the horns. Full of moving lines and sweeping harmonies the music builds to a resounding climax, accompanied by the timpani grounding the ensemble in successive strikes. After a cascading cadence, the dark opening theme again returns, but this time, the hopeful theme intertwines itself with the darker theme, symbolic of the hope that has emerged through the dark, discordant eras of history. The piece notably ends on a major chord.
The piece seems initially reminiscent of Barber’s famous Adagio for Strings, though that comparison quickly falls by the wayside. Leshnoff’s work is less brooding and, I think, more meditative than the Barber piece, blending as Leshnoff indicates hopeful passages along with the darker ones and ending on a more peaceful note. Still, it is a very compelling work, and the odd instrumentation gives it a unique sound-world and emotional life.
Luigi Cherubini is a composer with whom I am almost completely unfamiliar, except by reputation…and that reputation is via the impressions left behind by another composer with whom I am very familiar. Unfortunately for Cherubini, that composer is Hector Berlioz, who found Cherubini a conservative and pedantic obstacle in his youthful efforts to pursue his own philosophies of music and composition during his time at the Paris Conservatoire.
Now, how accurate Berlioz’s feelings about Cherubini might have been is an open question, as frankly is how accurate Berlioz’s depictions of those feelings in his Memoirs might have been. It seems likely that the two were in fact in conflict, and that Cherubini did in fact find this young and arrogant composer-in-waiting too brash and his music too harsh and unfocused. Those charges are not entirely unfair, after all, when one has listened to the early output of Berlioz, and when one has read a bit about the details of his life.
Cherubini was essentially a classicist, living as he did during the shift from music’s Classical era into the Romantic, and he is one of those figures who is not performed a great deal today, perhaps a bit unfairly; if his music presents certain challenges to contemporary ears, there is still reward to be found within, as Cherubini’s Classical influence can still be detected in Berlioz, who for all his bombast still preferred a degree of balance in his eruptions (Berlioz loved Gluck, for example), and surely a composer shouldn’t be relegated to second-rate status if he was counted as an influence by the likes of Beethoven and Rossini.
Cherubini’s opera-ballet Anacreon premiered in 1803 (the year of Berlioz’s birth!), whereupon it was greeted with complete indifference. The work failed utterly, likely due to the story (about the love life of a Greek poet) being completely out of style at the time, and from what I can tell, the work was pretty much forgotten entirely until the 1970s when it was finally recorded. The overture, however, did survive, being praised by many composers (including Berlioz!) and basically being one of the few pieces to keep Cherubini’s name alive into the 21st century. The overture is thrilling and lyrical in the best “classical” way (meaning in the manner of the Classical era), and listening to it now I find myself slotting it, stylistically, into exactly where it goes: between, say, the overtures of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz. Chronologically, that’s pretty much where it falls, too.
Here is the Overture to Anacreon by Luigi Cherubini.
Leonard Bernstein was born 106 years plus two days ago, on August 25, 1918. Oddly, I’ve never written much about him here, have I? I really should change that one of these days…maybe after I finally get Maestro off the “to-be-watched” queue…but for now, I feature a symphonic suite Bernstein culled from the score he wrote for the Eliz Kazan-Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront.
I’ve actually never seen On the Waterfront, for various reasons (I have to admit a distaste for Kazan owing to his naming names for HUAC, but mostly it’s that I’ve just never got ’round to it), but this symphonic suite is a fine work, pieced together into a single cohesive work from a score that Bernstein found frustrating to create: a film score is, by its nature, a subservient piece of music, and Bernstein was never one to easily suffer the pushing of music into the background. In his writings, Bernstein’s attitude toward film music does not seem to have been particularly positive, but his one attempt at film work resulted in a very fine American tone poem.
Here is the Symphonic Suite from On the Waterfront by Leonard Bernstein.
