Tuesday Tones

I was trying to come up with a theme for this month’s Tuesday selections, since themed groupings are fun and this month is good because it has five Tuesdays instead of the usual four. (Actually, come to think of it, I’m not sure if it’s more frequent for a month to have four Tuesdays or five….) So, what we’re going to do is look back one hundred years! Every Tuesday Tones work this month is a piece that premiered in 1925. We’re basically looking at where classical music was a century ago.

We’ll start with a piece I actually featured a year ago! But it’s a good piece, and I have no problem featuring good works more than once, so let’s listen again to Manuel de Falla’s wonderfully sensual, exotic, and fiery ballet El amor brujo. The ballet tells the story of a woman who is haunted by her dead husband’s ghost as she goes to marry another, and it really is one of the few outright sexual works of classical music that I know. I always have difficulty when people describe specific works as “sexy” or “sexual”; most times I just can’t hear it in that music, which inevitably leaves me to wondering if I’m not…well look, you know what I’m getting at. Ravel’s Bolero is often mentioned as a sexual and erotic work, and yet every time I hear it, I want to ask the people citing that one just how boring their sex lives really are.

But I digress. Let’s get to the music. This ballet is by turns energetic, gorgeous, moving, exciting, and downright sensual. I love this aspect of the music of a century ago.