Category Archives: Classical music

Igor Stravinsky

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Saturday, February 4th, 2012, 5:00-6:00

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Symphony No. 1 (1907). Scottish National Orchestra, Sir Alexander Gibson. Chandos 8345, CD1, Tr 1-4. 33:14

Stravinsky. Capriccio (1929). Geoffrey Tozer, piano, Orc­hestre de la Suisse Romande, Neeme Jarvi. Chandos 9238, Tr 8-10. 16:59

Rimsky-Korsakov was not a man given to high praise. So when he wrote the words “Not bad” in his diary about the music of one of his students, that was unusually complimentary. The student was Igor Stravinsky.

Even though he already was a talented musician, Stravinsky followed his family’s wishes and studied the law. But as chance would have it, one of his classmates at St. Petersburg University was the youngest son of Rimsky-Korsakov. A meeting was arranged with the famous composer, and private lessons began. The professor had once told another law student (and prospective composer) not to give up the law, so he obviously detected some promise in young Igor. He advised him not to enter the Conservatory, fearing that dry scholarship might dull his instincts.

Stravinsky dedicated his first symphony to Rimsky-Korsakov, and well he might. His teacher arranged to have the middle movements of it performed, and then to have the entire symphony published. The first complete performance took place in 1908, the year Rimsky-Korsakov died.

The influence of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky in it is not surprising, nor is the solid orchestration. Stravinsky was hardly making a splash—barely registering in the various new-music concerts of the time—but he was growing. He continued to write, and slowly became known to some who, like the impresario Diaghilev, would later figure so prominently in his career. In two years they would collaborate in the creation of the groundbreaking ballet The Firebird. This may have completed his final graduation from his late teacher. Rimsky-Korsakov detested ballet.

Not 20 years—and more ballets—after that, Stravinsky was a world-famous composer. Even so, lean times forced him to compose concert music in which he could perform and earn extra money. Capriccio is a piano concerto in which he performed often. Serge Koussevitzky, the new director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, heard it and commissioned him for his orchestra’s 50th Anniversary celebrations in 1930. For that, Stravinsky produced another major work, the Symphony of Psalms.

Stravinsky may be the most important composer of the 20th Century, but his teacher kept him out of music school. Rimsky-Korsakov knew something about that. He had been in the Navy, never took a formal music class, and became himself a great composer. His music and his handling of the orchestra influenced generations around the world. Perhaps he saw something of himself in Stravinsky. Not bad.

On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.

Béla Bartók

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Saturday, January 7th, 2012, 5:00-6:00

Béla Bartók (1881-1945). Two Images, Op. 10 (1910). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez. Deutsche Grammophon 445825, tr 7-8. 18:28

Bartók. Romanian Folk Dances (1917). Chicago Symphony Orchestra, George Solti. London 443444, tr 9-15. 6:06

Bartók. Four Orchestra Pieces, Op. 12 (1921). London Philharmonic, Leon Botstein. Telarc 80564, tr 6-9. 25:01

The Fine Arts Commission told Bartók that his opera, the only one he would ever write, was no good, not suitable for the stage. With only two singers and no set changes, Bluebeard’s Castle just wasn’t operatic. He’d later tinker with it some, but the immediate effect of the rejection was that, for four years, he almost completely stopped writing music. Now recognized as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Béla Bartók, just entering the height of his powers, in 1911 went into a composing blackout.

It may have been the best action he could take. A few years before, he had started to collect folksongs with his friend Zoltán Kodály. They had been classmates in conservatory, and, discovering a common interest, traveled throughout the countryside to find and transcribe old tunes, sung to them by old villagers and farmers. The music liberated the two students, and started to creep into their own creations.

The effect on Bartók would be profound. He was a devotee of Richard Strauss and Debussy, which can be picked up in his Four Orchestra Pieces, finished and put away in 1912, not orchestrated until 1921. The strange peasant music with asymmetrical rhythms, however, started influencing him right away. We can hear it already in Two Images, with the movements “In full flower” and “Village dance.” Bartók and Kodály discovered that the music wasn’t all “Gypsy,” either, at least what concert audiences had considered (by way of Liszt) to be Gypsy. There were five-note scales thought only to be Asian, and surprising harmonies that didn’t trudge along well-worn European paths.

So instead of giving up after the 1911 disappointment, Bartók decided to be useful. He went back to the field and started collecting folk music again. Recording tunes throughout Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria, he made arrangements of them as he went. And then, when World War I brought his traveling to a halt, he started composing revitalized, original music. The popular Romanian Folk Dances come from this time, 1915, when he put them together for piano, orchestrating them two years later.

In 1918 he would write the century-shifting work The Miraculous Mandarin. Later would come the great Cantata Profana, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, and the last four of his six string quartets. His immensely successful Concerto for Orchestra and Piano Concerto No. 3 were decades away, after he was forced, by another war, to leave Europe and move to America. But his self-education from the music of the people was the springboard for his entire output.

That his career was steeped in folk music is no revelation; he talked of it himself. He thought that a composer could use folk music in three ways. It could be lifted; it could be copied (with new tunes sounding just like old ones—no different from the first way); or it could be absorbed to create something completely new.

That is Bartók. His music could be highly dissonant, but it would always remain tonal and vocal, if wildly so. Quirky and relentless rhythms abound, and harmonies follow their own rules. But it took a crashing rebuff and a return to the country for Bartók to absorb and create anew. These three middle-period works show the emergence of a composer who would define the 20th century in entirely new terms.

On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now ten years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.

Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

Musik Ekklesia: The Vanishing Nordic Chorale 

It’s well past time to listen to historical instruments because they’re, well, historical. Or “informed,” or “accurate,” or whatever word we might use to feel scholastically correct. It’s time to listen because they sound beautiful.

Musik Ekklesia, “music for the church,” is an Indiana-based Baroque ensemble led by bassist and violonist Philip Spray. He’s rounded up some of the top period-instrument players—including Stanley Ritchie, violin, Wendy Gillespie, viol, and Kathryn Montoya, oboe—for this sparkling CD of surprising chorale arrangements.

It’s immediately surprising because in addition to the expected chorale setters Praetorius, Scheidt, Crüger, and the later J.S. Bach, who should show up but 20th-century Carl Nielsen? There’s also Grieg, and Mendelssohn’s deeply felt Verleih uns Frieden (Now grant us peace, Lord, in these troubled times), sung in Danish (Forlen os freden, Herre, nu). The light sweep and brilliance of the older instruments bring out new colors, which ought to make Mendelssohn, that lover of old music, smile.

The Lutheran chorale began in Germany but quickly spread to Scandinavian and other countries. They added their own tunes to the repertoire, and emigre enclaves in the U.S. continued those traditions. Musik Ekklesia brings the music all the way to today. There’s some Christmas music here, and even a brand-new work, an improvisation by the Budapest-born Bálint Karosi, Music Director of the First Lutheran Church of Boston, performing on its new 27-stop North German Baroque-style organ.

The times and instruments and composers spin, making any putative correctness happily unnecessary. It just sounds beautiful.

Samuel Hsu

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Most have now heard the tragic news of the passing of Samuel Hsu, our friend, colleague, and brother, on December 2nd. My… appreciation is such a weak word… some frail thoughts of mine on this truly great man are at the Broad Street Review.

The biggest problem in writing this was deleting things, keeping it under a thousand words. Collegium concerts, walks in Center City, pinball, encounters with street people, hearing him play, watching him play, sitting next to him as he played, and talking, talking, talking deep into the night, drinking tea, breathing and learning, always learning.

Rest in the Lord, Sam. See you before too long.

 

Jean Sibelius

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Saturday, December 3rd, 2011, 5:00-6:00 p.m

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). Nightride and Sunrise, Op. 55 (1907). London Symphony Orchestra, Adrian Boult. Vanguard 1202, Tr 2. 14:02

Sibelius. Romance in C, Op. 42 (1904). Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi. Bis 252, Tr 4. 5:16

Sibelius. Valse romantique, Op. 62b (1911). New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Pietari Inkinen. Naxos 570763, Tr 12. 4:13

Sibelius. Humoresques, Opp. 87, 89 (1917/23). Mela Tenenbaum, violin, Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, Richard Kapp. Essay 1075, Tr 1-6.  21:42

Gustav Mahler famously remarked that the symphony “must be like the world—it must embrace everything.” This explains those disjunct themes delightfully butting against each other in his symphonies. What is often forgotten is that he said this to disagree with Jean Sibelius, who told Mahler that every part of a symphony must have a logical, ruthless interconnection with every other part. Not the world, replies Sibelius: a symphony is like the earth.

The orchestra was the reason Sibelius composed. He wrote songs, and early on dabbled in the string quartet. But mostly, he had no time for chamber music, which he considered too aristocratic—too Viennese—for his taste. No, only symphonic forces could express what he felt from the earth, the landscape, and the people of Finland.

Each country is unique, but Finland is remarkably set apart. It had been controlled by Sweden for centuries, so the language of commerce, culture, and education was Swedish. Russia took it over in 1809, and Finland wouldn’t gain independence until 1917, two days before Sibelius’s 52nd birthday. Finnish is unlike any other language; it’s not Romance, Germanic, Russian, or Scandinavian, and only distantly related to Hungarian and Sanskrit, of all things. Those who spoke it—usually rustics far from the cities—were almost foreigners in their own country.

The Swedish-speaking Sibelius was caught up in the Finnish patriotism burgeoning in the late 19th century. He took classes in Finnish, and immersed himself in the growing nationalistic literature. His music is so steeped in the national ethos that his own melodies have been mistaken (over “the smirks of the self-appointed authorities,” he wrote) for traditional tunes, such as the famous ending of Finlandia. His numerous tone poems based on the folk epic Kalevala would shape Finnish music.

But after popular works of the late 1800s he turned deeper, trying new sounds in the orchestra as he embarked on his run of seven symphonies. He continued to write smaller pieces, mostly to work out his ideas. Nightride and Sunrise is, frankly, odd. In the almost interminable churning of the horse ride, Sibelius strives for a gravelly, essential sound. It borders on mesmerizing.

In his Romance for strings and the little-played Valse romantique, another side of Sibelius emerges. It’s the husband and father Sibelius, living in the idyllic house in the country, away from urban distractions, close to nature. He composed the six Humoresques during the burst of brilliance of his final symphonies to keep his name in front of the public, as writing symphonies was tough sledding. Normally performed separately, they were originally heard together. There’s an element of gravitas hearing them this way, and it’s an education listening to an extended solo violin work other than his Violin Concerto, one of the greatest in the repertoire.

In the awakening of Finland, Sibelius invented its music. But it’s also true that Finland—its people and landscape, even its very earth—created the music of Sibelius.

On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now nine years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.

Lili Boulanger, Vivian Fine, Florence Price

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Saturday, November 5th, 2011, 5:00-6:00 p.m.

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918). D’un matin de printemps (1918). The Women’s Philharmonic, JoAnn Falletta. Koch 3-7603-2. 5:05

Vivian Fine (1913-2000). Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1944). Reiko Honsho, piano, Japan Philharmonic, Akeo Watanabe. CRI 692. 17:46

Florence Price (1887-1953). Symphony No. 3 (1940), movements 2, 3, 4. The Women’s Philharmonic, Apo Hsu. Koch 375182. 18:45

Nadia Boulanger is well-known to musicians, being the Parisian teacher of many American composers, most notably Aaron Copland. But her younger sister Lili excelled as a composer despite battling sickness most of her life. She eventually succumbed to Crohn’s Disease at the much-too-young age of 24.

In 1913 Lili Boulanger was the first female to win the coveted Rome Prize (which her sister never succeeded in winning), but which their father Ernest had won in 1835. In her last years, she produced a number of beautiful works, including D’un matin de printemps, Of a Spring Morning. The Fleisher Collection is putting the finishing touches on a new, critical edition. The music is a gorgeous and delicate example of her talent.

This work, along with Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 and more than a hundred other titles, were given to the Fleisher Collection by The Women’s Philharmonic, which presented its final concert in 2004. In its two decades, the Philharmonic aggressively encouraged and promoted the work of women composers, instrumentalists, and conductors. Fleisher is proud to carry their legacy forward by making this music available for performance now and into the future. Composers such as Florence Price open a barely known window into the history of American music, as she was the first African-American woman to gain notoriety in orchestral writing.

Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, and many singers now know her songs, but the symphonic works are mostly unknown. This third symphony, like much of her music, hints at, rather than quotes, actual folk material. The hint, however, is undeniable and fresh. The third movement, “Juba Dance,” is catapulted by rhythm, the element Price considered essential to an understanding of the African-American experience in music. She is a finely balanced composer, though, strong in her handling of harmony and the orchestra.

Vivian Fine was an excellent pianist and composer, so it’s fitting to listen to her Concertante for Piano and Orchestra today. When she moved to New York City from Chicago in 1931, she supported herself by accompanying dance company rehearsals. She was soon writing dance scores and performing the works of Cowell, Ives, Copland, Rudhyar, Sessions, and many others.

Over her long career she composed in every form, including opera. She was never content to remain in any one style. The Concertante is tonal and almost romantic, but with a quirky humor that endears.

On the first Saturday of the month Jack Moore and I host Discoveries from the Fleisher Collection on WRTI 90.1 FM in Philadelphia and on the all-classical webstream at wrti.org. We also broadcast encore presentations of the entire Discoveries series (now nine years and counting!) every Wednesday at 7:00 pm on WRTI HD-2. For a look at all the shows, click here.

Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Harvest Home

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My latest CD mini-review for WRTI, including podcast. You can read all my CD reviews here.

Harvest Home: Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Nashville Chamber Orchestra

“Classical music” is not a single style, but an ever-widening variety. Because of this, classical audiences have the broadest tastes, and will happily listen to music on the borders of what others might consider “classical.” Take this CD by fiddler Jay Ungar and guitarist Molly Mason, which will also match the Thanksgiving spirit of any gathering you may be planning. The music blooms with the excellent Nashville Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Gambill.

It’s a fusion of mostly-new music in a mostly-folk style, with salutes to Yanks, Cajuns, and Copland. It also includes one tune you may already know from the Ken Burns film The Civil War, “The Ashokan Farewell.”

Ungar wrote that tune as the closing song for the fiddle camp he runs in the Catskills. Its genius is that it sounds like it’s an Appalachian or Scottish lament, hundreds of years old. It’s a timeless melody, given a ravishing reading here with orchestra.

The Harvest Home Suite includes “Autumn,” with a re-imagining of “We Gather Together to Ask Our Lord’s Blessing,” a Dutch hymn-text translated to Latin by Austrian Eduard Kremser (who composed the tune), then to English by the New Yorker Theodore Baker, the originator of one of the standard music reference resources, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary. New Yorker Jay Ungar now folds this classic Thanksgiving hymn into this lovingly-played suite. Everything on the CD is performed with beauty and sheen. That’s something all classical audiences love.

Listen to the podcast…