welcome to month 2 of music blob 365. i totally forgot about this yesterday for some reason, i guess it was because i left the apartment at 8:30 and didn't come back until after 11. ok anyway that is material for the other blog.
chausson was born in 1855 and died in 1899 apparently as the result of a freak accident involving his bicycle and a brick wall (no joke). a trained lawyer, his heart wasn't really in the law so he composed, but never really took off, though he was a big member of the artistic community at this point, playing host to such luminaries as debussy, franck, mallarme, turgenev, and monet. it was cool how back then all the artists in paris just associated naturally with each other.
he wrote only 39 opuses, influenced by wagner, franck, and his teacher, massenet. this composition was written in 1896 during the last years of his life, a period in which he was influenced by russian literature/symbolism. this was one of only three orchestral works he published, the others being a symphony in b minor and a "poem of love and the sea," a song cycle for voice and orchestra. this piece was requested by his friend eugene ysaye.
okay frustratingly enough i actually can't get blogger's youtube search to return part 2 to either of these great recordings, so just go here for the second part of oistrakh's and here for the second part of menuhin's. there are actually plenty of wonderful recordings of this on youtube. browse at your leisure.
there is some talk of a real life tale of thwarted love which is said to have inspired this work, but it's really not programmatic at all, so i will avoid talking about it.
the work is tempo'ed "lento e misterioso," and revolves centrally around the development of several recurring themes. one, a dark and moody meditation, is played right at the beginning by the solo violin, then echoed in chorale by the orchestra.
the cadenza right at the beginning is absurdly difficult. it's one melody line with accompaniment which is quite difficult to accomplish without interrupting the continuity. oistrakh does this superbly, managing the double lines without neglecting the lengths of notes, distinguishing between quarters and eighths.
then with a series of ascending scales and trills the orchestra enters, and we sense that we are off finally. there is a flighty theme with murmuring triplet accompaniment and lots of augmented small intervals, giving us a sense of harmony that sort of slithers around. (one description of chausson's overall style is that he sort of splits the difference between debussy-style impressionism and juicy romanticism.) at 5:26 we hear for the first time a hemiola/triplet based melody which recurs many many times in both the violin and orchestra parts.
the amazing thing about this piece (and most difficult to make work, as a musician) is the way the line just keeps going. it isn't all one "phrase," but there never seems to be a great conclusion, all the way from the orchestral entrance until the big outcry of passion/ridiculously hard scale (and it doesn't really stop there either).
the subsequent passage is some technically gnarly stuff which basically sends the orchestra off on a grand reprise of the opening theme, so this is sort of like a recap. the violin enters mid-phrase, and we are guided around an altered version of the first couple minutes after the first orchestral entrance. eventually the violin settles into a dark series of ascending trills, which gives us a shadowed ending that seems as if it is about to end in e flat minor, only to turn a page and give us a major chord instead.
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