Sibelius: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39 - III. Scherzo: Allegro

i am trying to get around to a fair number of composers before giving any one composer a second entry, otherwise i would do something else by schubert, whose birthday it happens to be today.

instead, though, i'm going to a composer that alex ross in his famous book "the rest is noise" described as more or less an isolated incidence of development in 20th century music. sibelius wrote music that was highly nationalistic, but like grieg, is not given quite enough credit for the musical loyalties he kept, which were called oldfashioned by the serialist and ultramodern schools developing in germany (there were actually articles published calling him "the worst composer in the world). i think most of us now can agree that this was pretty wide of the mark and that sibelius had some pretty unique, not at all backwards sounds.

sibelius wrote this symphony in 1898 when he was 33, with some revisions the subsequent year.

this is ashkenazy and philharmonia. there is a better video of bernstein with sappy slow bernstein tempi, but unfortunately the videos are not divided by movements so the movement starts in the middle of video 3 and ends halfway into video 4, if you are interested in looking it up.
this scherzo is, in form, as most are: a brisk 3/4. the recurrent tattoo of quarter notes is brought in emphatically  (and somewhat unusually) by the timpani, which comes back and brings it sharply back down to the ground every time it looks as if the other instruments will fly away with it. the motif gets shortened as instruments interrupt each other mid-sentence, giving the feeling of acceleration through instrumental compression, even though the rhythm and tempo remain the same.
slow section is somewhat rhapsodic, starts at 1:56 with the horns putting a sudden brake on the galloping scherzo with a big diminished chord which sounds totally out of nowhere, but manages to relax into a warm set of chords, later with solo winds adding a countermelody. then oboes come in with a pastoral little answer, but before you know it a rude awakening by trombones and tuba and bunch of swirling descending scales in winds and strings lead us back into the scherzo, which is a straight ride to the end.

listen to the other movements, which are actually from just about every aspect more intense and interesting. there is a high chance i'll do at least one of them sometime later. this movement is fun, though.

Smetana: Má Vlast - Vyšehrad

having had a headache for the last hour or so, this is a great balm and destressing piece. 

wikipedia has a perfectly acceptable and fairly comprehensive overview of the entire suite, and an especially fair explanation of this particular movement, so fair warning, i'm about to just copy most of it.

this tone poem, Vyšehrad (VEE-sheh-rad), is the first in a set of six that belong to the set "Ma Vlast," or "my country." smetana's vision/mission was basically to establish nationalist music for the czechs, and he accomplished this splendidly, with current czechs treating this and the moldau (the outrageously popular second poem of the six) as something like a second and third national anthem. in the course of this whole suite, we explore the Vyšehrad, a castle in Prague which was home to the earliest Czech kings; the Vltava, the river which runs the bohemian countryside; the local czech legends of a female warrior named Sarka and the army of knights which sleeps inside a mountain known as Blanik; the countryside and woods themselves, and Tabor, a city.

another interesting thing about smetana was that he went deaf in 1874 at the age of 50 (yea i bet that reminds you of someone). the Vyšehrad was composed/mostly completed almost immediately before he went deaf. which means that the rest of the cycle was composed in silence. here's an amusing take on that compositional process.

weird to call this a "movement" because they're not very commonly played as a complete cycle. think of it as a set of independently functioning pieces with a common theme, like dvorak's slavonic dances. they were all composed over a span of 5 years (1874-1879) and all premiered separately.

kubelik and the czech philharmonic. who better?

ok, so apparently *the* thing to talk about is that theme: b-flat, e-flat, d, b-flat (or any other relative setting of those pitches). there are claims that this actually represent bedrich smetana's name, because apparently "b" and "s" represent b-flat and e-flat in german notation. anyway, regardless what that is, it is definitely the most important recurring motif in the entire set of six poems, coming up again and again, from the dreamy double-harp arpeggios that nostalgically open, to the warm orchestral entrance, to the gigantic grandiose music that occurs about five minutes in (and if you think about it, the only possible visual incarnation of this music for me is some great hall with a huge court in a castle like the vysehrad...). but all this is still just overture, and the exposition or plot doesn't seem to start until almost six minutes in.

now we get some curiosity-inspiring drama. if you think of this whole piece as a sort of movie, this would be where the exposition actually starts, and according to the wiki article this is smetana taking us back and telling us the tale of the castle. a brisker tempo lends itself to a bit of distress but also streams of lush, "good-old-times" glory in the strings and fanfares in the upper brass. these are periodically interrupted by a tenser motif, the descending halfstep followed by a descending fourth. finally the tension builds until we get a gigantic descending chromatic scale at about 9:30, depicting the fall of the castle. the flutes enter again tentatively, followed by string tremolos, and a few quietly mournful wind passages. then at about 11:30, the opening harp flourishes return again, this time with string echoes pregnant with remembered glory. the big climax at this point seems to reaffirm the glory, but a shade of darkness in the strings swells out near the concluding measures, and the ending of the poem is actually quiet, seeming to say that all this is merely wonderful memories of days gone by. which, well, it is.

pretty good for sappy nationalistic music, wouldn't you say.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Overture, Op. 36

i know i'm not really doing much off the beaten path. after all youtube is flooded with high school orchestra recordings of this piece complete with comments of how this is their favorite piece EVER. it clearly requires little introduction. but i will branch out into a more diverse set of pieces after i have gotten into the swing of things. and anyway, this very fun piece deserves a bit more than mindless adulation.

this was written from 1887 to 1888, directly after he wrote capriccio espagnole, 1887 (op. 34), and scheherazade, 1888 (op. 35). right afterwards he basically stop writing orchestral works and focused entirely on opera. i think these three have proven more enduring than his operas, though.
this overture is a concert overture - no big opera or play attached to it - and is subtitled overture on liturgical themes. it's immediately clear why.

this is a reasonable recording by stokowski. there is one other decent one by maazel/cleveland, but i thought the stokowski a bit more interesting. there seem to be few professional recordings on youtube - the only other complete one i could find was by hollreiser/vpo, but the pitch on this recording is so high it basically just sounds like it's in the wrong key. there's also half of one by markevitch.

rimsky very much enjoyed playing around with liturgical themes and church tunes. in this piece he explicitly states that he was trying to explore both the pagan and religious aspects of the easter holiday. to that effect he actually puts in several bible verses into the score itself, and the main themes here are ostensibly church hymns, most prominently the paschal vigil (i tried to find a vid of this but only got crappy home vids, so this is the theme that the trombones give in the very beginning) and the angel cried, which is what the solo cello gives at 0:50. but there are tons more scattered around. see if you can pick out the lines that are hymns as you listen to the piece, but rimsky himself wrote a pretty comprehensive program note in his own autobiography, the excerpt which you can find here.
the cool thing about incorporating church hymns into music is that there are amazing ways of harmonizing them. especially for russian liturgical chants (or any chants really), all you are given is basically one unison line, and there are any number of ways to accompany this. what comes out can be purely major or minor, or, as rimsky ended up with sometimes in this work, modal. this flexibility goes for the rhythm too. usually with few rhythm markings, you can kind of stretch them to fit basically any meter. for example, the first theme, marked "lento mystico," is actually written in 5/2, though it's rather hard to tell from listening. it's not really important, as with chants, to stress strong and weak beats - this is more or less just for the sake of the notation. it's only after the first violin solo that we get something easier to nod our heads to.
apparently the violin solo, which crops up first at 0:29 and then again at 1:22 or so with the flute instead, is supposed to represent light from the sepulchre.
rimsky basically repeats himself twice in the first section, but he redoes the orchestration completely so that it still sounds fresh. the second time the original trombone theme comes back, it's maestoso, and written with reinforcement by a full string complement, which makes me hear, basically, an organ playing with several more stops pulled out.

we don't reach the "meat" of the piece until the allegro agitato at 3:52. here we get fast paced colorful writing - what everyone loves best about rimsky - with some occasional interludes for the violin solo theme to come back, and a more stretchy hymn (5:27). more grand entrances and even bells at the end are added for a huge climax at the end.
pretty much it's pure fun from the agitato until the end. but as one listens to this piece it's worth noting that even with the regular foot tapping rhythm, rimsky doesn't force these meter-less liturgical melodies into even, symmetric phrases. it makes this piece exotic and fun. not to mention all the fun off beat accents and syncopations. a good example is the slow hymn interlude. the chord at 5:37 would be longer in a less inventive person's piece.
the other thing one has to note is the saturation of pentatonic scale. they basically comprise the entirety of all the string parts (which are the busiest thing ever, but fortunately also the funnest thing to play).

ok, have fun.

Ravel: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano, M. 77 - I. Allegretto

M stands for marcel marnat, who catalogued ravel's stuff.

this sonata was composed between 1923-1927, and is one of my favorite violin sonatas. friendly and sophisticated at the same time, it seems to have a lot of pull even with non classical listeners.

the reasons for its lengthy complicated birth period were things which plagued ravel from the end of WWI until the end of his life, including recurring illness and a creative block that only left in 1926. as a result the pre-war period for him was several times more productive than the last phase of his life from 1926 until 1937 (fifteen compositions versus fifty-six).

the main program note that usually accompanies this piece regards only the second movement which is noted for having some jazz/blues influence (it's quite unsubtly titled "blues"). this movement is indeed quite special and funky, but for me it's the outer movements which are so compelling.

analyses of ravel's music postwar usually stress his interest in making subtle and not-so-subtle references to the horrors of the war and his wish for it not to be repeated (see piano concerto for the left hand, which was written for the wittgenstein who had his right hand blown off in combat). some of this jazz inspired music is said to be a sort of homage to the american contribution to the war. this sonata is more abstract and seems to fall largely outside the scope of these more programmatic works. but it does reflect a lot of the changes in his musical language which took place directly after the war: "His attitude toward musical texture changes from lush and thick to spare and ascetic; his form names change from colorful to abstract, while his formal shapes turn a bit more unpredictable than heretofore; bitonality, harsh dissonance or unresolved friction, jazz sonorities, folk-like modalities, and all-but-incompatible metric interconnecting relationships increase exponentially in these later works." (this is a very good set of program notes on this piece.)

all of these are readily visible/audible in this violin sonata. it was first performed on may 30, 1927, with georges enesco on the violin and ravel at the piano.
two very different recordings. the first is monique haas at the piano, max rostal at the violin. i like this because of its plainness, which to me seems to adhere very closely to the nature of the work. the second is shlomo mintz and yefim bronfman. i expected this to be sort of lusher but eh.

the movement is meandering and dreamy, lots of asymmetrical phrases and bitonal chords. the meter keeps grounded in 6/8, but everything else seems to slide it around as if it were going to sort of take off any second. the tonality slides around constantly. after the opening theme the violin echoes the piano a fifth above, but then goes somewhere else entirely, from a tonal perspective.

i like how spare this writing is. it's totally clear and one can hear every note, but it boggles our musical instincts by not at all adhering to... well, anything, really. lots of augmented sevenths and ninths, things usually only found in jazz music - but the voicing is still off.
note the little inserted countermelodies starting at 1:11. these come back noticeably in the last movement. that plus the opening theme provide the grounds for the whole movement.
notable is how, while the violin and piano often trade off voicing melodic material, sometimes they go off in completely different directions.
development starts at 3:11.
there's a big climax with triplets in the violin. but the catharsis doesn't really come until quite a bit after that: the part i find most amazing is the "phrase" which begins directly after the triplets stop at 5:52. from then straight until 7:18 is the longest-spinning phrase ever. and it's not until 7:12 that we feel the relief of it ending.

ok, this entry was really difficult to write for some reason. O WELL SEE YOU TOMORROW

Britten: Simple Symphony, Op. 4 - IV. Frolicsome Finale

early britten. apparently he wrote this string orchestra piece just after he got dissuaded from taking a scholarship he had won to go study with alban berg in vienna, when he was 20. everyone in britain was so against the idea of serialism that everyone was like OMG and so he stayed, writing this directly afterwards in dedication to his viola teacher. (now that i think of it i can't think of any british serialists, although in late elgar and britten you can hear a different brand of semi-atonalism). it was first performed in 1934, and was a major success.

coming in at only 16 minutes, it's a brief but not silly work. the movements are sort of arrangements and rescorings of little melodies he wrote between ages of 9-12 (what were you doing as a prepubescent child, hmmmm?) they all have kind of misleadingly silly titles.
I. boisterous bourree
II. playful pizzicato
III. sentimental sarabande
IV. frolicsome finale

the opening of this last movement is a unison upthrusting sequence of fifths and fourths which lays the foundation for the whole movement. this developed through this very short movement. there is a playful minor theme played by the violins after the unison introduction, which gets played with between major and minor keys, modulating on a dime in unexpected ways that don't quite satisfy one's need for cadence. the rhythm is motoric and seems to just propel the movement full circle to the ending, which is pretty much as it began.

von Suppe: Light Cavalry Overture

bet you heard this all the time and actually have no idea whom it's by!! and reading the name won't really ring a bell either. at least, that was my reaction when i first played this piece. i was like, why is this so familiar if i don't even recognize the composer's name. but this contains some of the most recognizable cartoon music ever! see the second section, about 2 and half minutes in. can you see the cartoon horses?


so, Franz von Suppe  (whose name the announcer at the performance i participated in managed to mispronounce as franz von SOUP, and forever now i will read his name wrong in my head when i see it) was an austrian light opera composer who lived from 1819 to 1895. he wrote four dozen operettas, which is impressive, but most have fallen to the wayside. anyway during his life he also sang as a tenor and had a reasonably successful career writing music for productions done in vienna. light cavalry was written in 1866 and is one of only two overtures (the other being poet and peasant) which have survived the ages.

this overture is basically a mirror form. you've got a brass fanfare section, then the fun galloping section, which both come back at the end. sandwiched in the middle is a very fun melodramatic cello melody.
it's a very military-inspired little operetta, but i'm sure you don't need me to tell you that.

Elgar: Salut d'Amour for violin and piano, Op. 12

if you remember those kreisler pieces liebesfreud and liebesleid, this was originally going to be called "liebesgruss," which means the same thing in german - because his betrothed was german-speaking. he wrote this as an engagement gift, in july 1888 when he was 31 (his wife-to-be gave him a poem as her own gift, which he later set to music).

this is early elgar, and reflects a pretty young and optimistic composer, before he began to focus on his own alienation from both higher level music and social circles. he wrote enigma in 1899, which was his first breakthrough. but this is music of a different, simpler, very appealing sort.

here is a very lovely rendition by kyung wha chung.

through the years elgar and others have released many different versions/instrumentations of this piece which is really a song. the violin/piano arrangement is the original.

really very little needs to be explained about this piece :)