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Category: music to ponder

December 15, 2012

Evgeny Kissin – a bouquet of composers‏

midway in my considerations about music I
came to myself in a dark wood for the straight
way was lost, if I may paraphrase Dante for my
own purposes, I’d digressed to Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Audrey Hepburn, and others, and
forgot what I had been talking about with
respect to the development of music, but have
been wonderfully, and perhaps even karmically, 
put back on track by this correspondingly 
 
Evgeny Kissin had provided a resplendent
haven’t yet finished enjoying often, but
found among his other Internet offerings
 
 
at first I wondered about the Schubert/Liszt
connection in the written introduction to the
program, they’d been united by a forward
slash, implying that there’d been some kind
of cooperation, but I hadn’t ever heard of
those two ever meeting  
 
upon very little investigation however I found
out that Liszt had merely transcribed of course
some of the Schubert lieder, something which 
Liszt was wont to do, Liszt transcribed
everybody and everything, most famously all
of Beethoven’s symphonies, writing them
up for piano only, so that more remote areas
could also enjoy them, in often even there 
aristocratic salon settings
 
lieder are songs in German, a lied, a song,
works Schubert produced in astonishingly
great number
 
 
Liszt was paraphrasing Schubert for his own 
Lisztian purposes of course, artists do that, 
which is to say he was giving them much
more Lisztian fanfare and, not unwelcome,
I might add, extravagance, Schubert could
be pretty dry, I think, in his lieder,
uncharacteristically, even his fun ones, 
despite their being ever so eminently
 
 
und der Bach“  from “Die schöne Müllerin“, one
of his song cycles,“Ständchen” from
“Schwanengesang“, another cycle, “Gretchen
 am Spinnrade“, and “Erlkönig” are all poems
of celebrated German poets Schubert set for
accompanied voice, and that Lizst, and Kissin,  
transform into something pretty special   
 
 
next on the program Schubert takes independent
flight with his wondrous “Wanderer” Fantasy,
opus 15, D760
 
 
a fantasy is not a sonata for having only one
movement, but note this fantasy goes through
all the motions of a sonata, fast, slow, fast, each
with its own structural contrasts, but without
any of the intervening pauses
 
so is a fantasy just a sonata without breaks, or is
a sonata just a fantasy with hiatuses, had the
sonata become a fantasy, had the fantasy
become a sonata, definitions were being
upended, then again that’s what revolutions
are about
 
before Beethoven this had been unheard of, 
when music hadn’t yet learned to actually talk,
mean something, Schubert, like Beethoven,
not only talks, not only narrates, as in for
 “Pastoral“,  nor either describes, as in
but actually speculates, ponders, moves 
metaphysically forward, in thrall to his
vagabond spirit much more than to his
wayward heart 
 
hence, incidentally, the more abstract, less
geographical, “Wanderer”, to compare with
for instance Liszt’s more panoramic
see also Caspar David Friedrich here for 
a close contemporary counterpart of his
in art
 
 
music has become no longer merely narration 
then but philosophy, it is finding its way like
the rest of us, and for the rest of us, to the
stars 
 
 
Bach then intervenes here with a Siciliana, a
Baroque composer in Kissin’s Romantic
clothing, but the shoe entirely fits, and
hauntingly, you’ll remember Bach was
composing for the harpsichord, which
had none of the piano’s resonance 
 
 
Brahms then returns us to a more abstruse
Romanticism, “7 Fantasies”, his opus 17,
pushes the limits of melodic continuity, you
can’t sing Brahms, you’re not even drawn to     
 
seven fantasies in one opus, incidentally,
suggests a sonata with seven movements,
with all of the permutations that have been  
suggested already for the fantasy I talked
about, it’s open season on sonatas, in
other words, and by extension their less
segmented fantasies  
 
it is the history of art 
 
 
the final piece is totally transcendent, some
incidental music from Glück, from his sublime
“Orfeo ed Euridice“, one of my very favourite
operas, Orpheus approaches the Underworld
in order to retrieve his beloved bride, we are
about to enter the Elysian Fields, the actual,
original Champs Élysées, or Elysium, with
him, the moment is unforgettable
 
others have led us into the Underworld, most
notably Homer in the “Odyssey“, Virgil in the
“Aeneid“, and of couse, somewhat more
recently but just, Dante in his “Divine Comedy“,
even Bosch in his “Garden of Earthly Delights”  
 
Glück is the one whose hereafter you won’t
not  remember  
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
 
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December 14, 2012

December 14, 2012‏ – a commemoration

 

two things brought tears to my eyes today, one
was a heartfelt response to tragedy, President
Obama speaking eloquently and meaningfully
about the senseless death of 20 children
 
the other a stirring expression of hope, poor
Paraguayan children building an orchestra, and
the possibility of a better future for themselves,
out of nothing but nearby garbage
 
 
may they all find their way to a more serene
heaven
 
 
Richard 

 

 

 

 

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December 3, 2012

Arthur Rubinstein – Chopin Piano Concerto no 2 in F minor, opus 21‏

I’ve wandered far from Mozart, Mussorgsky,
Saint-Saëns in my consideration of the evolution
of music in the West, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
would have her say, and so would the irrepressible,
the irresistible, Audrey Hepburn, I could not but
diligently for these incandescent luminaries abide

but here, to step back into the purview, the sway,
the particular empyrean of, more specifically, music,
is Arthur Rubinstein doing Chopin’s Piano Concerto
no 2 in F minor, opus 21, a piece that is for some
reason or other not as celebrated, nor familiar, as
the First, after listening you’ll also wonder why

Arthur Rubinstein is nothing short of bristling here,
Arthur Rubinstein is the august and inspired herald
who reintroduced Chopin essentially to the late
Twentieth Century, after listening, after only even
just superficially hearing, you won’t wonder either
at his well deserved position among the stars

enjoy

Richard

psst: incidentally, Evgeny Kissin doesn’t give an inch
in his own stellar rendition of the First, just click,
here or above

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November 2, 2012

“The Carnival of the Animals” – Saint-Saëns/Nash/Disney

in the same spirit of “music as literature” as in
Liszt’s “Années de pèlerinage“, or Mussorgsky‘s
“Pictures at an Exhibition“ especially, Camille
Saint-Saëns, composed his “Le carnaval des
through an anthropomorphised menagerie 
where the description is impressionistic rather
than narrative, which is to say more painterly
 
he composes in patches of musical textures
instead of melodic and linear paragraphs,
incompatible with the original association
of music as melody, or song, one’s response
would become thereby more intellectual
than emotional, one does not swoon, or
even sway, in other words, as marvel at the
synesthetic imagination, which lets you see
sounds and hear pictures
 
you’ll hear here, or “hear, hear”, the turtles
doing their determined interpretation of the 
can-can, at an improbable crawl, in playful
reference to Offenbach‘s “Galop infernal”,
mad gallop, from his “Orpheus in the  
“Underworld“, other such instances of 
compositional salutations follow, not at
all an unusual practice among composers,
great and small 
 
you’ll be enchanted by the shimmering
ethereality of the aquarium, by the grace
and majesty of the now mythic swan,
among other zoological bedazzlements, 
in 14 movements, in therefore essentially
a symphony, a piece for orchestra with
several movements
 
here they are        
I.      Introduction et marche royale du Lion
               (Introduction and Royal March of the Lion)
II.     Poules et Coqs 
               (Hens and Cocks)
III.    Hémiones (animaux véloces) 
               (Wild Asses)
IV.   Tortues
                (Tortoises)
V.     L’Éléphant 
                (The Elephant)
VI.    Kangourous 
                (Kangaroos)
VII.   Aquarium
VIII.  Personnages à longues oreilles
                (Personages with Long Ears)
IX.    Le coucou au fond des bois 
                (The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods)
X.     Volière
                (Aviary)
XI.    Pianistes
                (Pianists)
XII.   Fossiles
                (Fossils)
XIII.  Le Cygne
                (The Swan)
XIV.  Finale
 
 
you’ll want to read the poems that Ogden 
Nash later wrote about them, his very own
“Carnival of the Animals“, that now often
accompany the piece, a mistake, I find, for
exposing two entirely idiosyncratic and 
incompatible sensibilities opposite each
other, thereby taking away from each 
 
but Walt Disney has, and you will too have,
a great deal of fun nevertheless with both
of them, though they’re somewhat in his
version abridged, no swan 
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
 
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October 14, 2012

“Années de pèlerinage” – Franz Liszt

                                                                                                                                                      Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886)

    Années de pèlerinage 

         Première année: Suisse (published in 1855)

                1 Chapelle de Guillaume Tell
                2 Au lac de Wallenstadt
                3 Pastorale
                4 Au bord d’une source
                5 Orage
                6 Vallée d’Obermann
                7 Églogue
                8 Le mal du pays
                9 Les cloches de Genève

 
                                    Alfred Brendel, pianoforte
 
 
          Deuxième année – Italie (published in 1858)
 
                   1 Sposalizio
                   2 Il Pensieroso
                   3 Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa 
                   4 Sonetto 47 del Petrarca
                   5 Sonetto 104 del Petrarca
                   6 Sonetto 123 del Petrarca
                   7 Après une lecture du Dante. Fantasia quasi una Sonata
 
 
                                           Lazar Berman, piano

 

         Troisième année  (published in 1883)
 
                1 Angélus! Prière aux anges gardiens
                2 Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este I 
                3 Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este II
                4 Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este
                5 Sunt lacrymae rerum
                6 Marche funèbre
                7 Sursum corda

 
                                            Lazar Berman, piano
 

                                      ___________________________
 
 
 
music as literature

  

Richard
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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October 5, 2012

XXV. A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne – Elizabeth Barrett Browning‏

from “Sonnets from the Portuguese“

XXV. A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne

A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God’s own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being! Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature doth precipitate,
While thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

__________________

despite a rigorous rhyme scheme and a mostly
strict iambic pentameter here, which is to say
each verse is given five, or penta, metres, or
beats, where iambic means that the accent is
on the second syllable of each of those five
individual metres, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da times
five, should your Greek be understandably
amiss, Elizabeth still manages to skew the
pace of the piece again in this instance,
turning her poetry, as always, into a more
direct and purposeful prose

just try to follow the sentence metrically as
in a more traditional poem, or song, you’ll
block her headlong and unfettered propulsion

alteration of the beat is not much different
from what composers were doing then with
music, the early eighteen-hundreds, not much
different indeed at all, and which they did for
the very same particular reason, greater
authenticity, the truth part of the iconic
imperatives of beauty and truth

incidentally, where Elizabeth was trying to
invigorate poetry by giving it the apparent
immediacy of prose you might’ve noted
that in my own flurry of literary tidbits,
however ever so humble, I’ve been quite
consciously peppering prose rather with
the elements of poetry, for better or for
worse, but in my mind to reflect a less,
dare I say, prosaic, more inherently
enchanting, vision of the world

Richard

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September 29, 2012

“Pictures at an Exhibition” – Modest Mussorgsky‏

 
“You are definately (sic) now in Chopin mode!“, a friend
writes, much as the culture itself would’ve found
itself after a surfeit of Chopin, giving way to of
course newer inventions in art  
 
if there is an overview that would present the
fundamental outline of what was occuring at
the time it is that the heart was giving way to
the mind, late Romanticism still throbbed with
stirring passions, but a more exploratory
psychological perspective would begin to  
dominate, spurred on by a more analytical
approach to everything, even the arts
themselves to the arts themselves, science
had been unearthing revelations, painters
analyzed paint, writers parsed writing, 
composers deconstructed musical composition
 
all investigated potentiality and purpose within
the area of their field to discover if it still had
relevance, and if so, how and why
 
the first step in moving away from emotion in
music was through an attempt at notational
description, to have music become evocative 
of a scene rather than of a sentiment through
orchestrations of sound, an intellectual appeal
to the more probing cerebellum rather than to 
the more facile and evident strings of a rhythmic,
ardently and compellingly pulsing, but primal 
and therefore unreasoning, heart
 
which could also easily become self-indulgent,
only the very best, Chopin, Elizabeth Barrett 
Browning, avoid it, let me add here the never
ever maudlin, always enchanting, Walt Disney,
who cuts mighty, mighty close to the saccharine
in his post-Second-World-War epoch, as do as
skilfully also indeed the other two in theirs
 
it’s all in the rubato, I think, where musical magic
is allowed to turn into pandering kitsch
 
 
here’s Modest Mussorgsky describing “Pictures
at an Exhibition“, each movement a particular
pictorial work, separated by the return of the
original theme, the “Promenade”, representative
of the amble forward, curatorial and monocled, 
I think, to the next considered instalment 
 
here’s the same thing again in a neat transcription
for guitar 
 
 
Richard
 
 
 
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September 20, 2012

the Chopin Scherzi‏

 
“scherzo” is Italian for “joke”, it’s also a specific
musical mode, quick and delightful, usually
the third movement in a larger piece – sonata,
symphony, concerto – as a contrast to the
preceding adagio, or slower, more melancholic
tonal statement  
 
once again Chopin extracts the mode from the
larger composition, where it had sat as a merely
supportive entity, thereby giving it its own
distinction, having achieved the transcendental
ability to turn secondary material into resplendent
and incontrovertible gold   
 
 
to tell the truth I don’t much get the humour
either, what joke do these scherzi tell, though
I intuit a kind of slapstick, initial grunts for
instance, like engines gunning, before
undertaking a more ethereal flight in the 
second scherzo, the stardust that suddenly falls
on the more languid, forlorn notes, in the third
– contrasts that are, were, subversive surely
then, idiosyncratic, potentially aesthetically
controversial
 
or, is this music, people might’ve wondered 
 
except that Chopin invariably enchants, doubtless
did also then  
 
and turned the rules, as artist do, upside down  
 
maybe that’s the joke, and Chopin was already
onto it 
 
music, he meant, is in the eye of the beholder,
there is no explicit, dare I say Platonic, or
absolute, standard, music is fraught with 
merely imagination, rules do not apply 
 
perhaps his enduring fame rests on our own
complicity with this message, our lives are
the expression of the vividness, indeed
stardust, of, to a sublime degree, our dreams
 
aspiration, in other words, is destiny     
 
who’d a thunk it
 
 
Richard 
 
 
 
 
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September 16, 2012

a Chopin Fantasia‏, opus 61

 
to be specific, opus 61, you’ll more easily notice 
already the more abstract peregrinations of his
disciple, Debussy, and even the first stirrings of
improvisation incidentally, which is to say the
free-wheeling of idiosyncratic jazz, the very 
inversion of Classical order, personal expression
was trumping even ecclesiastical dictates, those 
very earlier immutable fundamentals of the long
unimpeachable Ten Commandments  
 
Oh Moses, Moses you stubborn, splendid, adorable 
fool, as Anne Baxter, Nefertiri, pagan, therefore 
insidious seductress, would admonish in the film
pronouncements, a film which of course fashioned 
the Biblical iconography of my entire generation,
a veritable “Divine Comedy” for our still recent
enough times, nothing has come up to displace it
meanwhile, though a progressively alternative
cultural morality seems steadily to harken
 
was Moses then a fool, a Prometheus in Christian
clothing 
 
time alone tells, and time is an inveterately
temperamental arbiter
 
 
it would appear now that faith equals
unconditional conformity, when I thought
that faith could not, by definition, be
constrained, faith had been meticulously
a considered personal conviction, an
individual emancipation rather than a
conformist, and nefarious ultimately, it
would appear, code 
 
I count on thoughtful efflorescence then,
and a garden of societal consideration, 
a pantheistic and cooperative accord
 
not excluding, let it be noted, the indeed
worthiest, by thoughtful process, of those
very Ten Commandments 
 
without my own children, for instance, I
still recommend honouring one’s parents,
this will bring, I knowlegeably warrant, 
untold benefits, indeed grace, peace and
profound satisfaction, plenary solace to
the very reaches of each our indeterminate
soul
 
take it right here from an appropriately  
distinctive Chopin, unparalleled poet to
the panoply of possible gods   
 
 
Richard

 

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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September 1, 2012

Debussy Preludes, Books 1 & 2‏

if Debussy composed not only “Études“, in the manner 
of Chopin but “Préludes” as well, Book 1 and Book 2,
with only twelve preludes apiece however, but for an
equal number of 24, to cover likewise all the keys, it
might be that his piano teacher, Mme de Fleurville, a
student of Chopin, she claimed, would have had him
duly practice her master’s musical methods, manner 
and propositions, accounting for the similar textures,
colours and even templates the diligent acolyte uses,
devout responses in effect to his mentor’s mentor
 
but time and temperament get in the way of an exact
of course replication 
 
Chopin follows the narrative line of melody, whereas
Debussy evokes a more nebulous mood, the line of
Romantic heroism has given way to the more abstract
investigation of the amorphous psyche or, if you like,
the suprarational soul, after Freud’s most recent
uncovering and elaboration of consciousness  
 
listening to Debussy therefore is more like looking at
a painting than reading a book, you are moved by the
evocative aspects of the composition, colour, texture,
tone, rather than by the chronological tale it no longer
tells  
 
unbending truth has given way to perspective, stream of
consciousness has superseded the narrator’s traditional
linear omnipresence, for better or for worse 
 
 
Richard
 
psst: Europe, as I was informed by a friend of mine, is
         celebrating Debussy‘s 150th birthday this year,
         he was born August 22, 1862
 
         may he live forever 
 
 
         thanks, Lajla
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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