Saint-Saëns | Richibi's Weblog

Tag: Saint-Saëns

how to listen to music if you don’t know your Beethoven from your Bach, Vl

The Potato Eaters, 1885 - Vincent van Gogh

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where do you start with Chopin, he is

in our Western cultural bloodstream,

as identifiable in music as, say, van

Gogh is in painting, you don’t need

to be interested in any kind of art to

have not been given even only a

whiff of these iconic artists

nearly anything I might present here

of Chopin you’ve probably already

heard somewhere before, if only in

bits

of van Gogh, well, he goes back in

the public imagination to at least

Vincent, 1971, the song, no one

doesn’t know about him, when I

heard it playing in Amsterdam at

the museum, with the first piece I

saw, The Potato Eaters, dominating

the first wall, insisting on van Gogh’s

vision, his prophecy, his profound

compassion, I cried, I understood

Chopin exerts a different kind of,

however equally potent, magic

Mozart might sound like Haydn,

Beethoven might sound like

Schubert, all of the Impressionists

sound like all of the Impressionists,

be they Ravel, Debussy, Satie, or

Saint-Saëns, to the untrained ear

but no one sounds like Chopin,

he’s, culturally, a North Star

here’s one of his nocturnes, the

here’s a polonaise, **here’s an étude,**

in English, a study, a finger exercise,

an iconic, here, prestidigitation

here’s an impromptu, his very,

indeed, Fantaisie-Impromptu, just

to get your categories going

consider its construction, having

some information already about

fantasias, a work of the imagination,

open to any experimentation within

the confines of one movement, with

an impromptu, something purported

to have been created on the spot,

also in one movement

the answer requires you to sharpen

your aesthetic pencil, always a

delight – an impromptu, a

spontaneous invention, a fantaisie,

a work of the imagination, how do

they differ, which part is a fantaisie,

which an impromptu, how do they

nevertheless coalesce

this exercise is the first step in

listening

enjoy

R ! chard

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“Dumbo”‏

“View of Murnau“

Wassily Kandinsky

______________________

once again a movie for children of all ages –

including for Zoë, incidentally, whose birth

date is coming up in May – “Dumbo“ is another

Walt Disney masterpiece, and once again

fraught with the tropes, the creative novelties

and devices, of the most modern arts

it’s not difficult to intuit the influence of

Saint-Saëns‘ – an awful lot of sibilants

in the possessive case of only those two

capitalized syllables, by the way – his, I say,

“The Carnival of the Animals“, its dance,

especially, of the elephants, for Disney‘s

famous sequence here of elephants on

parade, wherein psychedelia makes an

appearance in 1941 no less, years ahead

of its historical, and revolutionary, great

fruition, surely informing Warhol,

Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and just

generally the entire Pop Art coterie

he was transferring however what he’d

been learning from the German especially

Expressionists, their attraction to bold,

dissonant colours, flat uninflected

surfaces, arbitrary and malleable

dimensions

what Disney brought significantly to the

mix was essentially the spirit of fun, which

is what transformed all art after the First

World War, that generation’s response to

the utter failure of all that had come before,

politics, economics, ideologies, even the

very concept of the existence of God, none

of these had prevented the horror that had

been that signal event, the best defence, as

we said in the Seventies, was living well,

therefore the Roaring Twenties, therefore,

for that matter, the Seventies

we haven’t retreated from that imperative

yet, be it for better or for worse remains

still to be seen, for faith or fun, the opposite

poles of personal responsibility, both fell

and heal

animals, incidentally, courtesy of the spirit

of Henri Rousseau

Richard

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