CLASSICAL OPUS no.4

Bela Bartok: “Romanian Folk Dances”

ベラ・バルトーク：「ルーマニアの民俗舞踊」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 8 minutes

Bartok plants arduously corrosive seeds when using exotic time signatures.  He achieves such feats with cliché-free authenticity, neatly condensed into succinct forms.  Rectilinear craftsmanship of gypsy trails oozes from this sunny, carefree medley of cryptic jewels.

This popular set has both a keyboard and an orchestral version (both shown below), but make sure to check the third video by Muzsikas.  The Carpathian dilettante inspiration source hides in plain sight.

 

MUSIC

 

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Folk_Dances

 

A REFLECTION

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home:

At a touch sweet Pleasure melteth,

Like to bubbles when rain pelteth;

Then let winged Fancy wander

Through the thought still spread beyond her:

Open wide the mind’s cage-door,

She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.

 

John Keats: “Fancy

Published in: on December 27, 2018 at 5:35 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.9

Franz Liszt: “Liebestraum, no.3 in A-flat minor”

フランツリスト「愛の夢、A-flatマイナー3番」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 4 minutes

Misty, blithe, congenial and deceptively accessible, this gem glides effortlessly between the phlegmatic and the acrobatic.  Transcendentally passionate, the unobtrusively chopinesque Lied is devoted to love’s timelessness, thus allowing the fourth dimension to liberate it from the romantic shackles of evanescence.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebestr%C3%A4ume

 

A REFLECTION

O love, as long as love you can,

O love, as long as love you may,

The time will come, the time will come

When you will stand at the grave and mourn!

 

Be sure that your heart burns,

And holds and keeps love

As long as another heart beats warmly

With its love for you

 

Ferdinand Freiligrath: “O Love, As Long As Love You Can”

Published in: on December 22, 2018 at 5:34 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.10

Fryderyk Chopin – “Prelude in E Minor op.28 n.4”

フレデリック・ショパン  – 「プレリュードEマイナーop.28第4号」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 3 minutes

Taciturn melodicism clashes here with twilight melancholy of painfully burning absence.  As often in preludes, the metric structure is rhapsodic.  Abstract in intention, some of Chopin’s preludes were later contaminated by unintended associations with weather events.  And you don’t have to seek your roots on the muddy plains of Eastern Europe to hear the weeping willows’ squelching steps…

The second, monochromatic version, delivered here by Novi Singers, may, indeed, be apt for the depth of soggy winter.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude,_Op._28,_No._4_(Chopin)

 

A REFLECTION

I fall on the sand to wipe with my hair

My country’s blood-stained feet,

But I know her face and crown

Radiant like the sun of suns.

 

Cyprian Kamil Norwid: “My Country”

Published in: on December 21, 2018 at 5:45 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.26

Franz Liszt: “Hungarian Rhapsody No.2”

フランツリスト：「ハンガリー狂詩曲第2番」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 8 minutes

The short duration ensures that this quintessential romantic form remains enigmatic in its quasi-patriotic delirium.  Worse, it sounds almost contrarian in its multiform pithiness.  Despite the ubiquity of virtuoso fireworks, the middle section seems to leave quite a lot of freedom for imaginative, oxygenated phrasing.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Rhapsody_No._2

 

A REFLECTION

With frost fall upon my bed,

The ice upon my pillow

Cannot melt away-I lack the strength to die-

Leaving unfulfilled

The vow I made to you.

 

Fujiwara no Teika: “Love in Winter”

Published in: on December 5, 2018 at 5:08 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.29

Fryderyk Chopin: “Nocturne, E flat major, op.9, no.2”

フレデリック・ショパン： 「夜行性、Eフラット・メジャー、オペラ9、2番」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 5 minutes

Among the most eloquent, verbal miniatures that never fall into loquaciousness, these somnolent visions careen in vividly traceable childhood memories.  Cheerfully hesitant and vacillating, they were nearly stereotyped to death.  But the nocturnes have triumphed, retaining the power to grip and rip the lungs apart.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes_(Chopin)

 

A REFLECTION

Autumn is leaving

Tugging each others’ branches

Two pine trees

 

Masaoka Shiki: “Autumn is Leaving”

Published in: on December 2, 2018 at 4:48 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.31

Bela Bartok: “Allegro Barbaro”

ベラ・バートク：「アレグロ・バルバロ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

Martial, rumpled and always on the precipice of chaos, this psychodrama is prised open by its maniacal dedication to demented accelerations.  Bartok’s expertise is exhibited here in full: scurrying runners that grow ever louder and intense, just as the pace slows down.  The composition functions with more urgency when performed for solo piano, but the orchestral timbres may have infected Akira Ifukube’s stomping anthems which hailed Godzilla’s imminent appearance in Toho Studio’s classic monster flicks.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_barbaro_(Bart%C3%B3k)

 

A REFLECTION

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

 

Constantine Cavafy: “Waiting for the Barbarians”

Published in: on November 30, 2018 at 5:40 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.41

Fryderyk Chopin: “3rd sonata op.58, B minor”

フリードリヒ・ショパン：「第3ソナタop.58、マイナーB」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 9 minutes

This chameleonic riddle is renowned as a tour de force of labyrinthine dimensions.  A conglomerate of moods, alternatively sober and luminous, cogitative and lambent, alert and diffident, it never settles, unlike many other compositions written by this pianist.  Regrettably, we don’t have moving pictures here, but, hey, it’s Arthur Rubinstein’s recording.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._3_(Chopin)

 

A REFLECTION

When I die, I will see the lining of the world

The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset

The True meaning, ready to be decoded

What never added up will add up

What was incomprehensible, will be comprehended.

 

Czesław Miłosz: “Meaning”

Published in: on November 20, 2018 at 1:51 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.58

Aram Khachaturian: “Sabre Dance”

アラム ハチャトゥリアン： 「セイバーダンス」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

This evidently begs for a speed ticket.  It is convulsive, manic, almost psychotic and yet tantalizingly infectious, not least in its use of marimbaphones.  How fitting for the Transcaucasian exoticism of hardy, unpredictable mountain dwellers, softened here somewhat by Seiji Ozawa’s exceptionally graceful baton.  Few remember that this bagatelle originates from the final act of a ballet entitled “Gayane”.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_Dance

 

A REFLECTION

Listen,

if stars are lit

it means – there is someone who needs it.

It means – someone wants them to be,

that someone deems those specks of spit

magnificent.

 

Vladimir Mayakovsky: “Listen”

Published in: on November 2, 2018 at 4:45 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.65

Bela Bartok: “Duo for Two Violins – Transylvanian Dance op.44”

ベラ・バルトーク：「2つのヴァイオリンのデュオ – トランシルバニア・ダンスop.44」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

This perfectly fractured, fiddly ditto betrays the composer’s voyeurist addiction to folk inspirations.   Bartok’s folk song collection later helped him introduce novel percussive textures into western music (after which, we had to wait for Edgar Varèse and Moondog to do more work in this direction).  The second version here showcases cello, yet the dance really originated as a solo piano piece, some two decades earlier.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonatina_(Bart%C3%B3k)

 

A REFLECTION

Oh, Orlando!

Remember the night we danced

quietly on the sands where music

was played? Your words were

wonderers, said quietly

in the pockets of my ears.

 

Sheema Kalbasi: “Dancing Tango”

Published in: on October 26, 2018 at 4:58 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.81

Miklos Rozsa: “Piano Sonata in A Minor”

ミクロス・ローザ – 「ピアノ・ソナタ・イン・Aマイナー」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 6 minutes

This monochromatic and elegant sonata appears alternatively contemplative and cosmopolitan.  More directly lyrical than the other Hungarian greats of the past century, Rozsa is too often derided for his Hollywood scores.  He may, indeed, be bathing us in traditionalist tonality, but his romantic flare-ups are bold, honest and somewhat irreverent.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://www.cbcmusic.ca/posts/12261/forgotten-works-of-miklos-rozsa

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-double-life-of-miklos-rozsa/

 

A REFLECTION

I think it rains

That tongues may loosen from the parch

Uncleave roof-tops of

the mouth, hang

Heavy with knowledge

 

Wole Soyinka: “I Think It Rains”

Published in: on October 10, 2018 at 5:14 pm  Leave a Comment  
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