CLASSICAL OPUS no.33

Arnold Schoenberg: “Piano Concerto op.42”

アーノルド・シェーンベルク：「ピアノ協奏曲op.42」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 21 minutes

This pioneering concerto is an openly impulsive attempt to reconcile atonality with romantic expression and even with traces of classical structure.  Its complexity is almost purgatory; it repeatedly crushes any expectations with its all-encompassing, visionary, cubist inventiveness.  Mitsuko Uchida’s testimony in the second video is priceless.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_(Schoenberg)

 

A REFLECTION

I am not I

I am this one

Walking beside me whom I do not see

Whom at times I manage to visit

And whom at other times I forget

Who remains calms and silent while I talk

And forgives, gently when I hate

Who walks where I am not

Who will remain standing when I die

 

Juan Ramon Jimenez – “I Am Not I”

Published in: on November 28, 2018 at 4:28 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.36

 

Maurice Ravel: “Pavane pour une enfante défunte”

モーリス・ラヴェル：「死んだ子供のためのパヴァネ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 7 minutes

Nostalgic, artful and deceptively brittle, this poem nebulously envelops theme-less daydreams with pastel mirages and insistent rêveries.  But the forlorn bouquet offered by the brooding, patient orchestra is not laid on a funeral stone.  Rather, the composition was prompted by Velazquez’s canvas that still haunts us in one of El Prado’s most celebrated halls.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_pour_une_infante_d%C3%A9funte

 

A REFLECTION

No worst, there is none.  Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off.  Fury had shrieked ‘No lingering!

Let me be fell: force I must be brief.

 

Gerald Manley Hopkins: ”No worst, there is none.  Pitched past pitch of grief”

Published in: on November 25, 2018 at 2:29 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.37

Sergei Prokofiev: “Peter and the Wolf”

セルゲイ・プロコフィエフ：「ピーターと狼」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 29 minutes

This playful, craftily eloquent carnival of diminutive forms utilizes elusively inventive melodicism and fingerpoints at a myriad of fancies.  The narrative style of the lowly born composer is made even more explicit in this recording by the conductor’s clumsily clobbered, yet elucidating commentary.

 

MUSIC

 

My Italian friend suggested also this hilarious version, starring Claudio Abbado with the inimitable Roberto Benigni (e non solo per quelli che capiscono l’italiano):

 

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

 

Wisława Szymborska: “Dreams”

Published in: on November 24, 2018 at 5:08 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.40

Alberto Ginastera: “Piano Concerto no.1, 4th movement”

アルベルト・ギナステラ：「ピアノ協奏曲第1番、第4楽章」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 6 minutes

From the start, we are confronted with a breathtakingly epileptic tumult, exercised with savage flamboyance.  Unlike most South America’s modern composers, Ginastera eschews here folk-derived traditionalism.  That could be attributed to the fact that he penned the concerto during his late, neo-expressionist period.

Incidentally, this piece is dated a couple of months beyond our 1950s cut-off, but I could not resist inserting it into the list, for some uniquely chauvinist reason.  Ginastera was buried in the same cemetery as Jorge Luis Borges, in Geneva.  They both died there in 1980s, like Arthur Rubinstein…

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Concerto_No._1_(Ginastera)

 

A REFLECTION

Happy are the beloved

Happy the lovers

And happy those who can do without love

Happy are the happy

 

Jorge Luis Borges: “Apocryphal Evangelist”

Published in: on November 21, 2018 at 12:51 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.46

Igor Stravinsky: “Rites of Spring”

イゴール・ストラヴィンスキー：「春の儀式」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 10 minutes

Over a century later, this variegated, polycentric ballet still puzzles with its eternally adventurous miscellany of formal ecosystems.  We are in the realm of the ‘unreal’ or ‘near-real’.  The original, Parisian caste of the “Dancers of the Ballets Russes” A.D. 1913 also sported attire more commonly associated with the Baltic natives than Russia proper and even the composer’s source melodies were predominantly Lithuanian.  Disorderly ostinatos and persistent dissonance made dancers’ life impossible but remain a labyrinthine delight to any adventurous listener today.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

The water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily,

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Water”

Published in: on November 14, 2018 at 10:49 am  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.47

Maurice Ravel: “Boléro”

モーリス・ラヴェル：「ボレロ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 15 minutes

Jaded, as we are, by the familiarity with this piece, we should, for once, detect the composer’s full panoply of flippant, carnavalesque whim – executed on strings played alternatively portato, jeté, secco.  Nor should it be missed how this modernist archbishop of orchestral color augmented Western rhythmic vocabulary with his newfangled approach to percussion.   Alas, not everyone likes this conductor.  Or his toothpick, for that matter.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2016/12/05/ravel-bolero

 

A REFLECTION

The moon now rises to her absolute rule,

And the husbandman and hunter

Acknowledge her for their mistress.

Asters and golden reign in the fields

And the life everlasting withers not.

 

Henry David Thoreau: “The Moon Now Rises to Her Absolute Rule”

Published in: on November 13, 2018 at 2:06 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.48

Erik Satie: “Vexations”

エリックサティ：「愁傷」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 63 minutes

We are invited on a damp pilgrimage to the netherworlds of confused apathy.  Texturally brilliant despite its deceptive monotony, the composition relies on an industrious bass theme with chords overlaid above it.  It’s a surrealist journey, deambulating eerily cobbled streets emptied of hooves’ misty echo.  As unreal as the stench of horses’ dung, long swept away.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

Mr artist

Builds a world

Not from atoms

But from remnants

 

Zbigniew Herbert: “Nothing Special”

Published in: on November 12, 2018 at 1:08 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.50

 

Samuel Barber – “Adagio for Strings (Agnus Dei)”

サミュエル・バーバー – 「弦楽器のアガジオ・（アグナス・デイ）」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 8 minutes

Barber’s lacrymogenous tenebrism reverberates with bottomless anguish.  This latterday master of soaring vocal and choral works plunges us into cheerlessly elegiac veils until we reach transcendence in stagnant, cavernous candlelight.  Once it is finished, I recommend three minutes of complete silence and several deep breaths.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight;

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more—Oh, never more!

 

Percy B. Shelley: “A Lament”

Published in: on November 10, 2018 at 6:20 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.59

Alexander Scriabin: “Etude no.12 in D sharp”

アレキサンダー・スクリャービン：「Dシャープでエチュード12」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 3 minutes

This study of extremes runs the gamut from catatonic to heroic.  Emotional, defiant and heterodox, the progression is marchlike and turbulent.  Coming from a harmonic innovator and supporter of multimedia shows this ‘clenched fist’ approach should not come as a surprise.  The juxtaposition of such intentions with Horowitz’s finesse always does.  And who else can calm the fury resonating through entire body of the instrument with one gentle stroke of a pinkie?

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tude_in_D-sharp_minor,_Op._8,_No._12_(Scriabin)

 

A REFLECTION

Once three pathways, broad and wide,

Met upon the plain;

Into foreign parts, three brothers

Set out from Ukraine.

And they left an aged mother,

And one left a wife,

One a sister, and the youngest

Left his chosen bride.

 

Taras Shevchenko “The three pathways”

Published in: on November 1, 2018 at 4:49 pm  Leave a Comment  
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