Sonic Asymmetry

Sergei Prokofiev – “Dance of the Knights (Romeo and Juliet, no.13)”

セルゲイ・プロコフィエフ – 「騎士団のダンス（ロメオ＆ジュリエット、13番）」

TIME COMMITMENT: 6 minutes

Virulent, ghastly, almost vampiric, this ballet is just like the composer’s disfigured century, whence most of us still hail…  Prokofiev throws a brass-heavy Molotov cocktail that punches, flails and whacks, slaps and birches into ultimate submission.

MUSIC

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet_(Prokofiev)

A REFLECTION

Hour of Parting, hour of meeting

They know not – nor grief nor rest

Theirs no longing for the future

Theirs no sorrow for the past

By thy day of anguish broken

Think of them and calm thy woe

Be indifferent as they are

To the pangs of earth below

Mikhail Lermontov: “Demon”

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”

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”