CLASSICAL OPUS no.30

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Ave Verum Corpus”

ヴォルフガング・アマデウス・モーツァルト： 「アヴェ・マリア」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

This dreaming, elated, sacred phantasmagoria of elliptic immediacy explores a wide contemplative range.  A sense of exultation pervades this daring exploration of the soul’s netherworlds.  Invariably, performances call for fresh voices, ensuring recurrent renewal of this eternally evanescent choir piece.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_verum_corpus_(Mozart)

 

A REFLECTION

Where no knowing is I entered,

yet when I my own self saw there

without knowing where I rested

great things I understood there,

yet cannot say what I felt there,

since I rested in unknowing,

all knowledge there transcending.

 

San Juan de la Cruz: “Verses on the Ecstasy of Deep Contemplation”

Published in: on December 1, 2018 at 5:16 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.32

Johannes Sebastian Bach: “Badinerie”

ヨハネス・セバスチャン・バッハ：「バディネリエ」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 2 minutes

Essentially a jocular dance, this is a showpiece for solo flutists, extracted from Orchestra Suite no.2 in B minor.  A nimble, laconic, scherzo-like structure is however presented with a tempo only suited for the most agile of the courtiers.  Like a childlike, droll pamphlet of grave consequences, it is subverted in the second version by a youthful James Galway.

 

MUSIC

 

 

INFO

https://www.redlandssymphony.com/pieces/suite-no-2-in-b-minor-bwv-1067

 

A REFLECTION

Orpheus with his lute made trees, 

And the mountain tops that freeze, 

Bow themselves when he did sing:

To his music plants and flowers 

Ever sprung; as sun and showers 

There had made a lasting spring. 

 

William Shakespeare: “Orpheus with his Lute Made Trees”

Published in: on November 29, 2018 at 5:16 pm  Leave a Comment  

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.34

Hildegard von Bingen: “Symphonie”

ヒルデガルト・フォン・ビンゲン： 「交響曲」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 62 minutes

This emphatic, scintillating liturgy of unaltered, transparent fluidity comes from the most enigmatic of medieval figures.  She left behind hymns, psalms and sophisticated antiphonal textures (neither monophonic nor polyphonic), frequently broken down into small choruses.

It is so ironic that the most ancient composition in this series comes from a woman.  Over centuries, male control of musical creativity proved stronger and more enduring than in any other form of artistic expression.  Music had to wait till the 20th century to unleash on us the geniuses of Nadia Boulanger, Grażyna Bacewicz, Thea Musgrave, Sofia Gubaidulina, Kaija Saariaho, Pauline Oliveros or Karen Tanaka.  But how much of their work do you know?

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://sequentia.org/projects/hildegard.html

 

A REFLECTION

Hail, O greenest branch,

sprung forth in the airy breezes

of the prayers of the saints.

So the time has come

that your sprays have flourished:

hail, hail to you.

 

Hildegard von Bingen: “O Viridissima Virga”

Published in: on November 27, 2018 at 3:31 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.35

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: “Scheherezade op.35”

ニコライ・リムスキー ・ コルサコフ：「シェヘルザード37」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 52 minutes

This sonic fresco strikes as expansively maverick in its sedately sibilant solos, but the undulating imagery of open spaces remains forever compelling.  The composer manufactured a veritable pinnacle of symphonic synesthesia, but he did it in a starkly representational art form – a meticulous, graphic poem resonating with the sounds of the steppe.  Subversively, this Lansdschaft for our ears has remained lively and relevant, unlike, say, Sergei Bondarchuk’s long forgotten movies, which were intended as pictorial tributes to those endless vistas.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade_(Rimsky-Korsakov)

 

A REFLECTION

Night, snow and sand make the form

Of my slim fatherland

All silence is in its long line

All foam emerges from its marine beard

All coal fills it with mysterious kisses

 

Pablo Neruda: “Discoverers”

Published in: on November 26, 2018 at 3:46 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.38

Guillaume de Machaut – “Kyrie from Messe de Notre Dame”

ウィリアム・マカウト – 「キリスト・オブ・ア・レディー」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 7 minutes

This otherworldly and metaphysically desconsolate tapestry of plaintive themes gently bathes us in spiritual introspection.  What was the first polyphonic setting to a complete mass cycle emerges here masterfully intertwined in seductive isorhythms.  Timeless.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

O let your mind and tongue

dwell among divine phrases

For God has given this reward for the

effort, a little light

even to see some hidden thing, or, best,

to be spurred on by the pure God’s

awesome commands.

 

Gregory de Nazianzus – “Poems on the genuine books of divinely inspired Scripture”

Published in: on November 23, 2018 at 2:43 pm  Leave a Comment  

CLASSICAL OPUS no.39

Camille Saint-Saëns: “Carnival of Animals”

カミーユサン=サーンス 「動物のカーニバル」

 

TIME COMMITMENT: 27 minutes

This dreamy, meditative collection wafts almost hushed in its soothing quality.  Two parts engross us in particular: ‘Aquarium’ (at 10:50 mark) and ‘The Swan’ (22:23), with its sailing quality of aquatic expanses.  In this corner, Debussy was Saint-Saëns’ only competitor.  I enclosed two different ensemble versions.  Note the second video with Martha Argerich accompanied by an all-star crew in Japan.

Finally, for those still in search for lysergic nostalgia, there’s Clara Rockmore’s theremin version of ‘the Swan’.

 

MUSIC

 

INFO

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

 

A REFLECTION

He who wants to do good knocks at the gate;

he who loves

finds the gate open.

 

Rabindranath Tagore – “Stray birds”

Published in: on November 22, 2018 at 2:46 pm  Leave a Comment  
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