Sunday Classics: Let's get ready to . . . polka!

Carlos Kleiber conducts a rousing performance of Johann Strauss II's Amid Thunder and Lightning (Tokyo, May 1986), the very model of a polka. (For an interestingly more moderate performance, here's Herbert von Karajan from the 1987 Vienna New Year's Concert.)

by Ken

You may remember that I wrote recently about a project some years back where I wound up creating little 15-20 minute suites of wonderful short piece joined by some sort of theme. You've already heard my "lark" group, comprising the first movement of Haydn't Lark Quartet, Fenton's aria "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" from Otto Nicolai's opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' romance for violin and orchestra The Lark Ascending. This week it's Polka Time!

No, we're not going to start with The Beer-Barrel Polka -- you know, "Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun"-- but you can hear it here played by "Canada's Polka Master," Walter Ostanek. No, we've started in more primly proper classical polka terms with the most-performed of the wonderful polkas of Johann "The Waltz King" Strauss (1825-1899), Unter Donner und Blitz. And already, if you compare the Kleiber and Karajan performances, you can feel two distinctly different ways of feeling the rhythm of a polka, even in this same piece. (You may recall that we talked about Vienna's Strauss family and the Vienna New Year's Concert awhile back.)

We might contrast that even further by tossing in what must be the best-known piece composed by Johann II's younger brother Eduard Strauss (1835-1916), Bahn frei! (Clear Track, in the sense of a railroad track, 1869 -- conducted here with a wonderful blend of flair and poise by Willi Boskovsky, whose name is almost synonymous with the Vienna of the Strauss dynasty), which will be familiar to any fan of the late great radio monologist Jean Shepherd or to any fan of one of Jean Shepherd's great fans, Keith Olbermann, who uses it to introduce the "Oddball" segment of Countdown.

We move now to the polka with which the great Czech nationalist composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) brought the first act of his comic treasure The Bartered Bride (1863-70) to a close. It's one of a series of dances Smetana sprinkled through the opera, which go a long way toward defining its spirit. In the opera, in fact, the final iteration of the polka is sung, in potentially roof-raising fashion, by Smetana's villagers. It would be fun to hear the Bartered Bride Polka as it's heard in the opera, but here's a fairly lively rendition of the polka on its own:



Finally our Polka Tour brings us to Soviet Russia and the simultaneously hilarious and intoxicating Polka from the 1929-30 ballet The Golden Age (L'Age d'or) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), in the composer's own wicked arrangement for string quartet (the second of his Two Pieces for String Quartet, unpublished in his lifetime), performed by the Aurelia Quartet (warning -- the Internet connection where I am this weekend is spitting out clips in two-second bursts, so I can't even tell whether the performance is any good):



For the brazen orchestral original of the Golden Age Polka, the best I can offer is a more poker-faced than polka-paced performance by Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. And while we're cavorting with the youthfully rambunctious Shostakovich, I can't help but urge on you his unbearably delicious 1927 orchestral arrangement he made, supposedly in 45 minutes, from memory, on a bet, of a ditty known to Russians as Tahiti Trot -- which I assure you you'll recognize under a much more familiar name.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

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