"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Friday, June 10, 2011
Sunday Classics: Gotta dance -- Bach the suite-maker, Part 1 [formerly "Preview 1"]
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Guitarist Per-Olov Kindgren plays his arrangement of the Air, popularly known as "Air on the G String," from Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3.
by Ken
In my small way I've tried to defend Bach against the charge of being an offputtingly "intellectual" composer, whose music demands a superhuman effort of analytical penetration. The thing is, there's an element of truth to this. Bach can be difficult. But I don't think you enter the highest ranks of the musical immortals without a powerful ability, even compulsion, to communicate on a basic human level, and J.S.B. could do this as well as anyone who's ever set writing instrument to music paper.
This week we're going to dabble with the world of the suite as practiced by Bach, which means the partita and even overture as well, since functionally they were indistinguishable. I've thought for a long time that it would be fun to approach the large number of such works Bach wrote for such diverse forces -- keyboard, violin, cello, orchestra -- by breaking them down into the dance forms he used so frequently. But Bach always felt free to slip in a "ringer" movement, a "something else," and I can't help but start off with the amazingly beautiful Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3, which we hear above played in a guitar arrangement, and we'll hear more of in the click-through.
Sunday Classics preview: Musical motion, perpetual and otherwise
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Mickey Mouse plays the title role in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence from Fantasia, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. If any music depends on musical movement, surely it's Paul Dukas's symphonic poem.
by Ken
This is a tricky subject we're going to try to tackle this week. (Well, not so much tackle as sneak up on, the way we usually do.) It's the subject of musical motion -- how music moves forward of its own inner rhythmic urgencies and necessities, as opposed to simply obeying the waving of a conductor's baton, or responding to the inner metronome of singers or instrumentalists.
When we did our post-New Year's celebration of the Strauss family of Vienna last year, I pointed out that this supposedly "light," even trivial, music not only attracts the greatest conductors, but usually finds them bringing their "A" game. And I think perhaps the reason I love so much such music perhaps more than other, more serious-minded music-lovers -- this is music that is almost bursting with urgent musical purpose. And it's in good measure the performer's sense of musical urgency that separates good from mediocre performances.
ROSSINI'S IRRESISTIBLE OVERTURES:
MUSICAL DRIVE DOESN'T MEAN SPEED
A natural for our subject, surely -- this is music that's all about forward movement, which, we need to establish once and for all, has nothing to do with speed. The typical form of a Rossini overture is to introduce several kinds of music (normally not drawn from the opera) of contrasting sorts, leading up to a spritely romping section that may be quite extensively worked out. Here are two favorites, one from a comic opera (Cenerentola), the other from a serious one (Semiramide).
ROSSINI: Cenerentola: Overture
Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond., recorded 1964
ROSSINI: Semiramide : Overture
Philharmonia Orchestra, Carlo Maria Giulini, cond., recorded December 1962
THE GREAT JOHANN STRAUSS II: So is there perpetual musical motion?
Herbert von Karajan conducts Johann Strauss Jr.'s Perpetuum mobile at the 1987 Vienna New Year's Concert. Usually at the end the conductor says, "Und so weiter" ("and so forth," the German equivalent of "et cetera"); Karajan instead waves the music off when he's had enough.
Here's another, perhaps less ethereal take on Strauss's Perpetual Motion.
J. STRAUSS II: Perpetuum mobile, Op. 257
Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1972
Now a polka, you might think, anyone could make move. But what if you had all your strings plucking rather than bowing their instruments? Note the remarkable continuity of phrasing and the control of dynamics in this performance.
J. STRAUSS II: Pizzicato Polka
Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1972
And finally we have to include at least one of the great Strauss waltzes. So here is the king of them, or rather the emperor, the Emperor, so proud and confident that it begins not in waltz but in march rhythm.
J. STRAUSS II: Emperor Waltz, Op. 437
Vienna Philharmonic, Karl Böhm, cond. DG, recorded c1972
You will probably have noticed that all three of our Johann Strauss excerpts come from the same recording (orinally an LP) by Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. As I've mentioned before, this is not just a special treat among Böhm's many recordings but one of my very favorite records. And, as you'll see Sunday, there's another reason why we're hanging out with Karl tonight.
Sunday Classics: Rhapsodies from Sweden and points south and east
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Now this is more like it!Unfortunately in audio only, Vladimir Horowitz plays the rhapsody of rhapsodies, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (in, by the way, the composer's own version, more or less, not the pianist's famous arrangement). If you're looking for mediocre to revolting performances, there's no shortage on YouTube, as witness last night's fiasco.
by Ken
We still haven't quite finished with Norway's great composer, Edvard Grieg, even after pursuing him through Marching trolls and other lyric subjects (Lyric Pieces for piano, Lyric Suite for orchestra); "The Prophet has come!": The world of Peer Gynt (the two orchestral suites, enhanced); (more Peer Gynt and the Piano Concerto); Mastering the fine art of Edvard Grieg (the Lyric Pieces and Piano Concerto revisited, plus String Quartet No. 1). Meanwhile, we had a decent shot at Finland's Jan Sibelius, and at some point we'll come back for Denmark's Carl Nielsen.
Which leaves a gap in our Scandinavian itinerary. So today we're going to have a quick musical taste of Sweden in the form of a rhapsody, a form that composers have found well-suited to splashy musical quick portraits of their countries, dating back to the 19th-century rise of musical nationalism. And then we'll let the rhapsody transport us.
I. A QUICK TOUR OF SWEDEN AND ROMANIA: WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE THEIR RHAPSODIES
No, I don't suppose Sweden and Romania have a whole lot in common, beyond the curious phenomenon of a composer, arguably each country's best-known, who remains known principally for rhapsodies. (No, I'm not going to attempt a definition of rhapsody. Feel free to look it up if you like. By the end of this post you should be in a position to concoct your own definition if that's important to you.)
In Sweden's case, our composer is Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960). Alfvén in fact produced quite a sizable output, and there are admirers who consider his general neglect a scandal. I can't claim to be an expert on the subject, but what I've heard of his music is agreeable enough if not especially memorable (it's fair to say that worse music is played on a regular basis by most of the world's orchestras). Nevertheless, I don't see much likelihood of a change in the composer's fortunes, which have him known almost entirely for a single work that remains on the edge of the international repertory: the first of his three Swedish Rhapsodies, titled Midsummer Vigil (1903).
I got to know it through the back door, as it were. When we talked about Sibelius (see link above), I mentioned that two of my first three stereo LPs were bought for works by Sibelius, because -- outrageously! -- that's what you had to do to get Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra's recordings of The Swan of Tuonela and Finlandia. This left me with quite a lot of "filler" material. Okay, I suppose technically The Swan was the filler for Sibelius's Violin Concerto played by the great David Oistrakh, but that's not the way I looked at it in those days. The Finlandia fillers included Grieg's Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (hmm, Peer Gynt, where have we heard about that?) and, yes, Alfvén's Swedish Rhapsody No. 1. Eventually I wound up listening to this stuff quite a lot. Here is that very recording of Midsummer Vigil.
ALFVÉN: Swedish Rhapsody No. 1: Midsummer Vigil, Op. 19
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Dec. 21, 1959
I don't think there's much question that the model for the rhapsody as nationalistic vehicle was Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, which were written for piano solo, but half a dozen of which were soon orchestrated and absorbed into the international repertory. Surely Romania's Georges Enesco (1881-1955) had them in his head as models for his pair of Romanian Rhapsodies (1901-2). Awhile back Enesco's opera Oedipe got a bit of attention -- not to mention a prestigiously cast major-label recording -- and others of his works have been resurrected, but not much has stuck. As with Alfvén and the Swedish Rhapsodies, he remains pretty much the composer of the two Romanian Rhapsodies. Here's the somewhat more often played First.
ENESCO: Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 in A, Op. 11, No. 1
RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded February 1960
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Nov. 10, 1957
As long as we're at it, we might as well hear the Second Romanian Rhapsody, don't you think?
ENESCO: Romanian Rhapsody No. 2 in D, Op. 11, No. 2
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Nov. 10, 1957
II. LISZT AND THE RHAPSODY: THE HUNGARIAN RHAPSODY NO. 2
As I mentioned, Liszt wrote his Hungarian Rhapsodies for piano solo, and grand display pieces they are. Not surprisingly, half a dozen were quickly orchestrated, and approved by the composer for publication, though legions of conductors and arrangers have had a shot at these pieces since. In the case of No. 2 (about which Wikipedia incidentally has a quite extensive entry), the key has generally wound up dropping to C minor from C sharp minor. The piece itself follows the general form of the Hungarian Rhapsodies in having a soulful slow section and then an exhilarating fast one, though this hardly does justice to the piece's finely crafted structure.
Given the standing of the orchestral rhapsody as a vehicle for orchestral display, it's not surprising that we frequently encounter two names here: Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) and his successor as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985). Stokowski actually recorded an LP called Rhapsody, though even in expanded CD (now hybrid SACD) formit contains only two actual rhapsodies, the Enesco we just heard and the Liszt we're about to hear. Ormandy didn't record many rhapsodies en bloc, but Sony has assembled a splendid Famous Rhapsodies CDthat includes a lot of the music we're hearing today.
Stoky was famously willing to use any expressive device he thought he could make work, though he seems in pretty good behavior in the Enesco performance above -- that is one heckuva performance. The Liszt, however, strikes me as kind of weird. I suppose I've lived with the Ormandy too long to be totally objective about it, but I think it's sensational.
LISZT: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded February 1960
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded February 1958
Now to return to the Liszt rhapsody's piano origins. The Horowitz recording of No. 2 that we heard at the top of this post finds that musical bad boy too on pretty good musical behavior, which is a good thing and a bad thing. With both Stokowski and Horowitz, even when we question their musical decisions, when they're on form, those decisions are at the service of a real musical vision. In this Horowitz rhapsody performance, fine as it is in many ways, I think we hear VH pulling his punches -- and so the performance is often more about what he chooses not to do than what he does.
I suppose people think it's a slapdown when they refer to this music as "rhetorical," but rhetoric, like most everything else, can be good or bad, effective or not. Most of what's passed off as musical rhetoric is mere self-indulgence or plain fakery, pathetically obvious lying bullshit. This is generally true of what is often passed off, by self-appointed guardians of the "Grand Romantic Style," as the Grand Romantic Style, which tends to be neither grand nor romantic nor really even a style, but just a pose. When you hear a great orator, you find out what real rhetoric is, and the same is true in music.
Let's listen to this performance of the Liszt "No. 2," which the International Piano Archive included in an ingenious compendiumof historical recordings of all 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies.
Benno Moiseiwitsch, piano. HMV/IPA/VAI, recorded Oct. 9, 1940
It's certainly not a bad performance, but has Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963, and therefore already 50 here; unfortunately he's known today mostly for later, and sometimes much later, and less good, recordings) really risen to the challenge of this grand showpiece?
How about this performance then?
Alfred Brendel, piano. Vanguard, recorded 1967
Alfred Brendel (born 1931), only recently retired from keyboard performance but still active as a lecturer, was an eminently tasteful pianist, and this is an eminently tasteful performance. The pieces fit together quite naturally, it seems to me. But the piece as a whole seems to me to have been shrunk to even smaller stature than with Moiseiwitsch. When a truly mesmerizing orator grabs hold of you, you don't come away praising his excellent "taste," or bemoaning his lapses in same.
Here's something I think you'll agree is different:
Georges Cziffra, piano. EMI, recorded in Budapest, 1956
I think we're really on to something. Cziffra, although a maddeningly erratic performer, at his best could make the piano truly sing. Unfortunately, the four rhapsodies, including No. 2, that Cziffra recorded in mono in Budapest in 1956 were done with what appears to be a dull piano without much beauty of sound in it, in two-dimensional recorded sound. Later, in Paris in 1958, these four rhapsodies were expanded into a set of 15 Hungarian Rhapsodies. The later recordings used a much better instrument, and benefited from much better recorded sound. (We'll hear a sample below.)
III. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN IT'S SOMEBODY ELSE'S COUNTRY YOU'RE RHAPSODIZING ABOUT?
The EMI "twofer" set that gathered Georges Cziffra's 1956/58 Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies was filled out with Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody. Up till now we've been dealing with the rhapsody as a "national" form in which composers tried to represent their own countries. But what's to stop a composer from attempting to characterize another country?
Somehow, often as not, that meant foreigners trying to imagine themselves as Spaniards. Certainly French composers had a thing about their southern neighbor. And limiting ourselves just to the rhapsody form, we have two specimens that rank with the more popular works in the orchestral literature.
First we hear España, rapsodie pour orchestre (1883) by Emanuel Chabrier (1841-1894), a wonderfully tuneful farrago, some of whose tunes I'm pretty sure you'll recognize.
CHABRIER: España
London Symphony Orchestra, Ataulfo Argenta, cond. Decca, recorded January 1957
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Paul Paray, cond. Mercury, recorded Nov. 18, 1959
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia/CBS/Sony, recorded Feb. 24, 1963
And then we hear what is surely the greatest rhapsody of them all, the Spanish Rhapsody of Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). We're going to hear a really wonderful, wonderfully idiomatic performance by Jean Martinon, from his series of the complete Ravel orchestral works with the Orchestre de Paris. But then, because this is still a rhapsody, and Ravel was among other things a master orchestrator (remember that it's his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition that is still most often played), we have to hear our pal Stoky have a go at it -- first at the age of 92 (a live performance, note!), and then as a youngster of a mere 75. This is a significantly sultrier image of Spain, wouldn't you say?
RAVEL: Rapsodie espagnole
i. Prélude à la nuit (Prelude to the Night) ii. Malagueña iii. Habañera iv. Feria
Orchestre de Paris, Jean Martinon, cond. EMI, recorded 1974
New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. BBC Classics, recorded live in the Royal Albert Hall, London, May 4, 1974
London Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. EMI, recorded June 27-28, 1957
ONE LAST SPANISH RHAPSODY
As long as we've wound up listening to all these foreign-imagined Spanish rhapsodies, maybe you're wondering what the Liszt Spanish Rhapsody I mentioned sounds like. Here is that Cziffra recording. Note how much more seductive piano sound Cziffra coaxes out of this piano in Paris, in markedly better recorded sound, than he and the Budapest engineers were able to manage for the 1956 recording of the Second Hungarian Rhapsody.
Georges Cziffra, piano. EMI, recorded in Paris, 1958
In time for the holidays (um, which holiday again, Bill-O?): Buy John Lanchbery's splendid recordings of all three Tchaikovsky ballets for a mere $20!
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Leopold Stokowski conducts the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" in Walt Disney's Fantasia
by Ken
I've spent a lot of time listening to recordings and trying to puzzle out musical and technical enigmas that arise. I don't know that my "explanations" are much good, but what really throws me is when I can't come up with a reasonable explanation. I encountered such a case recently when I first became aware of a 2004 EMI France CD reissue of John Lanchbery's 1981 recordings of all three complete ballets by Tchaikovsky.
It seemed like an eminently logical idea: having Lanchbery (1823-2003), an internationally renowned ballet composer, arranger, and conductor, record this music in London in state-of-the-art digital sound with the excellent Philharmonia Orchestra. Lanchbery, after all, had impeccable credentials as a dance conductor, and therefore wouldn't commit the gross improprieties the Ballet Bullies always attribute to non-dance conductors who perform music composed for the dance.
The only thing was that when the recordings were released on LP, they didn't seem terribly special. Alongside the numerous outstanding recordings that had been made of all three ballets, they seemed rather pallid.
Over the years I returned to those LPs periodically, to see if I might get some message I'd previously missed, without success. But the other day I noticed the aforementioned French EMI CD issue, which squeezed the pieces onto five budget-priced discs. The set I saw was priced at $20 (and you can find it for that price online) -- for all three full-length ballets. My curiosity was reignited., even though I had previously bought EMI's CD compilation of Andre Previn's beautiful recordings of the three Tchaikovsky ballets with the London Symphony and found the sound quality distinctly disappointing -- and these are recordings I know to be musically and sonically top-notch.
I won't bore you with the paltry theories I've come up with to explain the discrepancy. Instead, let me just report, with delight, that as I hear them now the Lanchbery performances are a consistent joy -- full-bodied, rhythmically driving, passionate, songful, and gorgeously played and recorded. The scrunching onto five very well-filled isn't painless. A mere 8 1/2 minutes of The Nutcracker spills onto the second CD (though on the plus side, that puts "The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" [ye gods in heaven, is there really such a thing as Sugar-Plum Fairy Barbie?] at the start of the disc), and less than 5 minutes of the start of Act II of Sleeping Beauty is tacked onto a previous disc.
I should also say that I haven't sat down with scores to verify that, say, no repeats have been trimmed to squeeze the music on. Ironically, given the quality of the performances and recording, and the low per-disc cost (you can find the set online for $20), it would have been just as fine a bargain spread out over the more usual six CDs, but that may be just too persnickety. While we're being persnickety, English-speaking buyers need to know that the contents listing and liner note are all in French.
Does Tchaikovsky need defending?
As to the music itself, I hope at this date it doesn't need selling. There used to be Tchaikovsky snobs who sneered at those of us who adore his music, but my impression is that they've mostly gone on to other hobbies.
Poor Tchaikovsky's reputation among some "serious" critics has always suffered because of the sheer irresistibleness of so much of his music. It seems to pump directly into the bloodstream.
The composer himself may have had a touch of this same feeling. He had a low opinion of The Nutcracker, at least as compared with the short opera, Yolanta, which he composed to share a double bill with the littlest of his three ballets. (He was positively withering on the subject of the little Nutcracker Suite he extracted from the full ballet, which is probably still his most-performed work. The difference is that now there are a large number of other, more substantial Tchaikovsky works that are performed an awful lot.)
Yolanta is indeed a lovely work, of remarkably delicate sensibilities. It tells the story of a king who tries to protect (as he sees it) his daughter, the princess Yolanta, from suffering the pain of being blind by using all his royal powers to prevent her from ever knowing that she's blind. Of course it's a wonderful metaphor for parents' regrettable impulse to "protect" their children from realities it's ultimately dangerous and destructive to shield them from. But it's also a remarkable attempt to imagine a world where there is nothing to see and nothing seen -- and obviously music, placing such a premium on sound and hearing, is an ideal medium through which to try to imagine such a world. Yolanta might be deeply moving if the damned thing could be really well performed, but that's something I don't expect ever to see. (Records aren't a bad way to experience it, but even from a musical standpoint it's an excruciatingly difficult piece to bring to life.)
Whereas The Nutcracker is, for goodness' sake, one of the most astonishing creations to spring from the mind of humankind. Not even its involuntary servitude as a ritual Christmas torture for the kiddies can dim the brilliance of its imagined world of toy drama. In a competent performance, the inexorable build to the soaring climax of Act I is one of the supreme spans of musical construction -- and Lanchbery brings it off as well as anybody I've heard (with the optional choral part, if you're keeping score).
Oh, that's the "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy"?
At the top of this piece we have a clip of the chunk of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which Leopold Stokowski conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in the oh-so-familiar "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker -- the kind of all-sense-stimulating music that set Stoky's imagination roaring. (From this excerpt in particular it's hard to believe that the original Fantasia recordings will be 70 years old in April!) We know that the piece was inspired by Tchaikovsky's curiosity as to what use could be made of the intriguing celesta, a keyboard instrument that produces this distinctive chimelike sound. We know too that nobody has ever found a more arresting, not to mention tingling, application.
I'm sorry I can't offer you Lanchbery's performance, which holds its own against Stoky's. For that matter I would have liked to offer you, at minimum, say, the Sleeping Beauty Act I finale, which Lanchbery builds wonderfully. Alas, I'm still working on my (basically nonexistent) computer audio and video technical skills. One of these days perhaps . . .
It was Howie who pointed out to me the seasonal coincidence that I happened to decide to write about the Tchaikovsky ballets during the holiday season, the very time when kiddies the world over are being force-marched into renderings of The Nutcracker, with the apparent intent of engender a life-long hatred of serious music. You have only my word that the timing is a coincidence; I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets year-round.
But if this is a good time of year for you to think about this music, that works for me.
Why listen to the ballets complete?
Sometimes I listen to the Tchaikovsky ballets in suite form, but more often I prefer to hear them in full -- or at least a full act at a time. It's partly a matter of the sustained musical invention, which goes far beyond what you might guess from listening to collections of musical "highlights." But there's more to it. The complete scores aren't conceived in terms of highlights and lowlights. This composer's imagination had a specifically dramatic cast that comes to the fore in his theater works, the operas and ballets, animating the best of them in a way that you can't imagine from just excerpts, memorable as they are.
It occurs to me that we tend to think the Tchaikovsky ballets represent a genre, that of the "full-length ballet." However, the reality is that, except for Tchaikovsky's later countryman Sergei Prokofiev with his Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, nobody else has pulled off the feat of sustaining musical interest through the length of a full-evening ballet score. I guess you could make a case of sorts for Leo Delibes, but really now, how often would anybody really wish to sit through the whole of Coppelia or Sylvia?
Tchaikovsky, as noted, made his own little Nutcracker Suite, and Prokofiev extracted no fewer than three orchestral suites from his Romeo and Juliet. In addition, countless other hands have assembled suites from all of these great ballets -- and any conductor can make his/her own, by stringing together as much or as little music as he/she sees fit. Certainly, there have been many performances of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev ballet suites I've treasured, notably from conductors we have no opportunity to hear perform the complete scores, people like Yevgeny Mravinsky, Pierre Monteux, even Herbert von Karajan (a better Tchaikovsky conductor than a lot of people seem to remember).
Then there's the curious case of Eugene Ormandy, Stoky's successor in Philadelphia, who during his long tenure as music director gave glorious performances of (usually) his own suites from the Tchaikovsky ballets. The single LP's worth of each that he recorded for Columbia Masterworks ranks with the great Tchaikovsky on records. Surely, if he had wished, when it came to redoing their recorded repertory for RCA Red Seal, Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra could have done the ballets complete; it's my understanding that RCA would have been only too happy to have more repertory Ormandy and the Philadelphians hadn't already recorded. I have to assume the conductor just wasn't interested in doing so. For RCA he once again did a single LP's worth of selections from each of the ballets.
No knock on Tchaikovsky's little Nutcracker Suite -- it gathers 20 or so minutes' worth of ever-delightful music. But as an experiment, try listening to the Suite and then to just Act I of the complete Nutcracker, which lasts about 45 minutes. First off, I think you'll be astonished at how much wonderful music you lose in the Suite. And then, even if you don't know the story, especially as you get to know the music well, I think you'll find yourself overwhelmed by the dramatic build-up of the complete Act I.
You don't have to be a "dance person" -- I'm sure not!
I should stress that I'm not speaking here of the music's appeal for ballet fans. I'm not much of a dance person myself. On those rare occasions when I'm dragged to the ballet, generally on the promise of hearing some music I love played by musicians who supposedly understand its dance qualities, I usually come away (a) fuming at the miserable quality of the musical presentation, and (b) churlishly ungrateful for the tedious visual "spectacle," which, rather than adding anything to the music, merely distracts or actually detracts from it. In the same way that I rarely enjoy actual stagings of Stravinsky's trio of ballet masterpieces The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring (I much prefer to let them take shape in the theater of my imagination), I listen to Tchaikovsky's ballets for their all but unimaginable sustained inspiration.
Composer-arranger-conductor John Lanchbery
Now, I'm not about to chuck a shelfful of other recordings of these timeless masterpieces -- or rather shelves full, allowing for various recorded media. But I can say that I would be unable to direct you to a better version of any of them. I find this almost as remarkable as the quality of the music itself.
[6/10/2011] Gotta dance -- Bach the suite-maker, Part 1 [formerly Preview 1] (continued)
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And here guitarist Per-Olov Kindgren plays his arrangement of the Sarabande from Bach's Violin Partita No. 1.
NOW BACK TO BACH'S AIR
Here's how the Air sounds in its (more or less) original form.
BACH: Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068: No. 2, Air
Moscow Virtuosi, Vladimir Spivakov, cond. BMG, recorded in Munich, Apr. 22-28, 1989
And here it is, well, "done up" a bit -- as arranged and conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
BACH-STOKOWSKI: Air on the G String (Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D, BWV 1068)
Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded February 1958
AS IT HAPPENS, THE FAMOUS STOKOWSKI BACH ARRANGEMENTS INCLUDED OTHER SUITE MOVEMENTS
And we're going to hear two more tonight, along with their originals. You'll note that in Stoky's hands both the bourrée and the sarabande emerge as decidedly stately presentations. As the Wikipedia note indicates, this is indeed how Bach and other baroque composers heard the sarabande (in stark contrast to its original Spanish form). However, as you'll hear in Robert Levin's performance of tonight's bourrée as well as the two strikingly different ones by Martha Argerich (recorded only months apart -- the live performance fleeter, less percussive, shapelier than the studio version), the bourrée is a decidedly quick dance form. (Of course we heard some pretty spiffy bourrées in our posts devoted to Handel's Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music.)
BOURRÉE
BACH: English Suite No. 2 in A minor, BWV 807: No. 5, Bourrée
The bourrée (also borrèia) is a dance of French origin common in Auvergne and Biscay in Spain in the 17th century. It is danced in quick double time, somewhat resembling the gavotte. The main difference between the two is the anacrusis, or upbeat; a bourrée starts on the last beat of a bar, creating a quarter-bar anacrusis, whereas a gavotte has a half-bar anacrusis. It often has a dactylic rhythm. In his Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739), Johann Mattheson wrote of the bourrée, "its distinguishing feature resides in contentment and a pleasant demeanor, at the same time it is somewhat carefree and relaxed, a little indolent and easygoing, though not disagreeable". -- Wikipedia (links onsite)
orchestral version arr. Stokowski Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded February 1958 original version for keyboard solo Robert Levin, piano. Hänssler Classics, recorded Oct. 8-15, 1999 Martha Argerich, piano. DG, recorded February 1979 Martha Argerich, piano. EMI, recorded live in the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), May 7, 1978
SARABANDE
BACH: Partita for Solo Violin No. 1 in B minor, BWV 1002: No. 3, Sarabande
In music, the sarabande (It., sarabanda) is a dance in triple metre. The second and third beats of each measure are often tied, giving the dance a distinctive rhythm of quarter notes and eighth notes in alternation. The quarters are said to corresponded with dragging steps in the dance. . . . Apparently the dance became popular in the Spanish colonies before moving back across the Atlantic to Spain. . . . Later it became a traditional movement of the suite during the baroque period, usually coming directly after the Courante. The baroque sarabande is commonly a slow triple rather than the much faster Spanish original, consistent with the courtly European interpretations of many Latin dances. This slower, less spirited interpretation of the dance form was codified in the writings of various 18th century musicologists . . . . -- Wikipedia (links onsite)
orchestral version arr. Stokowski Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Capitol/EMI, recorded February 1958 original version for solo violin Ruggiero Ricci, violin. Westminster/MCA, recorded c1966
WHILE WE'RE AT IT, COULD WE SLIP IN JUST ONE MORE BOURRÉE AND ONE MORE SARABANDE?
As you'll see Sunday, this is actually more literally in the nature of a preview for this week's main post. The performance, by the way, is by the great Hungarian-born cellist János Starker (born 1924 and still with us the last time I checked), from his fifth and last recording of the Bach cello suites, made just weeks before his 68th birthday.
We hear the Sarabande and Bourrée first separately, then together. I kept going back and forth about this, then went ahead and made an audio file of the two movements together, then decided that no, maybe people might want to hear this wonderful bourrée in particular on its own. Since the "together" file was already made, I decided to throw it in as well. (I could have done something fancier like, say, go back to one of Starker's earlier recordings of the Bach suites, but for once I managed to control myself.)
BACH: Suite for Solo Cello No. 3 in C, BWV 1009:
No. 4, Sarabande
No. 5, Bourrée I-II
No. 4, Sarabande No. 5, Bourrée I-II János Starker, cello. BMG, recorded June 19-24, 1992
Now we've heard a bourrée and a sarabande, both suite-making staples for Bach. Tomorrow night we're going to sample some of the other dances most frequently heard in his suites.
SATURDAY UPDATE:As I explain in tonight's follow-up post, this erstwhile "preview" has been officially redesignated Part 1 of a three-part Sunday Classics post, continuing Saturday night and concluding Sunday morning.
it contains only two actual rhapsodies, the Enesco we just heard and the Liszt we're about to hear. Ormandy didn't record many rhapsodies en bloc, but Sony has assembled 
that includes a lot of the music we're hearing today.
of historical recordings of all 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies.
