Leos Janacek was one of the most original of late nineteenth and early twentieth century composers. His music lies somewhat outside the conventional path of modern European music. It’s modernity, if that is the right word, comes not from his adherence to some overarching musical ideology, like that of Schoenberg, Webern or Boulez, but more out of his interest in the detailed and specific - the sounds of water, of birds, of speech - in accents and sounds rather than semantics - all of which are reflected in his work. Nor does he seem to have been interested in musical virtuosity, or instrumentalism for its own sake. All his music seems to draw on, and refers back to, a wider understanding of life than just music. I can’t think of anyone who has been quite like him - Oliver Messiaen is the closest and even he isn’t very close.
His collection of short piano pieces, ‘Along an Overgrown Path’, each with touching little titles (’Our Evenings’, ‘A blown away leaf’, ‘They chattered like swallows’) is full of an intense nostalgic longing for his childhood home in Moravia. It was also written in the shadow of the death, aged 20, of his daughter Olga, to whom he was deeply attached, and a deep vein of melancholy permeates them all.
The piece called ‘Goodnight’ is one of the most haunting. It starts with a little four note figure - crochet, two quavers, crochet - high up on the piano, sounding on two notes only. It’s like a distant bell sounding, or a call across a river. The figure is repeated throughout the four minutes or so of the piece, gradually and slowly moving downwards until, at the end it sounds in the bass. It’s as if it was subsiding through consciousness into sleep - and as the final four notes sound, perhaps into that final sleep into which Olga, at long last, subsided - leaving Janacek alone.
The pianist is Thomas Hlawatsch.
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Posted in Film Music on Nov 25th, 2008 No Comments »
Alan Rickman is most famous as an actor - Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, the Sheriff of Nottingham in ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’, the mad villain in ‘Die Hard’, the ghost husband in ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply’. In 1997, in a departure from acting, he co-wrote and directed the film ‘The Winter Guest’. It’s a touching, if rather bleak tale, set in wintry Scotland, about a woman (Emma Thompson) coming to terms with the death of her husband and trying to re-establish her relationship with her difficult mother (Phyllida Law, her real life mother). But it’s not unremittingly bleak. The two local widows, whose hobby is attending as many funerals as they can, as if trying to stave off their own, are genuinely funny.
The soundtrack, by Michael Kamen, in noteworthy, in particular the final song ‘Take Me With You’ sung over the end titles. Here it is sung by Elisabeth Fraser.
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Posted in Classical on Nov 21st, 2008 No Comments »
This is a piece that Leopold Godowski wrote for Paul Wittgenstein, the one armed pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Godowski was a master pianist, and a wild virtuoso, who rewrote and ‘improved’ many of Chopin’s works, and in the process made them impossible to play for everyone but those who had his own level of virtuosity. Even Artur Rubinstein thought Godowski an impossible act to follow.
This Elegy is a short piece. But it’s lovely, and melancholy. It was an encore played by the great South American pianist, Jorge Bolet, at a concert I was privileged to be at almost a quarter of a century ago, on 21 December 1983, at St John’s Smith Square, London. The applause is cut off at the end, which is a pity, for it was rapturous.
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I posted earlier Schumann’s lovely setting of this shortest of Goethe’s poems. Here, written a quarter of a century earlier, is Schubert’s. Schumann finds a poignant, personal sense of loss, as if in death, in this yearning for rest at the day’s end. Schubert’s understanding is universal, less personal. He invokes the peace we all can find, as the day, and life, closes, in nature and in God.
‘Peace lies over all the hills; in the treetops there is barely a stir. Birds are hushed in the wood; wait just a little while, soon you too will be at rest.’
The singer is Karl Erb, the greatest of all interpreters of Schubert’s songs.
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Posted in Popular Song on Nov 18th, 2008 4 Comments »
Stephen Foster’s classic song, beautifully sung by Stuart Burrows.
“I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair floating like a zephyr on the soft summer air.”
A zephyr is a dragonfly, as we call it in England, which hovers and flickers over the flowers it searches for. You can think of her hair, new clean and clear, caught by a breath of wind, catching the light and hovering before it settles back, gently on her neck - like the dragonfly onto the flower.
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Those of you who are English and of a certain age will understand me instinctively when I mention ‘Singing Together’. It was a regular BBC broadcast for schools during the 1950s. Those of us brought up on it can, at the drop of a hat, sing word perfect such classic English folksongs as ‘The British Grenadiers’, ‘The Keel Row’, The Keeper Did A’Hunting Go’, ‘Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron’ and this one - ’Golden Slumbers’ - sung to us at Infant School in the early afternoon as we were got tucked up for our afternoon sleep - and the teachers’ tea break.
Here it is sung by the Cambridge Singers conducted by John Rutter.
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This lovely song by Clara Schumann was offered as a gift to her husband, Robert. As a song it is worthy to stand alongside the best that he wrote. Morning has broken as a clear, sunlit day. The sun, her lover, awakens her, just as it might open the petals on the blossom.
‘I desire only to rest upon your breast, and there transfigure you with the sunlight’s shining joy.’
It is touchingly sung by Geraldine McGreevy.
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As a companion to my Going to Sleep anthology, here is one about waking up. Waking up from blissful dreams or from nightmares, from the repose of sleep to the cares of the world, to the sight of the beloved in whose arms you have rested, or into the cold light of day.
Here we start on a positive note. An English hymn, in the immensely popular version by Cat Stevens.
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Posted in Jazz on Nov 6th, 2008 No Comments »
In December 1956, following his tour of Europe, Louis Armstrong entered the recording studios and over a period of two months re-recorded (or rather re-created) some forty or so classics from throughout his career - from his days in Chicago with King Oliver in the early 20s, through his classic Hot Five period and into the 1930s when he reached the peak of his early fame. Now, though, he was a young man no longer; he was in his mid fifties. For some reason, this exercise of re-creating his early hits seems to have inspired him - to the extent that some of his re-creations equal, and even better, their originals. When these recordings came out as a boxed set of four LPs as his ‘Musical Autobiography’, they were hailed as classics of their kind - a new peak, in his long career. He introduced each track with a spoken reminiscence. For this track, That’s My Home, he pays touching tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton who played it for him as his departing train pulled out of the station, on his way home to America.
Louis wasn’t the man he was in his youth. His trumpet had no longer the breathtaking technique of thirty years earlier. Yet it has something else - a majesty and poise that only maturity brings. And that trumpet tone - the sound of a golden sunset.
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One of the most famous, and loveliest, of Richard Strauss’s songs. Here is the last verse.
‘Dream, dream, flower of my love, of the quiet, blessed night, when the flower of his love changed forever this world into a heaven for me.’
It is beautifully sung by Gundula Janovitz.
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