Peter Maxwell Davies

The opening movement is a purely orchestral evocation of what is to come. The second starts with simmering activity for woodwind and strings, subtly underpinned by marimba. This continues as the baritone enters with a description of the beginnings of Operation Black Star and the consequent demise of the imaginary village of Hellya in its wake:

Black Star. Operation Black Star was how they described it. Great cargoes of cement were unloaded, lorries, hut sections, cranes, bulldozers, transformers. The houses collapsed before clashing jaws and black battering foreheads. Piecemeal the village died, shrivelled slowly in the radiance of Black, Black Star. What was happening was impossible to find out. The almost completed fence was too well guarded by men and dogs. But Hellya was probed and tunnelled to the roots. The island was full of noises, a clangour from morning to night. A thin shifting veil of dust hung between island and sun. A wooden town sprang up overnight with cook-house, laundry, canteens, sickbay, offices, a detention centre.

Black Pentecost (8.572359)

 

Alexander Scriabin
© HNH International

‘Black Mass’ (SWR10164)

 

Duke Ellington
Source: eBay / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

“Beige is an evocation of the Renaissance in African American music, conjuring the night life of Harlem. Brown offers tribute to the African-American soldiers who fought and gave their lives in the Civil War and World Wars I and II. Black pays homage to the tradition of African-American faith in prayer and hard work, and includes a people’s work song and the spiritual phrases of the tune Come Sunday.”

Black (8.559737)

 

George Rochberg

His Black Sounds is by turns an angry, stark and desolate work. New York’s Lincoln Center commissioned it for a September 1965 telecast, where it was first performed as a ballet by Anna Sokolow under the title The Act, describing an act of murder. It’s scored for twelve wind and brass instruments, four percussion, and piano/celesta. Here’s the first half of the 14-minute piece.

Black Sounds (8.559115)

 

Turning to the opposite end of the colour spectrum, I’ve chosen not three pieces, but three composers to represent the colour white.

The first is the English composer Robert White (1538-1574) who was trained as a singer at Trinity College, Cambridge and later served as Master of the Choristers at Ely Cathedral. He seems later to have been employed at Chester Cathedral and finally at Westminster Abbey. White’s church music includes settings of a number of Latin texts, with two versions of the Holy Week Lamentations, one for a 5-part choir, the other for six voices. There’s a touch of mournful grey, then, in what emerged from White’s pen for his five-part version. Here are the concluding two sections of the work.

Lamentations (8.550572)

 

Clarence Cameron White
Source: Maud Cuney-Hare, 1874–1936 / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Levee Dance (8.111379)

 

Finally to a  bit of a toe-tapper by Edward White (1910–1994), who was a British composer and arranger of light music. You might have come across his music before, without knowing who the composer was, since many of his compositions were used rather anonymously as theme tunes for radio and television in the middle of the last century. Whilst holidaying in England’s Isle of Wight, White was inspired by a grand steam locomotive called Puffing Billy to write his most familiar work, Puffin’ Billy. It was used on both sides of The Pond: in the UK it became the signature tune for BBC Radio’s Children’s Favourites — a radio request programme which ran from 1952 to 1966; and in America it served as the theme music for some twenty years to CBS TV’s children’s series Captain Kangaroo.

Puffin’ Billy (8.553515)

 

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First up, red, for which I’ve chosen John Corigliano I’s Red Violin Concerto, in which the composer elaborates on music from his third film score, The Red Violin. This traces the history of a beautiful antique violin from its creation in Cremona, Italy, in 1681, where a legendary violin maker paints it with his dead wife’s blood to keep her memory alive, to an auction house in modern-day Montreal, where it draws the eye of an expert appraiser. Over the years between, the violin travels through four different countries, where it has a profound impact on all those who own it. Corigliano describes his structural approach to composing the score:

“The story of The Red Violin is perfect for a lover of the repertoire and the instrument. It spans three centuries in the life of a magnificent but haunted violin in its travels through time and space. A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built. Against the chaconne chords I juxtaposed Anna’s theme, a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder’s doomed wife. Then, from those elements, I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century.”

A further three movements were subsequently added to this chaconne to produce a full-length concerto. We’ll hear the finale, described as follows by the composer:

“The fourth movement (Accelerando Finale), as the title suggests, is a rollicking race in which the opposed forces of soloist and orchestra vie with each other. They each accelerate at different times and speeds, providing a virtuoso climax befitting a last movement. Some other unusual techniques are used here: the violin (and orchestral strings) are asked to press so hard on their strings that there is no pitch at all, just a crunch. This percussive and unusual sound provides energy, especially during the races. A major theme from the film that was not used in the concert chaconne was that given to Moritz, the contemporary violin expert who discovers the mystery of the Red Violin. It is a sadly romantic theme, and becomes the lyrical counterpoint to the high spirits of this final movement. Near the end of the work, the original chaconne from the first movement comes back to complete the journey of this violin concerto.”

Accelerando Finale (8.559671)

I turned to the contemporary British composer Jonathan Dove for an orange reference, and to his three-song cycle Cut My Shadow. Premiered in 2011, Dove adopts the gritty realism of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) for his texts, which were translated by Gwynne Edwards. Lorca, a member of the Generation of 27, was executed in 1936 by nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. His remains were never found, making these lines from the first song (Surprise) tragically prophetic:

He lay dead in the street
With a Knife in his heart
And no one knew him

The final Song of the Dry Orange Tree offers no respite from the pervading mood of real fear and a need for justice and liberation. The song pleads for freedom from anguish, and there is a hopeless sense of defeat and tiredness throughout. The accompaniment prods and interjects – ‘liberation’, when it comes, is swift. Dove maintains a constant unease and longing for a homeland in these songs.

 
Woodcutter,
Cut my shadow.
Free me from the anguish
Of seeing myself fruitless.

Oh! Why was I born among mirrors?
The day moves around me,
And the night reflects me
In each of its stars.

I want to live but not to see myself
And I shall dream
That my leaves and birds
Are turned into ants and hawks.

Woodcutter,
Cut my shadow.
Free me from the anguish
Of seeing myself fruitless.

Song of the Dry Orange Tree (8.573080)

The first movement of Jennifer Higdon’s 2-movement Piano Trio is titled Pale Yellow. Here’s how the American composer explains the concept of her work:

“Can music reflect colors and can colors be reflected in music? I have always been fascinated with the connection between painting and music. In my composing, I often picture colors as if I were spreading them on a canvas, except I do so with melodies, harmonies and through the peculiar sounds of the instruments themselves. The colors that I have chosen in both of the movement titles of my Piano Trio, Pale Yellow and Fiery Red, and in the music itself, reflect very different moods and energy levels, which I find fascinating, as it begs the question, can colors (in music, words and painting) actually convey a mood?”

You can decide for yourself as we listen to the first movement.

Pale Yellow (8.559298)

There are numerous green shoots in the catalogue, but I’ve gone for a piece by Percy Grainger to showcase the colour. Green Bushes is a passacaglia on an English folk-song collected by Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), the founding father of the folk-song revival in England. Originally scored for small orchestra in 1905-06, it was re-scored for larger forces in 1921, which is the version we’ll listen to here. The Green Bushes tune is heard almost constantly throughout, to which Grainger adds a multitude of original counter-melodies. The innovation of using folksong in passacaglia form was a first in British music and, so Grainger suggested, led Delius to write his Brigg Fair and Dance Rhapsodies in a similar mould.

Green Bushes (8.554263)

Capriccio in Blue by Polish composer Romuald Twardowski (b. 1930) was premiered in its orchestral version at the 1979 DoRe-Mi Festival in Łódź; it’s a national event promoting contemporary music for young people. Bearing the subtitle ‘George Gershwin in memoriam’, it’s one of two Twardowski works inspired by the great American composer (the other, written in 1986, is Symphonic Variations on a Theme by George Gershwin).

The piece opens with a lengthy cadenza for the soloist. Once the orchestra enters, one hears occasional harmonic flavouring and syncopated rhythms reminiscent of Gershwin, but the American’s influence comes most prominently to the fore in the lyrical theme that follows. But this is not faux-Gershwin; Twardowski’s originality is stamped on every bar, especially in the ensuing passage featuring unmissable syncopations. A jazzy lick for solo clarinet leads to a second lyrical idea, but the syncopations return. A second, shorter cadenza leads back to the opening material. This cross-pollination of two widely divergent composers and cultures results in something delightfully original, neither American nor Polish, but highly entertaining.

Capriccio in Blue (8.579031)

Staying on the jazz wavelength for the colour indigo, I’ve chosen one of the works that helped secure Duke Ellington’s name on the American jazz scene. For most of his long and illustrious career Duke Ellington was a major figure in the genre, and an active participant in the evolution of recordings spanning the years 1923 to 1973. By the early 1930s he was already established as a top bandleader, and celebrated both as an arranger and a composer in his own right. Always willing to adapt, Duke mirrored and often anticipated new directions and it is to this that we owe the existence of many of the great standards he left behind. Dating from 1930, here’s his best-selling Mood Indigo.

Mood Indigo (8.555017)

Mozart has the final word today with his song Das Veilchen (The Violet), written in Vienna in 1785. Here’s an English translation of the German poem by Goethe which Mozart set so beautifully, and colourfully, to music:

A little violet stood upon the meadow,
Lowly, humble, and unknown;
It was a dear little violet.
There came a young shepherdess
With a light step and a merry spirit
Along, along,
Along the meadow, and sang.

Ah! thinks the violet, if I only were
The most beautiful flower in nature,
Ah, only for a little while,
Until the darling had picked me
And pressed me to her bosom until I became faint,
Ah only, ah only
A quarter of an hour long!

Alas! but alas! the maiden came
And paid no heed to the little violet,
She trampled the poor violet.
It drooped and died and yet rejoiced:
And if I must die, yet I die
Through her, through her,
Yet I die at her feet.

Das Veilchen (8.557900-01)

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View album details of Manhattan Intermezzo – Piano and Orchestral Works by Neil Sedaka, Keith Emerson, Duke Ellington and George Gershwin at naxos.com
Catalogue No.: 8.573490

The post Podcast: A Manhattan Medley appeared first on The Naxos Blog.

January 1 is rather thin on the ground when it comes to composer anniversaries, though we might spare a thought for Bach’s youngest son Johann Christian Bach, the ‘London’ Bach, who died on this day in 1782. Here’s the opening of one of his Opus 18 Sinfonias (8.553367) which has plenty of festive atmosphere. Another composer who passed away on this date was J.S. Bach’s most prestigious pupil, Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713–1780), and you can hear the influence of the master in the opening of his Toccata et Fuga in A Minor (8.553924).

Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (8.571214), one of the best loved and most famous works of its kind,was given its première today in 1846 with his wife Clara as soloist, while Schumann’s friend Johannes Brahms heard his Violin Concerto (8.570321) first performed on January 1, 1879; here’s a snatch of the final movement. Brahms’ friend Antonin Dvorák had his String Quartet No. 12 in F, Op. 96 ‘American’ (8.553256) premièred in Boston on January 1, 1894, the opening of which sets the scene for one of the most famous pieces in its genre.

New Year’s Day music has to be good for blowing away the cobwebs, and in 19th-century Vienna the many fashionable society balls held in that often troubled city resulted in the composition of vast quantities of popular music suitable for the purpose. But the current global association of New Year’s Day with Vienna and the music of the Strauss family is not as old as you might imagine.

The annual concert in the magnificent Musikverein is such a familiar image that you might assume it to be both a tradition going back to the days of the Strausses themselves, and a regular highlight in the life of the famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. In fact it wasn’t until 1925 that the orchestra gave an all-Strauss programme, and it was only in the late 1930s that the celebrated New Year’s Day connection was established by the conductor Clemens Kraus. The publicity for these New Year concerts has done more than anything to familiarise us with the works of the remarkable Strauss family, particularly Johann Strauss II, known the world over as “The Waltz King”. His waltz An der schönen, blauen Donau or ‘The Blue Danube’ has become one of the most famous ever written. And today’s world-famous, globally-broadcast concerts would be unthinkable without Johann Strauss I’s Radetzky March (8.225343), written to celebrate Field Marshall Radetzky’s victory at the Battle of Navara in Italy in 1848.

The success of the Strauss family’s music saw imitators popping up all over Europe. Danish composer Hans Christian Lumbye started concerts in the manner of Strauss in his native Copenhagen after hearing the older Johann Strauss’ band; so, here’s his Happy New Year! Galop from Christmas and New Year, Ball-Bouquet (8.225170), written in 1849.

New Year celebrations are also synonymous with champagne, and the influence of both Chopin and Strauss pop up in Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz’s energetic waltz Cotillon: No. 1. Champagne (8.573295). Dance traditions and ballroom opulence also held sway in old Russia, as in Prokofiev’s Waltz for the New Year’s Ball (8.553069) from his Waltz Suite Op. 110, which was originally used in his ballet War and Peace.

Finally, New Year just wouldn’t be the same without the singing of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and who better to show how it should be done than Dame Nellie Melba (8.110738) whose voice, recorded in 1904, reaches out to us from historical archives. And when all the festivities have been done with and we’re left to face the morning after, what finer way to drive away the post-party blues than the vitamin-rich Big Band sound of Duke Ellington’s Hollywood Hangover (8.120810).

We wish you all a very happy and musical New Year!

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