Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.

This week’s pick from the Ondine label (ODE1040-2) spotlights Sibelius’ Fourth Symphony. The composer made the following diary entry in November 1910, with the work still in progress: “A symphony, after all, is not a ‘composition’ in the usual sense. It is more like a declaration of faith at various stages in one’s life.” The Fourth reflects a serious self-searching in which Sibelius painfully lays bare his soul. The symphony is in four movements, but these are far from conventional. The second movement, a scherzo, presents an essentially bright first half followed by a chromatically distorted and darker second.

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Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

Question 10

Question 11

Question 12

Question 13

Question 14

Question 15

Answers

1. Beethoven: Violin Concerto

2. Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

3. Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3

4. Sibelius: Symphony No. 5

5. Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture

6. Messiaen: Turangalila-symphonie

7. Mozart: Piano sonata No. 11 (Turkish rondo)

8. Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini

9. Balakirev: Islamey

10. Sibelius: Violin Concerto

11. Britten: 4 Sea Interludes (Storm)

12. Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition orch. Ravel (The Great Gate of Kiev)

13. Elgar: Cello Concerto

14. Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

15. Ravel: Boléro

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This week’s blog, then, comprises a selection of entries in the Naxos catalogue that feature fools. We’ll hear some shorter examples by way of starters, and gradually work our way to a group of more substantial items.

Our opening number is an arrangement of a song written in 1944 by the major author, but lesser known composer, Paul Bowles (1910-1999). April Fool Baby is a nonsensically comical poem by the American author Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), who was a major influence on Bowles. The dotty text is well matched by Bowles’ jaunty rhythms. This arrangement of the song for piano duet is by Andrey Kasparov. Here’s the text of Stein’s poem:

It seems to be a note to she the sweet sweetie
But actually it’s April Fool to tender she
My sweetie
She is all me my sweetie
April full of fool which is me for my sweetie
Dear April which made she to be
All to he
April Fool to his sweetie which is she
Tenderly excessively sweetily
My April Fool baby

April Fool Baby (8.559786)

Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev

Next, we have a quick nod to the folly of alcohol addiction in a song by the 19th-century Russian composer, Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev. Its title, Kak naladidi: durak, translates as ‘They keep calling me a fool’ and appears in a collection of ten songs from 1895-96. The sardonic poem urges a drunkard to turn from ‘green wine’ (vodka) to water, whatever the likely consequences.

They keep calling me a fool (8.572218)

Peter Breiner
Photo: Guinara Samojlova

From Balakirev to The Beatles now in a song arranged by Peter Breiner in 1993 as part of his ever popular first volume of Beatles Go Baroque. Arranged for chamber orchestra in the style of a Handel concerto grosso, Fool on the Hill describes the fool of the title as a solitary figure, misunderstood by others, but actually a person of wisdom:

Day after day
Alone on a hill
The man with the foolish grin is keeping perfectly still
But nobody wants to know him
They can see that he’s just a fool
And he never gives an answer

But the fool on the hill
Sees the sun going down
And the eyes in his head
See the world spinning ‘round

Fool on the Hill (8.990050)

Jean Sibelius

Sibelius’ output of incidental music for the theatre began in 1898 with King Christian II, a historical drama written by his friend, the Swedish dramatist Adolf Paul. Although the play was a great success at the time, it has now disappeared from the repertory, with only the music surviving the test of time. The narrative centres around the love of Christian II (whose rule extended over all three Scandinavian countries) for a Dutch girl from a humble background. The music originally consisted of only four movements, although Sibelius was later encouraged to add a further three. We’ll hear the last of those original four movements, titled Fool’s Song of The Spider. You can follow this link to contemplate the complete text. Meanwhile, here are the words of the first verse in translation:

In the green field behind a wild hedge,
under the brooding heat of the sun,
Crouches a spider so black and so fat,
in the grass and fixes her gaze.
Then sunlight catches her and she begins to
thread and to twist and spin it until it is dark,
and she weaves herself a web, so strong and so dense,
so light and so airy,
in which to catch and torment every soul
until it lies dead in the threads.

Fool’s Song of The Spider (8.573299)

Now to a scene from David Schiff’s opera, Gimpel the Fool. Schiff recalls the genesis of the work, dating from the time when he was a graduate student in music composition at the Manhattan School of Music.

David Schiff

“One of my courses was Opera Composition. For our final assignment we had to write the libretto for a short opera. I decided then to write a libretto for an opera based on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s most famous story, Gimpel the Fool. I went to a reading that Singer was giving of his stories and asked him afterwards if he would give me permission to write such an opera; he said that he was sure there would be no problem.”

At the opening of Act I we find Elka, Gimpel’s wife of twenty years, on her deathbed. She confesses that their six children are not his. Stunned and shocked, Gimpel tries to understand how he let himself be deceived. From his earliest childhood he had always believed everyone. He was an orphan and given to the baker as an apprentice. The townspeople of Frampol told him that the Czar was coming, that the moon had fallen down, even that the Messiah was coming to town – and he believed them. The rabbi advised him that those who told him lies were the fools, not Gimpel, for they would lose the world to come.

Once we saw how easy it was to fool Gimpel… (8.669010-11)

Gustav Holst
© HNH International

Gustav Holst composed his one-act comic opera The Perfect Fool between 1918 and 1922; it parodies the conventions of romantic grand opera, especially Verdi and Wagner. It did not prove a success and all that remains in the current repertory is the music for the opening ballet, performed as a separate suite. The fact that audiences found the story confusing probably accounts for its failure. The part of the Fool, for example, consists of only one word. A possible symbolic interpretation of the work posits that the role of the Princess symbolises the world of opera, while the Fool represents the British public. Whatever, Holst’s colourful score for the dance sequence is irresistible and is cast in the following structure:

Andante (invocation)
Dance of Spirits of Earth (Moderato – Andante)
Dance of Spirits of Water (Allegro)
Dance of Spirits of Fire (Allegro moderato – Andante)

The Perfect Fool (9.80222)

Dmitry Shostakovich
© HNH International

When Stalin died in 1953 the conditions for film-making in the Soviet Union changed almost overnight. Censorship and supervision eased, and new party directives demanded at least 150 productions annually. Among the directors active at the time was Grigori Kosintsev, better known in western countries for his fine Shakespeare adaptations of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1970). During pre-production for the latter, Kosintsev sent a memo to Shostakovich, who had been commissioned to write the film score: “There should be no stylisation of antiquity. It should be the language of contemporary art which you use to express the contemporary world.”

The Ten Songs of the Fool from the incidental music that Shostakovich wrote for a stage production of King Lear in 1930 certainly seemed to anticipate that concept. Our final audio extract is taken from a volume that includes the music for both the stage and screen versions. Writing about that recording, Classical Net wrote:

“The CD contains the music for a stage production done in the 1930s as well as for the 1970 film. The tone of the two scores differs wildly. The earlier production grins like a skull, with the heavy satire idiosyncratic to Shostakovich. For example, at one point the Fool breaks out into “Jingle Bells”, to different words, of course.”

Ten Songs of the Fool (C10397)

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The world’s five oceans are daunting to contemplate – their strength, enormity, depth. I was only a youngster when Sir Francis Chichester became the first person to single-handedly sail around the world in his yacht Gypsy Moth IV in 1966-67. I remember trying to contemplate the sense of loneliness he must be experiencing as regular updates on his progress flowed into the news channels.

The ocean’s overawing nature is clearly appreciated in Ravel’s Une barque sur l’océan (A boat on the ocean) which started life as one of his five piano pieces, Miroirs, written in 1904-05. A year later, Ravel produced an orchestrated version of Une barque sur l’océan which, despite his undisputed skill as an orchestrator, wasn’t well received. Thoughts of producing an alternative orchestration some 20 years later were aborted, and the 1906 version wasn’t published until 1950. Here’s the opening of the work with woodwind instruments over the muted arpeggios of divided strings, suggesting the ocean’s initially tranquil presence.

Une barque sur l’océan (8.573545)

Quite where the five oceans transform into the seven seas, I’ve never really understood. Composers, however, have often clearly focused on the sea as a basis for their works. Think of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony, Elgar’s Sea Pictures, Debussy’s La mer, Sibelius’ The Oceanides, or The Sea by Frank Bridge. But I’ve chosen a piece by one of Bridge’s students, Benjamin Britten, for my seascape: one of the 4 Sea Interludes from his opera Peter Grimes. These are titled Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm, the movement we can listen to here.

Storm (8.578269-70)

We move inland now to lakes. I’ve chosen an orchestral work by the Russian nationalist composer Anatol Liadov (1855-1914) to represent this category. As a composer, Liadov was less hard-working than he might have been. It was his tendency to procrastinate that was to give Stravinsky his chance to work with Diaghalev, when the score for the ballet The Firebird that had been commissioned from Liadov wasn’t finished in time. When asked by Diaghalev how the music was progressing, Liadov famously replied that things were going very well, and that he had just bought some ruled paper. Liadov completed The Enchanted Lake in 1909. It’s a colourful, fantasy miniature for orchestra that bathes the listener in the subtleties of a moonlit stillness. Although, as with many of Liadov’s works, it’s based on a fairy tale, this seven-minute piece doesn’t so much tell a story as depict a state of being; enjoy it as you stretch out in your mind’s eye on the lake’s grassy bank.

The Enchanted Lake (8.556606)

Musical lakes aren’t always havens of bliss, however, and certainly not the one in Dvořák’s The Water Goblin. It opens with the malicious spirit singing of his coming marriage the next day. His bride-to-be has been irresistibly drawn to the goblin in the water, despite her mother’s warnings. As she approaches, the ground sinks beneath her feet and she is drawn down into the water, where she becomes the goblin’s wife. In the depths of the lake she grows sad, since it is in this gloomy place that the goblin holds the souls of those who have drowned. She sings a song to her child expressing regret for what has happened. When the goblin hears her complaint, he angrily threatens to change her into a fish, but is persuaded to allow her to return home for one day, although he keeps her child as a hostage against her return. The girl and her mother are overjoyed to be reunited, but when the goblin angrily knocks at the door, he is turned away by the girl’s mother. At this he raises a great storm, during which something is hurled against the door of the house: it is the body of the child, its head cut from the body.

No prizes for guessing from which point in the story our music extract is taken!

The Water Goblin (8.550896)

There are plenty of musical rivers in the catalogue, from Wagner’s depiction of the River Rhein at the opening of his music drama tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung, to Smetana’s representation of the River Moldau, from its trickling source to its full majestic flow. But I’ve chosen a more contemporary characterisation, that of Snake River which rises in America’s Yellowstone Park before eventually reaching Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park. The American composer is Jennifer Higdon, whose music captures the river’s rapid flow and unpredictability, ever changing and powerful, yet at times gentle. It’s taken from her orchestral suite All Things Majestic, written in 2011 in response to a commission from Grand Teton Music Festival.

Snake River (8.559823)

Downsizing to a stream, we come to down the stream merrily by Eric Moe, who provides an epigraph for his short piece for percussion in a line set by Franz Schubert in his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin:

Ich hört ein Bächlein rauschen…
(I hear a little brook rushing along…)

The composer adds: “Neither Row, row, row your boat nor the Schubert song is quoted musically, but this short piece seems to bubble along as they do.”

down the stream merrily (8.559612)

Moving to airborne water compounds, I’ve chosen Liszt’s Nuages gris, or Gray Clouds, a piece for piano that he wrote in 1881. Although the form is quite simple, its unusual dissonances and harmonies make it sound far ahead of its time, almost a presentimental mix of both impressionism and the atonal world of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
 
 
 
 
Nuages gris (8.553852)

I have just three more musical stages of water’s diminishing transformations to explore: rain showers; water droplets; and steam. I’ve often wondered if Debussy was sitting in a tin-roofed potting shed during a rainstorm when he got the inspiration for the last of his three Estampes for piano solo titled Jardins sous la pluie (Gardens in the Rain). The notes fairly rattle away practically from start to finish, as can be heard on this recording.

Jardins sous la pluie (CDX-5063)

Sibelius captured a gentler down-flow in his miniature for pizzicato cello and violin, Water Drops. And it really is a miniature, dripping down at under a minute in our recording.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Water Drops (ODE850-2)

Finally, before our water subject evaporates completely, we have steam. I thought the best way to illustrate this would be through the power of steam trains, and I’ve chosen a piece by the American composer Michael Daugherty by way of illustration. He wrote his 3-movement orchestral work Deus ex Machina in 2007, and cast it as a piano concerto in which each movement is a musical response to the world of trains. The last movement is titled Night Steam. It evokes O. Winston Link’s historic photographs of steam locomotives that were gradually being replaced in America post-1950. In the composer’s own words:

“Like O. Winston Link’s photographs, I have composed music that sonically captures the final journeys of trains from a bygone era. In Night Steam, we hear majestic fire-eating steam locomotives rumble and whistle their way through the small towns and lonely back roads of the Shenandoah Valley into extinction.”

Night Steam (8.559635)

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The obvious place to start is John Cage’s 4′ 33″, which is three movements of silence totaling four minutes and thirty-three seconds. No need to play an extract here as it’s been rolling since the start of this blog. Cage’s intention, of course, was to make people focus on ambient, rather than composed sound. Silence takes an active part in Cage’s other works. We can listen here to part of his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, in which decaying sound or silence is as magnetic as the piano sounds he manufactured with the aid of screws and erasers.

Sonata No. 6 (8.559042)

We turn to more conventional fare now with the closing stretch of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony featuring the ‘swan theme’, a melody that suggested itself to Sibelius following the sight and sound of swans circling above him in the haze of early spring sunshine. Just as memorable as the majestic tune are the silences that bring the work to a close, punctuated by short hammer-blows of sound. While some conductors milk those silences for all they’re worth, others seem less persuaded to invest in their power. You can decide for yourself which works best artistically for you.

Sibelius Symphony No. 5 (8.554377)

Sibelius Symphony No. 5 (8.550200)

Sibelius Symphony No. 5 (ODE1035-2)

Another Fifth Symphony now, this time by Mahler. The first movement of the work is a death march. In the final moments the dynamic markings get softer and softer and the rests get ever more telling as a shrouding silence seems to accompany the lowering of a coffin into its final resting place. Mahler’s instruction on the score is that the last note should be given a sudden accent: the drop of a concluding clod of earth, maybe, or that final nail being driven home. Do any of the following seem either more or less scrupulous about observing Mahler’s rests and his desired effects?

Mahler Symphony No. 5 (CD93.101)

Mahler Symphony No. 5 (8.550528)

Mahler Symphony No. 5 (C49052)

And yet another Fifth Symphony now. In one of my previous lives as a concert reviewer, there’s one performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth that stands out. It was being given by the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra under their noted conductor Yuri Temirkanov, who certainly knew how to get to the heart of the music. Unfortunately, the orchestra was on tour in south east Asia at the time and the timpanist must have been suffering from a deal of jet-lag. There’s a dramatic silence towards the end of the last movement (often misinterpreted as the end of the work by newcomers in the audience, who might clap prematurely), but on this occasion the timpanist just kept rolling out his very loud roll, solo, until he realised that a couple of thousand pairs of eyes were burning into him. Compare and contrast how that silence is observed in these interpretations.

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 (8.550191)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 (8.550716)

Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 5 (C449961B)

If you’ve ever performed Handel’s Messiah, you’ll no doubt have experienced that moment of uncertainty towards the end of the Hallelujah! chorus as you fear having miscounted the number of times you’ve declaimed ‘Hallelujah!’ and end up producing an extra repeat on your own. Handel makes no indication that he then wants a dramatic silence before the final utterance of the word, but many conductors call on the power of such an effect. Here are a couple of examples for you to reflect on.

Hallelujah! (8.550667-68)

Hallelujah! (C60068-2)

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is full of drama, but one particularly arresting moment is during the finale, when the chorus have declaimed to their full and to the rafters and Beethoven presents a sort of silent sorbet to refresh the ear before the soft opening strains of the Turkish March. Here are three versions for you to compare, including one by a conductor noted for not hanging around in Beethoven’s symphonies.

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (CD93.142)

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (8.550181)

Beethoven Symphony No. 9 (CD93.088)

In a way, we come full circle with our last piece because Toru Takemitsu (1930-1966) readily acknowledged the influence of John Cage in his compositions. He also wrote:

“Music is either sound or silence. As long as I live I shall choose sound as something to confront a silence. That sound should be a single, strong sound.”

Takemitsu expressed that opinion in 1962, the same year he wrote Corona for pianist(s). By way of reflection, we end with an extract from the opening of that work.

Corona for pianist(s) (NYNG-003)

The post Amplified by the power of zero. appeared first on The Naxos Blog.

Let’s start, however, with a nod to Mary herself with John Dowland’s Galliards by Mary, Queen of Scots (8.553381).

The French musician Claude-Bénigne Balbastre was born on 8 December 1724. His profile may not be so well known today, but in his time he was a noted keyboard player and composer. That was during the genteel period of France’s ancien régime. Despite his musical renown and association with the aristocracy, he was able to escape subsequent arrest and execution following the French Revolution; nonetheless, he was fated to die in poverty ten years after that tumultuous turning point in history. Balabstre was spared the chop owing in part to patriotic pieces he composed that ostensibly embraced the ideals of the revolution, the most famous dating from 1792, Marche des Marsellois et l’Air Ça-ira (8.572034-35). Added to which, his daughter married a man associated with the revolutionary government, which undoubtedly helped to save the family from prosecution. A marriage of convenience indeed.

A contemporary of Balbastre, the Czech composer František Xaver Dušek was born on 8 December, 1731. He held an important place in Prague’s musical life and was a friend of Mozart: he welcomed him to Prague when he attended a performance of Le nozze di Figaro; also during the composition of Don Giovanni in 1787 (which Mozart completed in Dušek’s summer villa); and for the staging in 1791 of La clemenza di Tito. Dušek left behind a collection of solo and duet keyboard sonatas, some 37 sinfonias and a number of concertos. Here’s the finale of his Sinfonia in G major, Altner G4 (8.572683), which has a suitable birthday bounce about it.

A number of first performances took place on 8 December in the early 19th century.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (8.553477) was premiered on that date in 1813. In spite of his deafness Beethoven, in his early forties, was at the height of his powers, but the new symphony was greeted by some contemporary critics as the work of a drunkard. Weber summed up this opinion of the work:

“The extravagances of  Beethoven’s genius have reached the ne plus ultra in the Seventh Symphony, and he is quite ripe for the mad-house.”

At the first performance, however, the work was received with considerable enthusiasm. The occasion was a patriotic one, a concert organised by Maelzel, inventor of the new metronome, in aid of the wounded at the battle of Hanau. Here’s the symphony’s closing section.

Verdi’s opera Luisa Miller (CDS523) received its first performance on 8 December, 1849 at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. It was a contractual obligation that Verdi write a follow-up work to Alzira, which had been a failure in 1845; not a felicitous starting point. Although Luisa Miller was initially a success, it struggled to establish itself, largely because the cast was not fully equal to the score’s demands. The four leading roles need to have an extended vocal range, with the title role covering more than two octaves. As a taster for the work, here’s part of Rodolfo’s aria Quando le sere al placido from Act II.

Berlioz first discovered Goethe’s Faust in 1828, but it was some years later before the work morphed into his La damnation de Faust (8.660116-17). It was given its first performance on 8 December, 1846, having been composed episodically during an 1845-46 concert tour of Vienna, Prague, Pest and Brunswick. Berlioz claimed to have written parts of the work in a variety of locations: in a German post-chaise, in coaches, trains and steamboats, and in an inn. I wonder where he was when he penned these familiar strains from Part I, Scene 3.

Finally a double whammy of a work that was premiered on 8 December, the composer’s 50th birthday, in 1915, namely Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony (8.550200)—maybe a triple whammy if we add the fact that Sibelius himself conducted the performance. A second and a final version of the work appeared respectively in 1916 and 1919. But Sibelius already had the work in mind in 1912, when he spoke of it in somewhat apocalyptic terms, declaring that he saw himself in a deep valley, with the mountain that he should ascend visible before him:

“God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”

Awesome!

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View album details of Jean Sibelius’ Pelleas et Melisande at naxos.com
Catalogue No.: 8.573301

The post Podcast: Jean Sibelius – a journey beyond the symphonies appeared first on The Naxos Blog.