;)
The wonderful piano music of MartinůThe tourist brochure in Policka, Moravia (Bohuslav Martinů’s home town), is called “Sunlight on the Marble.” The marble being, the marble on Martinů’s tombstone.
This phrase is peculiarly apt for describing the markedly sunny (yet substantial) style of Martinů.
John GibbonsThis is what you do:
;)
The measurably superior First Concerto is an astounding amalgam of Liszt, Stravinsky, Richard Strauss and Slavic and most probably quasi-Slavic folk motifs. The wholly original second movement stands with Stravinsky’s “Les Noces” as a uniquely extended timbral mosaic. The mediation between percussion and string sonority in the piano writing reveals a profound understanding of the piano’s unique multiple role as a rhythmic, melodic and percussion instrument. Bartok’s piano is a virtuoso piano, inherited from Liszt but informed by modernity.
Greg Mitchell’s HuffPo piece on Beethoven’s legendary 1808 concert (written about by Bonnie yesterday) generated a lively discussion by a very engaged and informed Huffington Post audience. In response, I give you my own deserted island musical moments.
Today the BSO became the latest musical institution to put historical performances online.
Starting with two pages of “broadcast archives” and other compilations, the initial digital library centers on a 12-album series dedicated BSO conductors from Koussevitsky to Ozawa, plus several prominent guest conductors.
Music is available in two quality levels (i.e. mp3 file sizes) and can be purchased by the album ($8.99 each), work, or track.
Last Wednesday, the Metropolitan Opera unveiled its latest new media strategy: the Met Player. Over 150 operas from the past 71 years are available for listening or viewing on your computer. The oldest is a 1937 Carmen with Rosa Ponselle, the newest are from the 2007-2008 high definition move theater broadcasts, including definitive performances of La Fille du Regiment (Dessay, Flores) and Eugene Onegin (Fleming, Hvorostovsky), and the Tristan und Isolde featuring Deborah Voight and Robert Dean Smith.
I wonder if the whole Anna Magdalena Bach controversy doesn’t reveal a “sees the trees but not the forest” sort of outlook fostered by the inculcation of a limited academic perspective in analysis, fostered by the problemmatical absorption of music into limited and doctrinaire academic frameworks.
11. The electrifying nature of the principal subject of the first movement of the Sixth Sonata is not founded on its dissonance but on its consonance. In fact, the primary dissonant elements, the alteration between A major and a minor and the leading tone to the dominant, d#, serve to enhance the stability of A as the tonic, they create a stasis, a stability, not chromatic flux, which gives the music its massive bulldozer effect. Paradoxically, it is typical of Prokofieven dissonance that his “wrong notes” and mercurial modulatory schemes achieve centrality rather than tonal diffusion. Consider also Peter’s principal theme in “Peter and the Wolf”…what could be more C-majorish, despite the theme’s flattened mediant excursions?
John Gibbons offers “Twenty Comments on the Prokofiev Piano Sonatas.” This article is the first in a two-part series. John will be teaching a related course on Rachmaninov and Prokofiev in downtown Chicago beginning September 23. more…
Leopold, Wolfgang and Nannerl on stage by Delafosse, 1764Listen up: If you have limited time to listen to Mozart, or don’t have to teach a class on Mozart’s piano concerti or something, like I do, you don’t have time for these works. Go listen to Cosi fan Tutte or something. Go on, git! I don’t have all day.
Alright, everybody else-are those bozos gone? Good. Today we’re talking about the four concertos Mozart wrote at the age of eleven, based on pre-existing pieces, primarily by the Parisian Roccoco school, guys like Schobert and Eckard. These pieces aren’t even included in Cuthbert Girdlestone’s (what a name! Sounds like a character from Arthur Conan Doyle…I think I’ll change my name to his!) classic study of the Mozart piano concerti. He calls the 5th concerto the first. Which is fine. But either I’m entering my second childhood (not a likely possibility, you!) or the pieces are surprisingly viable. It helps to have a record of them played and conducted by Daniel Barenboim, who, make no bones about it, plays the pieces in a wonderfully warm, playful, and wholly romantic manner. I don’t understand critics of Barenboim’s Mozart, and I’ve met a lot of them. But on the other hand, I’ve met a lot of guys who prefer Artur Rubinstein’s piano playing to that of Vladimir Horowitz. To me this is incomprehensible, I’ll just never get it.
Anyway, here’s the Gibbons Maxim: All Music Should Be Played Romantically.
No, I am not appending a caveat. And if you squeal, “What about Bach?” I’ll majestically intone, “Especially Bach!”
Alright, I concede it’s largely a matter of taste and temperament. If Thomas Beecham puts cymbals and harp in Messiah, I’ll laugh along with the rest of you. And de Pachman’s Chopin (I’ve heard it) is gross and tasteless, not charming. And Huneker’s “analysis” of Chopin is an embarrassment. Let him go get drunk with Dvorak. Was that him? Here are some points about the four Mozart concerti which have been conspicuous by their absence in this essay:
1. Formally, they are totally conventional fast-slow-fast affairs with rudimentary binary and song forms with episodes instead of developments, with the exception of the first mvt. of the D major, which is actually interesting, and it is further interesting that Wolfy only provided a cadenza for this piece, clearly the best of the four.
2. The orchestration is too classy to be labeled, or libeled, “perfunctory”. But don’t get in a tizzy about it, we’re not gonna “alert the media”. If you don’t appreciate Mozart’s orchestration, just listen to some of his contemporaries. (excepting Haydn).
3. The left hand of the pianist is constantly playing orchestral style music, not piano style music, except where it is playing ubiquitous alberti basses…which is most of the time, come to think of it. When the piano doubles the bass, it’s actually kind of a fun texture on the piano, but on a harpsichord or fortepiano it’d be a dull and conventional texture. And is it lese majestie to criticize some of the left hand writing in Mozart’s “real” concerti?
4. The right hand plays an awful lot of arpeggios and scales. But if you inflect this prefabricated material like Barenboim does, it is indeed beautiful.
5. Cheerful and elegant, the melodic writing delights.
6. The most ambitious slow movement, the F-major movement of the 2nd concerto (the B-flat) fails. It tries to have beautiful suspensions and real gravity but is just boring. The piano plays too many triplets, and doesn’t even have a chance for rubato or nuance much.
7. These pieces aren’t particularly worse than Mozart’s concerti 6-8. 5 is much better than these, but 6-8? These (1-4) concerti are pithier and no more superficial than 6-8. The 7th is a disappointment: with 3 keyboards one might think Mozart would get more, not less, but less he gets.
8. The slow movement of No. 4 is in g minor. Relax! Geezus, I can’t take you anywhere! It’s not real Mozart g minor.
9. The fine scholar William Kinderman says in his book, “Mozart’s Piano Music” that Mozart merely adapted pre-existing sonatas and added orchestral ritornelli. But can this be totally true? There are definitely passages in the piano part that sure don’t feel sonata-like; that seem to depend on the interaction of piano and orchestra. I at least can’t imagine simply playing the piano parts as sonatas. I’m way too lazy to look up the original sources, so I hereby commission you, reader, to spend hours in the library doing so. Let me know what you find out.
John Gibbons