Welcome again to a slightly different set up. For the next nine weeks the main content of this blog will be, not (as previously) mostly in written text, but in the spoken word and contained in the sound file below. In addition, at the bottom of the post, there will be a ‘concert’ of works […]
Welcome to a slightly different set up. For the next ten weeks the main content of this blog will be, not (as previously) mostly in written text, but in the spoken word and contained in a sound file (first example below!) In addition, at the bottom of the post, there will be a ‘concert’ of […]
Josef Stalin died in March 1953; Shostakovich′s 10th Symphony was first performed in December of that year. The composer had been labouring under official (i.e. Stalin’s) censure for his ‘insanely sombre and neurotic’ music since 1948 … The audio file below deals with the final three movements of the work (remember to adjust the volume, […]
Dmitri Shostakovich’s musical signature (above and you can hear it (twice) in its sound file) dominates the latter half of his 10th Symphony and is a major component in several of his later works. But first things first: this week’s about concentrating on the musical architecture of the symphony’s big first movement, from which the […]
Listen to this… w and then listen to this…
Strauss’s last tone-poem, An Alpine Symphony, wasn’t written until 1915 (the composer’s previous essay in the genre, the Symphonia Domestica, was completed back in 1903). There was a reason for this long gestation period (up until the Domestic Symphony the largest gap between symphonic poems had been six years). From 1903 onwards the composer’s focus […]
Strauss’s autobiographical turn of mind continued with the work that followed Ein Heldenleben. Only this time the critic-slaying hero of The Hero’s Life (i.e. Strauss himself) is transformed into a rather cuddly paterfamilias (Richard) replete with fond/nagging wife (Pauline) and yelling/gurgling baby (Franz) plus a few extras in the form of a troupe of aunts […]
Poor old dragon! While Don Quixote’s (see the previous post) heroic dragon slaying activity was tilting (at windmills and sheep and pilgrims and monks), the particular ‘dragon’ that the hero (Ein Heldenleben = A Hero’s Life) of Strauss’s next tone poem attempts to slay is an altogether easier(??) but no less pernicious target – music […]
Don Quixote, the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, here seen in Daumier’s famous painting (though it seems to me that the star of that particular show is the clapped-out horse, Rocinante – the Don’s doleful countenance just isn’t in evidence and poor old, long suffering Sancho Panza’s reduced to an amorphous blob on the horizon). […]
The final bars (in short score) of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra; notice the key signature 5 sharps – B major. Now, while the top, treble clef, end of the orchestra is dutifully reiterating a few quiet chords in the home key (a respectable, if rather downmarket, way to end a piece), you’ll notice that, at […]
