Monthly Archives: February 2015

Schumann’s week of song

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Schumann’s week of song – Kitty Whately and Joseph Middleton performs songs written after the composer’s marriage to Clara

kitty-whately-joseph-middletonKitty Whately (mezzo-soprano)*, Joseph Middleton (piano) – Wigmore Hall, live on BBC Radio 3, 19 January 2015

Listening link (opens in a new window):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04y9rsg

on the iPlayer until 21 February

Download

You can also download the song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben (A Woman’s Life and Love) from this performance. Just right click on the red heart and select ‘Save link as’

For non-UK listeners, this Spotify playlist is available:

What’s the music?

Schumann – 5 Songs, Op.40

Words: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/notes/33106-B.pdf

Schumann – 3 Songs, Op.31

Schumann – Frauenliebe und –leben (A Woman’s Life and Love)

Words: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDJ33103

All were written in 1840, and are settings of the poet Adelbert von Chamisso

What about the music?

Schumann’s ‘year of song’ really was a peak of creativity for the composer in 1840, spurred on entirely by his marriage to the elder woman Clara, against her father’s wishes. The songs heard here were all within a single week, and although they capture the breathlessness of recent marriage, they also have a dark side that is fully revealed at the end with the death of the woman’s husband.

The 5 songs that Schumann published as his Op.40 are essentially two lighter songs on the outer edges and three darker, fraut ones on the inside. The three Op.31 are unpredictable and experimental, while Frauenliebe und –leben, a song cycle with a linked theme, is brighter and beautifully structured, with some shorter songs here.

Performance verdict

Kitty Whately sings these beautifully, with a little in reserve that brings out the intimacy of Schumann’s compositions. She is ideally complemented by Joseph Middleton’s sensitive piano playing.

What should I listen out for?

1:36 – the light and fairly heady first song, seemingly setting the scene for some rapturous insights. And yet…

3:07 …the cycle takes a turn for the darker with its second song, ‘Muttertraum’ (‘A mother’s dream’)

13:04 – ‘The lion’s bride’ – the first of the three songs Op.31. The prowling lion is brought uncannily to life by the left hand of the piano, a figure that dominates this long and rather tragic song

24:08 – the third song of the group of three, ‘Die rote Hanne’ (‘Red Hannah’) – with refrains in five part harmony

31:07 The start of the song cycle. The key note here is low in the piano (31:55), giving a hint of the ultimate darkness to come.

38:25 Den ring on my finger. It sounds here as though Kitty is singing in English, but the German is just very similar. This is however the serene high point of the cycle

43:08 really nice singing here, beautifully controlled

49:12 a turn for the darker, with news of the death – which runs into…

51:07 The beautiful piano-only postlude

Want to hear more?

Schumann’s orchestral music is a wealth of good things, with the Symphony no.2 a great next move.

Glossary

*mezzo-soprano – the range just below soprano, which is the highest range a female singer tends to have. Mezzos are often capable of richer, lower notes and tend not to sing as high.

Finding the Romanian soul

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Finding the soul of Romania – Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Polina Leschenko play Enescu’s remarkable third sonata with music by Mozart
patricia-kopatchinskaja

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin) and Polina Leschenko (piano) – Wigmore Hall, live on BBC Radio 3, 12 January 2015

Listening link (opens in a new window):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04xrsl2

on the iPlayer until 14 February

For non-UK listeners, this Spotify playlist is available:

What’s the music?

Mozart – Sonata for Violin and Piano in B flat (1784, 20 minutes)

Georges Enescu – Violin Sonata no.3, ‘dans le caractère populaire roumain’ (‘in Romanian Folk Style’) (1926, 25 minutes)

What about the music?

Mozart wrote a mass of sonatas for piano and violin. The order of instruments is significant, because whereas now we tend to be used to the piano playing second fiddle – as it were! – to the violin, Mozart wrote for them the other way around. For this piece, the tale is that he didn’t even have a piano part ready for the first performance in Vienna, so had to make one up on the spot!

Just a week after our encounter with the remarkable Solo Cello Sonata of Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, we experience an equivalent outpouring of national passion from his contemporary, the Romanian composer Georges Enescu. A formidable violinist as well as a conductor, Enescu wrote what is regarded as one of the most difficult pieces for the instrument in 1926, looking to explore the soul of his country’s music. He does so in music of an incredibly direct nature, treating the violin as a voice at times.

Performance verdict

The Mozart proves to be a delicate palette cleanser for the main course, where the two performers feel a lot more at home in a meaty and often stormy account of Enescu’s masterpiece. It may need several listens but this is a forward thinking piece of work that brings out some extraordinary colours from Kopatchinskaya’s violin. Leschenko is no slouch either! A red hot performance.

What should I listen out for?

Listen especially for these bits:

Mozart

01:28 – the start of the piece. A polite musical language, calm and unaffecting. Kopatchinskaja uses very little vibrato here.

02:47 – Mozart moves from the slow section (marked by the Italian term Largo) to the fast (‘Allegro’). The music becomes more nimble

08:02 – The start of quite a lengthy but serene slow movement, with violin and piano imitating each other’s musical phrases.

14:42 – The beginning of the third movement, a sprightly number – where Kopatchinskaja’s outbursts suggest a bit of impatience!

Enescu

22:22 – the mysterious and almost otherworldly start of the Enescu

26:40 – the sort of broad, highly expressive melody in which the Romanian composer specialises, with animated backing on the piano.

31:30 – Enescu employs harmonics on the violin to get a really unusual, glassy sound quality, the start of a passage with a kaleidoscope of colours that reaches its peak at 34:39 with some weird and wonderful squeaks from the instrument – before 35:30 features some incredibly robust double stopping (more than one note at once on the violin) and runs on the piano from Leschenko

40:00 – A strong set of quotations from Romanian sources, with brilliant ensemble from the two players.

43:00 – Vigorous plucking to add a percussive element to the music

47:00 – the lead up to the powerful end

Encores

The duo gave two encores to the performance:

Cage – Etude for Violin and Piano (from 49:23 to 53:03)

Fritz Kreisler – Syncopation for Violin and Piano (from 54:12 to 56:22)

Want to hear more?

Mozart – one of the great master’s five violin concertos, which provides a good number of tunes (K216)

Enescu – further explorations of his country’s heritage in the Romanian Rhapsody no.1

 

Hungarian passion

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Hungarian passion – Alisa Weilerstein plays music for solo cello by Bach and Kodály

alisa-weilersteinAlisa Weilerstein (cello) – Wigmore Hall, live on BBC Radio 3, 5 January 2015

Listening link (opens in a new window):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04wmjx6

on the iPlayer until 7 February

For non-UK listeners, this Spotify playlist is available:

What’s the music?

J.S. Bach – Solo Cello Suite no.5 (1724, 26 minutes)

Zoltán Kodály – Solo Cello Sonata (1915, 28 minutes)

What about the music?

Bach wrote six suites for the cello – or an instrument incredibly similar to it – and they have become some of his most popular works, suitable for students or performers alike. They are intensely private pieces but have a nice line in humour as well, especially in the faster sections, set to European dance forms of the time.

The first of Bach’s six suites was used in the film Master and Commander, on which more can be found here. The fifth is a sparse work and quite bleak at times. It is in six movements – with a Prelude, two faster dances (an Allemande (German) and a Courante (French), then a slow French one (Sarabande). Then we have a pair of lively Bourrées (French again) and a Gigue.

The Hungarian composer Kodály has written a much more modern sounding piece; even more so than its 1915 composition date suggests. Before performance the cellist is required to lower the lower of the four from a ‘C’ pitch to a ‘B’, darkening the colour considerably. Kodály uses a lot of dance music – like Bach – but this is much freer and has an improvised feel, the listener practically carried outside into the village by the directness of the writing.

Performance verdict

Despite a couple of lapses of tuning in the Bach, Alisa Weilerstein gives a carefully thought performance. In the Kodály she really comes into her own though, with plenty of fire and brimstone!

What should I listen out for?

Listen especially for these bits:

J.S. Bach

01:08 – the start of the Prelude, where Weilerstein plays very quietly with no vibrato*. The music is bare and at a funeral pace.

16:03 – the ‘Sarabande’ (a slow dance), which Weilerstein takes incredibly slowly. To me this sounded like an evocation of slowly falling tears.

Kodály

26:44 – the arresting start of the Kodály Sonata. A lot of music for just one instrument!

30:00 – the second main theme. More serene and songful.

37:27 – the start of the second movement. A broad low ‘B’ leads through a slow melody to

38:00, where a distant tune brings the strongest use yet of Hungarian folk music. While the right hand is using the bow, the left hand is plucking the open string alongside.

41:36 – a powerful outburst on the cello.

57:55 – the incredibly fraught and powerful run to the finish, ending with an emphatic final double-stopped** chord.

Want to hear more?

Bach – if you enjoyed this performance something equally dramatic can be found in the form of the St John Passion, a vivid telling of the Gospel

Kodály – the Hungarian’s grasp of orchestral colour can be fully appreciated in the Dances of Galanta

Glossary

*Vibrato – a way of adding extra expression to a piece of music, usually used by string players or singers. For string players it is controlled by the non-bowing arm, with a vibration applied to the finger pressed onto the string. For singers it is achieved through control of the voice.

**Double-stopped – playing more than one string at a time on the cello.

Welcome to Team Arcana!

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arcana-purple-25

Welcome to Arcana.fm! It’s great to see you here.

Arcana has been set up to give you the chance to step into classical music with no fear or pressure – just the chance to enjoy and read about good music!

The name Arcana comes from a forward-looking orchestral piece written by the French composer Edgard Varèse in the 1920s. Varèse was a visionary, an early sign of the direction electronic music was to take some fifty years later – and I want to capture something of that sense of discovery and originality in a number of ways through the site.

To do this I am treating all musical styles as equals, enjoying what they take from each other – pop drawing from classical, as in The Borrowers series that will begin with Manfred Mann‘s Joybringer, and vice versa – an example for starters being Philip Glass and his symphonies from the work of David Bowie. If Taylor Swift or Muse suddenly go classical, you’ll be the first to read about it!

There will be an extended look at classical music as used for TV and film in Screen Grab, beginning with the score for the Russell Crowe-led seafaring epic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and looking at TV adds and promos, too. What’s the music Channel 4 are using to promote The Jump? You’ll find out here (it’s the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin‘s opera Prince Igor!)

There will be a series of guides for online concerts, which in the case of the BBC iPlayer will then be available for 30 days’ enjoyment. There will be interviews – a couple of whom are tenatively lined up for the next week or two in the shape of Emika and John Tejada. There will be reviews of new relevant recordings, both pop and classical. We will go on a Richard Strauss Odyssey, inspired by the composer’s centenary last year – and fellow centurion Sibelius will follow! Later, in a more ambitious series, we will take music year-by-year from 1700, so we can start with the very best the Baroque period had to offer. There is also Under the Surface, a look at underappreciated composers or works.

What matters most at this or any stage is your feedback and suggestions. Arcana is not just for my enjoyment – I want everyone to get as much as possible out of it. So tell me what you would like to see more / less of on this site, what music you like and dislike, or anything else – through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail.

Let’s enjoy the music!

-Ben Hogwood

Screen Grab: Master & Commander

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Master and Commander-The Far Side of the World poster by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

One of the secrets behind the success of the 2003 Oscar-winning film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, apart from the outstanding ensemble acting, was the music – and especially the classical music used.

That’s not to discredit the original score, which is a combination of original music written by Christopher Gordon, Iva Davies and Richard Tognetti, and traditional folk dances. The original score is on a massive scale, carrying a powerful blast of sea spray in its opening number, The Far Side of the World, and it captures the grandeur of the ship as well as the menace of approaching battle.

The use of classical music lifts the film still further, none more so than the use of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis. This becomes the stirring motto of the film, with a newly-motivated crew and their strong feelings of brotherhood:

With the film set in 1805, director Peter Weir skilfully incorporates music written in the preceding century. At the other end of the scale from the big-boned soundtrack music is the Prelude for solo cello by J.S. Bach, taken from the Cello Suite no.1 and played by Yo-Yo Ma:

Also used are pieces by Mozart (a brief excerpt from the last movement of his Violin Concerto no.3, leading from a slow introduction to busy strings) and Corelli, whose Adagio from his Christmas Concerto is solemn but rather beautiful.

Finally, for the closing credits, we have a String Quintet by the Baroque composer Luigi Boccherini, for string quintet (two violins, viola and two cellos), which is genial in terms of the communal music making the crew get involved in below decks, but alternates between slow, profound thoughts and vigorous bursts of energy.

The Master & Commander soundtrack can be heard on Spotify here:

Published post no.2 – Sunday 1 February 2015