Beethoven's Emperor Concerto

 I've been watching Netflix Instant documentaries. In Search of Beethoven is full of wonderful performances and interviews. It got me wanting to hear a piece I only have on vinyl, Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto." Here is Glen Gould performing.

Cloud Cult acoustic concert

I truly adore Cloud Cult. We saw them play outdoors  a few years ago, and they are fantastic live performers, so I jumped on the opportunity to get tickets to their next show in Minneapolis, in December. It will be acoustic, like the one recorded above at a radio station in Seattle.

The Fox

The original viral sensation:


The marching band version:

Beethoven's 6th

And the headliner, Ludwig Van himself, with his  engaging symphonie pastorale.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Symphony No. 6, Pastoral

Edo de Waart, conductor

The Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, composed concurrently in 1808, were premiered together (with their numbers switched) as part of a four-hour extravaganza Beethoven produced in Vienna. The following year, they were published in the now-familiar order, with adjacent opus numbers. On the surface, the two symphonies seem unlikely twin siblings: the Fifth Symphony is dark and dramatic, with its imposing “fate” motive and triumphant progress to a major-key resolution, while the Sixth Symphony is relaxed and bucolic, full of extra-musical associations.
Beethoven’s Sixth was one of the first programmatic symphonies, with descriptive movement headings that evoked specific ideas and images. But this was not, for the most part, literal tone-painting, as in later works such as Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique or the symphonic poems of Franz Liszt and Richard Strauss. Beethoven, for his part, made this distinction in the title he inscribed on the parts for the initial performance, which read “Pastoral Symphony, or Recollections of Country Life: More an Expression of Feeling than Painting.”
Beethoven’s journals and letters reveal his love of nature, as when he wrote in 1810, “How delighted I will be to ramble for awhile through the bushes, woods, under trees, through grass, and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo that man desires to hear.” Recognizing and appreciating the natural world was a cornerstone of the Romantic sensibility, as espoused by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the Sixth Symphony, Beethoven joined a common thread in music, art, and literature of the early nineteenth century that rhapsodized on the beauty and grandeur of the natural world, with a reverence that was in no small part spiritual.
What the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies share, along with other works from Beethoven’s “middle” period, is rigorous economy and unity in the musical language. Just as the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony influence every measure of the opening movement, the Sixth Symphony builds an expansive essay out of a seemingly naïve theme. The first movement, characterized as the “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country,” enters bashfully, with four quiet measures that trail off. Fragments of this figure build slowly, basking in long stretches of unmoving harmony and resonant pedal figures. The development section, often an opportunity for increased turbulence and activity, instead sinks deeper into a country calm, savoring each radiant change of harmony.
The second movement, “Scene by the brook,” establishes a lapping triplet pulse under another mere wisp of melody. The idyllic scene ends with a trio of birdcalls from the woodwinds, representing a nightingale, quail, and cuckoo. From here, the symphony diverges from a typical four-movement pattern. There is a Scherzo-like third movement, “Merry assembly of country folk,” but the rollicking dance music halts unresolved and is supplanted by the first staccato raindrops of the “Thunderstorm.” Fearful dissonances and thunderous timpani strikes make for a convincing tempest, until it trails off in one last upward patter from the flute. A clarinet takes over to establish the sing-song contours of the “Shepherds’ song; happy and grateful feelings after the storm.” This tune, at once humble and heroic, returns the symphony to its pastoral calm. Near the end, a hymn-like variant lends a deeper resonance to this warm-hearted conclusion.

SPCO concert: Schoenberg

After the super-melodic Serenade, we will hear a more modern piece. This is not the twelve-tone later work of Schoenberg, but it does challenge the listener who prefers more Romantic music. In some YouTube note conversation, someone mentioned how this music influenced movie scores.

Arnold Schoenberg

Chamber Symphony No. 1

Edo de Waart, conductor

Schoenberg’s earliest music represented a natural evolution of the Romantic ideal forged by Beethoven, advanced by Brahms and Wagner, and stretched to new limits by Strauss and Mahler. Although Schoenberg moved away from the hyper-Romantic style he developed in the early years of the twentieth century, works from that formative stage have proved no less groundbreaking and influential than the atonal and serial (i.e. twelve-tone) works from later decades. One score that serves as a template for countless modern compositions is the Chamber Symphony No. 1, completed in July 1906. Like the First String Quartet from the previous year, the Chamber Symphony progresses in one continuous, interconnected stream of music. Unlike the Second String Quartet and other works from 1908 and beyond, the Chamber Symphony still adheres, however precariously, to the strictures of tonality—at least ending on a major triad in the home key.
The First Chamber Symphony is, above all, a study in concision. The single-movement form, lasting some twenty minutes, incorporates five distinct sections, which Schoenberg identified as Sonata (Allegro), Scherzo, Development, Adagio, and Recapitulation and Finale. The symphonic ensemble is compressed to a chamber group of fifteen soloists comprising one of each stringed instrument, eight woodwinds and two horns, each part requiring considerable virtuosity and independence from its performer. Much of the musical material is drawn from two main devices: sequences of perfect fourths (as in the distance between the first two notes in “Here Comes the Bride”), and the whole-tone series, built from equally spaced whole steps. Groups of fourths and whole-tones, besides informing the melodies, also form vertical structures that serve as alternative harmonies, replacing more traditional triadic chords. The conductor and Schoenberg expert Robert Craft made the apt assessment that the First Chamber Symphony was “the densest, most compact and rapidly moving music up to its time,” yet the formal clarity and lucid orchestration guarantee that this powerhouse score delivers its message with the utmost cogency.
Aaron Grad ©2013

SPCO concert: Dvořák

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra program notes for tonight's concert, for which we have FREE tickets!
If the start of the show is Beethoven, the other two pieces are also delightful. I am fond of Dvorak, and eager to hear how the SPCO performs the Serenade by Dvořák. Apparently, this piece caught the eye of Brahams, whose patronage helped get Dvořák to the next level of his musical career,

Antonín Dvořák

Serenade in E Major for String Orchestra

Edo de Waart, conductor

Dvořák spent his early adulthood scraping by as a freelance musician in Prague; he accompanied church services from the organ, played viola in a dance band and the local opera orchestra, taught piano lessons, and kept up his composing on the side. One source of income he tapped was the Austrian State Stipendium, an annual competition for composers. He won cash prizes each year from 1874 to 1876, and, more importantly, caught the attention of the panel’s newest judge, Johannes Brahms. Dvořák’s 1877 application included the Serenade for Strings (Opus 22), a work Dvořák had composed over twelve days in May of 1875. By this point, Brahms was so impressed that he forwarded scores on to his publisher, Simrock, writing, “For several years I have enjoyed works sent in by Antonín Dvořák (pronounced Dvorschak) of Prague. … Dvořák has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces. In any case, he is a very talented man. Moreover, he is poor! I ask you to think about it!” Simrock soon commissioned Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. Within months of that work’s 1878 publication, performances had occurred across the continent and even as far away as London and New York, launching Dvořák’s international career.
The Serenade, as practiced by eighteenth-century composers, comprised light-hearted (and often forgettable) music to be performed outdoors at public gatherings in the evening. By the nineteenth century, composers applied the term more generally to pieces of a pleasing, “night-music” character with a loose assemblage of movements, a format that suited Dvořák’s gift for melodic invention. Most of the movements of the Serenade for Strings follow a streamlined three-part structure, with statements of a primary theme (or group of themes) separated by a contrasting middle section. The opening Moderato demonstrates this simple elegance, forgoing an introduction and developmental transitions, and instead moving without delay from one memorable melody to the next. Singable themes continue to unfurl in the Waltz, Scherzo and Larghetto, the last of which provides a rich and sentimental departure from the Serenade’s cheery disposition. The Finale rounds out the Serenade with a dash of craftiness, introducing canonic imitation and surprising transitions into new sections. Playful quotations help to bring the work full circle: The touching Larghetto theme returns with a wry, syncopated accompaniment, and the mild-mannered Moderato theme appears in a trick ending before the boisterous coda.
Aaron Grad ©2011

Here is a performance by the Czech Chamber Orchestra.