If You Think You Hate Charles Ives On His Birthday

Not that I’m referring to anyone in particular who might have mourned the anniversary of Ive’s birth today on social media. But if you don’t do quarter-tones and all those other “intellectual” aspects of Ive’s instrumental music, there could be hours of pleasure in store for you in his deceptively simple songs.

I’m sitting in a search marketing conference right now, so I can’t say much. But the songs are catchy, melodic and walk a tightrope between the satirical and the sentimental.

Preview - Charles Ives: Songs by Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish - Rhapsody lets you listen to 20 full tracks per months without joining or paying. This wonderful album is a worthy use of those freebies.

For a totally free Ives song session, here is a wonderful playlist where you can listen to some of the songs and watch a scrolling score. The singing on this playlist is not always ideal (Ives songs are a student recital staple) but it’s a convenient way to get familiar with these songs.

“The Circus Band” is a favorite. I like it better as a song (and PLEEZ, pianists, DO shout “Hear the trombones” at the appointed time - really) but some prefer this totally raucus orchestra/chorus arrangement by Ives, performed here by a school group under the helm of Michael Tippett:

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A Final Reckoning: Viktor Ullmann's Last Piece

January 27 is Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops. Representing the many victims, especially the doomed artists of Theresienstadt, we’re listening to the Seventh Piano Sonata of Viktor Ullmann. Under the Nazi regime, Ullmann was first silenced as a “degenerate” composer owing to his Jewish ancestry, then deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto/transit camp in September 1942. After contributing to the camp’s poignantly rich artistic life for two years — and composing most of the pieces of his which survive today — he was deported to Auschwitz in mid-October 1944 along with members of his family and many colleagues such as Hans Krasa (composer of the opera Brundibar), Pavel Haas, and Gideon Klein. He’s believed to have been gassed on October 18, 1944.

Here are the Variations and Fugue from Ullmann’s last work, his 7th Piano Sonata. The fugue is on Yehuda Sharret’s Song of Rachel, a popular Zionist anthem. It’s dedicated to Ullmann’s three eldest children and dated August 22, 1944. His youngest son, Pavel, had died in the camp at the age of three and son Max would die in Auschwitz at twelve.  Felice and Jean (Johannes) were safe in the England.

As was Ullmann’s habit, this movement is full of other musical quotations, the most audible of which may be “Now Thank We All Our God.”

The seventh sonata is also the short score for a planned Second Symphony, eventually realized by Bernhard Wulff. (Look for the CD and DVD conducted by James Conlon.) Reviewing a performance of the orchestral version, James Reid Baxter offers this chilling description:

Wulff described the final Variations and Fugue on a Hebrew Folksong as a ‘final reckoning with European culture, which allowed things like Terezin to happen’. It is simply the most disturbing music I have ever heard. The little melody is lightly varied several times, then subjected to vehement, superb fugal treatment which sets alarms ringing — the possible symbolism of which is stomach-turning. The horror grows as ‘Now Thank We All Our God’is sonorously declaimed by the brass over a furious counterpoint, which builds to a general pause. Then a single, derisory blare of ‘B-A-C-H’ is heard on trombine, and the father of German music is dismissed in a ferocious stretto using the Hebrew melody, which concludes the Symphony with heartbreaking energy, singing in the face of deliberate murder of so many millions of futures. The sheer strength required to write, in those circumstances, silences all criticism. Never has the idea of ‘music as music’ seemed so small: as Wulff wrote, this is not ‘engaged composition, this is music as the will to survive.

Ullmann kept a diary in Theresienstadt in which he addressed the idea of singing in the face of… (words fail).

I have composed quite a lot of new music here in Theresienstadt, mostly at the request of pianists, singers and conductors for the purpose of the Ghetto’s recreation periods. It would be as irksome to count them, as it would be to remark on the fact that in Theresienstadt, it would be impossible to play a piano if there was none available. In addition, future generations will care little for the lack of music paper that we presently experience. I emphasise only the fact that in my musical work at Theresienstadt, I have bloomed in musical growth and not felt myself at all inhibited: we simply did not sit and lament on the shores of the rivers of Babylon that our will for culture was not sufficient to our will to exist. And I am convinced that all who have worked in life and art to wrestle content into its unyielding form will say that I was right…”

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Good Friday, April 10, 1868

Starting from an unused funeral march he’d written years before, Brahms began his requiem after the death of his mother in 1865, an event that added timely weight to his longstanding desire to memorialize his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. It all tied together, at least for writers, when Brahms bumped into Clara Schumann (widow to Robert and friend to Brahms’s mother — and around when Brahms had thought up the funeral march while trying to write piano music) outside the Bremen cathedral on the way into that first performance.

Written on a personal impetus during the romantic period (virtually defined by the concept of personal narrative), the Requiem is not liturgical. Its full title translates as “A German Requiem, after words of the Holy Scriptures.” There are only two soloists: a soprano singing of consolation on behalf of Brahms’s mother, and a baritone whose “Behold, I tell you a mystery” solo anchors a movement so searching, emotional and yet historically learned that it simply must be a musical conversation with Schumann.

If you listen to a classical station regularly, chances are you already know that 141 years ago on another April 10, Good Friday, the first performance of the Brahms requiem took place in Bremen.

Starting from an unused funeral march he’d written years before, Brahms began his requiem after the death of his mother in 1865, an event that added timely weight to his longstanding desire to memorialize his friend and mentor Robert Schumann. It all tied together, at least for writers, when Brahms bumped into Clara Schumann (widow to Robert and friend to Brahms’s mother — and around when Brahms had thought up the funeral march while trying to write piano music) outside the Bremen cathedral on the way into that first performance.

Written on a personal impetus during the romantic period (virtually defined by the concept of personal narrative), the Requiem is not liturgical. Its full title translates as “A German Requiem, after words of the Holy Scriptures.” There are only two soloists: a soprano singing of consolation on behalf of Brahms’s mother, and a baritone whose “Behold, I tell you a mystery” solo anchors a movement so searching, emotional and yet historically learned that it simply must be a musical conversation with Schumann.

For YouTube junkies, how about this complete performance, gathered in a convenient playlist? It features Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic with the Swedish Radio Chorus and Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, with Bryn Terfel and Barbara Bonney. And subtitles?

See the entire playlist or watch the opening:

There’s another complete performance on YouTube by Otto Klemperer. The Wikipedia entry for Ein Deutsches Requiem has all the texts in German and English.

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Prokofiev, Bartok Interviews

(Via Jessica Duchen, British music writer and Korngold biographer.)

In this 1944 radio interview in English, Bela Bartok discusses the pieces in an upcoming recital by his wife. At this time, he was suffering from leukemia and had a little over a year to live. Bartok’s English is fluent, but his accent charmingly has a little Peter Lorre flavor (make that “Peter Lorre impersonator” flavor, since the real Lorre had an additional Viennese sound that Mel Blanc et al. missed.) Bartok speaks in some detail about forms and folk influences of these pieces.

And here’s a short video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and talking about what he’s composing. The excerpt is from Scene 5 of his opera War and Peace, which had just had a partial concert performance in Leningrad. At that moment (the middle section of the waltz), Anatole Kuragin has been going after the engage Natasha, and he gets her alone to kiss her and hand her a love letter. The entire scene IS the waltz, except for Natasha’s interjections in her own musical style, which wane in strength as the scene goes on.

(Via Jessica Duchen, British music writer and Korngold biographer.)

In this 1944 radio interview in English, Bela Bartok discusses the pieces in an upcoming recital by his wife. At this time, he was suffering from leukemia and had a little over a year to live. Bartok’s English is fluent, but his accent charmingly has a little Peter Lorre flavor (make that “Peter Lorre impersonator” flavor, since the real Lorre had an additional Viennese sound that Mel Blanc et al. missed.) Bartok speaks in some detail about forms and folk influences of these pieces.

And here’s a short video of Sergei Prokofiev playing the piano and talking about what he’s composing. The excerpt is from Scene 5 of his opera War and Peace, which had just had a partial concert performance in Leningrad. At that moment (the middle section of the waltz), Anatole Kuragin has been going after the engage Natasha, and he gets her alone to kiss her and hand her a love letter. The entire scene IS the waltz, except for Natasha’s interjections in her own musical style, which wane in strength as the scene goes on.

Courtesy of YouTube member bramley88: Prokofiev is asked: “Sergei Sergeevich, maybe you will tell our viewers about your work?”

He replies: “Well, right now I am working on a symphonic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cinderella, two waltzes from the War and Peace, and one waltz from the movie score “Lermontov.” [War and Peace] has just been brilliantly produced in Leningrad, where the composer Cheshko (?) made an especially noteworthy appearance as a tenor, giving a superb performance in the role of Pierre Bezukhoff. Besides this suite, I am working on a sonata for violin and piano [no.1 in f minor], upon completion of which I will resume work on the sixth symphony, which I had started last year. I have just completed three suites from the Cinderella ballet and I am now turning the score over to copyists for writing the parts, so that most likely the suites will already be performed at the beginning of the fall season.”

The scene Prokofiev plays above is very astutely directed in this DVD by Francesca Zembello:

Prokofiev - War and Peace / Bertini, Gunn, Kit, Mamsirova, Gouriakova, Brubaker, Paris Opera starring Olga Gouriakova, Nathan Gunn, Robert Brubaker, Anatoli Kocherga, Yelena Obraztsova

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