Throwback Thursday

SHAME WEEK! Throwback Thursday: “Un Bel Di,” OperaBabes

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Talk about gilding the lily.  The original aria is delicate and tender and completely heartbreaking in the context of the story.

The OperaBabes (seriously, that’s their name) version is mindless elevator music.  It was part of a mix CD I got during a summer semester in college.  I didn’t know much about the original opera, let alone the story, and, being totally addicted to rhythm then as I am now, I thought it was really catchy and great exercise music.  And then years passed and I heard the story behind Madame Butterfly and had an excellent “facepalm” moment.

Throwback Thursday: “La Canarie,” Michael Praetorius

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I’m sorry, Tune-Up fans – this week is bananas so I don’t have an inspiring (or even amusing) write-up for you today.  But I wanted to at least give you something cheerful to listen to.  I love Praetorius, as you’ve probably picked up, and the man who does these recordings, Eduardo Antonello, is a just amazing.  Hey, Folger Consort: call him.  From what I can tell, he is self-taught and a complete early music instrument savant.  I am so grateful to musicians like him who are keeping gorgeous pieces like this alive and well.

Throwback Thursday: “Miri It Is While Sumer Ilast,” Anonymous

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Hooray, climate change!  Thanks for making the temperatures hurl themselves from the 90s to the 50s in the space of a day!  Miri it is that we might get to look forward to bizarro-world weather swings like this as our new normal, and the phrase “wardrobe-planning” take on a new scope.  I don’t own a car and already judicious with my energy usage at home, so I’m not sure what more I can do reduce my carbon footprint that wouldn’t equally reduce my living standards to those of our friendly English composer “Anonymous” in 1225.  But at least I’d have pretty songs to sing.

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Miri it is while sumer ilast with fugheles song, oc nu
neheth windes blast and weder strong. ei ei what this
niht is long. and ich with wel michel wrong, soregh and
murn and fast.

Merry it is while summer lasts with the song of birds; 
but now draws near the wind’s blast and harsh weather. 
Alas, Alas! How long this night is! And I, most unjustly, 
sorrow and mourn and fast.

Throwback Thursday: “Symphony No. 9,” Ludwig Van Beethoven

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Beethoven wrote some of the most famous “first few notes” in the history of music.  The beginning of the first and second movements are definitely among those.  But that’s not why I’m posting this.  You already know all of this.

I’m posting this because of Maestro Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen.  Järvi is famously devoted to Beethoven’s original tempo markings, which are quite faster than how modern conductors usually take his works.  Such speed with a two-bit orchestra would make this music sound sloppy and muddy.  But the DKB produces razor-sharp, gloriously precise phrasing.

If you want to enjoy this properly, make this video full screen and watch the orchestra.  The entire collective is at the top of their game.  They are throwing everything they have into the notes.  The cellist at 0:28.  The violinist at 0:39.  Järvi himself from 1:28-:136.  They are an army of music, and it is glorious.  Because here’s the thing: the 9th is standard orchestra fare.  These people have played this hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times before.  But in this recording, in this video, it’s like they’ve just been rehearsing their whole lives. This is their first real performance.  It’s one of the most exhilarating things I’ve seen in ages.

Throwback Thursday: “Die Forelle,” Franz Schubert

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I’d like to learn how to fish.  I don’t really know why.  I guess it just seems like something a normal, calm, reasonably happy person would do in their spare time.  I don’t know whether I’d classify my hobbies as such, given I don’t classify myself as normal or calm.  Come to think of it, I don’t really know what my hobbies are.

The dictionary defines a hobby as “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”  By that logic, the following things could be hobbies of mine:

  • Sleeping
  • Holding a wedge of cheese and eating it like an apple with the fridge door open, at night, with the lights off
  • Avoiding Swiffering my floors
  • Noodling aimlessly on my piano
  • Walking aimlessly around D.C.
  • Staring off into space
  • Taking a Buzzfeed quiz when I should be [fill in anything remotely more useful than taking a Buzzfeed quiz]
  • Reading a New Yorker profile of someone interesting, regretting my degrees and career choices, frantically opening my computer, and searching for jobs in the profile-ee’s field
  • Daydreaming of how great life would be as a [insert profession of New Yorker profile-ee]
  • Looking at real estate I’ll never be able to afford unless I abandon reason, ethics, and hope

Anyway.  Here’s a song about a trout.

Throwback Thursday: “Academic Festival Overture, op. 80,” Johannes Brahms

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb6qkZY6TLU

 

I listened to this piece on loop during the last month of both my undergraduate and my graduate programs.  Normally I like the statelier tempo of George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, but Kurt Masur captures the real heart of this piece, which is basically, “oh please can this just be over already I am very very tired.”

There isn’t anything quite like the mad dash to the finish of any educational program.  You had no idea you had the capacity to write three papers and take four exams in the same week until you don’t have a choice in the matter.  The last month of my graduate program was especially heinous.  Breakfast, lunch, and dinner could be found for $0.75 in the vending machine closest to the library.  My fuse was short as number of hours of sleep I allowed myself at night.  Fully inked yellow highlighters were currency.  I would do wall sits in between paper drafts to keep my legs limber (because clearly I couldn’t take an actual walk, that would take too much time).  The little dots next to my friends’ names on GChat would be red throughout the day until after 10pm, when they would turn over to green because they wanted company, moral support, and spell-check help.  It was a dark time.

And then, slowly, these massive boulders got pushed down the other side of the mountain, one by one, until one Tuesday afternoon.  I finished a paper, closed my computer, and after sitting for a minute, realized…I just did it.  I just did all my work.  I called my friend Rebecca who lived down the street and said, “I…uh…I think I just…finished.”  “Yeah…I think I did too…”  We sat in silence on the phone for a minute.  “This is weird.”  The daze lasted for about a day or two.  But then…

…at 8:30 in the piece, jubilation!  Gaudeamus igitur!  We got capped and gowned and graduated and drank champagne with little raspberries floating in it and called ourselves Masters.  It was a hell of a feeling.  So to all the students in my Capstone course, to all my friends who are turning in those papers now – keep your spirits up.  I promise it will be over soon.

Throwback Thursday: “Violin Concerto in D major,” Erich Korngold

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49cKqKmLiDg

 

I had the great good fortune of seeing this performed live with Gil Shaham about a few weeks ago and oh, jeepers, was it ever amazing.  I had never heard of Korngold before that night and I forgot how glorious it is to be surprised by new music.  This piece absolutely knocked me flat.

Korngold was an American composer and a contemporary of Aaron Copland – Korngold wrote this piece in 1945, three years after “Rodeo” and “Fanfare for the Common Man.”  Korngold experiments with both atonality and out-and-out romanticism than does Copland, but there are echoes of Copland’s work especially in the third movement (at 17:17).  More than anything, the violin concerto sounds like a movie score (“E.T.,” anyone?), which isn’t a surprise since Korngold did write movie scores.  In fact, his score for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (with the raffish Errol Flynn) won an Academy Award in 1938, the first time the award had been given to a composer and not the director of the studio’s music department.

Beyond all this, the second movement (08:56) is just exquisite.  It’s my favorite part of the concerto.  Go ahead, call me a sap.

Throwback Thursday: “La Bouree (With Racketts),” Michael Praetorious

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For my next trick, I will now turn back into my six-year-old self hearing the rackett for the first time and laughing so hard I hyperventilate because I envision a flotilla of angry and obese ducks.  That is all.

…No really, guys.  That’s the entire post today.  I have no interesting backstory, no history about this piece, nothing.  It just makes me laugh.  Really, really, really hard.

Throwback Thursday: “Szeroka Woda,” Henryk Gorecki

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy774gkJf5Y

Gorecki was a modern Polish composer who is probably best known for his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.  This piece is my favorite of his.  It is a very simple arrangement of a Polish folk song about undying love.

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Broad waters on the Vistula,

Now I’ll tell you my thoughts.

As it was yesterday, so it is today:

I must be with you through the ages.

Throwback Thursday: “The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave): Overture,” Felix Mendelssohn

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Felix Mendelssohn, you magnificent bastard.  (I read your book!  …Wait.  (“Patton?”  Anyone?  Ok I’ll stop.))  Mendelssohn wrote this in 1830.  Let’s see what else was happening around that time, shall we?

  • The first railroad station in the United States opened (in Baltimore)
  • The Republic of Ecuador became a country
  • “Mary Had A Little Lamb” was published
  • Revolution broke out in Paris in opposition to the rule of Charles X
  • Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey (yes, like the tea), became Prime Minister of Great Britain
  • Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia recognized the new country of Belgium
  • Hector Berlioz premieres his “Symphony Fantastique”

And Mendelssohn wrote this gorgeous symphony, inspired by a trip he took to Scotland.

Mendelssohn was German and one of the early Romantic composers.  He definitely crams a lot of feeling into nine minutes.  I love the swelling major to minor at 4:28.  Gives me tingles every time.  Although I do deeply resent that he wrote this piece when he was 21.  Show-off.