Miss Piggy Lunchbox

The Norwegians don’t come out looking so great on this one, as the Finnish Sibelius’ pieces outshine Greg’s considerably. The Norwegians don’t really have a rivalry with Finland, as Finland’s culture, language, and history are quite distinct from the strict Scandinavia of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Heck, even Iceland has more in common with those countries than Finland. But due to their shared boarder and approximate shapes, people like to lump the two together. Moreover, the point is that if you put Grieg on a CD we don’t appreciate it not being the best thing on said CD.

But who knows if Sibelius’ pieces really are better than Grieg’s. I can tell you that these specific performances are, but for the first time I really feel like a classical music reviewer as I am able to have a strong preference for two different recordings of the same piece. Despite the strengths of his other two pieces and the relative shortcomings of Grieg’s, it’s Sibleius’ “The Swan of Tuonela” that fails so miserably here. I reviewed another CD with a version of the piece on it about a year ago, and though I didn’t comment much on it, it did get kept. Even without that version, I’m not sure the recording here would get kept. Despite having the same conductor and soloist, the versions are markedly different. All the weight and passion are gone, and the English horn doesn’t even sound like an English horn. I’ve always been skeptical up until now about whether all the ink that’s spilled over which version of which pieces are the best is worthwhile, but now that I can contrast these two I believe it. If the same conductor, orchestra, and soloist on the same record label, can make the same piece sound so dramatically different, it’s an entirely new game.

Sibelius’ other two pieces on here shine. “Valse Triste” is a brilliant combination of 20th century compositional techniques overlaid on an 18th century musical form, while Finlandia still rings with a bold nationalism that, for all its pitfalls, still vigorously and animatedly denounces Soviet influence in Finland, presciently summing up a culture’s passion and music’s direction decades after its 1899 date of composition.

Grieg’s macro pieces on this disc are the Peer Gynt and From Holberg’s Time suites. You know Peer Gynt, or at the very least you know “In The Hall Of The Mountain King” and probably “Morning Mood” (listen here and here). Originally written as an accompaniment to Ibsen’s five-act play of the same name, Peer Gynt is now most commonly played in the much smaller format of the two suites presented here. They’re very good, in particular the gorgeously orchestrated build and release of “Aase’s Death” and the dramatic, vivid beginning to “The Abduction Of The Bride.” However, there’s also a little bit of blandness, as in parts of “Arabian Dance” and “Peer Gynt’s Return Home,” though, to be fair, this is likely not as noticeable when performed programmatically with Ibsen’s play. “Morning Mood” is cliché by now, as I’m certain I’m watching a commercial whenever I hear it, but it’s still magnificent and overcomes its modern associations. “In The Hall Of The Mountain King,” unfortunately, does not overcome its omnipresence in modern culture. It doesn’t help that it follows “Anitra’s Dance,” which might have well come straight out of the also overplayed Nutcracker. It gets kept, though, in part to keep the suite together.

From Holberg’s Time is a suite written in 1884 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of a Danish-Norwegian playwright, and, as its title suggests, is a collection of courtly dances. Like Peer Gynt, I find it to be a mixed bag as well. There’s nothing bad in the bunch, but the “Sarabande” and “Gavotte” can’t even really sniff the jock of the magnificent “Praludium” or “Air.”

This is an enjoyable if not entirely remarkable CD pretty much all the way through. I’ll always think of it as something of a disappointment, though, since Deutsche Grammophon, von Karajan, and the Berlin Philharmonic can all do so much better, especially given the material these two composers provide.

Rating:

Mixers: Peer Gynt Suite 1: “Aase’s Death,” From Holberg’s Time: “Praludium”
Non-keepers: From Holberg’s Time: “Sarabande,” “Gavotte;” “The Swan Of Tuonela”
Filed Between: Grieg/Schumann (Grieg: Piano Concerto in A Minor / Schumann: Piano Concerto in A Minor (perf. Leif Ove Andsnes, cond. Mariss Jansons, orch. Berlin Philharmoniker))and Gruntruck (Inside Yours)

Barber was an American composer who lived from 1910 to 1981. He’s most famous for his “Adagio for Strings,” which you may not know by name but you probably know by sound. It’s one of those nearly ubiquitous classical pieces that, in recent times, has appeared in the movies Platoon, The Elephant Man, and Amélie. It is the sound of violins crying. I swear the piece itself weeps, as it nearly imperceptibly builds for over six minutes until it climaxes in a howl of anguish, leaving the silence that follows to scream and roar in your ears and images of tragedy to flash before your eyes.

The Adagio has always been one of my favorite piece and is the reason I bought this CD. But it’s less than nine minutes long, so the rest of the CD served as an introduction to more of Barber’s works for me. If you read any encyclopedia-length bio of Barber, you’re bound to read some form of two words: lyrical and bold. And with good reason: his bold statements are lousy with beautiful lyricism, so it really is a fitting cocktail-party level of knowledge to have about him.

Barber had more abilities than just that, though. “Overture To The ‘School For Scandal’,” inspired by a play by Richard Sheridan, is full of life and energy and spends a good portion of its early minutes bubbling and percolating that energy into you. “Music For A Scene From Shelley,” inspired by “Prometheus Unbound,” features a Wagnerian simmering of strings reminiscent of the shimmering Rhinemaidens scene in Das Rheingold. His first symphony revels in the dissonance and 12-tone harmonic textures from the Second Viennese School. On the downside, he can get off course at times and lose me, as he does here in the non-keepers. For the most part, though, this is a great listen.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keeper: “Second Essay For Orchestra,” Symphony 1, Movement 1
Filed Between: Bang Tango (Dancin’ On Coals) and Barenaked Ladies (Maybe You Should Drive)

Finland is one of those countries where they put their famous artists on their money. Despite my respect for the ladies and gentlemen gracing our currency, I wish we put our great artists on our money. It’s hard to think of a more famous Finn than Sibelius, and he graces or graced the 100 mark note in Finland.

After listening to this, it’s hard to imagine there could have been any greater Finn ever, so I guess it’s appropriate that I can’t name any others off the top of my head. This double CD has his last four symphonies, one movement (“The Swan Of Tuonela”) from a larger piece based on Finnish mythology that is possibly his most famous work and contains possibly the most famous English horn solo in the canon, and a 20-minute tone poem written about the Finnish forest (Tapiola).

On first listen, Sibelius doesn’t quite fit into the radical mold of much of the 20th Century classical music I’ve been listening to lately. In fact, I think most ears accustomed primarily to popular music wouldn’t think twice about throwing it in with Beethoven and Mozart. Closer listening, however, reveals that, despite the conventional instrumentation and emphasis on tonality and thematic development, there are halting, unsure vacillations in the rhythm and a brooding angst underlying almost every minute of these pieces.

Sibelius, as the reputation of the Finns would suggest, suffered from severe loneliness, depression, and solitude, and naturally it comes through in his music. The third movement of the Fourth Symphony takes forever to do anything; themes are started, left incomplete, and then subside to the same theme emerging a bit differently or stand aside for a new theme altogether. Finally, at the 7:45 mark we get about 50 seconds of sublime beauty, but it falls back down in its bed to mutter away for several more minutes, making hearty attempts here and there but never quite becoming ambulatory. The final movement feels as if it was written by a man about to take his own life. It’s nine-and-a-half minutes of music falling apart, as if it can barely will itself to go on. Here we have a violin ostinato, there the winds pipe up for a brief moment. Things end in a sea of lukewarm entropy, everything having fallen apart.

Symphonies Five and Six are alternately Sibelius’ greatest symphony, depending on which one I’m listening to. The first movement of the Fifth is a masterpiece. At times it is bold, stately, fast, gripping… everything that the Fourth was not, the manic to the Fourth’s depressive. The Sixth is the controlled middle ground, healthy, and reaching for inspiration and guidance from the Overture to Wagner’s Lohengrin, one of my favorite pieces.

If the thought of a Finnish forest, especially during a long, dark winter, frigthens you, I don’t recommend listening to Tapiola, because your pants will be wet with “fear” before it’s over. From catchy but harmonically tricky thematic development at the start to total Wagner/John Williams-Darth Vader moments midway through to howling and screeching in the violins that would put the most abrasive David Lynch moments to shame, this is one of the darkest and greatest dark pieces in the history of music.

I appreciate honoring their artistic heroes, but there’s no way Finland can have a denomination high enough to warrant Sibelius’ image. They should just name their GDP after him.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Keepers: Symphony 4, Movement 1; “The Swan Of Tuonela;” Symphony 5, Movements 1 and 3; Symphony 6; Symphony 7, Movements 1-3; Tapiola
Filed Between: Shudder To Think (50,000 B.C.) and Silverchair (“Tomorrow”)

Here we have three piano pieces, two concertos (which are backed by an orchestra) and one solo piece, from the first third of the 20th century by two of that century’s most respected composers. Each piece has lengthy, incredibly technically demanding sections, and so Argerich is the real star here.

Prokofiev is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers. I loved Alexander Nevsky last spring and, as with that piece, I find his Third Piano Concerto (1921) to be the perfect blend of Romantic and 20th Century music. It has enough of the 19th century to be easily understood and emotionally gripping while including enough 20th century experimentation to be interesting and exciting.

Since Ravel was a French “impressionist” composer, I’ve always just assumed he was Debussy, Part Deux. I may eventually determine that to be the case, but his compositions here distinguish him from his countryman in my mind. The Piano Concerto in G, from 1932, could have been written by Gershwin, with its seamless blending of classical and jazz idioms. One recurring theme is, in fact, a direct quote from Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue from eight years prior, if im not mistaken. Horns wail out themes plaintively only to be swept away by the orchestra and piano. It’s so obvious when you hear it, but so few composers have done it. It is an absolute triumph and, in the present, an almost sad statement of what was missed from the general lack of combination of these schools of music.

Ravel’s other piece here, Gaspard de la Nuit, a setting for a poem by Aloysius Bertrand, is more like Debussy in that each movement paints an impression of some noun: water fairy, gallows, and goblin. There is less harmonic lushness and, as a result, an ultimately unsatisfying aspect to this piece. “Ondine,” the first movement, sounds like riplling reflections of water, but never seems to go far below the surface. I think its most unsoundly blemish, though, is in Argerich’s muddled interpretation: often times the melody seems to get lost in the blur of glissandi and rapid runs on the page.

Conductor Claudio Abbado is to blame for this as well in the piano concerti. I often find his tempi to be far too fast. The third movement of the Prokofiev is marked “Allegro ma non troppo” (quickly, but not too quickly). Abbado’s tempo is, however, definitely “troppo.”

Those flaws are not enough to take away from the technical brilliance displayed by Argerich, nor the compositional beauty of these pieces. On both of those counts, this is an excellent disc.

Rating:

Mixers: none
Non-keepers: Piano Concerto in G Major, Movement Three; Gaspard De La Nuit, “Scarbo”
Filed Between: Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky/Scythian Suite (perf. Linda Finnie, Scottish National Orchestra, cond. Neeme Järvi) and Prong (Force Fed)

If you know one thing about Stravinksy’s ballet The Rite Of Spring it’s probably that at its 1913 debut in Paris it set off riots. Here’s a dirty little secret, folks, people loved to fucking riot in Europe at concerts and ballets in the 19th century and the early part of the last century. It happened all the fucking time. If you pick any piece out of the canon that debuted after the French Revolution, there’s probably a 50/50 chance that there was a riot at its premiere. (Aside: I don’t know why I’m swearing.)

But for some reason this story about the riot at The Rite is retold far more than than all the other riots put together. I don’t really know why that is, but I’ll make up shit because I like doing that.

So, I think it’s because when it’s heard today, either for the first time or the hundredth, it still sounds obnoxiously foreign yet innately familiar all at the same time. The Rite is completely different than everything that came before it, and very different from everything you’ve ever heard, and yet everybody immediately gets it.

Its rhythms are all completely unexpected, with syncopated accents appearing in no discernible pattern, yet it cuts right to the rhythm of the human body, mind, and soul. You feel its accents inside you, echoing the strongest emotions of your life as well as the Big Bang. You can’t predict when the next downbeat is coming, yet you can’t help but move to it. It’s thrown off the formalisms of common time and the artificial civility of the ballet that accompanies that and replaced it with something sinister and pagan within all of us. Every instrument is playing in a different meter, simultaneously, conjuring up the most excited, confused moments when our brain is scattered, racing, and torn between competing sets of desires.

Alternately ominous and beautiful, crystal clear in its dominance of your ear canal and bewildering in its presentation of so…much…information, The Rite leaves you gasping for air. Your mind will race, confused, and yet excited at the same time. One moment you’ll hear madness in the composition, and then it will quickly resolve to genius, and just when you think you’ve heard everything, like it can’t get any better, it does. You can’t keep up with this piece as it whisks you along at its own exhilarating pace. A nearly steady build right to the end, this is what a primal, hedonistic, 30-minute orgasm, delivered as only a true dom can, sounds like.

The premiere of The Rite is still talked about because we can still hear its echoes when we listen to it today. It’s still discussed because at that moment music changed…Stravinsky opened the door to a whole world of music that was immediate, obvious, and exciting, but had been unknown to us before that time. In my opinion, it’s the first piece of rock and roll ever written, and owes as much to its current state as native African music and its mutation, the blues (to take absolutely nothing away from those contributions to modern Western music, of course). Not only was it a music-changing, an art-changing, piece, it is a life-changing piece. I don’t care how you feel about classical music in general, you must hear this piece, and Obama is going to require it to be taught in high schools because it is that fucking important.

This album, featuring Stravinsky himself conducting The Columbia Symphony Orchestra, begins with Petrushka, a “burlesque,” kind of a ballet suite like The Rite, as far as I can tell, and it’s awesome as well. It’s got a few more dead spots than The Rite, but it probably stands up there at about four lunchboxes just by itself.

It blurs the line between reality, fantasy, and dream in the tale of a sometimes animate marionette named Petrushka who is treated cruelly, and eventually murdered, by his creator/owner/pupettmaster. More traditionally dancey and less radical than The Rite, Petrushka still features motifs obscuring other motifs in a way that Wagner couldn’t even quite bring himself to pull off and also features a brilliant sonic impersonation of the hustle and bustle of the early 20th century crowds that would hear its 1911 premiere.

Going backwards chronologically from right now, Stravinsky is the first composer you get to where you think, “Yeah, that guy is clearly a giant, one of the greatest composers of all time and head and shoulders above his contemporaries.” He was, and still is somewhat, a modern celebrity, conducting these recordings in 1960 and passing away in 1971. It’s been 95 years since the premier of The Rite, and the world is still reeling, still feeling its aftershocks. Someday composers may be willing to wade into this world and write in this style. For now, though, Stravinsky’s greatness is still too intimidating for anybody else to truly attempt to further his work. That would be a shame if what the maestro had left us weren’t so brilliant on its own.

Rating:

Mixers: The Rite, Part I: “Dance Of The Earth,” Part II: “Summoning Of The Ancients,” “Sacrificial Dance”
Non-keepers: Petrushka, Tableau I: “Russian Dance,” Tableau III: “Beginning,” Tableau IV: “Conclusion (Petrushka’s Death),” The Rite, Part I: “Adoration Of The Earth,” Part II: “Introduction,” “Mystical Circles Of The Young Girls”
Filed Between: Richard Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier perf. Te Kanawa, Rydl, Von Otter, Grundheber, Hendricks, orch. Staatsopernchor Dresden, cond. Haitink) and Sub Pop-200

From Gregorian Chant all the way up through Mahler and Strauss at the very beginning of the 20th century, music had gradually added dissonance and stretching of harmony and melody in what amounts to a sort of evolution. As human ears became accustomed to certain tonal structures, composers were able to make things exciting by breaking a few of the old rules, ears adjusted, and so on. This isn’t earth-shattering and you can hear the same effect in comparing popular music of today to that of 50 years ago.

The point at which the wheels came off the gradual-and-natural-evolution train, however, was with Arnold Schoenberg, who examined this gradualness and decided that he might as well be a millennium ahead of his time and just throw off tonality altogether. Of course, it doesn’t really work like that…things happen gradually for a reason and you can’t, for the most part, jump all of the musical world forward several hundred years.

Curiously, though, Schoenberg was quite celebrated in his time. While his giant leap forward in harmony might have been a bit much, he enables the listener to come with him by emphasizing beautiful static sounds and graspable melodies throughout his 5 Pieces For Orchestra from 1909. When you listen to it now, in fact, you realize how much modern music owes to Schoenberg.

Without this piece, composed well before Schoenberg’s conception and articulation of “12-tone music,” film music wouldn’t sound the same, nor would the music of cartoons. Consider Bugs Bunny walking along while Elmer Fudd shoots at him, anvils fall from the sky, and animals run off cliffs only to be suspended in mid-air for several seconds. The music accompanying these scenes, with its quick and quickly-changing motifs is straight out of this work. He eventually leads you down into the same deep, dark hole that Berg does to open the disc, but he’s at least holding his hand as he gradually takes you further and further from the life you once knew and might never see again.

Schoenberg’s students in what was dubbed the Second Viennese School (the first being loosely comprised of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), Alban Berg and Anton Webern, on the other hand…well, they’re a little harder to get your head around. Berg’s contribution here, his 3 Pieces For Orchestra, originally composed in 1914 but revised in 1929 (which is the version on this disc), is particularly abstruse. It is grandly symphonic, a sonic maelstrom with no life presevers in the form of melodies or static beauty to guide you through. If you want to listen to this, it’s put your head down, lean into the wind, and push through. Its final part is militant both in its sometimes, but not for long, march feel and in the unpredictable explosions and cacophony, the sonic equivalent of what the middle of a World War I cannon bombardment must have felt like…and it was written around the time of Germany’s march through Europe in 1914. I like it more and more with each listen, as its ominous flower of darkness is slowly opening itself up to me, but it’s still tough.

If you know anything about Webern, it’s that he was a miniaturist, composing very short works, some only a few seconds long, that laid out his musical thought quickly with little to no development. As with Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, though, throw that notion away for this CD because Webern’s composition, 6 Pieces For Orchestra, was written before then, though all but one of the Pieces are still quite short, ranging from 0:55 to 2:33. They all stem from the death of his mother, and you can hear the seeds of his later work here as he wastes no time in explicating each emotion succinctly. There’s nothing traditionally beautiful here, but a wide range of sounds is produced, from a bubbling, percolating muck (II), to a gargantuan sounding funeral march whose climax is nearly deafening (IV), to chords upon chords layered in such a way that they simply refuse to resolve, bringing to mind a sumptuous but unsatisfying infinity. It is equal parts mystifying and palpably close to something familiar. Here, Webern lies nearly halfway between the now-everywhere sounds of Schoenberg and the total mindf**k of Berg.

One of the comparisons that leads off Alex Ross’ history of 20th Century classical music is that modern music is the analogue to modern film, dance, and visual art…not just in that it’s new, but in that the 20th century has seemingly produced art that has been so violently opposed to what came before it. I agree. This is absolutely the analogue to Kandinsky, Pollock, and David Lynch: there are parts that excite you, but it’s more about color, maybe a little about form, and less about some cohesive representativeness…and since music was always the least representative of all art forms (save possibly dance), the revolt against the structures that were there seem even more revolutionary.

One final note that I can’t fit in anywhere else. I love that James Levine conducted these pieces. Not because I think his interpreations are fine (I have no point of comparison) or that he’s one of my favorite conductors (I just don’t have enough data to really form an opinion on that), but just because I heard him speak when I lived in Boston (where he is now Music Director of the BSO), and found him to be intelligent, articulate, and quite likeable despite (or maybe because of) disagreeing with certain musical opinions of his. It was an intellectually challenging, enlightening, and mildly disturbing experience…much like this album.

Rating:

Mixers: ha, yeah right
Non-keepers: 3 Pieces For Orchestra III; 6 Pieces For Orchestra V, VI; 5 Pieces For Orchestra IV, V
Filed Between: Ben Folds Five (Whatever And Ever Amen) and The Best of Both Worlds – The Rykodisc and Hannibal World Music Sampler