CGF Newsletter 14: Attacca
The show goes on in Ukraine; Joey's one note samba; a manuscript restored
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is coming from me, Joey. I’m pulling a Will and claiming that this one is too easy for a hint (this probably applies only to string players).
As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 13
Herbert Howells, Rhapsodic Quintet, op. 31
Listener Jeremy, naturally, texted me right away:
Trust me, I never thought I could!
Joey showed himself as canny listener as ever, noting that “it is definitely first half of 20th century.” (it’s from 1919) and “could be American, could be French (by the harmonies in the strings? As for instrumentation, it seemed to be clarinet and string quartet.” Spot on with the instrumentation, but alas, he guessed Widor and Reger.
Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!
Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.
The Night the Lights Went Out in Kyiv
Two videos have surfaced this past week of Ukrainian musicians performing in blackout conditions at Kyiv’s Philharmonic Hall.
Bach’s 3rd Brandenburg Concerto performed by the Kyiv Soloists:
Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto performed by musicians from the Ukraine National Philharmonic. (NYT)
These performances can’t help but put one in mind of the premiere of Shostakovich’s 7th symphony, the “Leningrad.” Quoth Wikipedia:
The Leningrad première of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 took place on 9 August 1942 during the Second World War, while the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was under siege by Nazi German forces.
The Leningrad première was performed by the surviving musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, supplemented with military performers. Most of the musicians were suffering from starvation, which made rehearsing difficult: musicians frequently collapsed during rehearsals, and three died. The orchestra was able to play the symphony all the way through only once before the concert.
Despite the poor condition of the performers, the concert was highly successful, prompting an hour-long ovation. The concert was supported by a Soviet military offensive, code-named Squall, intended to silence German forces during the performance. The symphony was broadcast to the German lines by loudspeaker as a form of psychological warfare. The Leningrad première was considered by music critics to be one of the most important artistic performances of the war because of its psychological and political effects. The conductor concluded that "in that moment, we triumphed over the soulless Nazi war machine.”
CGF, Performer’s Edition: Forget the conductors, what do pianists do?
I (Joey) am learning a beloved set of pieces by Maurice Ravel, his Miroirs from 1905. It is not without its challenges.
Of the five early impressionist pieces* contained in Miroirs, the one I chose to begin with is the fourth in the set, “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Aubade”). This piece is a doozy, a virtuoso showpiece with huge technical demands, but thankfully it also has the musical integrity to merit its level of difficulty. The above recording, by Dinu Lipatti, is commonly cited as the gold standard. (There’s a great story that Lipatti sat down and recorded it spontaneously without having practiced it for months. Unfortunately, it’s a myth, but it’s still pretty fabulous.)
As a pianist, the first thing one notices in this piece is that it contains several passages of rapid repeated notes. Repeated notes on the piano are a specialized technical problem, and I have often told people that playing them is a weak point in my technique. Up until now, I had never forced myself to learn the fingering gymnastics it takes to play one note over and over at high speeds. By tackling “Alborada,” I set myself a challenge, and since I like the music, I thought it wouldn’t be too painful.
That has mostly borne out. The irritating part is not playing these passages over and over at slow tempi until you can turn the metronome up by 1 beat per minute. (That’s actually a rather meditative experience.) However, I have changed my fingering for these repeated-note passages probably fifteen times in two months in pursuit of the perfect sequence for my specific hands and technique. Hopefully, this work bears out in future performances of the work, no matter the piano I play on. We pianists are beholden to the instruments made available to us, and different piano actions change the feeling of repeated notes significantly.
[For anyone who is interested at the most technical level: the main idea of my fingering is to limit the number of times I have to repeat a note in one hand, opting instead to use an alternation of right and left hands. This isn’t always possible, of course, because often there is other musical material to be played in one or the other of the hands. However, I have managed to make it so that I only have to play more than 2 repeated notes with the same hand twice in the whole piece — once five times (3-2-1-2-3), and once four (1-3-2-1).]
*For early works, there is shockingly mature writing in several of these movements, pre-dating or contemporaneous with some of Debussy’s most famous piano impressionism.
Just in time for Hanukkah!
A musical manuscript handwritten by Ludwig van Beethoven is getting returned to the heirs of the richest family in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, whose members had to flee the country to escape the Holocaust.
The Moravian Museum in the Czech city of Brno has had the original manuscript for the fourth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op. 130 in its collection for more than 80 years. The museum put the score on display for the first time this week in anticipation of handing it over to its rightful owners.
“We’re sorry about losing it, but it rightly belongs to the Petschek family,” Šindelářová said.
The family tried but failed to send the manuscript abroad by mail in March 1939 during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, drawing the attention of the Gestapo.
According to Šindelářová, the Germans asked an expert from the Moravian Museum at the time to verify Beethoven had penned the document, and “he denied that in an effort to save it" from the occupiers.
[On the theme of art repatriation, I just read a non-classical music book that I’d recommend quite highly: Africa is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin.]
Classical Mixtape
Antonin Dvorak, Two Minuets, op. 28
You may not think of Dvořák as having been a “piano composer” per se, but you’d be wrong! Dvorak wrote a fantastic piano concerto and tons of amazing piano chamber music. But I found myself captivated this week by these two little miniatures, eac a perfect encapsulation of this master’s art. They are colorful, melodic, pianistic, slightly nostalgic, and just great listening all around.
As a bad, delinquent, trash string player, this is too hard for me to obviously get without a hint, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's a Bartok string quartet. I believe there are six of them, so I'm going to guess this is #1 from it's relative tameness.
Always good to read about some insider thoughts on practicing and technique.
The Dvořák minuets are lovely. Probably would’ve made good name that tune submissions.