CGF Newsletter 25: Oh What a Circus
Charles hires a band; a great composer’s thoughts on his peers; announcement season begins
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: the composer of this work is not particularly well known, but his father-in-law is.
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 24
William Walton, Façade
Listener Rebecca’s inaugural entry in the NTT space gave much reason to rejoice this week, as many Listeners were able to identify the piece immediately! It’s one of those pieces where “if you know it, you know it,” since there’s hardly anything else in the repertoire like it. Knowers included myself and Listeners Kevin, Chris, and Anonymous.
Listener Eric’s guess of Virgil Thomson strikes me as exceedingly good for someone who had to logic their way into it.
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.
Song of the King
The Beeb reports that King Charles III has commissioned no fewer than twelve composers to write new music for his upcoming coronation, including Dame Sir Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The other composers chosen by the King to write new music are Iain Farrington, Sarah Class, Nigel Hess, Paul Mealor, Tarik O'Regan, Roxanna Panufnik, Shirley J. Thompson, Judith Weir, Roderick Williams and Debbie Wiseman.
There will be a "coronation orchestra" assembled and soloists will include Welsh opera singer Sir Bryn Terfel.
Part of the service will be sung in Welsh and Sir John Eliot Gardiner will conduct a programme of choral music.
At the moment when the King is acclaimed, the Latin call "Vivat" will be sung by choristers from Westminster School, as it has been for previous coronations, including the late Queen in 1953.
About the king’s choice to include Lord ALW, I will say little, for I do not care to commit the crime of lèse-majesté in this newsletter. But nothing I could say about Lord Andrew could be worse than him having to live with the knowledge that, no matter how many billions of pounds he acquired in his lifetime, he would never be more than a distant second-best composer for the musical theater.
Dvořák on Schubert
This absolutely fascinating article from 1894 came to my attention this week, in which we get to see the insightful commentary of one canonically great composer about another canonically great composer.
Along the way, Dvořák opines on any number of other top-flight composers, and the whole thing is just serious enough to be serious but just gossipy enough to keep one’s interest absolutely riveted throughout the entire read. Here’s an amuse bouche:
Like Chopin and Rossini, Schubert has frequently shown how a melody may be created which can wonderfully charm us even apart from the harmonic accompaniment which naturally goes with and enriches it. But he was accused by his contemporaries of neglecting polyphony, or the art of interweaving several melodious parts into a contrapuntal web. This charge, combined with a late study of Handel's scores, induced him shortly before his death to plan a course in counterpoint with Sechter.
No doubt his education in counterpoint had been neglected. It is not likely, however, that such study would have materially altered his style. That was too individual from the beginning to undergo much change, for Schubert did not outgrow his early style so noticeably as did Beethoven and Wagner, for example. Besides, Schubert had no real need of contrapuntal study. In his chamber music, as in his symphonies, we often find beautiful specimens of polyphonic writing — see, for instance, the andantes of the C-major quintet and of the D-minor quartet —and though his polyphony be different from Bach's or Beethoven's, it is none-the-less admirable. Mendelssohn is undoubtedly a greater master of polyphony than Schubert, yet I prefer Schubert's chamber music to Mendelssohn's.
Me too, Tony!
It’s that Time of Year
All the biggies are making their season announcements; over the next few weeks I’m going to choose some representative institutions and see what we can glean from the programming, but this week I’m going to start with the institution that is perhaps the least representative of music-making in the US, the Metropolitan Opera.
Why do I say the Met is unrepresentative? Well, it’s sort of the same way that New York City itself is an unrepresentative American city; there’s just not another one like it in our land. The Met is the nation’s largest performing arts organization, and it’s what’s known in the opera world as a “repertory house.” This means that any given title on its menu of operas will play sporadically throughout the season. For example, the date spread listed for Carmen is Dec. 31 – May 25. During that time, you’ll also be able to catch performances of Bohème, Fire, and The Hours.
This is in contrast to all the other American opera houses, which operate on the stagione system, in which a given production is mounted for a limited period of time. So for example, at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, Carmen is also playing this season, but only from March 11 – April 7. (Technically speaking, the Met used to be a pure repertory house, but in recent years it has blended the repertory and stagione systems.)
The big news about this Met announcement is something that Peter Gelb hinted at back in December: there are four contemporary operas vs. three classics. I haven’t counted up the number of performances; it’s possible that the standards will still get more stage time overall than the newcomers. But it’s certainly an interesting development, and they have good data to show that it will pay off, since all of these contemporary pieces have already had solid runs at the Met (or at other houses.)
Classical Mixtape
Christos Hatzis, Old Photographs
I was recently recommended this piano trio by Greek-Canadian composer (and University of Toronto professor) Christos Hatzis. It is unabashedly neo-romantic soul food with a splash of Piazzolla here and there, and I think it’s the kind of music that it secretly (or if you’re Will, not so secretly) warms the heart of many classical music lovers to hear still being written.
—Joey
NTT: Like Laurie, the hint doesn't help me because I am only aware of the Liszt/Wagner in-law connection!
The first thought I had once that lovely string melody came in was Khachaturian, but I'm guessing it's earlier than this. And Laurie's guess sounds extremely plausible, so I'll bandwagon. (not to mention Dvorak's other appearance in this week's newsletter! On that subject, I'd respond that "Schubert did not outgrow his early style so noticeably as did Beethoven and Wagner" because the dude barely made it to 30!)
NTT: Well . . . Wagner, the son-in-law, being less well known than Listz, the father-in-law, doesn't properly fit the clue . . . or the musical snippet.
I'd say this is a waltz by Suk, whose father-in-law was Dvorák. I'm not all that familiar with his music, but I believe he tried to steer clear of sounding like Dvorák in his compositions. And I know he wrote some orchestral works, and I think he was a violinist.
Suk and Dvorák were the first pair of composers I recalled as being in-laws while reading the clue, so I freely admit I wouldn't have guessed Suk without that hint. I don't know the name of this work, but it sounds like something I'll like when I hear the entire piece whether he wrote it or not.