Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey special. Here’s your hint: This piece is from this composer’s Op. 7. No Googling!
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 45
Max Bruch, Concerto for Clarinet and Viola, op. 88
First off, a belated congratulations to listener Eric for correctly guessing Amy Beach in Newsletter 44!
As for this week, I wasn’t able to get around to guessing before I checked the CGF email to find that Listener Kevin had correctly identified the composer AND the piece. Listener Kevin doesn’t participate in NTT unless he knows the answer exactly—exactly contrary to the spirit of the game—but this is a deeply impressive pull from the auditory memory bank (as far as I’m concerned anyway.)
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.
News!
A violinist from the Schleswig-Holstein Symphony Orchestra has denied in court that he attempted to kill his mother and two colleagues with rat poison. According to the indictment, the 62-year-old is alleged to have mixed the poison in his 93-year-old mother’s food in a retirement home in Hanover in early September 2022. On a concert tour, he is said to have given the two orchestra members – another violinist and a cellist – a garlic dip mixed with the poison brodifacoum.
...All three victims survived, thanks to the swift intervention of doctors.
In Memoriam André Watts (1946-2023)
André Watts, the piano virtuoso and pedagogue, passed away this week at the age of 77. Watts was a renowned performer, appearing with most of the world’s great orchestras during a decades-long career, well known for his theatrical mannerisms on stage.
As a piano-loving youth growing up in the Midwest, I (Joey) had the chance to see him perform at least twice with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (including the only live performance of Edward MacDowell’s 2nd Piano Concerto that I’ve ever seen). Additionally, during my time at Indiana University, where Watts was a professor since 2004, I personally knew several pianists touched by his teaching and/or mentorship. My few memories of watching him interact with students after recitals allow me to recall him as a large and warm personality.
Watts’ career started with a bang when he won an audition to perform with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the televised Young People’s Concerts. From there, he became a true superstar of the piano world, filling in for Glenn Gould, winning a Grammy, and performing to sold-out audiences around the world. On top of it all, one cannot omit the fact that as a Black man, he was doubly inspirational to several younger generations of musicians of color.
Perhaps because of his start on TV, Watts was never afraid to champion the cause of classical music in creative ways. Here he is on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, performing Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude.
Everybody Loves Louis
The New York Times published a profile of my former boss, Louis Langrée this past weekend.
...at 62, Langrée has never been one of the world’s most famous or sought-after conductors. His career has been a steady climb of prestige and quality, quietly remarkable but undersung even as he has transformed ensembles: in Cincinnati, where he has been at the podium for a decade, and in New York, where he has been the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra since 2003.
The profile is an unabashed piece of puffery, and I’m totally fine with that. Louis’ lovable! Louis’ popular! Louis’ generous! When he assumed the music directorship of Cincinnati, he imported a bottle of wine from his family’s vineyard for every member of the orchestra (he told me “ce n’est pas un bon vin—c’est un grand vin!”)
So I feel no need to do a take on this article or undercut it, except to mention that the last line of this paragraph is total disingenuous bullshit:
Langrée told the Cincinnati Symphony in 2021 that he wouldn’t renew his contract there beyond the 2023-24 season. That year, he was hired by President Emmanuel Macron of France to run the Opéra Comique; it was, Langrée said, the first job he had ever applied for.
Classical Mixtape
Anna Clyne, This Midnight Hour
I offer up this week’s mixtape suggestion not as an unalloyed endorsement, but as a way of puzzling through my feelings about this piece, which I heard just last night in a concert at the Bellingham Festival of Music conducted by my friend Conner Covington.
There’s a lot of great, well-orchestrated, melodic, interesting material in here. So at a base level, I’m sitting on the positive side of the spectrum with this piece. The thing is, it’s a kind of “sonata form” work, in that it has two contrasting themes that are pitted against one another.
My issue with the work as a composition is that the two themes are really disparate, and this is, I think, one of the great challenges for any 21st-century composer working in sonata form. What we always hear about classical composers like Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven is that they were trying to maximize contrast in their works, particularly between their theme groups.
But the thing is, the musical language in which they were writing didn’t offer nearly the breadth that we have at our disposal today. So the compositions hung together organically. These days, you could easily write a piece where the first theme was neo-baroque pastiche and the second theme was ska-punk-hip hop. Composers today have the technical tools to create composites of anything they want. But to quote my favorite line from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
I’ll just mention that this issue has been one of my own main obsessions as a composer for the past 20 years. Having started out as a devoté of Alfred Schnittke and Leonard Bernstein, I’ve frequently gotten myself into just this trap, and my goal for several years now has been to lessen the stylistic contrasts between my thematic material so it can be made to work together as a unified whole.
Anyway, I’m not sure that This Midnight Hour succeeds in tying the room together, as it were, but I’d love to know anyone else’s thoughts. I certainly think it’s worth a couple listens!
The Classical Gabfest Newsletter is a spin-off of the now-defunct Classical Gabfest Podcast. It is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
NTT: solo piano. We start out with a contrary-motion chromatic passage that leads to an almost ragtime/stride-sounding texture, but not so much so that I'm willing to put myself out there and say it's a jazzy American type. But it could be? The motion from I to IV also suggests a certain bluesiness/jazz influence.
The clue is interesting, because it implies this is an early work (and I'd say by extension it implies this is the early work of a well-known composer.)
So does one assume that the composer's work continued in this vein? That it was a primarily pianistic output and that maybe the composer's style developed more along vernacular lines?
Part of me wants to say Stravinsky, but that's partly because I know Joey as well as I do. I could definitely see this being Russian though. Maybe Prokofiev? I feel like he was already a bit juicier by the time he would have been writing an op. 7. Shostakovich seems like a definite possibility; it doesn't really sound like him, but he was into popular music, and every once in a while he could pop out a sui generis movement in an oeuvre otherwise characterized by a very consistent voice.
I feel like I've got to get at least one American in there. I don't think there's any way this could be Joplin, but is there someone who's Joplin adjacent? Obviously I'm focusing on a time period that would be something like 1880-1920.
I'm going with Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Eubie Blake