Although most listeners know Satie through his three Gymnopédies or six Gnossiennes, he has written quite a lot more that is worth exploring. Je te veux--I want you--is one such piece. It's not nearly as abstract as the Gymnopédies or Gnossiennes, nor as melancholy, but wholly delightful.
Erik Satie was a contemporary of Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre) in Paris in the 1920's, though curiously not a member. In fact, the name Les Six comes from the title of an article written by French critic Henri Collet in 1923, which includes Satie in the coterie with Les Six: Les cinq Russes, les six Français et M. Satie, which translates to The Five Russians, The Six French and Monsieur Satie (The five Russians being Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin, collectively known as The Five or The Mighty Handful, who preceeded Les Six by roughly fifty years). Satie, and Les Six for that matter, compose what may be considered the musical equivalent of Claude Monet's paintings: art which is not created to realistically represent an event or location but to represent the emotions associated with it.
Pascal Rogé is widely regarded as the best Satie interpreter and has released several fine albums of Satie compositions. The album linked to below, 3 Gymnopédies and Other Piano Works, is my favorite although After the Rain... The Soft Sounds of Erik Satie is almost as good, and contains a lot of duplication with 3 Gymnopédies. I'd recommended buying whichever is cheaper, and if equal then go with 3 Gymnopédies.
I had the pleasure of seeing Portland Taiko perform a few years ago in a theater barely large enough to hold their drums, let alone us in the audience. The sound was incredible, but incomparable to the actual pressure I could feel in my chest with each beat of the ōdaiko drum. Taiko is the Japanese word (太鼓) for drum, and the ōdaiko (大太鼓--"great drum") is the largest of these, with a head diameter in excess of one meter. Some are so large and heavy that they are essentially unmovable, permanently residing in the temple in which the taiko ensemble plays.
Taiko ensembles are rare in this country, limiting most people's exposure mostly to Akira Kurosawa movies like Rashomon and Seven Samurai (and if you haven't seen any Kurosawa movies, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised--in fact, if you're at all a fan of classic westerns, you really owe it to yourself as The Magnificent Seven is an almost identical remake of Seven Samurai, transported from feudal Japan to the early American west, with worse fight sequences and much worse acting). But recently, the film Red Cliff featured many battle scenes where messages were (historically accurately) relayed from general to general and to the troops with the use of taiko drumming, similar to the drummer boys from the American Civil War.
Unlike much of the other music I've written about on this blog, which can be thoroughly enjoyed with the volume just above a whisper, taiko drumming really deserves a high volume and especially a nice set of speakers with a deep woofer (of course, only if live is not possible!). The enjoyment comes equally from the sound of the drums as from the physical feeling of that much air being forced around. It's a bit like that final firework which you see initially but then hear moments later simultaneous with the slap on your chest. Exhilarating!
This particular piece is by Joji Hirota, a rather accomplished performer from North Japan who since the late 1970's has been touring North and South American, Europe, and Japan as well as recording and composing.
During the period that the Münchener Kammerorchester was recording Valentin Silvestrov's Stille Musik and Abschiedsserenade, the composer relaxed before and after the recording sessions by playing a piano set up in the studio. Luckily, producer Manfred Eicher had left the mics on during these brief sessions and the thirteen bagatelles were the result.
Silvestrov, born in Kiev in 1937, did not receive much attention until the late sixties when his music began to be performed by Western musicians; under the communist regime his music was deemed too avant-garde and violently criticized. Although his music indeed does bare only minute resemblance to that of the Romantic or Classical periods, it is a reaction to it and intended as evolution instead of revolution--Silvestrov himself once said "I do not write new music. My music is a response to and an echo of what already exists." In fact, Silvestrov claims that a bagatelle arises from the momentary 'flash' of a motif, a brief music moment. Whether intentionally or not, this phrase alludes to Schubert's 1828 op. 74 pianos pieces dubbed Moments musicaux. According to critic Tatjana Frunkis, the most important thing for Silvestrov is to capture this musical moment and to make it singable without complicating it by subjecting it to motivic-thematic manipulation.
I would describe these bagatelles as Arvo Pärt's Für Alina but with more structure (as an aside, Pärt and Silvestrov are good friends; the final piece on this disc, Two Dialogues with Afterword, is dedicated to Pärt). But I think Austin, Texas bus driver and music lover Larry L. Looney says it best: In the liner notes to Silvestrov's Requiem for Larissa,
Paul Griffiths makes a statement that cuts to the heart of Silvestrov's art: "Time in Valentin Silvestrov's music is a black lake. The water barely moves, the past refuses to slide away, and the slow, irregular stirrings of an oar remain in place." This sense of 'stopped time' pervades many of the composer's works ... In Silvestrov's music, time seems to stand still to the point of disorientation--some of his larger, longer works seem to give the impression of constantly 'ending', only to continue ... The listener is left with a sense of déjà vu - has this music been experienced before, perhaps in another lifetime? ... I think perhaps it's not so much that Silvestrov is trying to 'stop time'--it's more like he's setting the listener afloat in that 'lake', where the present and the past touch and interact. Memory becomes as tangible as present existence--tenses merge and blur. Herbert Glossner, in the booklet accompanying the ECM release of Silvestrov's Symphony No. 6, appropriately quotes Marcel Proust (from Remembrance of Things Past): "And all at once the memory returned." Memory, in the music of Valentin Silvestrov, is as much a physical dimension as space.
Piano Sonata In F Minor, Op. 5, Ii. Intermezzo - Allegro by Nikolai Medtner
Nikolai Medtner is another one of those undiscovered greats. Born in 1880 and a student of the Moscow Conservatory, Medtner was admired by his friends Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin (Rachmaninoff even dedicated his fourth piano concerto to Medtner). Although he considered himself Beethovenian and is sometimes called the Russian Brahms, his music sounds very much like Rachmaninoff's and I'm sure many would assume it were if not told otherwise. Of all the music in his repertoire, his piano sonatas are possibly the most well known but in my opinion the piano concertos are equally enjoyable.
It also turns out that Medtner had quite possible the most generous brother in all of recorded human history:
During the years leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Medtner lived at home with his parents. During this time Medtner fell in love with Anna Mikhaylovna Bratenskaya, a respected violinist and the young wife of his older brother Emil. Later, when World War I broke out, Emil was interned in Germany where he had been studying. He generously gave Anna the freedom to marry his brother. Medtner and Anna were married in 1918.
However, I found another source that puts the relationship in a much different light:
For many years, Medtner had been in love with Anna Mikhaylovna Bratenskaya, a violinist and the young wife of his older brother Emil. With Emil’s blessing, Medtner waited until his parents had died and his brother had divorced before marrying Anna in 1918. “Medtner was a man of high principles and morals,” said [Canadian pianist Paul] Stewart. “There would not have been any sexual liaison between Medtner and Anna before their marriage.”
And finally, although I find it unnecessarily pleonastic and a bit sesquipedalian, the following quote does seem to describe Medtner's music quite well:
Whether Medtner’s music makes inroads into the wider repertoire or remains the territory of a few performers and listeners depends on whether it is true, as is said (by some other than the aforementioned performers and listeners...) that he sacrificed melodic interest, beauty, and communicativeness (or enough of them) on the altar of complexity, the sonata form, and counterpoint. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Medtner possessed considerable skill in writing heartfelt melody of rare beauty, and along with his uncanny skill in developing thematic material, his oeuvre constitutes an ideal balance of "head" and "heart". In constant intellectual ferment and, with rare exceptions, a restless quality that demands repeated listenings to penetrate, Medtner's music often has a psychologically intense, almost demonic character. The piano works in particular are notoriously difficult to sight-read and require enormous technical and intellectual resources to perform. Yet at the top of his game, Medtner's melodies speak to the listener on a direct emotional level. It may be that some of his works are better advocates for him in this respect--his songs and concertos are more directly communicative than the solo piano music, t
he violin sonatas more extroverted--than others--and it is also true that his music is now that of a cult composer, at least in reputation and possibly in fact.
Prelude And Fugue In D Major, Op. 87, No. 5 by Dmitri Shostakovich
In 1950, Shostakovich travelled to Leipzig for a festival commemorating the bicentennial of Bach's death. At the festival, he heard the 26-year old Tatiana Nikolaeva perform Bach's 24 Preludes and Fugues. Inspired by it, Shostakovich returned to Moscow to write his own 24 Preludes and Fugues. They were dedicated to Nikolaeva, who played their premier in Leningrad in 1952.
I've had Konstantin Scherbakov's recording of the pieces for a while, but only recently got Nikolaeva's (She recorded three versions in her lifetime, one for Hyperion and two for Melodiya; the first on Melodiya is by far the superior version, and it has been re-released under the Regis label). Scherbakov's are excellent but Nikolaeva's really shine and, I presume, are probably the closest to how Shostakovich himself intended them to be played (he was in the audience at the premier and maintained a long friendship with Nikolaeva). I've heard great things about Keith Jarrett's recording on ECM, but have also heard that it is too "jazzy" which would seem to me not to fit these pieces well. Shostakovich is not well known for his piano work; and it is a shame because it is on par with his symphonic and string quartet output. That said, these preludes and fugues are not what you would expect as typical Shostakovich. They are much more melodic with less dissonance, the rhythms are not exceptionally difficult to understand and it is basically "easier" music on the whole to listen to. I would suggest it as a great introduction to Shostakovich for this reason although there are certainly far more popular works out there, such as his fifth or tenth symphonies. Buy it here.
“I grew up in a quiet spot and was saturated from earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty of Russian popular song.”
– Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
Getting Off to a Good Start
Unless you were fortunate enough to grow up in a household that listened to a lot of classical music, you might feel that it is quite hard to pick up casually and must require extraordinary intellectual effort. Of course, knowledge of any kind of music doesn’t come automatically, and you have to put some time and effort into listening to classical music to get rewards from it, just as you would with rock, blues, jazz, country, and so on. Yet there are other challenges that can make classical music seem particularly daunting. First, listening to anything and everything randomly, either online or at a music library, may bring about confusion, because of the sheer quantity of classical music that exists and the variety of styles and periods it’s associated with, from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque to Classical, Romantic, and Modern. It’s easy to get lost. Second, you can squander a fortune on buying classical music, even out of the mid-line and budget bins, especially without knowing what’s worth hearing more than once. Third, if you lack a trusted guide, you may begin to feel overwhelmed by all the choices and quit out of frustration. If you aren’t lucky enough to have ready access to the best recordings, vast disposable income, or a knowledgeable teacher or friend to make suggestions, where on earth do you begin? To whom should you turn in your time of greatest need?
Meet Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840 -1893), one of the great Russian composers from the Romantic period, a perennial favorite among classical fans, and possibly the best pathfinder to classical music. Although he demonstrated talent in childhood and received music lessons early, Tchaikovsky began his professional career as a composer relatively late in life, starting out as a lawyer, but changing goals in his twenties to become a professor of music in Moscow. He achieved an artistic breakthrough with the premiere in 1877 of his ballet The Swan Lake, and proved to the public that he had a phenomenal grasp of melody, dance forms, and orchestral colors. He went on to even greater successes, and despite suffering severe doubts over his music and bouts of nearly suicidal depression over his homosexuality, he persevered and was acknowledged as a great composer in his lifetime. Tchaikovsky died ten days after the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 in B minor, “Pathétique,” which many regard as the ne plus ultra of his intensely personal expression.
Tchaikovsky is quite approachable from the start because his music is instantly memorable, and it’s easy to appreciate because of its expressive directness. You don’t need to understand the finer points of music theory to know that Tchaikovsky’s music is usually quite dramatic, exciting, moving, and abundantly tuneful, and much of it is brilliantly orchestrated. It also helps that Tchaikovsky composed pieces in all the available forms of his time, so it’s just as easy to find operas, concertos, symphonies, suites, and other large scale works as it is to find short character pieces, songs, and waltzes in his catalog. Beginners will also find it useful to know that Tchaikovsky is one of the most prolifically recorded composers in history, so there’s really no shortage of albums of his work. Ultimately, there are many paths to take with Tchaikovsky, and all of them will lead you deeper into classical music.
Accessibility and Memorability
Anyone entering the wide field of classical music should begin with learning tunes they’ll remember on one or two hearings. Almost everyone knows something by Tchaikovsky, even if it’s just a snippet of music they’ve heard in a film or on television. Once you have a firm grasp of a Tchaikovsky melody, it’s easy to comprehend the other parts of a composition as music that highlights it and makes it more dramatic, varies the theme in some interesting ways, or offers contrasting material to create tension or movement. Much of Tchaikovsky’s music is constructed around long, song-like melodies, and while he used all the developmental techniques and formal structures that he inherited from the Classical era of Franz Joseph Haydn,Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven, his melodies are the soul of virtually everything he wrote. Knowing this pretty much makes everything else fall into place.
Below are some samples of the best loved melodies in Tchaikovsky’s ouevre.
Tchaikovsky wrote in virtually all the forms of his day, so there are many ways to learn about the varieties of classical music from his examples. Even though he is considered a late Romantic master, Tchaikovsky’s favorite period was the Classical era, and his idol was Mozart. Bearing this in mind, we can see that Tchaikovsky closely followed western musical tradition, and he composed concertos, symphonies, suites, and chamber music that fit the basic molds of familiar classical forms. But he was a child of his own time, so he also composed in the new Romantic forms as well, such as tone poems, programmatic overtures, and character pieces. Of course, Tchaikovsky achieved his greatest fame as a composer of ballets, and The Swan Lake,The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker are definitive masterpieces.
Like the violin concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major was his only full-length concerto for the instrument. It is enormously popular and regarded as one of the top vehicles for virtuosi.
Of Tchaikovsky’s six symphonies, the last three are the most frequently performed and essential listening for anyone interested in his music. (The first three symphonies are charmers, but they are best heard after gaining a better understanding of the mature masterpieces.)
There are several other works which have ensured Tchaikovsky’s reputation and pleased audiences for over a century. Some of these are regularly found as excerpts on greatest hits compilations, but be sure to accept only complete performances.
Tchaikovsky’s operas, choral music, and songs are somewhat less familiar in the west than his instrumental pieces, largely because some acquaintance with the Russian language is needed for appreciation, and some of this music wasn’t widely available on recordings in the United States until the last decades of the 20th century.
As one of the most popular composers of all time, Tchaikovsky receives a great amount of attention in the concert hall and in recording studios. Some might say too much. At a time when fewer and fewer new recordings of undiscovered and underperformed music are being made, mainly because of the financial risk, a disproportionate number of CDs and SACDs are devoted to Tchaikovsky’s best known compositions, and released without much thought to redundancy. Experienced listeners may feel that this is overkill, and certainly the frequency of reissues of Tchaikovsky’s most famous music may signal a lack of imagination on the part of the major labels.
But beginners who don’t have much or any classical background should feel relieved that so much is available. They will have no trouble finding any of Tchaikovsky’s major works, and even his most obscure music has found its way to disc. Because Tchaikovsky’s music is immediately accessible, highly tuneful, stylistically varied, and widely available, newcomers should start here and explore as much of it as possible. From there, it should be easy to branch out toward Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries – Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt,Antonin Dvorak,Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov,Alexander Borodin,Modest Mussorgsky,Sergey Rachmaninov – and eventually get to know many more composers who came before and after them. It’s possible to acquire a considerable amount of musical knowledge from concentrating on just one master, and because Tchaikovsky is quite possibly the most user-friendly of them all, his music is an excellent choice for all beginners. Indeed, if you have enjoyed the samples here, you’ve already begun to appreciate some of the best that classical music has to offer.
With many records, the critics either praise its technical virtuosity or its emotional appeal, but very rarely both. Fred Hersch is one artist who consistently receives both accolades. And his In Amsterdam: Live at the Bimhuis album, despite being recorded live on stage, has such high engineering quality that you'd be forgiven for thinking it was recorded in the studio. The entire album is equally incredible; I had trouble picking just one selection to showcase here.
The music is sublime like Bill Evans' Waltz for Debby but exciting like Monk. It was this 2006 album that led Lorraine Gordon, owner of the legendary Village Vanguard club in New York City, to invite Hersch to play the first solo piano concert in the club's 70-year history--and Hersch was on the playbill for a full week.Buy it here.
Cantus Arcticus I: The Bog by Einojuhani Rautavaara
Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of those "If you love X, then you've got to try Y!," X being, in this case, Jean Sibelius, and Y obviously Rautavaara. He was born in 1928 and at 91 is still composing today. He is Finland's most popular composer after, of course, Sibelius.
Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus is subtitled Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, and as the name implies it prominently features recorded birdsongs along with the orchestra. But unlike all of those "Bach with Ocean Sounds" albums, this one really works. The birds in question were recorded near the Arctic Circle in Northern Finland and are not just randomly thrown in behind the music--the species are chosen to fit with the theme of each particular movement and their cries are matched well with the emotional ascetic of the moment. The really great disc with Max Pommer conducting Cantus Arcticus along with the 4th string quartet and 5th symphony unfortunately is not available anymore, but Pommer's Cantus Arcticus is still available, here.
The music of Nils Økland is perhaps the most unlikely combination I've found to actually work. It sounds to me like a cross between an American square dance, an African fire dance, Irish pub music, and the jazz of Scandinavia. That last one is fitting because Økland is Norwegian, but I do not know what his other influences are. Unfortunately, background information on him is difficult to find, not least because he shares a name with another (relatively) famous Norewegian born 1881.
Økland plays the Hardingfele, also known as the Hardanger Fiddle, an 8-, or sometimes 9-, stringed instrument very similar to the violin. It has the standard four strings of a violin with the remaining strings, fittingly called understrings, residing between the standard strings and the instrument's body. The understrings are not played directly but resonate under the influence of the other four, providing a drone-like sound. I've heard that fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg let the Hardingfele guide some of his compositions, notably in the famous Morning piece from Peer Gynt, which is based upon a standard tuning of the instrument. And some trivia: turns out, the soundtracks to all three installments of the Lord of the Rings as well as the soundtrack to Fargo feature a Hardingfele.
It is said that Monk's 'Round Midnight is the most-recorded jazz standard written by a jazz musician. I'm not exactly sure who else, besides jazz musicians, writes jazz standards, or how a jazz standard differs from just your run-of-the-mill jazz song, but it's something of a distinction anyways. Amazon.com has 2,900 entries for the song search "'Round Midnight," and allmusic.com as 2,304. Possibly the most popular version is that from Miles Davis' 'Round About Midnight album, but my favorite has always been Monk's solo piano version here.
Thelonious Monk was quite the quirky character. His attire frequently consisted of a suit, a funky hat, and sunglasses. One of my favorite descriptions of the man (from TIME magazine, Feb 28, 1964) defines him, in fact, by his hats:
"At every turn of his long life in jazz, Monk's hats have described him almost as well as the name his parents had the crystal vision to invent for him 43 years ago - Thelonious Sphere Monk. It sounds like an alchemist's formula or a yoga ritual, but during the many years when the owner merely strayed through life (absurd beneath a baseball cap), it was the perfect name for the legends dreamed up to account for his sad silence. "Thelonious Monk? He's a recluse, man!" In the mid-'40's, when Monk's reputation at last took hold in the jazz underground, his name and his mystic utterances ("It's always night or we wouldn't need light") made him seem like the ideal Dharma Bum to an audience of hipsters; anyone who wears a Chinese coolie hat and has a name like that must be cool."
His playing was the first to go mainstream that featured almost as many "wrong" notes as correct ones--Monk popularized dissonance in jazz (in the classical world, artists such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg were using dissonance successfully a few decades prior.) Bet even so, his music is so melodic that the tunes are instantly memorable. Monk's was the first jazz I listened to, while still in grade school, so accessible it is. Yet it still manages to be so complex to garner critical analysis half a century after it was originally released.
While a collection such as The Essential Thelonious Monk will give you all of the hits at a great price, it is worth it to dive deep into his studio albums and if you can afford it pick up his box sets (I like his early stuff on Blue Note, but the Prestige recordings and Riverside are fine as well.) Finally, it's worth checking out his live recordings of which the most popular is from Carnegie Hall, with John Coltrane on sax. Buy it here.
