The Official Classical Music Blog

Grażyna Bacewicz’s Divertimento for String Orchestra

This piece isn't mentioned in the title of tonight's Prom, being overshadowed (as usual) by two better-know male composers (Mendelssohn and Mozart). However. Bacewicz was a delightfully interesting composer, whose Overture (which I am sure I will feature at some point in the future) I got to play at an informal concert with members of my county's youth orchestra and the NYO.

During World War II, Bacewicz performed in secretive underground concerts in Warsaw, and after the war, she took up a position as a professor at the State Conservatoire of Music in Łódź. Despite the ideological control of arts, Bacewicz continued composing from 1945 to 1955, even though it was difficult to perform many of them.

Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome

Each movement of this piece depicts a setting Rome in the city with pine trees, specifically those in the Villa Borghese gardens, near a catacomb, on the Janiculum Hill, and along the Appian Way.

Having relocated from his hometown of Bologna to Rome in 1913, Respighi said that the city's "umbrella-like pines that appear in every part of the horizon...had spoken to my imagination above all", prompting him to write his three Roman tone poems, of which Pines is the second.

Classical Piece of the Day - day 40

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano (recommended by @smallsilvervine)

This sonata was completed only weeks before Shostakovich’s death; in the final days before its completion, Shostakovich complained about the inability of his right hand to remain still enough for writing and had also telephoned Fyodor Druzhinin (its dedicatee) warning him that he was considering delaying further work as a result of his declining health.

It is divided into three movements: Moderato, which Shostakovich described as a “novella”; Allegretto, in which most of the material is borrowed from his unfinished opera The Gamblers; and Adagio, which Shostakovich often called an "Adagio in Memory of Beethoven" and which contains allusions to Beethoven's “Moonlight” Sonata, as well as Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote.

Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6

Best know (at least in percussion circles) for the enormous wooden sledgehammer featured in movement 4, Mahler's 6th Symphony was composed during an exceptionally happy time in his life, as he had married Alma Schindler in 1902, and during the course of the work's composition, his second daughter was born.

This contrasts with the tragic, even nihilistic, ending of the symphony. Conductor and friend of Mahler’s, Bruno Walter, found the piece too expressively dark for him to conduct, since it “ends in hopelessness and the dark night of the soul”.

The subtitle "tragic" often given to it was not of Mahler's creation; however, Alma Mahler's statement has often associated the symphony with tragedy:

"In the last movement, Mahler described himself and his downfall, or as he later said, that of his hero. 'It is the hero on whom fall three blows of fate, the last of which fells him, as a tree is felled.'"

The first few bars of Maurice Ravel’s Une Barque sur l’Océan, played by yours truly (I keep Ravel at the end of my piano to judge me while I’m playing).

Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra

This piece is a tone poem inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel of the same name. It’s best known for the initial fanfare due to its use in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the BBC also used the theme in its coverage of the Apollo space missions.

Soooooo

What would you 🫵, the viewer, like to see on this blog?

for classical piece of the day can i recommend dvoraks 8th symphony? its my fav symphony by him (i love the 3rd mvt!!)

thanks and have a great day :>

Classical Piece of the Day - day 37

Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 8 (recommended by @vexingvexvexes)

No Prom today, so a request instead! Dvořák's 8 is, most unfortunately, often overshadowed by his much better-know 9th symphony, but (personally) it slaps just as hard.

In contrast to other symphonies of both Dvořák and the period, the music is cheerful and optimistic. 8 is rather different to his stormy, Romantic 7th Symphony, and draws its inspiration more from the Bohemian folk music that Dvořák loved.

I learned the whole of the first movement to conduct it and then wasn't given the chance, but I remain a big fan of it to this day. The first time I heard the third movement, I couldn't for the life of me work out the orchestration of the first few bars - it sounded like water to me.

Maurice Ravel’s Boléro

Apologies for the repeated Ravel (he’s not featured again in the Proms so there won’t be any more of his music until September or so!) but I’m at this Prom right now (with Ravel himself 🩵)

Ravel’s Boléro has always received mixed reviews; some people view it as merely an exercise in orchestration, or, at worse, boring!

This piece reveals a few things about Ravel. Firstly, his obsession with the miniature and the mechanical; the clockwork repetition of Boléro has been linked to this, and Ravel’s father was a mechanic who passed his love on to his son. The repetitive nature of this piece has also been attributed to Ravel’s declining mental health (just as in the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand). Finally, its origins in the Spanish bolero dance lie in Ravel’s Basque heritage.

In case you can’t tell by the sheer amount of knowledge I have on this, Boléro is one of my favourite pieces of all time. I am stressfully anticipating it at the end of the next half. Wish my teary self good luck 🥲

Edit: I definitely didn’t cry so hard that my nose ran…

But in all seriousness, Boléro is SO clever. Many critics have focused on the musico-sexual (one of my favourite words, despite its meaning) elements, but my personal favourite part is when the first of the two melodies is orchestrated so that the piccolos play the first harmonic above the fundamental pitch. The level of knowledge of music theory and orchestration needed to pull that off is just incredible (sorry I’ll shut up about Ravel now it’s just been a long day and I’m feeling all the emotions).

Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man

A rock arrangement of this is being played at the Proms tonight (and the normal version was the opener of last night's Prom too). I considered going, as outside of classical music, one of my favourite musicians is Guy Garvey (who will be singing), but I don't have loads of money and there are other concerts I'd rather go to.

This piece was inspired in part by a speech made in 1942 by then American Vice President, Henry A. Wallace, in which Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the "Century of the Common Man".

It's scored for only four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, a tuba, timpani, a bass drum and a tam-tam.