wild blue yonder
I was expecting busing. I mean, I know there will never be an end to busing because they were busing on the orange line, but at least I didn't have to deal with that.
The temperature peaked at 77°F yesterday and 83°F today.
Ludwig van Beethoven - Egmont Orchestra
The initial program didn’t mention anything about the Egmont Overture. After all, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Brahms’ Violin Concerto perfectly complement each other.
A story goes: Beethoven and Goethe were on a walk and a prince walks by. Goethe bows and Beethoven doesn’t even look down.
Egmont was a count back when the Spanish ruled over the Netherlands because all those royals were all related anyway, who was beheaded, his head skewered on a stake for the crime of lèse-majesté. Though he died, the Netherlands became an independent polity at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War, a war that stretched on for as long as it did because it was easier to let mercenary forces sustain themselves through looting and conquest than it was to pay them. Goethe made a play about them and seeing the potential for an allegory about Napoleon, was eager to write the music.
We’ve all forgotten Egmont but we all remember that F-D. After that, there’s some pleading from the oboes followed by another gigantic F. Oppression and force. A falling phrase for the struggle. A passage that begs to crescendo though Beethoven doesn’t allow it. The dee-da from the violins which isn’t as dramatic as Berlioz or Strauss’ executions but it gets the job done. They call out once in a strange key and once in the home key. There’s a pp melody and then a C-major chord building to an F-major climax, that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
It was used as the music for the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. I say failed even though the uprising was put down and Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter, and Miklós Gimes executed, Soviet Bloc Hungary never got as bad as as Romania, Albania, East Germany or even Poland.
Zander picked this as he was listening to Egmont when Kamala Harris took up the nomination. After all, things were political in 1810, as they are now.
Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto
It goes on a little too long for its own good. Also, this was a sunday afternoon concert and the sun was shining on me from the gap between the curtains.
It’s Zander’s favorite concerto.
Brahms loved simplicity. There’s a theme in five and then the soloist comes in shooting up like a rocket.
Brahms wrote with piano, not violin, so Joseph Joachim wrote the cadenzas.
The second movement of Brahms is an extended oboe solo and the third movement is a Hungarian dance.
Béla Bartók - Concerto for Orchetra
In the 18th century, musicians ate with the servants and served with their music. In the 19th century, orchestras became professional and the soloist became more important and set against the orchestra. In the 20th century, Bartók sought to showcase the orchestra’s virtuosity itself.
In 1915, someone in Musical Quarterly wrote ““…representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform nor ears to listen to.”
Bartók wrote this for the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky. He’s not Jewish but nonetheless wanted nothing to do with fascism. He tried to make a career here but only ended up at a library collating information on folk music and the library never published his work. He gave a talk at Harvard and fainted. Because doctors at the time wanted to protect him, he never found out the cause of his illness was leukemia. When he wrote the concerto in the later half of 1943, he weighed 87 pounds.
It’s broken up into five movements. Two large, not Mahlerian in scale but ten minutes apiece, bookending two short intermezzi that sandwich the elegiac core.
The first is the sonata and all things associated with it: a development, a capitulation, blah-de-blah-de-blah. It’s built in fourths and unusual 3-3-2 rhythms, an Arab tune played on the oboe.
The second movement is a páros gemutató (because Italian is the language of music, that Hungarian phrase meaning ‘pairwise presentation’ became giuoco delle coppie or game of couples), all about coupling. Two horns play a sixth apart. Two oboes play a third part. Two clarinets play a seventh apart and that should sound awful but it doesn’t. Two trumpets play two notes apart. And then everything else plays. Towards the end, a third bassoon joins.
The third is an elegy for himself. Like in Brahms, there are some Romany melodies played right at the end. There’s a piccolo solo in there, and it reminds me of Mahler’s tendency to write extended parts for people in the orchestra who are, ahem, discouraged from playing violin or piano solos. The oboe is an earthbound spirit. He says to the audience listening to the talk “don’t you dare cough.”
In the fourth movement, the strings and oboe play a tender waltz which is rudely interrupted by a parody of Shostakovich’s seventh symphony (Bartók was in the audience and told the tromboner to play louder) which Bartók says he heard on the radio entirely too much while writing this. The orchestra sends them packing and comes back to the waltz, with touch more melancholy.
The fifth movement, four horns introduce the moto perpetuo from the second violins and Hungarian dance from the violas and strings.
Kira got off the train while I was putting the details into the rings.
On the way home, a man had a tattoo of a lion, a deer, a bird in flight with distant pine trees, roses and small flowers and stars.
burning question: Why did Amazon need to put reviews behind a login wall? And like every other quality of life reduction, why is it that nobody else online is even talking about it? I get that almost everyone has an account on Amazon and I get that Amazon reviews are usually terrible but still.
The temperature peaked at 77°F yesterday and 83°F today.
Ludwig van Beethoven - Egmont Orchestra
The initial program didn’t mention anything about the Egmont Overture. After all, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Brahms’ Violin Concerto perfectly complement each other.
A story goes: Beethoven and Goethe were on a walk and a prince walks by. Goethe bows and Beethoven doesn’t even look down.
Egmont was a count back when the Spanish ruled over the Netherlands because all those royals were all related anyway, who was beheaded, his head skewered on a stake for the crime of lèse-majesté. Though he died, the Netherlands became an independent polity at the conclusion of the Thirty Years War, a war that stretched on for as long as it did because it was easier to let mercenary forces sustain themselves through looting and conquest than it was to pay them. Goethe made a play about them and seeing the potential for an allegory about Napoleon, was eager to write the music.
We’ve all forgotten Egmont but we all remember that F-D. After that, there’s some pleading from the oboes followed by another gigantic F. Oppression and force. A falling phrase for the struggle. A passage that begs to crescendo though Beethoven doesn’t allow it. The dee-da from the violins which isn’t as dramatic as Berlioz or Strauss’ executions but it gets the job done. They call out once in a strange key and once in the home key. There’s a pp melody and then a C-major chord building to an F-major climax, that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat.
It was used as the music for the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. I say failed even though the uprising was put down and Imre Nagy, Pál Maléter, and Miklós Gimes executed, Soviet Bloc Hungary never got as bad as as Romania, Albania, East Germany or even Poland.
Zander picked this as he was listening to Egmont when Kamala Harris took up the nomination. After all, things were political in 1810, as they are now.
Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto
It goes on a little too long for its own good. Also, this was a sunday afternoon concert and the sun was shining on me from the gap between the curtains.
It’s Zander’s favorite concerto.
Brahms loved simplicity. There’s a theme in five and then the soloist comes in shooting up like a rocket.
Brahms wrote with piano, not violin, so Joseph Joachim wrote the cadenzas.
The second movement of Brahms is an extended oboe solo and the third movement is a Hungarian dance.
Béla Bartók - Concerto for Orchetra
In the 18th century, musicians ate with the servants and served with their music. In the 19th century, orchestras became professional and the soloist became more important and set against the orchestra. In the 20th century, Bartók sought to showcase the orchestra’s virtuosity itself.
In 1915, someone in Musical Quarterly wrote ““…representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform nor ears to listen to.”
Bartók wrote this for the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky. He’s not Jewish but nonetheless wanted nothing to do with fascism. He tried to make a career here but only ended up at a library collating information on folk music and the library never published his work. He gave a talk at Harvard and fainted. Because doctors at the time wanted to protect him, he never found out the cause of his illness was leukemia. When he wrote the concerto in the later half of 1943, he weighed 87 pounds.
It’s broken up into five movements. Two large, not Mahlerian in scale but ten minutes apiece, bookending two short intermezzi that sandwich the elegiac core.
The first is the sonata and all things associated with it: a development, a capitulation, blah-de-blah-de-blah. It’s built in fourths and unusual 3-3-2 rhythms, an Arab tune played on the oboe.
The second movement is a páros gemutató (because Italian is the language of music, that Hungarian phrase meaning ‘pairwise presentation’ became giuoco delle coppie or game of couples), all about coupling. Two horns play a sixth apart. Two oboes play a third part. Two clarinets play a seventh apart and that should sound awful but it doesn’t. Two trumpets play two notes apart. And then everything else plays. Towards the end, a third bassoon joins.
The third is an elegy for himself. Like in Brahms, there are some Romany melodies played right at the end. There’s a piccolo solo in there, and it reminds me of Mahler’s tendency to write extended parts for people in the orchestra who are, ahem, discouraged from playing violin or piano solos. The oboe is an earthbound spirit. He says to the audience listening to the talk “don’t you dare cough.”
In the fourth movement, the strings and oboe play a tender waltz which is rudely interrupted by a parody of Shostakovich’s seventh symphony (Bartók was in the audience and told the tromboner to play louder) which Bartók says he heard on the radio entirely too much while writing this. The orchestra sends them packing and comes back to the waltz, with touch more melancholy.
The fifth movement, four horns introduce the moto perpetuo from the second violins and Hungarian dance from the violas and strings.
Kira got off the train while I was putting the details into the rings.
On the way home, a man had a tattoo of a lion, a deer, a bird in flight with distant pine trees, roses and small flowers and stars.
burning question: Why did Amazon need to put reviews behind a login wall? And like every other quality of life reduction, why is it that nobody else online is even talking about it? I get that almost everyone has an account on Amazon and I get that Amazon reviews are usually terrible but still.