Seraph is a concertino for trumpet and strings, containing three short movements. The first movement is fast, and based on two main ideas. Firstly we hear brusque, angular chords accompanying a jaunty trumpet melody which contains dotted rhythms, running semiquavers and fast repeated notes.
The second idea is more lyrical, incorporating rising 4ths and falling 3rds. The second movement, an Adagio, has its leading cantabile melodic material on solo violin or tutti strings, while the solo trumpet seems to ruminate introspectively with oppositional and contrary lines. The movement subsides in a quasi-improvisatory duet between solo trumpet and violin.
The trumpet part is peppered with little military fanfares. Eventually the music settles down to a cadenza-like passage, where the soloist is accompanied by tremolando strings, before the principal canonic theme is recapitulated on the violins and violas. A seraph is a celestial being or angel, usually and traditionally associated with trumpets. This work is dedicated to Alison Balsom. His music fuses contemporary techniques with lyrical melodies and a strong sense of form, and he seamlessly integrates French tonal tradition with a more modern atonal sensibility, creating a hybrid musical form that is all at once engaging and distinctive.
Incestuous relationships are not an unheard of phenomenon in Greek mythology, and even their parents, Cronus and Rhea, were married siblings. Gruesome creatures have always fascinated me, so when Duo Scorpio asked me if I would be interested in writing them a new piece, and their only request was that I incorporate the scorpion as a theme, I was happy to oblige.
The tempo is appropriately marked con fuoco, and the contrapuntal middle section is subtly infused with Ca- lypso rhythms. This begins when the male and female locate and identify each other using a mixture of pheromones and vibrational communication. In some cases, the male will inject her with a small amount of venom, perhaps as a means of pacifying her.
Once mating is complete, they separate. The male generally retreats quickly, most likely to avoid being cannibalised by the female, although sexual cannibalism is infrequent with scorpions. Scorpions glow fluorescent under black lights, so I imagine the scorpions basking in a fluorescent afterglow after completing their courtship. The third movement, The Tale of Orion, is inspired by an ancient Greek myth. According to legend, Orion boasted to goddess Artemis and her mother, Leto, that he would kill every animal on earth.
Although Artemis was known to be a hunter herself, she offered protection to all creatures. Artemis and her mother sent a scorpion to deal with Orion. The pair battled and the scorpion killed Orion. This served as a reminder for mortals to curb their excessive pride.
A second version describes Orion and Artemis growing fond of each other. After Orion was killed, Artemis asked Zeus to put Orion up in the sky.
So every winter Orion hunts in the sky, but every summer he flees as the constellation of the scorpion approaches. RAGA A raga, the musical framework for the art music of India, is both a mode and a melodic form, and is associated with specific emotions and with a season or a time of day.
Definition : Le Petit Larousse, In general a raga opens with a simple and quiet musical statement that is gradually amplified until all the elements of the music intertwine and catch fire. Everything begins in this raga with a strange drumstick sliding on the metal strings of the harp to make a plaintive, distant sound; it resembles the song of a whale on the high seas. We buy several percussion instruments, and then sail off again with the good old pentatonic scale oscillating between minor and major, spiced up by bells and antique cymbals … A raga for two harps with Indian spices and delicate Western flavors.
Parvis was composed in and is in two sections, Cortege and Danse. The ever-present tuning key is used as a percussion instrument, with the harpist tapping on her tuning pins as well as using the tuning key in place of fingers to strike individual notes and to evoke metallic, forceful glissandi.
The Concerto No. To be understood, every composer writes music using the same language while featuring his or her own personal pronunciation. This variation in notation provides contemporary musicians the ability to distinguish the unique qualities of many composers and their time periods.
Over time, new ways of saying the same ideas were introduced to the musical world that would usually take about a century to evolve and then stabilize.
In present times, we find composers emerging at a rapid pace as they generate fresh ideas for new extended techniques that push performers and their instruments to new limits. According to Bacri, his music is a form of communication and communion, always giving priority to the balance between his instinct as a composer and the discipline he has developed by working at the piano.
In the autumn of , Shostakovich began working on a violin concerto for David Oistrakh. Days after finishing the concerto, Shostakovich brought it to the last class he taught before his dismissal from the Conservatory, and asked student violinist Venyamin Basner to read through it.
Shaking like a leaf, I got my violin out. The Concerto is a relentlessly hard, intense piece for the soloist. The difficult Scherzo is followed by the Passacaglia, then comes immediately the enormous cadenza, which leads without a break into the finale.
The violinist is not given the chance to pause and take breath. I remember that even Oistrakh, a god for all violinists, asked Shostakovich to show mercy. Architecturally, this concerto is a bit of a hybrid.
Shostakovich wrote four movements rather than the usual three, suggesting a symphonic structure. The individual movements themselves do not conform to expected concerto format fast outer movements bracketing a slow central section , and even their titles are somewhat eccentric — Nocturne, Scherzo, Passacaglia, Burlesca.
In the most obvious departure from traditional form, Shostakovich links the Passacaglia and Burlesca by a massive, technically demanding solo cadenza. A note about the dual opus numbers: When Shostakovich began writing the A minor Violin Concerto, he gave it the opus number When Oistrakh finally premiered it, in the autumn of , Shostakovich chose to publish it with the opus number 99, reflecting the fact that he felt it necessary to keep the concerto under wraps for eight years.
This, to the French salon set, sounded like the language of the street, or worse, the musical hall. While caricaturing the poses and manners of these animals, the composer still retains a measure of sympathy for the guileless sincerity with which they live out their lives.
Le Paon Peacock is blissfully ignorant of how silly he looks as he gets stood up at the altar, still dressed in all his finery. Ravel doubles down on the humour by giving him a strutting French overture kind of piano accompaniment, as if he were Louis XIV, the Sun King himself. The pictorial representation of water, a trademark of impressionist musical imagery, is brilliantly accomplished in Le Cygne Swan.
La Pintade Guinea fowl is hilariously painted as the bully of the aviary world, disturbing every other creature with its loud cackling and enforcing its own pecking order on surrounding hens and turkeys. A cozy mood of slumbering repose is created by drone tones in the bass and a cradle-rocking accompaniment.
A rambunctious melody with constantly shifting accents describes the restless energy of the young boy. Le Jardin de Dolly evokes the calm of the perfect garden as a young girl might imagine it, her childlike delight in what she sees symbolized by frequent modulations.
The suite ends with Le Pas espagnol , a tribute to the castanet-clicking sounds and heel-stomping dance rhythms of Spain. As the gay son of a wealthy family, he roamed freely among the more louche enclaves of Parisian nightlife, picking up a taste for the type of devilish wit and stylish parody that we would probably associate with drag shows today. Poulenc was still in his late teens when he composed his three-movement Sonata for Piano Duet, a work both serious and anything but. It does, however, engage seriously with the new trend of musical primitivism introduced by Stravinsky, who in fact was something of a mentor to the young Poulenc and used his influence to get him a publisher for this work.
The second movement, entitled Rustique, is especially interesting from this point of view. Its simultaneous use of similar melodic material in both 8th-note and 16th-note figuration patterns is reminiscent of the fractal-type layered textures of Balinese gamelan music. It employs a wider variety of rhythms, and in a nod to or dig at Classical tradition, recalls themes from previous movements and seems set to build up momentum for a bang-up finish.
Seeking to generate enthusiasm for the virtues of pagan sensuality, he published what he claimed were his own translations of newly discovered poems by Bilitis, a supposed contemporary of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho—poems that featured lines such as: I undressed to climb a tree, my naked thighs embraced the smooth and humid bark.
In each of the six pieces in this set Debussy meditates on a wish, a prayer or a dedication such as those found in the epigraphs on the walls of ancient buildings or tombs. He begins with a description of pastoral life in the ancient world by invoking Pan, god of the summer wind, who is heard playing his pan pipes as the piece opens. Used throughout is the pentatonic scale, neither major nor minor, symbolizing the call of the natural world.
A quizzical whole-tone scale, however, is used to summon up the mystery surrounding a Tomb without a name, its anonymous occupant mourned by the chromatic descent of distant voices. A wish That the night may be propitious paints the silence of the night, and the various creatures moving about within it, in a richly layered texture of ostinato patterns and animal calls.
A Dancer with cymbals then appears on the scene, her dainty steps and waving gestures imitated in graceful triplets while exuberant ornamentation conveys the sound of her instrument. She is followed by the Egyptian woman, as dark and mysterious as the drone tones quietly drumming in the bass register. Sensuous, snaking lines of an oriental flavour, rich in augmented 2nds, accompany her lascivious movements. The final epigraph expresses a wish To thank the morning rain.
It features a delicate imitation of raindrops in a constant patter of 16th notes that only ceases when the the pan pipe melody that opened the work is recalled, marking the return of the sun. The neo-classical style that Stravinsky was to adopt after the Great War can already be seen taking shape in such works as his Three Easy Pieces for piano duet of In their stripped down, bare-bones textures and identification with established genres of European music—march, waltz and polka—they foreshadow the treatment that Stravinsky would soon apply to the music of Pergolesi in his ballet Pulcinella.
The March, in fact, seems to be a prototype of this procedure, based as it is on the old Irish folk melody The Blacksmith and his Son. The genre of each piece is easily recognizable by its characteristic pulse and rhythmic style: the steady walking beat of the march, the lilt of the waltz, the hop-hop-hop of the polka. Stravinsky had already used this polytonal effect before when he combined two key centres a tritone apart F major and C major to create the famous Petrushka chord in his ballet of the same name.
The result is an exhilarating aural experience as prismatic shimmerings of tonal colour in the primo part are splashed over a mechanical and boringly repetitive accompaniment pattern in the secondo. Ravel was an avuncular presence in the Godebski home, as Mimi would later recall in her memoirs:.
The score is of the utmost simplicity, tailored to suit the small hands and limited technical abilities of the children who were to play it. Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant paints the hushed stillness enveloping Sleeping Beauty, who is cursed to remain in an enchanted slumber until being awakened by the kiss of Prince Charming.
Recurring pedal points in the bass summon up the drowsiness of sleepy-time while modal harmonies with a flat 7th scale degree evoke an era in the distant past when courtiers danced the pavane, a slow stately processional dance popular in the Renaissance. Petit Poucet tells the story of Tom Thumb wandering through the forest in a steady pattern of double 3rds dropping crumbs behind him to find his way back, only to find that birds with high chirps in the upper register have eaten them all up.
As she takes her bath, she is surrounded by a troupe of servants playing various instruments for her entertainment. The pentatonic scale, used throughout, represents the Oriental setting of the tale. The surprise comes at the end, of course, when he is transformed into an ever-so handsome prince and they live happily ever after. The elegiac tone returns as the prince touchingly beholds the most beautiful woman he has ever seen and bends down to kiss her.
Being thus released from her enchanted sleep, she awakens to a chorus of glittering glissandos expressing the brilliant light hitting her eyes and the exultation she feels at seeing her long-awaited Prince Charming. When the Mozart children were touring, though, they would most likely have been playing the harpsichord, since the hammered fortepiano progenitor of the modern pianoforte did not replace in popularity its string-plucking keyboard cousin until the following decade.
While the Sonata in D major K. These qualities are particularly evident in the outer movements of this sonata, which feature strong textural contrasts between consecutive phrases, a pattern that resembles the interplay between various sections of an orchestra. And indeed, this entire sonata has been described as a three-movement Italian symphony composed on the keyboard. Simple songfulness pervades the Andante second movement but here again the play of textures adds an extra dimension to the proceedings, especially in the rich use of low bass tones.
There is even an unusual passage in which the top melodic voice is doubled in the tenor range, as if a string or flute melody were being doubled by the bassoons and cellos. The Allegro molto finale has the character of a scene from comic opera in which separate characters engage in punchline-oriented repartee.
It features short question-and-answer phrases in which bright bold chords are answered by frivolous fluttering triplets, and blithe solo melodies by blaring military trumpet calls. Scotch snaps and chirpy grace notes anticipate the comical musical effects that Rossini would use decades later. Each of its four movements depicts a scene from nature or from personal life: the lapping of waves against the side of a gondola, bird calls in the wild, tears dropping, the clangorous ringing of church bells.
Typical Rachmaninoff stylistic traits such as the use of ostinati and repeated sequences that build to a climax are present throughout. Barcarolle opens with the delicious quiet rippling of water, soon joined by a simple, mildly obsessive tune that always seeks to return to the same note. The filigree patterns surrounding this foreground melody gradually grow in elaboration to become a lush carpet of harmonic colouring covering a full five octaves of the keyboard as the opening ripples are transformed into great surging waves of piano sonority.
This movement opens with the repeated motive of a major 3rd representing the warbling of the nightingale, soon paired with a downward sliding chromatic melody embodying the feelings of romantic love.
Ecstatic flights of fancy in the high register express the ecstatic emotions of the scene. Les larmes Tears depicts the falling of teardrops with a repetitive four-note motive that opens the movement and pervades it throughout, at times rhythmically displaced from the main beat to suggest the convulsive spasms of sobbing. In this virtually melody-less movement, open 5ths in the bass convey the weighty resonance of massive swaying church bells while a hammering tintinnabulation of repeated motives in the high register imitates the chiming of metallic overtones above.
Almost lost in the near-cacaphony of full-spectrum ringing sounds is the solemn intonation of a Russian liturgical chant in the mid-register. Franz Liszt Tarantella from Venezia e Napoli. It leaves the starting blocks at presto speed, dicing and slicing the agitated tarantella melody into an impressive series of choppy and sparkling pianistic textures, often alternating duple and triple versions of the tune.
The slower middle section, featuring a sensuous and langorous canzona napoletana with Bellini-esque arabesques of vocal ornamentation, serves to interrupt the torrential onslaught of virtuosity, but it too soon erupts into iridescent cascading rainbows of tonal colour and peppery sprays of repeated notes—perhaps in reference to the favourite instrument of the Neapolitans: the mandolin.
The concluding section returns to the bravura frenzy of the opening, upping the tempo to prestissimo and heading off to the horizon like a cat with its tail on fire. The sheer volume of piano tone pulled from the instrument on the final page is eyebrow-raisingly theatrical. The second thing to know is that it has nothing at all to do with Bambi. Much at home in woodland settings, fauns led an idyllic life with little to do each day but a play the pan pipes, b chat up the local nymphs, and c fall drowsily asleep to dream about a and b.
One of most important of these is the melody that opens the work, a languorous chromatic descent of a tritone, representing the pan pipe, which establishes no key and has no sharp rhythmic profile.
There are 19 rhapsodies in all, the first 15 composed in the period between and Fundamental to the form of each rhapsody is a two-part division into a slow, introductory lassan followed by a quick, dancelike friss. In the soulful and brooding lassan, a handful of folk melodies are repeated over and over, trancelike, in varied forms, blooming from time to time into dazzling cadenza-like flourishes of keyboard sparkle and colour.
The friss is sectional, presenting a series of impish dance tunes that in an accelerating pattern of frenetic activity inevitably drive the work to a barn-storming conclusion. The Hungarian Rhapsody No. The standard rhapsody lassan begins in the 3rd section, and what a change in tone it brings. The friss that follows brings welcome relief with its simple playful tune constantly repeated over a folk-style drone in the bass.
Excitement leads to exhilaration as the pace progressively accelerates and thicker textural cladding is added. Meanwhile, the left hand accompaniment commutes back and forth from the nether regions as a full-on, octave-spanning stride bass. All in all, this Hungarian rhapsody displays 19th-century pianistic showmanship at its most extroverted.
But the project lay dormant for many years, and it was only under a commission from impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the famous Ballets Russes that he was prompted to finish it in Swirling clouds offer glimpses of waltzing couples.
As the clouds scatter little by little, an immense hall filled with a whirling crowd comes clearly into view. The scene grows steadily brighter until the chandeliers bursts forth with dazzling light at the fortissimo. An imperial court, about Given the glittering age it celebrates, one would expect the work to be as bright in mood as the ballrooms it depicts. But this score is unusually dark for Ravel. It begins rumbling deep down in the bass before scraps of waltz rhythm begin to emerge above in the mid-range.
After this introduction, the work is structured as a series of waltzes, alternating in mood between a voluptuous, sometimes explosive joie de vivre and more demure evocations of coyness and lilting nostalgia. The aesthetic stance of the work is ambiguous, to be sure, and that is perhaps the quality that has made it endure in the repertoire since its first performance a century ago.
From a tonal point of view, it floated in stasis in a world of pastel sounds that arrived at their destination more by whim than by design. How, they asked, could what he composed actually be called music? After all, it had so little of what, since the s, had been the operating principle of Western music: tonal tension.
Tonal tension was that feeling that certain chords wanted, needed, felt the inner urge to proceed to other chords, and that when they did so, the music went from a state of tension to one of relaxation—in other words, that dissonance had resolved to consonance. He ignored them. His use of parallel streams of identically structured chords blurred the distinction between harmony and melody.
His textures seemed like lush exotic gardens of sound, with each melodic phrase a flowering plant swaying in the breeze, combining with others to create an overall impression. The comparison with the emerging school of Impressionist painters was all too obvious. And yet, for all his painterly credentials as a musical pictorialist, we find Debussy at the end of his life writing sonatas , the most rule-laden form apart from fugue that Western music had produced, the genre most associated with the musical Establishment.
Phrases tend to be short and often unpredictable, either coquettishly playful or tender and pensive. Textures are thinned out and made more transparent by the use of streams of parallel 5ths, especially in the bass, and melodic octave doublings throughout the texture.
Debussy thus inverts the normal relationship between melody and harmony. The Allegro vivo first movement opens in a manner strikingly similar to that of the Franck Violin Sonata in A major, laying down a reflecting pool of keyboard colour over which the violin enters with a melodic motive of slowly rocking 3rds.
Elaboration of this melodic motion in 3rds, in 4ths, and then in 5ths is a major source of onward momentum in the more active sections of the movement, which on the whole is nevertheless warmly melodic in tone. Debussy also, however, makes frequent nods to the rhapsodic practices of gypsy fiddling, especially pronounced at the end of this movement. Clownish as this nimble movement is, its sense of mischief is more hopping Harlequin than hapless hobo. In a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union, with an arts establishment beholden to the official ideology of socialist realism, the spiky modernisms that we associate with this nerdy, thickly bespectacled composer were not his bread and butter.
The square phrasing and gently persistent pulse of the Gavotte evokes a feeling of simple but relaxed jollity. The sad little Waltz in G minor is a restless affair that rises to surprising heights of passion in its short duration. The concluding Polka is a rollicking village romp full of breathless phrases and stomping cadences that would be perfect music for a carnival ride.
As a pianist he is known for his performances of the often devilishly-difficult keyboard works of now-neglected composers such as Alkan, Godowsky, Sorabji and Samuil Feinberg whose Sonata No.
His Reverie for Two Violins and Piano comes fresh from his pen this summer and he sends us these notes about this new piece:.
I have to say that it was a lot of fun to try to imagine what Leila heard in her sleep! Chaminade had a successful career as a performing pianist both in Europe and in the United States. Sheet music of her smaller works sold extremely well on both continents, and even spawned the creation of numerous Chaminade Musical Clubs in the US. Her career difficulties were, in the academic jargon of gender studies, intersectional.
She was a woman in a world dominated by men, she was French in a music world dominated by Germans, and she was a composer of salon music in an era dominated by musical revolutionaries.
But snobbishness aside, there is no mistaking her gifts as a melodist and as a composer for the keyboard. It will be a while yet before the Huffington Post is read by musicologists as a scholarly journal, and yet Alan Elsner, the Huff-Po reporter hot on the trail of breaking news in 19th-century Belgian music, is not wide of the mark in observing that.
This, one feels, is truly the music of the angels. The Allegro ben moderato first movement floats in a world of harmonic uncertainty.
It opens with a number of dreamy piano chords, each followed by a simple chordal interval, as if giving the pitches to the instrumentalist, who then obliges by using them to create a gently rocking, barcarolle-like melody, the outline of which will infuse much of the work as a whole. This theme, played by the violin over a simple chordal accompaniment from the piano, builds in urgency until it can hold it no more, and a second theme takes centre stage in a lyrical outpouring of almost melodramatic intensity but ending in a dark turn to the minor.
The violin will have none of it, however, and dreams both sleepwalkers back to the major mode for an amicable review of the two themes, both in the home key. Where drama breaks out for real is in the Allegro second movement, one of the most challenging in the chamber repertoire for the pianist.
This sonata-form movement bolts from the starting gate with a swirling vortex of 16ths in the piano, fretting anxiously over a theme in the mid-range that is soon picked up by the violin. Its worrisome collection of motives is based on the same small-hop intervals that opened the first movement, but reversed in direction and cast in the minor mode.
A more sunny mood prevails in the second theme which, however, ebbs away as both instruments take stock of the ground covered in a sober interlude marked Quasi lento. The development section engages in a full and frank discussion of the two themes until the convulsive agitation of the opening theme returns in the recapitulation. Despite the turbulence roiling at the heart of this movement, it manages to pull a major-mode ending out of a hat for its final cadence.
As this thematic material is brooded over, the violin tries to change the subject several times in distracted flights of fancy, but eventually agrees to join with the piano in a ruminative journey that passes through nostalgic reminiscence to end in heart-wrenching pathos. No major-mode ending here. All tensions are eased, all hearts healed, however, in a last-movement rondo that offers up a simple tuneful melody in continuous alternation with brief sections of contrasting material.
This tune, so harmonically rooted as to suit being presented in strict canonic imitation like a round , is shaped from the melodic outline of the theme that opened the sonata, bringing its cyclical journey full circle. It is hard to resist reading this as a musical symbol of married bliss, especially when the dialogue is placed even closer together, at a distance of half a bar rather than a full bar, on the deliriously happy closing page.
Luigi Boccherini was perhaps the greatest cellist of the 18th century, and like his compatriot of a previous generation, Domenico Scarlatti, he spent the most active portion of his professional life at the court of Spain. The addition of Boccherini to this ensemble was likely the creative prompt for the more than string quintets — in the unusual configuration of 2 violins, viola and 2 cellos — for which he is principally known.
A cellist of extraordinary technical skill, Boccherini, like Paganini after him, wrote for his own hand and acquired a reputation as a virtuoso performer through performances of his own works. One feature of his playing that astonished his contemporaries was his predilection for playing the violin repertoire, at pitch, on the cello, and indeed passages in which the cello plays in the high register are a recurring feature of his own scores.
His musical style stands at the intersection of two eras: floridly ornamental in the late Baroque manner, but early Classical in its slow harmonic rhythm and clear periodic phrasing, with direct repetition of short phrases a prominent characteristic. Its gracious but relatively unadventurous melodic lines are set within an elaborate filigree of appoggiaturas, trills and flamboyant scalar flourishes. An ascending arpeggio in the penultimate bar nearly sends the cellist off the fingerboard to reach a high E above the treble staff.
Debussy made his first public appearance as a composer in in a performance of his Nocturne et Scherzo , a work originally scored for violin and piano but later that year revised for cello.
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