Classical Music Diary No. 14

The uniformity of endings in classical music has been bothering me. Every piece seems to conclude with multiple soundings of the tonic chord. Composers will sometimes dress up these bits of aural clipart with rhythmic flair, but in most cases they stick to the dogma.

For an example, I’ll pick on “Sinfonietta” (1873) by German-Swiss composer Joachim Raff — mostly because I’ve been listening to it a lot since hearing the Holyoke Civic Symphony perform it last fall. The diminutive title is appropriate both for the length of the piece (about 25 minutes) and the stripped-down orchestra of woodwinds and French horns.

Each of the four movements is interesting, but they all conclude in the most predictable way. The first and fourth movements, in the home key of F Major, end with F chords struck multiple times. The third movement, in the dominant key of C Major, puts a C chord through descending inversions before hammering it home. By comparison, the second movement’s ending is adventurous: The tonic chord, F minor, is placed on either side of an outside-the-key C Major chord. Each time I listen, I think, Couldn’t Raff come up with anything better?

I often think back on Arthur Rubinstein’s recording of the scherzo from Frédéric Chopin’s “Funeral March” sonata. The pianist plays the movement’s final two notes in a way that I can only describe as offhand. Is he as bored with endings as I am?

Classical Music Diary No. 13

Gabriela Lena Frank (1972- ) writes that her string quartet “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout” (2001) is a mixture of “western classical and Andean folk music traditions.” Yet certain parts of it take me to a different part of the world altogether.

Movements I and III, she writes, are inspired by Andean panpipes — instruments traditionally tuned to pentatonic scales. Yet the pentatonic scales used here sound, to me, stereotypically Asian. Indeed III is based on a scale that matches the yo scale typical of Japanese folk music (in this case, C#, D#, F#, G#, A# — all the black keys).

Cursory research brought me to a video of some Andean panpipes tuned to a different flavor of pentatonic scale (G#, B, C#, D#, F#), which to me sounded more stereotypically South American. They have different starting points, but in terms of intervals the scales are identical except for one note.

Safe to assume that Frank knows more about Andean music than me. I wonder when and how my brain came to identify one pentatonic scale with Asia and another with South America. Can I ever unlearn this auditory bias?

Classical Music Diary No. 12

This month, within six days and 20 miles of each other, the Pioneer Valley Symphony and the Musicians of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra both gave incomplete performances of Antonín Dvořák’s “From the New World” (Symphony No. 9, 1893).

The abridgment, at least in one case, was born of necessity. MOSSO had just one afternoon to rehearse with its conductor, and wanted to play portions of several other pieces. It played only the outermost movements of the Dvořák, skipping the second and third.

PVS centered its program on the symphony, applying the idea of a new world to a planet upended by pandemic. Nonetheless it skipped the third movement.

Both performances were forward-looking in an optimistic way. And both were lovely renditions. One couldn’t help but notice, though, that something was missing.

And that’s as it should be. There is in fact a lot missing from this new world — foremost the 4.5 million people (that we know of) who have succumbed to the disease so far. It’s a bit hard to sustain optimism in the face of a reminder like that. But there is still music.

Classical Music Diary No. 10

Barely any way into Johannes Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” (1869), an exceedingly beautiful piece, there are two bars of ugliness (starting at about 4:27 in this recording). Three diminished chords in a row that almost sound like a mistake. Then the chorus enters with a soothing major chord, and there is virtually no dissonance in the remaining 70 minutes of music.

Why put that ugliness up front?

I’m reminded of that aphorism about Persian rugmakers intentionally weaving imperfections because only Allah is perfect. (As some have pointed out, it’s pretty arrogant to believe your work would otherwise be perfect.)

Maybe the dissonance is the inciting incident. Death is ugly. It’s the loss that the rest of the piece works to console.

Classical Music Diary No. 9

How does one listen to Chopin’s “Funeral March” in a post-“Looney Toons” world? The doomy, plodding left hand and ominous melody feature prominently in 1948’s “Scaredy Cat” and plenty of other cartoon and comedy settings where death and defeat require a soundtrack. Keep listening to the piece, though, and it gets sentimental, almost sweet. Media reductions put an unwelcome slant on any listening to the complete piece (Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 35, 1839). On the other hand, when the music evolves beyond this popculture touchstone, the surprises are that much more surprising.

Classical Music Diary No. 8

As I’ve been reading classical music reviews I’ve been awed by critics who can contrast subtle stylistic differences in various recordings of the same piece. I notice superficial differences, but my ear is not that sophisticated.

There’s one case, however, where I thought I had identified one superior and one inferior recording. I returned to them this week to see if those earlier impressions held up and if I could put them into words.

I’ve owned many copies of Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta performing Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” from 1992. I keep lending it to people who, quite understandably, never give it back. At some point I replaced it with a recording from a couple years later by Joanna Kozlowska and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which didn’t seem to live up to the one I was familiar with.

In my most recent listenings, I’ve identified a few reasons. It’s meant to be a slow, meditative piece. The London version, clocking in at 53:43, hits the sweet spot, whereas the Warsaw version is too slow, stretching to 59:06.

One has to wait more than two minutes longer for the real draw of the piece — the vocals — to enter (13:18 vs. 15:23). And how can anyone compete with Dawn Upshaw? She and the Sinfonietta lean into the drama of the piece, where Kozlowska’s reading feels a bit flat.

The difference between the two versions is most stark in the third movement. The London version is legato, producing a serene, rocking sensation. The Warsaw version, on the other hand, disconnects the two repeated notes of the movement’s foundation, lurching through the whole thing.

Where the Warsaw version is superior is in the recording itself. All the elements can be heard more clearly. The best example is at the very beginning. In the London version, the murmuring doublebasses get lost in a fog, whereas in the Warsaw version they stand out like whispers across a domed gallery.

There’s plenty of music that excites me mentally, but the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” is a rare piece that also excites me dermally. At key moments it sends ripples of surface goosebumps and subsurface chills up and down my arms, my sides, my scalp.

But how do I reconcile my abiding love of this piece with my newfound dislike of repetition? I’ll evade the question and reply with an observation about intervals. Each note is rarely more than a major second away from the one that preceded it, sometimes a third in epiphanic moments.

This is a different kind of minimalism from the scrolling landscape of Adams’ “Harmonielehre.” Both tonally and structurally, “Sorrowful Songs” paces within a confined space, something like the prisoner in the Gestapo cell at Zakopane. But even within these strictures there is still the possibility of transcendence — so many higher octaves within reach.

Classical Music Diary No. 7

There’s nothing more frustrating than when a piece of music has a clear shot at perfection but doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. 

Cécile Chaminade’s Flute Concertino in D major, Op. 107 (1902), is just such a piece. It’s very showoffy, with scales racing up and down and notes jumping to their octave in a split second. Although I suppose the point of a concerto (or even its diminutive) is to showcase the technical prowess of the soloist. But on top of that concedable reservation I have an unshakable one: At seven or eight minutes, it’s too long.

The piece is exciting, and it has wonderful melodic ideas. But after they’re developed they’re restated, like the head of a jazz tune, and in the process they overstay their welcome. There’s my old nemesis, Repetition. These ideas are strong enough that they don’t need repetition to legitimize them. Could some clever arranger out there perform an abridgement?