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Tag: The Lost Chord

Ravel’s Triumph Over Adversity

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. Or, as the French would have it, “Qui vivra verra.” He who lives shall see.

It’s healthy to be challenged sometimes, even if you’re a master like Maurice Ravel. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” for Ravel’s birthday, we’ll enjoy two of the composer’s harder-won works.

Beethoven once remarked, in regard to his string trios, that writing for three instruments is more difficult than writing for four, as in a string quartet. How much more difficult still it must have been for Ravel to compose his Sonata for Violin and Cello.

In 1920, Henri Prunière, editor of “La Revue musicale,” commissioned a number of prominent musicians to contribute works to the memory of Claude Debussy. Ravel’s participation amounted to a single movement for violin and cello. Later, during the summer of 1921, while on vacation in the Basque region (Ravel was of Basque descent), he decided to expand the piece into four movements. The portion dedicated to Debussy now serves as the work’s opener.

Ravel became totally immersed in the project, but the going was not at all easy. At one point, he complained, “This rascal of a duo makes me extremely ill.” By January of 1922, he was still grappling with the scherzo, which he finally tossed out and replaced, completing the work the following month.

In the end, he understood the significance of the piece in relation to his artistic development. Working from a limited palette of two stringed instruments had required him to focus on the essentials. Gone was the cushion of harmonic luxuriousness. The interplay of melody, rhythm, and counterpoint were of even greater importance.

These restrictions caused him to explore a leaner, more Classical sound, but the intensity of completing the assignment did not come without cost. So drained was he by the austere exercise that he produced only one other, minor work over the next two years.

As a younger composer, at the turn of the century, Ravel was eager to win the Prix de Rome. The prize, awarded to worthy young artists in several disciplines, would mean a year of subsidized study at Rome’s Villa Medici. It would also entitle Ravel to a five-year pension. Applicants were required to submit a fugue, as proof of their compositional skill, and then those candidates selected by the Paris Conservatory were requested to write a dramatic cantata on a text chosen by the judges.

Ravel was 26 when he came to compete for the prize, already with a number of impressive works in his portfolio, including the sublime “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” Even so, powerful factions at the conservatory were aligned against him. Three times he submitted music to the panel of judges, and three times he was denied. In exasperation, he decided to take off for year to regroup, but when he returned for a final attempt, he was informed he was now too old, despite the fact that he was still well shy of the cut-off age of 30.

The music Ravel composed for these applications is now almost totally forgotten. We’ll hear the last of these cantatas, “Alyssa,” written in 1903, based on an Irish legend, replete with sprites and fairies.

Conservatory politics may have robbed him of a chance to study in Rome, but Ravel would have the last laugh. His opponents couldn’t keep him from becoming one of France’s most beloved composers. I hope you’ll join me for “All’s Ravel That Ends Well,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

March 7, 2021
Aurora Borealis Classical Music Sounds North

All signs point north!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” keep looking up, with musical responses to the uncanny, natural phenomenon known as the Aurora Borealis.

Uuno Klami studied in Helsinki, with Erkki Melartin, then in Paris and Vienna. Following the premiere of his “Northern Lights” in 1948, some critics questioned whether the content of the piece lived up to the expectations engendered by its title. Klami remarked, “The northern lights can be much more than the superficial play of colors in the sky. They can be an expression of the infinite loneliness of the human spirit.” Personally, he thought it his best work.

Geirr Tveitt was born in Bergen, Edvard Grieg’s native city. Though he was very much influenced by folk music of the Norwegian countryside, he too acquired further polish abroad. He studied first in Leipzig and then in Paris, with Arthur Honegger, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Nadia Boulanger.

In 1970, a very great tragedy occurred, when a fire swept through Tveitt’s home, a farmhouse in Nordheimsund, destroying most of his unpublished manuscripts – 300 pieces, stored in wooden chests – fully 4/5ths of his compositional output. It also crippled his ability to compose. Tveitt succumbed to alcoholism and died a broken man, with little hope of being remembered, in 1981.

Happily, since then, a number of these “lost” works have been reconstructed. In the case of his Piano Concerto No. 4, subtitled “Aurora Borealis,” from 1947, the orchestral parts survived, along with a two-piano reduction and an archived broadcast recording.

The restored concerto falls into three movements: “The Northern Lights awaken above the autumn colors,” “Glittering in the winter heavens,” and “Fading away in the bright night of spring.”

I hope you’ll join me for an hour of radiant music, on “Aural Borealis,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 10, 2021
Viking Lore Sounds on “The Lost Chord”

Experience the lore of the lur!

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s a stoic start to the new year, with musical settings of the Icelandic Eddas.

Enjoy selections from “The Rheingold Curse,” after the “Volsunga Saga,” the earliest written sources of the ancient Germanic myths (including those of Sigurd, Loki, and Fafnir). We’ll hear them in imaginative, though scholarly-informed, realizations by Benjamin Bagby and the ensemble Sequentia.

Then we’ll turn to “The Creation of the World,” Part One of a bold, massive “Edda” oratorio by Icelandic composer Jón Leifs. Odin and his brothers defeat the giant Ymir, and from him fashion Earth, Sea, and Heavens, and soon after create the first man and woman from two trees. With its horn-helmeted, grunting choruses, laconic pounding, and austere poetry, this one will have you shouting for more mead.

It’s a new year of swan’s bone flutes, tuned rocks, and Nordic lurs (reconstructions of ancient Viking horns), on “Cold Comfort,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

January 3, 2021
Hoffnung Music Festival a Hilarious New Year

If a ball drops in Times Square, and no one’s around to see it, is it still a new year? Call it the final conundrum of 2020.

This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we laugh away a very rough year with highlights from the notorious and uproarious Hoffnung Music Festival concerts.

Gerard Hoffnung was a boy when his family arrived in London, refugees from Nazi Germany. In his new home, he cultivated the persona of an English gentleman, though one with a decidedly impish bent. He attained celebrity through his work as a cartoonist, a sparkling panelist, and a public speaker. He was lauded as a brilliant improviser with a dry wit and a masterly sense of timing. He also played the tuba well enough that he was able to tackle the Vaughan Williams concerto.

Following a successful April Fool’s concert in 1956, Hoffnung embarked on the enterprise which, alongside his cartooning, ensured a kind of immortality – the first of the Hoffnung Music Festival concerts. The concerts brought together representatives of England’s finest musical talent to lampoon what, especially at the time, might have been perceived as a rather stodgy art form.

There would be three Hoffnung concerts in all. Alas, the third was presented posthumously. Hoffnung collapsed at his home in 1959, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage three days later, at the age of only 34. An untimely finish for a character who seemed his entire life to be a brilliant, fully-developed, middle-aged man, always at the peak of his form.

I hope you’ll join me tonight as we celebrate Hoffnung’s whimsical legacy. We’ll hear Sir Malcolm Arnold’s “A Grand, Grand Overture,” for orchestra, organ, electric floor polisher, and three vacuum cleaners – the work was dedicated to President “Hoover” – and Franz Reizenstein’s “Concerto populare,” billed as “a piano concerto to end all piano concertos,” among others.

It’s a lighthearted playlist calculated to put a smile on your face and lend a boost to your spirits. He who laughs last laughs best. So “Have a Ball,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

December 27, 2020
Hanukkah Music Lost Chord Festival of Lights

Hanukkah begins at sunset. Kick off the Festival of Lights with a little musical sustenance, in this archived episode of “The Lost Chord,” originally broadcast last December.

The program begins with David Ludwig’s “Hanukkah Cantata.” Ludwig, who studied with Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, and Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute of Music, and John Corigliano at Juilliard, is the nephew of pianist Peter Serkin, the grandson of Rudolf Serkin, and the great-grandson of Adolf Busch. That’s quite a pedigree! The text of his cantata, compiled by Cantor Dan Sklar, is sung in English and Hebrew. The work falls into eight movements, wholly befitting for this eight-day celebration.

That’s followed by Ludwig Altman’s “Theme and Variations on ‘Ma’oz Tzur,’” the Hanukkah melody also known as “Rock of Ages.” Altman was born in what was once Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). He studied at the University of Breslau, and then at Berlin’s State Academy for Sacred Music. The rise of the National Socialist Party meant that he was restricted to employment in Jewish organizations.

In 1936, he emigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco, where he became organist and choral director at Congregation Emanu-El. For over three decades, he was also organist of the San Francisco Symphony. Altman’s variations on a Hanukkah theme are performed by another composer of note, Barbara Harbach, at the console.

The hour concludes with “A Klezmer Nutcracker” – with apologies to Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky – in a lively recording made by the Boston-based ensemble Shirim. Kazatsky ‘til you dropsky!

It’s a “sound” foundation for eight days of fried food, sugar, and cheese. Click the link for “Latke Tonic,” music of substance for Hanukkah.

https://www.wwfm.org/post/lost-chord-december-22-latke-tonic

Then tune in to “The Lost Chord” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST for more, including Ofer Ben-Amots’ Klezmer Concerto, on “Pieces of Eight.”

There’s oil to burn, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

December 10, 2020

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