Sergei Prokofiev – music for Alexander Nevsky, a film by Sergei Eisenstein

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Nothing shook the world of artistic creation like the advent of cinema. At once admired and feared since its inception, the new medium offered an unprecedented way to tell a story in moving images, mimic life and conjure up impossible visions, an imitation and a distortion of reality all at the same time. Unsurprisingly, film was used as an ideological weapon by the Century’s most polarizing dictators and their regimes, and cinema became for them the ideal vehicle for their propaganda. Let’s tell the masses what they need to hear, and let’s package it in a sensational spectacle, full of sweeping shots, self-aggrandizing closeups, gleaming metal machinery and sweaty athletic bodies. The greatest achievements in cinema sprung out of the necessity to captivate an audience, whether it was DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi documentaries, or Sergei Eisenstein’s paeans to the proletarian ideals.
While still in its infancy, cinema had tapped into the people’s need for escape, but it also firmly established itself as the most immediate and accessible form of art there was, making it the bridge between what Adorno would describe as high and low art. Intellectuals and more traditional critics resisted the moving images initially, but it soon became evident that cinema was here to stay. Progress, in all its guises, has this thing about scaring people only to fascinate them to addiction.

Progress also heralds and celebrates new milestones in technological achievements: speed, machines, the wonders of science and engineering. The first ever motion picture is a single shot of a train arriving in a station after all, a moving subject for a moving medium. And with this new, exhilarating potential, a whole industry burgeoned and flourished. And of course, it wasn’t long before cinema amalgamated other artistic fields to become the art form of the Century.

By the time technology allowed movies to include a soundtrack on the projection reels in the 1930s, music had already been playing a major role in silent pictures. Metropolis was usually accompanied by an orchestra playing live in the pit of the theater, and smaller projections usually had at least a piano reel playing along with the movies. But being able to include dialogue, sound effects and music as part of the entire film-making process meant that a film would become the sum of its interdisciplinary parts rather than a silent reel with live accompaniment. The emotional gain was unprecedented, and composers started thinking in very pragmatic terms about the visual aspect of music. The greatest films of that decade all had memorable scores, usually including songs that would become immortal classics such as Someday My Prince Will Come or Over the Rainbow. Think of Gone with the Wind and the main theme would come to mind, a sweeping sentimental melody evoking the scale of the movie’s ambitions.

Movies launched the careers of many composers in the West who were not visionary enough to be recognised on their own strength, but rather used a filmmaker’s vision as a springboard for their creations. Think of the special bond between Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone or Federico Fellini and Nino Rota: their masterpieces exist on a mutual plane. Take the visuals or the score away, and you feel how one informs the other, and vice versa. The filmmakers’ visual flair was matched by a distinctive musical language, one that was created for the specific purpose to illustrate moving images.

In Soviet Russia, however, directors and producers turned to their most iconic modern musicians, Shostakovich and Prokofiev. As films were commissioned by the Party for ideological reasons, so were the composers asked to contribute to the cause. Both Shostakovich and Prokofiev, already quite prolific on their own merit, took the challenge as a new form of collaborative project, a ballet of celluloid, an opera on silver halide. Of course, you can draw parallels between their scores and their symphonies, but the music becomes even more descriptive and focused now that it is matched by a specific set of movements, images, shots and sequences.
Prokofiev would set the standard for the classic ‘epic’ soundtrack we are all familiar with: evil lurking suggested by trombone glissandos, impending doom and bloodshed marked by hypnotic ostinatos, pathos and mourning led by string legatos. The battle scene in Alexander Nevsky is still the blueprint for all big-budget battle scenes, and neither the camera work nor the evocative power of the score have aged a single day since their release in 1938.
In fact, I would define most of the modern-day movie composers as post-Prokofiev: it’s impossible to watch any Spielberg or Lucas film and not hear echoes of the 5th Symphony in John Williams’s music. Hans Zimmer, another brilliant illustrator, is hugely indebted to Prokofiev for his use of texture and instruments in setting the mood of a scene (think of the climactic sequence of Inception or the brooding overtones of Nolan’s Batman movies and you can trace their genealogy to Prokofiev’s work for Eisenstein).

Michael Giacchino has been receiving the praise that he justly deserves. His contribution to the wonderful world of Pixar is exquisite, a savvy mix of pastiche and original wit, and his forays into mainstream Hollywood projects have put him on the map of the important composers of our generation. But his real masterpiece is of course the 100 hour-long symphony he composed for LOST over its 6 season course. In his New Yorker piece, Alex Ross demonstrates the ingeniousness displayed by Michael Giacchino in his choice of instruments and sonic palette, the meticulous craft behind the characters’ leitmotifs, and his comprehensive view of the Island’s mystery. In the music he wrote for LOST, you can of course find the elements put forth by Prokofiev, but the real inspiration is, I think, Shostakovich: the harp never sounded spookier than in his 11th Symphony, muted trumpets never so pungent and manic, and his sentimental interludes hardly carried any saccharine overload. As far as made-for-TV soundtracks are concerned, LOST is as Russian as it gets.
Music of epic proportions.

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This concludes the Russian Cycle. The post-rock lover’s guide will hibernate until the next year. Time to get new perspectives, and start working on more amberhaze-related material. Thank you for reading.

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Texture is everything. You can create astounding works of art just by carefully arranging sounds and focusing your sonic palette on a series of instrumental combinations that will captivate the listener and create a self-contained experience. Composers are aware of the primordial power of sound and texture alone, and an album like Ben Frost’s By the Throat is a brilliant example of this idea. Not to say that music (or melody) is absent, far from it. But the music hits you on a visceral level precisely because it plays on our perception of time and space through a remarkable economy of means. There is not a moment wasted in an album like By The Throat, not a superfluous sound, and it commands our full, undivided attention. An enriching, if harrowing, experience.

Shostakovich’s string quartets work in a similar way. The repertoire he created for the ubiquitous ‘violin/violin/viola/cello’ formation is one of the most exhaustive, in scope and breadth, for this ensemble. The format was popularized by Haydn, who wrote over 60 pieces for it, and was later refined by Mozart’s daring “dissonance” series of quartets. But it is through Beethoven’s and Shostakovich’s string quartet cycles that you are able to fully realize the potential that chamber music possesses.

Like Beethoven, Shostakovich’s later works are intimate affairs. And like Beethoven, the Russian composer used the string quartet format as a laboratory for experimentation on sound and texture. Listen to Beethoven’s quartets n.15 and 16 and you have pieces that are well ahead of their time, in form, structure and tonal logic. They are complex works, reflections on mortality and passing, and can be heard as Beethoven’s musical testament. Similarly, Shostakovich’s last works are the summative representations of a composer coming to terms with his failing body, a composer who still wants to leave us with some of his best work.
Of course, it would be hard to single out Shostakovich’s best work. Is it one of his 15 symphonies or one of his 15 string quartets? A concerto, or one of his movie scores? Whatever it is, I think the dichotomy between the big scale works and the intimate pieces is similar to a musician releasing solo work in contrast with full band albums. You come to those works with different expectations, but enjoy similar, if not more satisfying, rewards.

The string quartets really represent Shostakovich’s later period, as most of them were composed between the 1950s and 1973. As his health was gradually failing, the pieces become gradually darker, even though they do retain his penchant for sarcasm and inquisitiveness. If you listen closely, you will find references to his symphonies throughout, and the trademark 4-tone DSCH motif (D-Eb-C-B) permeates his compositions as a sort of existential question: what have I been here for? What am I going to leave behind?

As he was still looking for this unanswered question, Shostakovich created some of the most haunting pages of the modern repertoire. The later quartets are mirrors to our own insecurities and doubts, but also reaffirm our faith in the beauty of the human spirit. Music has rarely been so focused and essential as a vessel to our most profound hopes and fears. This is Shostakovich’s legacy, and the fact that he could say so much with only four sounds is pure magic.

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String quartet n.8 is one of Shostakovich’s most popular chamber works. Although it was composed 15 years before his death, it is now seen as an early testament. The composer acknowledged his mortality throughout the piece, with the DSCH motif opening and closing the quartet and other quotes and references to his earlier works. It was dedicated to all the victims of Fascism and War, though, naturally, one could hear a more introspective side to the quartet and guess Shostakovich’s own dissatisfaction with the Communist regime…

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String quartet n.14 is one of the very last works composed by Shostakovich. It is usually paired with String quartet n.15 on records and live performances, and the pair works beautifully: the inquisitiveness of the former is the perfect balance to the elegiac and sombre overtones of Shostakovich’s final quartet.
I remember seeing the Borodin Quartet in 1997 play both pieces in Lyon, in a completely dark concert hall, except for a row of votive candles on stage. There was nothing to distract you from the music, and for a brief evening, life felt much deeper, in a way that can’t easily be put into words. Experiences like these are few and far between.

[Custom clearance being what it is, there won't be any sample this week either... but you'll have two fabulous versions in the video section below. Fingers crossed for next week, or the week after...]

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I don’t have particularly bad memories of my teenage years. Sure, I was awkward, clueless and hopelessly idealistic, but I can’t look back and say ‘wow, I really hated the first half of the 90s’. In fact, I was a lot less cynical and blase, and if anything, a lot less self-conscious than the person I am now. Which is why I still like to listen to Rachmaninoff.

As a composer, Rachmaninoff started out as a child of his time and ended up being completely anachronistic by the time he reached his maturity. While the turn of the Century announced new ideas in tonality and harmony, Rachmaninoff clearly remained anchored in the late-Romantic tradition, which led many critics and theorists of the time to dismiss him as a footnote to Tchaikovsky’s fin de siecle bombast. But while the allegation could hold on a superficial level, there is much more to Rachmaninoff’s music than this simplistic assumption.

I used to ask my students to give me a definition of what they thought was Romantic music, which would – more often than not – lead to a list of the top 10 cliches most commonly associated with that word: candlelight dinner, roses, Kenny G and Clayderman, you get the idea…
I can’t honestly blame them, because that was the unfortunate fate that befell the genre after its great composers died. Interest had shifted towards modernity, abstraction and experimentation, and, to a certain extent, clinging onto the old tropes of torturous soul-searching and exacerbated emotions was seen as reactionary. Good music, as Adorno would have it, was the stuff of intellectual challenges and higher-order thinking, the true art form through which one attains true consciousness. The rest, the easy stuff, was just bad, and untrue.
But that’s missing an obvious truth about Rachmaninoff. Sure, there is a strong Romantic undercurrent, a certain propensity to the facile, but on a close hearing, his piano concertos owe as much to Bach and Beethoven as they do to Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff was a preternaturally gifted pianist, and he had absorbed a variety of styles, including the art of counterpoint and a Classical sense of balance and structure. Listen to the first movements of both concertos and you can clearly distinguish these elements: phrases are used and reintroduced with variations, overturned according to the harmonic principles dictated by the Baroque composers. The typically lyrical adagios of the second movements show a certain romantic effusiveness, but they still remain self-contained around a central theme. And the third movements synthesize this amalgamation with a clarity few other Romantic composers had.

Rachmaninoff did not possess that self-consciousness that his contemporaries had. He did not scorn melody or feelings just because they were too obvious or literal. His music was devoid of sarcasm or cynicism. He still believed in the beauty of form and the universality of the musical language. After his exile from Russia in 1917, he composed less and less and focused instead on his career as a performer. But the two piano concertos eventually became the staples of any reputable pianist and world-class orchestra.

I guess we all want to feel like teenagers sometimes.

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Piano concerto n.2 is probably my favourite, for its unabashed late-romanticism, and its total lack of irony and self-consciousness. From the opening block chords to the thunderous cadenza to the obviously overused second movement, the effusiveness level is cranked up to 11 here…
And yet, it all works, and if you listen closely it owes a lot more to Baroque contrapuntal technique and Classical balance than its Romantic sheen would let us believe. Great pianists possess a clarity of thought which lets us appreciate Rachmaninoff’s intention (as you would hear from one of his own recordings) that are completely lost among the throngs of late-romantic wannabes and emo pianists (Matt Bellamy, I’m looking at you).

The version below was recorded by Vladimir Ashkenazy under the direction of Andre Previn, and it is one of the absolute best, in sound, clarity and technical prowess.

1st movement

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2nd movement

(also known as the all by myself movement…)

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3rd movement

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Piano concerto n.3 is a bit of a pianist’s calling card, and Rachmaninoff clearly intended it so. The stories behind it are the stuff of musical lore, and Rachmaninoff even acknowledged that the great Horowitz could play it better than he ever would. But again, technical difficulties aside, the concerto works best as a synthesis of the past 300 years of Western music, while remaining deeply Russian at heart.

Horowitz made what most musicologists consider the definitive recording, once in 1930 and another time in 1941. A consummate late-romantic, he truly championed Rachmaninoff’s music, making it one of the staples of his repertoire after the composer’s death in 1943.
Martha Argerich channels the same effortlessness and superhuman ability to see past the keyboard’s obstacles in order to reach the essence of the music. Her live version with Riccardo Chailly is formidable.

1st movement

(also known as the difficult one)

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2nd movement

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3rd movement

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[Still waiting to be reunited with my CD collection! So this episode is not exactly centered on a particular work, but rather on Prokofiev himself. There are a few suggestions below, of course.]

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My love affair with Prokofiev started by chance, and it happened after years of not really listening to a lot Classical music. I caught a movement of his first piano concerto on the radio and I was immediately won over by the newness of his language, the way the melody could sound so fresh and exciting, going to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, while still being strongly anchored in a clear tonal system. That moment literally opened up a whole new perspective on musical ideas, in a way very few musical works have ever since.

Years of listening to as much Prokofiev as I could showed me that that single concerto was no fluke. When you become really familiar with a particular band’s style, you develop a bond with the records, the sound of the guitars, the particular inflections of certain riffs and hooks. Godspeed just sounds like Godspeed, 65 Days of Static just sounds like 65 Days of Static, and so on…You could try to put this intimate knowledge into words, but you’d be missing the easiest description: their music speaks for itself.

Prokofiev flirted with atonality as a student at the turn of the Century, but never really embraced it. He did however create a language that is extremely articulate and nuanced. He understood how texture can suggest sarcasm and irony to a particular scene in a way few composers did. Listen to the more lighthearted passages in Romeo and Juliet or his Love for Three Oranges: comedy is rarely so obvious in music.

As most composers of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Prokofiev was deeply affected by the atrocities of his time. His Fifth Symphony was hailed as the unofficial soundtrack to the end of World War II, as it celebrated the hard-fought victory of the Red Army against the Germans on the Russian Front, which would eventually lead to Hitler’s downfall in the East. Listen to the first movement (which you can download here) and it isn’t hard to imagine the state Prokofiev was in. A victory of this magnitude doesn’t come for free, and the music mourns the fallen as much as it celebrates their courage.

Much like his friend Shostakovitch, Prokofiev was a witness of the Twentieth Century, through its achievements, its victories but also its struggles and its losses. Both composers enjoyed relative freedom from the Communist Party doctrines on cultural productions, while remaining attached to their native land. They enjoyed tremendous success in the West, but in their hearts, they remained Russian to the end.

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953. In a rigid regime like the one he helped creating, the death of the leader was an unprecedented national event, followed by days of mourning. The country literally stopped, and Moscow was at a standstill during the whole week leading up to his funeral. Deaths like these only happen a few times in a Century.
Oddly enough, Prokofiev died the same day, in the same city.

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Among Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, I find his first one to be the most interesting, in a way. It clearly sounds like the product of a young mind, brash, bold and tentative at the same time. While not the most popular of his works, there are moments of ecstatic beauty in this relatively short concerto. It is a technically demanding piece, which displays Prokofiev’s own pianistic skills, but even as a student showpiece, it already contains the main elements of his unique musical language.
This live version by Martha Argerich is formidable, as she always is.

1st movement

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2nd movement

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3rd movement

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Peter and the Wolf is one of the mainstays of music composed for children, and it’s easy to see why. Prokofiev thoroughly enjoyed the process and the objective of this commission piece, as he took only four days to complete the story and score.
As an introduction to the different voices and textures of an orchestra, Peter and the Wolf brilliantly puts the various sounds into a coherent narrative whole, which emphasizes the dramatic connotation we put on some instruments.
Let’s face it: could Darth Vader be represented by anything other than trombones and tubas?

The stop-motion Oscar winning version by Suzie Templeton takes some liberties with the original story, but she manages to recreate the fears of a child, in a way most child-friendly programs avoid. Genuine, cathartic fear, like a story by the Brothers Grimm. My children love it, and are both rightly elated and scared by it, as it should be.

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[apologies for the lack of excerpt to download this week...I should be reunited with my CD collection once I reach Toronto!]

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I never really got into the Smiths. Maybe it was a variety of factors, but even when I started reading about how influential they had been to a whole lot of bands I was really into growing up, I still somehow failed to see the reason behind the reverence. Things would have been different, I’m sure, if I had been just a few years older and able to discover them right from the start. Or maybe, they would still have sounded just too…twee, perhaps? But being among a group of friends who were worshipping Morrissey in High School and College meant that I had to keep some thoughts for myself…

Until Southpaw Grammar. Now, there was something that Morrissey was doing right! Even though some of his ardent supporters were criticizing the album for being too heavy, textured, and prog (and God knows you don’t want to be labelled prog in certain indie circles…), his music was leading toward a new direction. And there was that formidably ominous opener, The teachers are afraid of the pupils, with its hypnotic orchestral sample backed by a simple tambourine loop. A simple motif, 4 notes in a rising/falling pattern, that keeps repeating throughout the song for over 11 minutes.

I wondered where that sample might have come from for the whole summer of ‘95. A few weeks later I stumbled upon Shostakovitch’s fifth.
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Artists often produce contrasting works about their native countries. Their ambiguities, their questionings and criticisms are met with some instinctual attachment to the land of their ancestors, the land they still love in spite of what History may have to say. They are no different from the other citizens, they just articulate the dichotomy more eloquently perhaps. And Shostakovitch’s entire body of work can be seen as a musical documentary on Soviet Russia, the rise and fall of Stalinism, and a tentative, timid opening to the West. He kept working on those themes throughout his life (another entry mentions this, if you missed it), but the Fifth Symphony marks a pivotal moment in his career.

After a few daring pieces in the early 1930s, Party members and dignitaries expressed their concern about Shostakovitch’s controversial musical language. This was a time of increased paranoia, cultural realignment, and state-sponsored purges. Artists, of course, were not spared, and Shostakovitch himself had been warned: he had to come up with something that would please the Party.
When the Fifth came out in 1937, it was an immediate critical and popular success. And yet, the opening sequence is hardly an optimistic or bombastic introduction in the vein of military marches, far from it. The motif that Morrissey sampled lies ambiguously between major and minor, an unresolved musical phrase that leaves the listener in a state of unease.
Perhaps the most obviously Soviet part of the symphony is its second movement. It is also its shortest act, and it is punctuated by a certain pungent irony, something that was shared by Prokofiev as well in most of his works. Hardly what you would call program music, or tone poem in dedication to the greatness of Stalin. But the leaders were happy with it.

What about the popular acclaim? The greatness of Shostakovitch lies in the fact that he offers no easy answers in his music: his ambiguity reflects the listener’s psyche, and what was hailed as one of the great musical works of Communist culture by some was also considered as a subtle criticism of Stalinism and its excesses by others. Listen to the mournful third movement and you might see it this way too. What are we celebrating here? Aren’t we rather mourning the countless victims of Stalin’s paranoia instead?

Perhaps the key to the success of Shostakovitch’s Fifth lies also in its accessibility. The melodic passages are clear and well-defined, the orchestration is powerful without being bombastic, and the narrative keeps going forward. Shostakovitch would eventually become more ambitious in his symphonic scope in the next two decades, but the blueprint is right here. A musical universe that is rich and complex, multifaceted and profound.

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The Fifth is arguably one of Shostakovitch’s most popular works. I grew up listening to the Bernstein version highlighted by the NPR clip, which had been approved by the composer himself. Interest in the Rusian composer has not waned over the years, and he is featured among every important conductor’s list of recordings. Sir Georg Solti and Yevgeny Mravinsky both released essential versions of most (if not all) his symphonies,
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The young LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel is going from strength to strength, and in the following videos you can easily see why. This was recorded in Italy with the Isreal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006, when he was only 25.

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I’ve been wanting to resume the series for a while now, but life has this unknowable knack for getting in the way, and while I’ve been trying to work on new music as well, there simply didn’t seem to be time to devote to this project.
Now, as I transition from one continent to the next, and while what remains of my studio is slowly being shipped to Toronto, I take advantage of this break to start a new weekly program. No podcast for now, because, of course, my microphone is in the middle of the Atlantic as I’m writing this… but you’ll still find an excerpt to download, and some youtube clips to watch the whole piece. It’s quite amazing what you can find now if you search for a bit.

I’m starting with this Russian cycle for a few reasons. The composers that I’ve chosen represent a clear transition from one period to the next, as they take elements of the XIXth Century Romantics and inject a new dimension of modernity into their music. And as much as the early 1800s belonged to the Germans, the Russians really led music into the XXth Century.

I’ve also been giving some thought about the nationality of music. Where is music really from? Can you say that Mogwai is essentially Scottish, and Mono unmistakably Japanese? Music speaks of origins, currents are formed and languages are honed and refined, and few composers managed to express their attachment to their native land as comprehensively as the late 1800s Russians did. And first in line was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
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Five young Russian composers came together in the early 1860s in Saint Petersburg. They were not professional musicians by trade, in fact, all of them still had day jobs and they retained them well into their established musical careers. But they bonded over a certain dissatisfaction with Western music and its emulation amongst the Elites of the Russian conservatories. They wanted their music to feel more genuine, to exude national feelings, to evoke Eastern landscapes rather than the imitation of a Western court.
Chief among them was Balakirev, but the youngest of the lot would eventually make one of the Russian Nationalists’ most enduring pieces.

Sheherazade is Rimsky-Korsakov’s best known work, and it displays all the aesthetic elements brought forward by The Five: use of oriental modes, increased presence of fourth and fifth intervals that eschew the clear distinction between major and minor, inclusion of folk and peasant tunes, and a strong, visual, musical language. Sheherazade is, for lack of better words, an Epic piece of symphonic music, a Fantasy based on middle Eastern legends and themes, the soundtrack to a film that we can all conjure up in the confines of our mind.

Not that Rimsky-Korsakov did away with every stylistic concept developed in Western music. Roughly speaking, Sheherazade is a typical Romantic symphony: 4 movements strongly articulated around 3 main themes, a slow and thunderous first and second movements, a lyrical and more playful third movement, and a majestic conclusion afterward.
However, the main symphonic structure is there to serve a purpose, a program. Each movement is a suggested reading from the 1001 nights: The voyages of Sindbad, the story of the Kalendar Prince, the story of a young Prince and a young Princess, and a final scene in Baghdad containing all the previous characters. And as such, the tonal color displayed by the orchestra ranges from the menacing to the suave, the sensual to the terrifying.

There are many melodic passages throughout the four movements which can be seen as a succession of solo instances, fleeting images reminiscent of the Orient and of forgotten lands. And Sheherazade, represented by a beautifully sensual violin motif, ties all the episodes together, weaving in and out of the musical narrative until the conclusion of her own story. After all, stories are the only thing keeping her alive, for fear of upsetting the Sultan and meeting the same tragic fate as all his previous wives.
The Sultan finally concedes to sparing her life after hearing her stories every evening for 1001 nights, and the finale of the fourth movement couldn’t have expressed this better: both musical themes meet and end the piece on a quiet, peaceful, major chord.

It’s easy to see how a work like this paved the ground for the next generation of musicians: Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich and Prokofiev all professed a huge debt to Rimsky-Korsakov and his use of texture and harmony, for integrating folk tunes and odd modal schemes into a musical grammar that was becoming too stifling for innovation.
But his was an innovation that never sacrificed melody, feelings, or accessibility. Through his brand of Russian nationalism, Rimsky-Korsakov simply combined the best of both Worlds.

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Sheherazade has remained a consistently popular work, and the list of good recordings is quite exhaustive. I grew up listening to the Karajan version, and you can sample its first movement in this post (follow the link at the top). Some critics dislike the slightly slower tempo and the overarching solemn tone of the orchestra, but I have a hard time getting used to a more sprightly version! Besides, there is something genuinely terrifying about a Sultan who will execute you if you can’t manage to tell him a good story every night.
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The Dutch conductor Arthur Arnold has a version with the Moscow Philharmonic on Youtube. The cuts between videos don’t correspond to the separation between movements, and it hampers the listening, but it’s always a joy to watch an orchestra working its magic. Enjoy:

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It’s the end of the year. For some it’s the end of the decade, though everyone knows that the decade will only end next year… either way, everywhere you turn someone is writing a top 3/5/10/100 somewhere.

So that set me thinking. If I were to pick my 3 favourite piano pieces, which would they be? I’m perfectly aware that those 3 choices would change tomorrow, next week, or even later, but I’ve been giving this top 3 some thinking, and for the time being, I’ll stick to it. So in the next couple of episodes, this is what I’ll share, rather than a more obvious tie to a postrock theme or feature. Of course, you may find affinities of your own if you listen closely…
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There was a time when I started getting bored with classical music. I suppose you could have put this on the account of a teenage crisis, a reaction against the music my parents would mostly listen to at the time, or the fact that I wasn’t entirely thrilled about my piano lessons… So I swapped the piano for a Roland synth and a Stratocaster, dropped out of the music school I was attending, and got into MTV’s alternative nation and 120 minutes.
And postrock, once that term came about.

And that was great. By myself and with friends, I learnt a lot more about music theory and harmony over those few years than in the laborious decade that had preceded. There’s nothing like the automatic chord predictor function on a keyboard to let you understand how a song works, and finding it out on your own makes you realise that music is just another language that you are slowly mastering.

That’s when I started missing classical music again…

Music can be like close relationships. You fall in love, sometimes you fall out, sometimes you make up and when that works out you understand why you fell in love in the first place. Debussy made me fall in love with classical music again.
In my senior year of high school I wanted to resume my piano lessons, and besides the obvious romantic staples of Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, Debussy opened a world of possibilities I wasn’t aware of. His unusual harmonies and chord patterns belonged to a whole different universe from the classical music I had been used to until then, and his sense of melody seemed both instinctual and incredibly foreign.
You can’t really beat the piano for versatility and range, but with Debussy the instrument suddenly sounded like bells or windchimes, thanks to his ingenious use of the pedals and harmonics.

Like the Impressionist painters he was often linked with, Debussy was an artist of transition, a modernist with late-romantic ideals. Tone and colour are fundamental in his work, whether solo piano Etudes or fully orchestral pieces. Technique is never an end but a means to achieve this ethereal quality, the twilight skies of a Monet painting. And the Preludes should be seen as a series of musical polaroids, sudden sketches where the subjects are left incomplete rather than fully fleshed out. The score is just an outline. The rest is our own interpretation.
That seemed like a perfect match for me, as a musician and as a student. I could totally relate to Debussy’s soundscapes and artistic vision, and I still believe that his music achieves the delicate act of balancing familiarity with experimentation.

There was only one problem, and I found out about it too late. I wasn’t good enough anymore to really play Debussy properly. But that’s another story…

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Many pianists have recorded Debussy’s Preludes and Etudes. Claudio Arrau gives a refined and aristocratic reading of those pieces, and Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s version is bold and exuberant, but the benchmark is Still Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s recordings.
The elusive Italian pianist was famous for his exacting sound and attention to detail, and with Debussy he was able to commit to this uncanny precision to the fullest. The tone of his piano is surprisingly rich and varied, as clear and metallic as it can sound distant and wooden. The control and restraint that he displays are remarkable, light years away from the more polarising and egotistical stars of the lid of our generation…
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Unfortunately, the video cannot be embedded by request from the uploader.

You can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrVyQhUM5C4

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It’s the end of the year. For some it’s the end of the decade, though everyone knows that the decade will only end next year… either way, everywhere you turn someone is writing a top 3/5/10/100 somewhere.

So that set me thinking. If I were to pick my 3 favourite piano pieces, which would they be? I’m perfectly aware that those 3 choices would change tomorrow, next week, or even later, but I’ve been giving this top 3 some thinking, and for the time being, I’ll stick to it. So in the next couple of episodes, this is what I’ll share, rather than a more obvious tie to a postrock theme or feature. Of course, you may find affinities of your own if you listen closely…
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More than any other composer, I think I would associate growing up and learning about music with Mozart. I used to be obsessed with my father’s LP collection, and to me, Mozart is the sound of a Friday evening before bed, the needle gently touching the grooves, my parents and I tucked under a plaid blanket on the living room couch.

When CDs made their appearance in the mid-80’s my dad started buying as much Mozart as he could lay his hands on, and at the time, you couldn’t get more technologically advanced than that: those were the first recordings that had been engineered with the CD format in mind, maximising the 70-plus minutes recording time, which meant that you could now have 3 concerti on the same disc!
I remember one of them: a very old man, almost cartoon-like in the way he smiled and in his penchant for extravagant bowties, playing concerto n.23 and piano sonata K.333. The whole CD just sounded so easy and effortless, the melody sounding as though it had just been thought of. The very old man also happened to be Vladimir Horowitz, the greatest pianist of the XXth Century, and that was one of his final recordings. No wonder it sounded like a little miracle.

As I was growing up, I started to think that Mozart was too simple and almost too easy on the ear, too “classical”. It wasn’t as emotional as romantic music, or as radical as early XXth Century, and to use a contemporary comparison, it all seemed too “pop music” to retain any particular interest. Mozart was for kids.

Except that I couldn’t have been further from the truth. It takes real genius to make the piano sound so obvious and profound at the same time, and it takes more maturity than you would think to be able to extract all the nuances that Mozart had intended. As a composer, Mozart will stay with you all your life, and I suppose that’s why Horowitz had decided to go back to him for one of his last studio performances. And maybe this is the ultimate reward: you only get to play like a child after a lifetime of experience. The knowledge that your time is up, that everything is behind you now, and that you still have time for one more performance, one more take: how could it not be Mozart?

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first movement

The recording was filmed, and the documentary shows what goes on in the studio for a classical recording session. The way Horowitz’s hands dance on the keyboard is slightly unreal: he is well in his 80s, but the music has never sounded so youthful. The whole orchestra watches and plays in a mix of reverence, admiration and fear…

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second movement

You can hear Beethoven and Schubert here. In fact, you can hear Romantic music, and to go back to an earlier post, this piece bears a certain affinity with some of Mono’s compositions too. The theme is operatic in tone, the solo is overtly emotional without being bombastic, and the use of dissonances and key changes adds complexity to its natural sadness. I can’t see how it cannot be in my top 3.

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third movement

In typical fashion, things end lightly in Mozart’s piano concerti, and here we bid farewell in the most pleasant way. It’s such a pleasure to watch Horowitz play, listen to the orchestra and interact with the players. There is so much spirit and grace in his performance. If I knew I could age like this, I wouldn’t mind being a grumpy old man when the time comes.

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It’s the end of the year. For some it’s the end of the decade, though everyone knows that the decade will only end next year… either way, everywhere you turn someone is writing a top 3/5/10/100 somewhere.

So that set me thinking. If I were to pick my 3 favourite piano pieces, which would they be? I’m perfectly aware that those 3 choices would change tomorrow, next week, or even later, but I’ve been giving this top 3 some thinking, and for the time being, I’ll stick to it. So in the next couple of episodes, this is what I’ll share, rather than a more obvious tie to a postrock theme or feature. Of course, you may find affinities of your own if you listen closely…
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It seems only natural that I should include Johann Sebastian Bach here. The hard part is knowing which piece to include. Am I going for the Well tempered Clavier, or the art of the fugue?
Fine, I’ll go for the Goldberg Variations instead.

Baroque music often puts people off by its unnecessary intricacy and overarching structural complexity. Baroque composers took music theory apart and experimented on each and every chord known at the time, and beyond. While it is a staggering work of genius, it is not always touching, or soulful. Not with Bach though, and especially not with the Goldberg Variations.

The main theme, or Aria, is one of the purest pieces of music ever composed, a self-contained miniature that harbors the essence of what music could, and should, be. What happens after that is a series of 30 variations, of varying length and difficulty, some in major and some in minor keys and transpositions, some fugal and some contrapuntal, until we reach home again, and the aria is played once more, as a recapitulation, and a sendoff.
It’s hard to describe the effect that the reprise has on the listener: the sense of a journey completed, the access to a higher level of consciousness, the tangibility of time as you appreciate what it took to close the parenthesis… but I think that Bach really works best as a sort of spiritual experience. And I think I’m a good candidate for this: as a convinced agnostic, I find the Goldberg Variations the strongest case for the Divine, an intelligent and benevolent Design that knows what he/she/it is doing.

Much has been commented on the perfection on the Goldberg Variations in terms of its mathematical and musical balance. Variations are ordered in such a way that cycles and intervals recur, and the inner structure only becomes more apparent the more you listen to it. If one were to think of music as the purest form of art, with no beginning and no end, then look no further than the Goldberg Variations.

It’s philosophy without words, truth without distortion.

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Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Bach without mentioning Glenn Gould. The Canadian pianist was perhaps the most influential artist to record and update Bach to suit modern-day taste. His choice of the piano instead of the harpsichord is fundamental in the way we perceive his music nowadays, and his attention to details in the studio paved the way for many technical innovations in the field of recording.

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It’s fascinating to see how Gould’s mind works when he plays, and his humming is part and parcel of the experience, like Thelonious Monk. In Bach, Gould found an intellectual challenge, a stimulating conversation with his many selves (you do have to be slightly schizophrenic to play Bach well, I believe) and a world without end. It only seems logical that Carl Sagan chose his version of the Well Tempered Clavier to send into space on the Voyager Golden record.

To this day, it has become the furthest man-made object in the universe.

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Note: the version on the mp3 is by Murray Perahia, recorded for Sony. Not to take anything away from Glenn Gould, but I have come to prefer this more recent take. You decide.

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“there is a great man living in this country – a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self and to learn. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives”
Arnold Schoenberg

“Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair”
Charles Ives

This would sum up quite accurately how Charles Ives saw his position as a composer. He never thought he could have made a true living out of it, and did not want his family to “starve on his dissonances”. And at the same time, he never wanted to compromise his art for the sake of conforming to the standards of his time.

As a result, he saw music as his true passion, a pastime really close to his heart and mind, a luxury that he could afford, as a very wealthy insurance businessman. And it’s only when you are free from all the other considerations that affect you as a composer (having to pay the bills, composing and performing music hoping that others “will get it”, getting a record deal with a major label) that you can really achieve something great. Something uniquely yours. Something that may also take a while to be understood.

Ives’s music was largely ignored for about 40 years, until the first wave of famous movie and radio composers started championing his works and praising his groundbreaking views on the nascent American music scene. The great Leonard Bernstein was an ardent supporter of Ives, and premiered some of his most important pieces and symphonies, almost 50 years after they had been composed. “The impossibilities of today are the possibilities of tomorrow”, Ives wrote, and when you listen to “the unanswered question” you definitely have a glimpse into the next century, right there in just over six minutes.

“The unanswered question” is one of the 2 metaphysical pieces that Ives wrote in 1906, the other being “Central Park in the dark”. Both compositions showcase some of Ives’s trademarks: polytonalities, polyrhythms, ingenious instrument placements in the sound spectrum, and an eerie, uncanny use of melody as a philosophical medium.
“The unanswered question” is over a hundred years old, but it hardly seems so. The suspended string section would fit in any post-apocalyptic record made this decade, in a way reminiscent of the latest Russian Circles album or even Godspeed you! Black Emperor. The beauty of it is that it never attempts at answering the question, and we can all fill in the blanks with our own existential doubts, fears, hopes and dreams. The insistent trumpet and woodwind motives bring the mystery to an unresolved close, and the piece ends as it started, on a single glacial, perfect major chord.

There is nothing else that sounds like Charles Ives’s music, or at the very least, his place in American Twentieth Century music is unique: not as popular as the first great composers like Gershwin or Ellington, or even Copland, but completely ahead of his time like Bartok. And like Bartok, his music works as a kaleidoscope of places and people. “Central park in the Dark” contains samples of famous ragtime songs and other popular showtunes, and you can hear marching bands in many of his symphonies and orchestral works. This was due partly to an experience he had as a child, when he heard two bands playing different songs at the same time on a field, and the conflagration of sounds and melodies stuck with him throughout his career as an “amateur” composer.

Ives was a true independent artist, in the purest sense of the word. Unaffected by norms, fashions or fads, he worked in the margins of popular music, perfecting an idiom that would take years to be revealed, understood and appreciated for what it would offer us.
As a musician, I couldn’t agree with his views more. I am lucky to have a job that pays the bills more than adequately, and I don’t think I’d like to put my music in a difficult position by compromising my vision and making things that only satisfy a general audience. I want to keep making music that I feel proud of, whether or not it finds commercial success – something that is too often taken as a yardstick of self-validation.

Now, here is a question I already have the answer for…

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This live performance was filmed at La Scala in Milan. The trumpet player is sitting in a box way up at the back of the theater, and the woodwind section is also separated from the strings. Other versions may place the instruments differently, something which Ives had thoroughly experimented with while conducting his own compositions.
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