Musings

It’s the season for the Singapore Youth Festival (SYF) Central Judging for Choirs for secondary schools again. Just the other day, I went to support my ex-choir at Singapore of the Arts (SOTA) School where the judging was held. Actually, the support was a nice way of masking the fact that I missed their singing despite all the heartaches and stress I went through while I was their teacher in-charge.

One of their two set pieces, The Snow by Elgar, touched many hearts. There was a time not too long ago that saw youth choirs performing technically challenging pieces which were mostly not easy on the ears. One often ended up appreciating the prowess of the singers and sophistication of the choral arrangement rather than the music itself. Hence, it was a refreshing change when The Snow was sung at the SYF. The other set piece, Essassa by Ko Matsushita, was probably one of the most difficult pieces for a youth choir to master as it was rated a 5 from a difficulty scale of 1-5. This composition is in 5 parts and here’s an audio recording of the choir performing it.

I was happy for the choir when they were given the award they deserved at the end of the day. Here’s an audio recording of The Snow they sang. (The sound quality would be better with good speakers or earphones.) Lyrics of the song below. Enjoy :)

The Snow

O snow, which sinks so light,

Brown earth is hid from sight,

O soul, be thou as white as snow.

O snow, which falls so slow,

Dear earth quite warm below;

O heart, so keep thy glow,

Beneath the snow.

O snow, in thy soft grave

Sad flowers the winter brave;

O heart, so soothe and save,

As does the snow.

The snow must melt, must go,

Fast, fast as water flow.

Not thus, my soul, O sow

Thy gifts to fade like snow.

O snow, thou art white no more,

Thy sparkling too, is o’er;

O soul, be as before,

Was bright the snow.

Then as the snow all pure,

O heart be, but endure,

Through all the years full sure,

Not as the snow.

(C. Alice Elgar)

I think many piano learners here would have gone the route of learning Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven sonatas at some point. The three are among the most widely known of ‘classical’-period music composers from the mid 1700s to early 1800s.

There are numerous other composers who lived around their time though, and also wrote marvelous music. It’s a pity that their compositions weren’t recorded as prolifically in the early days of audio recording. But with many of the lesser-known but no less skilled European orchestras and also budget recording labels getting into the act from the 1980s onwards, there’s been many relatively obscure works coming to the fore and finally seeing the light of day outside live performances in theatres.

I’ve been exploring many of these ‘contemporaries’ of Mozart by way of the emusic subscription service I’ve been on for a year now, and it’s been an incredible experience digging out the hundreds of piano concerto and symphonies composed by many others during the early 18th century but all got overshadowed over the years by output from the H., M. B. trio. Among some of my findings include:

Cramer, Johann Baptist (English) – Wrote some absolutely lovely Piano Concertos
Gyrowetz, Adalbert (Bohemian) – Symphonies
Gossec, François Joseph (Belgian) – Symphonies
Herschel, William (English) – Wrote Symphonies but also known for his work in astronomy LOL
Hoffmeister, Franz Anton (German) – Symphonies
Kraus, Joseph Martin (Bohemian) – Symphonies
Krommer, Franz (Moravian) – Clarinet and Oboe Concertos. Gigantic output that I’ve just barely scratched the surface of.
Kozeluch, Leopold (Czech) – Symphonies.
Mysliveček, Josef (Czech) – Symphonies. A close friend of Mozart and who provided some of his early inspiration to.
Pichl, Wenzel (Bohemian) – Symphonies
Pleyel, Ignace Joseph (French) – Symphonies. Famous during his time but whose works are rarely heard today.
Richter, Franz Xaver (German) – Symphonies
Ries, Ferdinand (German) – Piano Concertos and Symphonies. Friend, pupil and performer of Beethoven.
Rosetti, Antonio (Bohemian) – Symphonies
Stamitz, Karl Philipp (German) – Clarinet Concertos and Symphonies
Vanhal, Johann Baptist (Bohemian) – Symphonies
Wesley, Samuel (English) – Symphonies
Wranitzky, Pavel (Moravian) – Symphonies. Highly regarded by H., M. and B – and even their preferred conductor by Haydn and Beethoven for their new works.

Apparently, the brother of the more famous Wesley was himself a composer, and considered during his time as the English equivalent of Mozart.:)

I’ve blogged about wedding music last year, and in the pair of posts noted that one of my choices for Ling’s Processional was “I’ll Always Go Back to that Church”, better known as “Kip’s Lights”, from The English Patient by Gabriel Yared.

The original motion picture soundtrack on CD has a marvelous recording of this track. For those of us who don’t mind picking up an alternative recording of the same music, Naxos has just released a soundtracks CD of film music performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Carl Davis – and one of the tracks is an arrangement of the piano solo theme from The English Patient and “Kip’s Lights”. Easy way to pick up two very lovely pieces of music at a go.:)

The MP3 version of the track is available at Amazon here for those of us with US Credit Cards. Alternatively, you can pick up the track for free at eMusic as a trial subscriber, or just USD0.20 in my case as a current subscriber.

Either way, it’s well worth the acquisition.:)

There comes a point in time listening to the classics that you start being able to distinctly tell by listening who’s the person singing a particular role. Funnily, the two vocal ranges I have difficulty with singer identification are Alto and Tenor. Soprano and Bass is easy – I wonder why LOL.

In any case, there several Sopranos I enjoy listening to: there’s Kiri Te Kanawa, Kathleen Battle, and Eva Lind. By far though, the singer I most admire is Lucia Popp. Her voice isn’t expansive and at times almost seems a little ‘small’. But there’s an incredible elegance and passion evident in her voice, and of a very distinct timbre.

She’s especially well-known for handling lyric coloratura soprano repertoire. When she sings in operas of the comedic variety, there’s infectious fun in her voice. Of the recordings I have of her, everyone of them is a favorite: her part as the feisty Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro which I’ve blogged about here before, Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, and Rosalinde in Johann Strauus II’s comic opera Die Fledermaus.

Called “one of the most gifted, attractive and intelligent singers of her generation”, she sadly passed away from brain cancer in 1993 at the age of 54.

Of all the classical music there is out there that’s composed for solo instruments, I’m guessing that the piano got the largest heap. Haydn wrote 62 piano sonatas; Mozart wrote 18 (plus a huge number of other solo piano works), and Beethoven wrote 32. And there’s Chopin’s waltzes, etudes, and polonaises.

Funnily, I didn’t enjoy solo piano music very much. Certainly not when I was learning the piano – I dread those Clementi sonatas and I struggled with the Beethoven ones – and even when I started seriously listening to classical music, I stayed clear of piano works.

My first CDs of sonata music was a five disc set of Mozart’s piano sonatas performed by Hungarian pianist Jenő Jandó in 1996 who recorded a number of other piano music albums for the Naxos Records label. The music was enjoyable, but outside a couple of works that I’d played as a teenager, the music didn’t especially leave me with an impression, as great as Jandó‘s artistry was.

My favorite piano music today, strangely, lies elsewhere. I played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C as a Grade VIII exam piece, and all those hours of drilling and practice then left an indelible impression! So it’s ironical today that the piano works I listen to most often are Bach’s.

There’s an album of Bach’s music I recently picked up on eMusic, and this one’s an interesting one: The Goldberg Variations, a set of music comprising an aria followed by 30 variations which, interestingly, does not follow the melody line but the bass line instead:

The Variations isn’t actually all that unfamiliar even for persons who don’t listen to the Classics. It’s the piece that’s heard in the background in Hannibal Lector’s cell in Silence of the Lambs, and also in The English Patient. In fact, the lovely final credits music of the latter seems a variation of these Variations itself.

The new album of The Goldberg Variations I got is performed by Simone Dinnerstein in her breakout recording. What’s interesting is that Dinnerstein wasn’t a recording artiste but a Brooklyn piano teacher who raised her own $15,000 to make the recording. Her performance shot straight up to #1 on the Billboard classical music charts, and been compared to Glenn Gould’s 1955 album which listeners regarded as the standard to which all Goldberg Variations recordings are compared to.

This Myspace web site has embedded recordings of her two pieces from her albums: including the Aria from the Variations here. The first piece that plays off this web site though is the Gavotte from Bach’s French Suite No. 5 in G, recorded at a live Berlin concert – the Gavotte is my favorite piece of piano music, anywhere.:)

Alternatively, here’s a video of Dinnerstein sharing about how she learnt the piano, and about her family. The Aria from the Variations is also heard in the video.:)

Highly recommended.:)