Hey, we've got a bit of music this week! (Glass a tiny bit full or mostly empty? You be the judge)

by Ken

Now I ask you, is that something, or what?

Maybe I should explain just a little. I've been playing records lately -- well, CDs, to be exact, but to me they're records too. This is pretty unusual in itself, and I thought I might want to talk about it, but not now. I thought I might want to talk about the unexpected reasons and ways I've been listening, but I don't want to talk about that either right now. However, I did want to share this bit of music that, in the course of this listening, practically knocked me off my feet. So that's what I'm going to do: share it. Or rather that's what I've just done, so maybe we should all just get on with our lives.

Of course it might be objected that "sharing" is maybe a tad misleading, inasmuch as this music doesn't belong to me and a person can hardly be said to be "sharing" stuff that wasn't his to begin with, can he? Which is the tip of another story I thought I might want to talk about, but again not now.

What I've been doing is reorganizing/reshelving/interfiling a section of the CDs: the non-operatic by-composer section from A ("Albéniz," to be exact) through roughly Nielsen -- excluding Haydn, Mahler, and Mozart, who have sections of their own. It so happened on this particular afternoon that while I was listening to CDs from this section more or less at random, or maybe at will, I happened to think of two that would be a snap to locate and might be fun to hear for the first time in ages. They were by the same composer, but imagine my surprise when I realized that in my filing system the two happened to be right next to each other! I wound up listening to both, but the part that's relevant to today's story is that when I first put on the first of them, a few minutes or so in it happened -- the near-knocking-off-my-feet, I mean.

It wasn't the music, or at least not just the music, gorgeous as it is. But the music I've heard by conservative estimate dozens of times, and pretty much always loved, but not with this feet-near-knocking-off-of effect. No, there was something more, and I wonder if the little clip I've made will have this kind of effect on anyone else. Which is all I'm going to say about it, except that if one lousy 2:21 audio clip seems a mighty stingy musical offering for a whole Sunday, it could have been worse. My original idea was to offer only the first 37 or so seconds, or maybe just 18 seconds, since really that was all it took to blow my mind. Which isn't to say that things don't get a whole lot mind-blowinger as the full version of our clip, which is to say the whole 2:21 you wrung out of me, blows on.

So this could have gone something like so:

37-second version of clip


18-second version of clip


Instead, however, you got that whopping 2:21's worth. Wanna hear it again? We can do that! (To be strictly technical, I can't actually hear what the clip sounds like, for computer-technical reasons I should probably note for the record but don't, you know, feel up to talking about just now, not even now that there's reason to think we've got the room pretty fully cleared.)




IF YOU'RE THAT GREEDY AND YOU STILL
WANT MORE, GO ON AND CLICK THROUGH

Ghost of Sunday Classics: "Baton Bunny" music with and without the Bunny, plus a treasure trove of overtures and, oh yes, "Gaudeamus igitur"

In which we watch part of a cartoon, then listen
to an overture, and then another overture, and then --
can you imagine? -- drift off into other, er, stuff


A nice chunk of Chuck Jones's Baton Bunny (1959) -- from the confident-looking start, things deteriorate pretty quickly.

by Ken

As I mentioned most recently Friday night, New York City's Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, is currently hosting a grand exhibition devoted to one of the giants of animated film, Chuck Jones. And as I mentioned Friday night, this afternoon I hope to get to MoMI for this week's "Chuck Jones Matinee" (each week the same hour-long program is offered on Saturday and Sunday), to see -- in 35mm, on a large screen -- Duck Amuck, which I've already declared the greatest cartoon ever made, and What's Opera, Doc?, the famous Bugs Bunny classical-music extravaganza.

On my last weekend visit to the museum, the CJM program included a different classical-Bugs enterprise, one I didn't remember: Baton Bunny, from 1959. In it Bugs attempts to conduct Suppé's A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna Overture, and you can see some of it above.

We've heard our fair share of Suppé, entirely in the form of overtures. Yes, occasional efforts are made to revive some of his numerous operettas, but they don't stick. A dozen or so of his overtures do, however, for the simple reason that they're utterly wonderful, utterly gorgeous music, and among them are a couple -- I mean Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry -- that I would listen to as happily as anything in the orchestral repertory.

When the poster of our Baton Bunny clip posted it, a rash of commenters were frantic to know what the music was. The question was answered in due course, of course, but we're going to answer it in our own way -- with three distinctly different performances.


FRANZ VON SUPPÉ: A Morning, Noon, and Night in Vienna: Overture

What comes after Mozart's and Beethoven's minor-key symphonic opening movements?

What comes after the monumental, mysterious opening movement of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, which we heard last week? At the link, Christian Thielemann conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in what seems to me a grindingly prosaic rendering of the thunderingly dramatic scherzo.

by Ken

I realize I should have been saying more about this amazing music we've been hearing, dipping into the two symphonies apiece for which Mozart and Beethoven composed opening movements in the minor mode. But really, when it comes to an incandescent movement like the opening one of Mozart's great later G minor symphony, No. 40, could I really have said anything more helpful than, say, "Wouldja listen to that?" And ditto when it comes to the opening movements of Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. I mean, we're talking here about two of the monuments of human civilization, and I thought talking should take distant second place to listening.

What we began pursuing in this week's preview is the question I raised last week: Where do you go from there?

My point was, if we accept that writing a minor-mode symphonic first movement is an uncommon and nervy thing to do, and is likely to happen only if a composer has been seized by some gripping musical material that requires it, where does he want to take his audience next?

Consider, for example, the most modest of the four Mozart and Beethoven symphonies we began last week: Mozart's earlier G minor symphony, No. 25. Let's add the second movement to the performances we heard last week of the first.

All the major players in "Carmen" gather outside the bullfighting arena in Seville

The Entr'acte to Act III is played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, with Emmanuel Pahud as flute soloist, at the orchestra's 2010 Silvesterkonzert (i.e., New Year's Eve concert)

by Ken

As I explained in Friday night's preview ("Enter the Toreador"), we're picking up on our look at the unfolding of the romantic obsession of the Army sergeant Don José, a Basque who has left his home in Navarre for the southerly latitudes of Seville, for the free-spirited gypsy Carmen, whose original interest in José was the very fact that he was one of the rare man who shows absolutely no interest in her. However, by the end of Act II, where we left the couple in part 1 of this series ("'And long live the music that falls on us from heaven' (Carmen)"), he was thoroughly under her spell.

We're going to move pretty quickly through Act III to get to the climactic meeting of the now-former lovers in Act IV.

BIZET: Carmen: Entr'acte to Act III

We already did the Act III Entr'acte pretty thoroughly in a February 2012 flute-and-harp post, and we just heard (and saw) it again at the top of the post. Well, here it is again.


Orchestra of the Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, cond. EMI, recorded 1969-70

Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. EMI, recorded 1958-59


WE'RE IN THE MOUNTAINS NOW, IN "A PICTURESQUE
AND WILD SITE" WHERE CARMEN & CO. HAVE GONE . . .

Preview: Night Music

Part 1 (of the poster's 17) of the 1990 New York City Opera telecast of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music

by Ken

The German Nachtmusik is literally "night music," but by extension it's also the standard term for "serenade." As for example:

MOZART: Serenade in G, K. 525 (Eine kleine Nachtmusik)


Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, cond. Victor 78rpm set M 364, recorded Dec. 17, 1936, digital transfer by F. Reeder

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, cond. Victor 78rpm set DM 1163, recorded 1945, transferred and restored by Bob Varney
[Restorer Bob Varney notes of the 1945 Beecham set: "A 1947 magazine ad showed this recording priced at $3. That would be the equivalent of about $30.25 today and would buy only 16 minutes of music."]

IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We'll be hearing what I think qualifies as the ultimate in Night Music. Here's a glimpse. Note that in the opening two-horn dialogue, the theatrical first part is played by the Chicago Symphony's legendary Dale Clevenger (born 1940), who has been the orchestra's principal horn since 1966 -- and, yes, is still on the job.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded May 1971

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