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New Series: Bernstein

Hello all,

Welcome a new series on the music of the great American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein! We’ll explore his greatest hits, his movie scores, his Broadway songs, and some of his more obscure works that (I believe) deserve more attention than they get.

Leonard Bernstein is one of the most important figures in American music. He was a composer, conductor, educator, and humanitarian. After training with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s legendary conductor Serge Koussevitsky, Bernstein embarked on an incredible career at the helm of the world-renowned New York Philharmonic.

While Bernstein is probably most famous for his score to West Side Story, he wrote many other compositions that were just as spectacular. One of these is the 1949 film On the Town (adapted from the 1944 Broadway play by the same name), which starred Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin on a 24-hour exploration of New York City. The lyrics tell us that New York is “a wonderful town” and “if you can make it there you can make it anywhere.” While the lyrics and the upbeat tune are the deserving focus, the music itself is not as basic as it may seem. Bernstein actually composed the entire film score for On the Town based on a single theme. In other words, every song is a variation on the same set of tonalities. Even within this tune, Bernstein creates a variation on the opening theme by adding sixteenth (faster) notes to the last iteration of the theme.

Enjoy!

T

Posted on by tjphilbrick

The Ruler of the Spirits

 

Hello all,

Our music for this week is the “Ruler of the Spirits Overture” by little-known Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber. This overture was originally intended for an opera that Weber never ended up publishing. You can hear the dramatic elements from the very first note.

Weber is not a composer that we hear about very often, but he was an amazing person. He exemplified the ideal of a Renaissance man, pursuing composing, conducting, writing, painting, and poetry. He is best known for his opera Der Freischutz, which is seen as one of the most important expressions of Germany’s musical heritage.

Weber was born into a musical family that traveled the European countryside as a performing troupe. He was appointed as a lead musician in the court of King Frederick I of Württemberg, but his carefree upbringing had instilled in him a restlessness and resistance to structure that quickly got him banished from that court. He resumed his gypsy lifestyle and rose to fame as a piano virtuoso before being appointed conductor of the opera in Prague in 1813. He seemed to have learned his lesson by this point, for he managed to hold this job for many successful years.

We can thank Weber for the opera genre, since before he came along, the opera was scorned in most European countries (except, of course, Italy). Weber’s brave introduction of the opera format into German musical circles is one of the primary reasons that we can enjoy great operas today.

Enjoy!

T

 

 

Posted on by tjphilbrick

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Our music for today comes from Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. This song is a soprano solo titled Katerina’s Aria, and it is sung by Galina Vishnevskaya.

This opera was based on a Russian folk story about a young woman who falls in love but is shunned by the object of her affections. This rejection later drives her to madness and, eventually, murder. However, Shostakovich was not interested in the story itself; rather, he was interested in exploring all of the possibilities of the soprano voice. The opera is almost entirely focused on glittering soprano solo lines, and even the oft-powerful tenor line is noticeably absent. Shostakovich even changed the folk story so that he could give the soprano more of a solo presence. The aria that you hear this recording is one in which the main character, Katerina, sings of the guilt and remorse that have resulted from her murderous actions.

Shostakovich which was not only interested in displaying the soprano voice through a dark and tragic story. He also wanted to paint a new and different conception of what love could be. As he wrote about the opera, “I dedicated Lady Macbeth to my bride, my future wife, so naturally the opera is about love, too, but not only love. It’s also about how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things.”

The opera enjoyed spectacular success until early 1936, when it was the object of a sudden and shockingly harsh reprimand by the ruling Communist Party. This denunciation was, for the time being, a death knell for this opera. Sadly, it became well known later on largely because of its history of censorship.

The singer you will hear is Galina Vishnevskaya, who was honored as a People’s Artist of Russia in 1966. As a child prodigy growing up under the guidance of the renowned Moscow Conservatory, she rose to fame at a young age and performed most of the world’s most popular Sopranos lines before the age of 30. She was married to the world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and the two of them where best friends with Shostakovich himself. It is therefore quite likely that Shostakovich wrote this soprano line with Galina’s voice in mind.

Enjoy!