Matthew Monday: School Concert and Lip Synch Show

Matthew’s school put on their annual show for the school families.  It’s a combination orchestral performances and lip synch dancing.  Matthew participated in both this year. 

I got there late, so I didn’t get a very good seat.  I’m in the back and the pictures didn’t come ut the best.  Here’s a picture of violin orchestra.  Matthew is there on the left in the front.

Now here is a clip I was able to video.  It’s called Allegro from some composer named Suzuki.  That will be their music teacher who will lead the class, and at about the 59 second mark she will point to Matthew for a solo.  The solo is only about five seconds long and then she’ll point to a couple of others.

So cute.

As to the lip synch, I have no clue what song they were performing.  I lost the program.  I didn’t get any video but here are a few pictures.  Matthew is the boy on the right.

Personally I didn’t care for any of the lip synch performances but the kids had fun.  Isn’t he cute?  My little boy is growing too fast!  

Music Tuesday: Spring from the Four Seasons by Vivaldi

It’s been such a hard winter around here.  I don’t know if this makes it as the coldest on record, but if it isn’t it’s close.  I know it’s not the snowiest on record, but we’ve had a good share of that too.  Every time we think spring is finally here, the weather regresses back.  Most people are begging for spring to come.

Well, if you’re begging, here it is, the “Spring” Concerto from the set of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi named The Four Seasons. 

Here’s some background information.  Vivaldi is considered one of the great composers of the Baroque era, a favorite of Johann Sebastian Bach.  His nickname was the il Prete Rosso, “the red priest” because he was a priest and had red hair.  A Venetian and the the musical director of at an woman’s orphanage where many women went on to be musicians, he reached notariety from his violin virtuosity and then as a composer. 

Vivaldi wrote many violin concerti, and one factoid that surprised me in my research was that Vivaldi in his conceretos established the fast/slow/fast tempos of a concerto’s three movements.  This became a general rule, and not just for concertos.  So many pieces of music are set to a fast/slow/fast pattern, down to our very day. 

The Four Seasons (Le quattro stagioni) are a set of concerti where each of the seasons are an individual concerto.  Each concerto is rendered to reflect a sense of its respective season.  It has been claimed that each season was based on a series of sonnets, also respective to a season, but the sonnets are so dreadful as literary works, a counter claim has been made that the sonnets were backformed from the musical work.  Nonetheless whether the music was based on the sonnet or on elements of the season, it does make the concerti program music.  

Here is the Spring Sonnet from which the composition was supposedly based on. 

Allegro

Springtime is upon us.
The birds celebrate her return with festive song,
and murmuring streams are softly caressed by the breezes.
Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven,
Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more.

Largo
On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.

Allegro
Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of spring.

So in the first Allegro movement, which is in ritornello form, birds singing make up the theme while stream and thunder motifs offer a contrast.  In the slow Largo we have a picture-scape with goats and dogs.  And in the final Allegro we have a folk spring time dance.  I’ve never been a fan of program music.  I hardly ever see the pictures or drama they are supposed to be represent. 

 

But this is such a joyful work.  Here is the great Itzhak Perlman with the israel Philharmonic.

 

So did you catch the birds singing, the thunder resonating, and the dogs barking? 

Music Tuesday: Mozart, Violin Concerto No. 5, 3rd Movement

I love this Violin Concerto. I know there are others that are ranked greater. Mozart composed his violin concertos when he was young, this his last at 19 years old. All five are bright and vivacious and written in a major key. This one does have its own Wikipedia entry.

Its full title is Violin Concerto No. 5, K. 219 "Turkish.”  The nickname “Turkish” comes from the third movement’s deviation from a minuet into an exotic melody associated with Turkish music, though not necessarily truly from Turkey.

I'm not going to post the entire concerto, just the third movement.  That’s where the Turkish excursion takes place.  I think it transforms the entire last movement.  The rondo form is based on a returning melody alternating with a cadenza.  This third movement uses a very stately minuet as its rondo melody, and then at about 3:45 transitions into the Turkish section, and that lasts for two and a quarter minutes, returning da capo to the minuet.

Here’s what the program notes from the Toronto Symphony says about this third movement. 

The finale is an urbane minuet that unfolds, at first, in a perfectly rondo form. But just when the end seems nigh, Mozart interpolates an episode even more astonishing than the Adagio in the first movement: a hundred and thirty bars of the sort of tongue-in-cheek “Turkish” music he used in works like The Abduction from the Seraglio. All of the conventional building-blocks of eighteenth-century “Turkish”music are here: the key of A minor, march-like 2/4 time, drone basses, “gypsy” violin writing, leaping themes, pervasive chromaticism, “exotic” melodic intervals like the augmented second, repeated notes, frequent ornamentation, and grotesque, and percussive scoring. This episode has a handful of melodies of its own, several borrowed from folk music, arranged to form a separate little movement—a rondo within the rondo. When it’s over, the minuet returns to complete its appointed rounds, and like the first movement the finale ends quietly, wittily, with a little arpeggio decorated with grace notes—a wink and a smile.

Programme Note by Kevin Bazzana © 2013

Yes, “rondo within a rondo” is the perfect way to describe it.  Besides the structural peculiarity, what really gets me is the sharp contrast between a reserved 18^th century European classism with an exotic, exuberant, and wild foreignism. 

Here is the third movement with Gideon Kremer (soloist), Nicholas Harnoncourt (conductor), Wiener Philharmoniker orchestra.  Listen for the transition at just after 3:45, and after listening to the entire movement, try to answer this question: Is the "Turkish" excursion integral to the entire piece or does it sound like two separate pieces yoked together?

 

If you go to Youtube you’ll be able to find both the first and second movements.  If you have a half hour, listen to all three movements in succession as meant to be heard.  The recording I own is with ItzhakPerlman (soloist), James Levine (conductor), and also with the Wiener Philharmoniker orchestra and I highly recommend it.

 

So does it sound integral?  I think it does.