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| 7 new of 31 responses total. |
md
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response 25 of 31:
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Mar 26 23:39 UTC 2003 |
Very nice review. I came *that* close to buying the CD the other day.
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dbratman
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response 26 of 31:
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Jul 10 06:08 UTC 2003 |
I am sitting here, reeling in mild astonishment as I listen, once
again, to the allegretto movement of the Second Symphony by the
Portuguese composer Joly Braga Santos (who should be filed under S, but
the record company [Marco Polo] confuses Portuguese with Spanish and
tries to put him under B).
I swear, if somebody'd played this for me without identification, I
would have insisted that it was a misplaced piece by Vaughan Williams.
The sound-world is uncanny: much of the orchestration is very like him,
and there is a phrase in the main theme (5th-6th bars) that is the
absolute essence of his melodic style. Mix in a crescendo straight out
of Carl Nielsen (at 5 minutes in), and that's the movement.
I'd read that this composer resembles VW, but the rest of the symphony
seemed to me to do so only in a general way: Santos favors a loose but
cogent construction and a colorful conservative modern orchestration,
both of which he shares with VW, but I'm not otherwise specifically
reminded of him.
But even just on the basis of this one work, I have to say we have a
winner of a composer here. I shall be looking for more by him. This
work was written in 1948, about the time pundits were declaring the
symphony dead (for the second or third time). A lot they knew.
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dbratman
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response 27 of 31:
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Jul 10 06:11 UTC 2003 |
Also in RVW news: I shall be using the 3rd movement of Gordon Jacob's
orchestration of the "English Folk Song Suite" in a lecture on music
and Tolkien, as a demonstration of what the author might have thought
an orchestrated version of hobbit folk music for a film should have
sounded like (in contrast to the pseudo-Celtic stuff in
Jackson's "Fellowship of the Ring", which would have made Tolkien's
ears steam).
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md
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response 28 of 31:
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Jul 10 15:13 UTC 2003 |
Cool! Are you going to be playing the Flanders & Swan songs? (I think
it was them. I have an old LP around somewhere. I never liked them
much.)
I always thought Holst's Planets would make good LotR music.
Interludes, if not background. Mars is Mordor; Venus is that nice
forest where they rest between battles; Mercury is the little stream
that sings a song; Jupiter is Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday party;
Saturn is the Grey Havens; Uranus is Treebeard and the Ents trashing
Isengard; Neptune is the scene in Bombadil's house where he tells the
hobbits about the origin of te universe.
If it's RVW you want, much of the music in Job would do, too.
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dbratman
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response 29 of 31:
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Jul 16 05:01 UTC 2003 |
Well, I'm trying to avoid giving a paper on "What I think would make
good LotR music," though I am indulging far enough to discuss Elgar
(very much personally like Tolkien in many ways: they were both
displaced Victorian west-midlands melancholy Catholics with a quiet
nationalistic patriotism) and to cite various parts of the Enigma
Variations that remind me of certain parts of Tolkien's stories.
(Bilbo struggling to stay on top of his barrel in the river is
obviously the G.R.S. variation, for instance.)
My subjects are: what Tolkien thought Middle-earth music sounded like,
and what he would have liked music inspired by his works to sound
like. I'm leaving for next year the subject of what music inspired by
his works has actually sounded like, and that starts with Swann. I
agree that Job and The Planets would work well, but I don't think
Tolkien would have liked them much. Besides Elgar, I'm using some of
Sibelius's Kalavala works, and the spookier parts of Der Freischutz, as
Weber is a composer Tolkien is known to have liked.
As for what Tolkien thought the music -should- sound like, I'm
convinced that the Ainulindale (the creation of the world from the
Silmarillion) is supposed to sound like late Renaissance and high
Baroque sacred choral music.
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md
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response 30 of 31:
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Oct 1 11:42 UTC 2004 |
In the current RVW Society Journal, somebody makes the point that
loving the Pastoral Symphony is the sign of the true RVW fan. Ahem.
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dbratman
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response 31 of 31:
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Oct 8 06:17 UTC 2004 |
I recently picked up the Boult EMI recording of the Pastoral on CD, so
now I have it (and the 5th) to play more easily. I still think the 5th
is the greater work, but anyone who thinks the Pastoral is tedious,
placid, or eventless certainly hasn't listened to it.
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