Posts By: willcwhite

CSO Addenda: Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich

As is usually the case when I prepare my pre-concert lectures at the Chicago Symphony, I end up with way more information than I can share in the 30 minutes allotted.  Here are some extra insights on the March 4-6 concerts. Welcome CSO patrons!

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor

Any piece with as many gorgeous tunes as Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto is just asking to be pillaged for its melodies, and thus we have Wikipedia’s list of several works as being derived from or inspired by this piece.  Let’s see if we agree with them:

1st movement


Frank Sinatra’s “I Think of You“

Here’s the Rachmaninoff:

OK, no argument there.  [BTW, does anyone else agree that the Hollywood session player in Nelson Riddle’s orchestra sounded WAY better on the horn solo than the principal in the New Philharmonia Orchestra?]

The Wik then goes on to list no fewer than four songs by Muse which supposedly quote the first movement:

1. “Space Dementia”:

which is pretty obviously an homage to the opening of the concerto:

[BTW, does anybody agree that Moshe Atmon is a way better pianist than the guy from Muse?]

then #2. “Butterflies & Hurricanes

and #3. “Ruled by Secrecy”

which both quote the end of the movement’s first theme:

As for “Megalomania”, the closest thing I could find was this:

which I would hardly call a “quote”, but does share certain melodic and harmonic ideas with the concerto.

2nd movement

Unfortunately it can’t all be Frank Sinatra and English alt-prog-art rock.  When it comes to the gorgeous second movement,

we go from the semi-decent:


(which has a questionable connection to the original),

to the bad:

to the truly, spine-cringingly, awful:

Interestingly, that last excerpt is nothing but the original Rachmaninoff with some cheeze-fried vocals laid on top.  It comes out the absolute worst because it puts the original composition in such stark relief.

3rd movement

Let’s cleanse our ears, shall we, with some more grade-A Frank:

which, it hardly needs saying, is this:

Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 (“The Year 1905”)

As it’s title would indicate, Shostakovich took the 1905 Russian Revolution as the subject of his 11th Symphony.  Theories abound as to other, hidden meanings behind this work (especially the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the communist government).

Perhaps the most widely known piece of art concerning the 1905 Revolution is Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark silent film from 1925, Battleship Potemkin.  Below is the much acclaimed “Odessa Steps” sequence.

(Please note that this clip contains music from Shostakovich’s 11th and 5th symphonies – not the original score by Meisel which was lost and has since been restored.)  The whole film can be viewed here.

The Symphony “1905” was a turning point for Shostakovich — he had outlived Stalin and was now in the position to regain some sense of sanity and ease, if not full official favor.  His troubles with the government had begun in the year 1936, at which point Joseph Stalin, eager to send a message to the artistic community, denounced Shostakovitch’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as immoral and anti-soviet.  Let’s watch a bit of the opera and see if we can spot anything that Stalin may have found objectionable.  Remember to look very closely now:

At first glance, it looks pretty tame, but that Stalin always had a fine eye for detail.  Anyhoo, that led to this very famous headline from the Soviet newspaper Pravda:

which roughly translates to “Muddle instead of Music”, and which began a nightmarish 20 year period of heavy government repression and scare tactics aimed at keeping Shostakovitch in line.

I’d like to recommend two more valuable resources pertaining to Shostakovich’s music and life:

The first is the audio guide to chapter 7 of Alex Ross’s phenomenal book, The Rest is Noise.  Even if you haven’t read the book or don’t have a copy handy, the audio guide gives you a nice synopsis of the chapter on music in the 1930’s and 40’s USSR.

The second is an article by everybody’s favorite Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian-psychoanalytic philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, entitled “Shostakovich in Casablanca“.  In this article, Žižek compares Soviet repression of classical music to the Hollywood Hays code, in terms of what the censors expected and how an artist was meant both to abide by the code and simultaneously to circumvent it.  He posits that Shostakovich found whatever success he could with the Soviet regime because he understood this Janus-faced censorship, whereas Prokofiev just couldn’t figure it out.

That’s all the extra goodies for this concert series.  Feel free to leave a note in the comments section to share your opinions of the concert!  Also, feel free to peruse the rest of my site at your own risk, in full awareness that hereafter, the Chicago Symphony has nothing to do with the content on this site…

Culture Wars: America loses big time

And who’s winning?  The Japanese.  Witness below:

Cultures wage wars in many ways, often leading to profound advances in human creativity and knowledge.  They create opulent works of architecture, erect grand totems to their gods, and go exploring for uncharted territories and domains.  But now there’s a new race: the race to teach little kids to memorize and perfectly execute the music of Leonard Bernstein.

I urge all parents: start now.  If your infant’s first word isn’t “Maria”, we’re never going to cover the ground we need to.  Make “Let Our Garden Grow” your nighttime lullaby.  At birthday parties, replace the traditional “Happy Birthday” with the 4 Anniversaries of 1948 [but please avoid the 7 Anniversaries of 1988 at all costs.]

By the age of five, if your child can’t rattle off the opening lick of Trouble in Tahiti on the clarinet, or make at least a passable rendition of the piano solo from the 2nd Symphony, we will simply have to give up hope and demure to the accomplishments of a much greater culture.

PS. While we’re at it, let’s give Mozart a rest for the ABC’s and switch to Ligeti:

These are a few of my favorite trillz!

F. Joseph Haydn, Sinfonia Concertante, 1st movement.
This trill shows the kind of super-extended harmony one can make at the end of a cadenza for a chamber group.

Erkki-Sven Tüür, Architectonics 4.
Clearly an homage to/parody of the above trill by Haydn, this one pushes the tonal-cadential trill to the max.  Only a man with two consecutive umlauts in his name could do a thing like this!!  [Ed. note to himself: begin amassing list of favorite umlauts…]

Alfred Schnittke, String Quartet No. 3, 1st movement.
An entire trilling texture with an amazing climax of the top instruments trilling together, this is Schnittke at his creepy best.  Interestingly, this excerpt also contains one of my very favorite suspensions.  The most astute of listeners will recognize the motive from Beethoven’s Große Fuge being morphed.

Maurice Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, troisième partie.
This is the gesture that would go on to be used in every Disney cartoon whenever two deer fell in love.  I give Ravel enormously high points for his immense originality, despite the fact that it became such a cliché.

George Bruns, The Jungle Book, Overture.
Speaking of Disney movies, “The Jungle Book” is definitely my favorite Disney score of all time, and the overture ends with a truly searing extended trill.  I also love the harp bisbigliando that circles it.

William White, Thy King Cometh, Overture.
I sort of half-tried not to include any of my own music on this list, but when you write a trill as great as this, it’s just got to be included.  Listeners are invited to ignore the poor ensemble of the second pizzicato.

So, what are some of your favorite trills?

Logical Phallusies

Last week, Indiana University was thrown into a minor turmoil by this whole Cleveland Orchestra scandal.  Essentially what happened is that the Cleveland Orchestra (which is apparently available for your next residency, wedding or bar mitzvah) was scheduled to come to the Jacobs School of Music to perform a series of workshops and side-by-side rehearsals and to give a concert, along with their dreamy Austrian music director, Franz Welser-Möst

The problem was that the Cleveland players had been playing without a contract for several months and they had set a strike date at 12 midnight last Sunday, leaving us trying to guess whether or not they would in fact go on strike, and whether or not they would travel to our campus.

Well, if you read the NYT article at the top, you know that they did in fact go on strike, and that they did NOT come to IU.  BUT, the strike only lasted for only ~12 hours — just enough time for them not to come to Bloomington, but safely in time to make it  to their highly lucrative residency in Miami, FL.

A little suspicious, wouldn’t you agree?  I say it smells – rotten.

Well OK, I wouldn’t actively accuse the entire orchestra of welching on their promise to the poor students of this fair institution just for kicks, or laziness or whatever.  The strike date was set months ago, but in all fairness to us (Bloomingtonians), isn’t it possible that the orchestra’s union could have handled this matter in a slightly classier fashion, so that the only ones who got screwed weren’t the aspiring young music students?

Some other people here in Bloomington had the same question.  Enter the fabulous, Inaesque personality of a certain former concertmistress of the Minnesota Orchestra, one Jorja Fleezanis, currently a faculty member at IU, who decided to organize a little forum to talk about this very question and others.

The thing I liked most about Ms. Fleezanis’ little powow was that she wasn’t afraid to expose the faulty logic of Cleveland’s Musicians’ Union for what it was, though she did it with real panache.  If I had been running it, I probably would have pointed out that these musicians come off as rather naïve in their understanding of the current economy.  OK, let’s just say downright stupid.  People are losing their jobs left and right, the classical music industry is nothing more than a glowing ember (outside of China, that is), and they are seriously going to argue over a few thousand dollars a year when the current minimum salary is already $115K??  [Median is $140K and the top players make over $500K, btw… not to mention the fact that many if not most of these musicians pad their incomes with highly lucrative professorships at CIM and Case Western.]

The Cleveland musicians claim that if they aren’t paid at parity with the other “Big Five” American Orchestras, their quality will go down.  I was very glad to hear Ms. Fleezanis agree with me that this perspective simply doesn’t jive with the reality of supply and demand in the classical music business.  Our conservatories churn out highly, highly qualified candidates on an annual basis, such that even tiny regional orchestras have huge turnouts for their auditions.  Add to these freshly minted young people the denizens of older musicians who have way more experience but are out of jobs right now, and it should be obvious that there are far too many people chasing way too few jobs in the “industry”.  It’s a buyers’ market.  I would argue that Cleveland could get itself at least as good an orchestra for about half the price.

[Oh, and about that “Big Five” thing… isn’t it a shame that they’re always the last to know?  Yikes.  It’s no wonder that anyone who’s still latching onto that old trope would find themselves following the above “logic”.]

Herr Welser-Möst (which is not his real name, according to this gossipy little article from a certain “Wikipedia”) did end up coming to Bloomington nonetheless, and I did get the chance to work with him.  He’s an absolute gentleman and had some really lovely and helpful things to say about music.  If only he could have convinced his colleagues in Cleveland that it was worth their while to quit squabbling for a few hours and come share a bit of that beauty with us.

And I’m still pissed that I didn’t get to hear the goddamn Adès Violin Concerto!!!!