Symphony

A Vibrant Beethoven Fifth: Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic

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There’s a special excitement which comes with hearing an old, familiar piece in a new way. That’s what happens when you listen to Christian Thielemann’s vibrant 2011 live concert recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (video below). In this interpretation, Thielemann’s approach to tempo is interestingly elastic. For example, listen to the opening of the final movement, the climactic apex of the entire symphony. This is the moment when …

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How Important Are Conductors?

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“Is the conductor really doing anything, or is he/she just for show? I mean, couldn’t you guys play without someone standing on a podium and waving their arms?” This is the unexpected question once posed to me by an audience member after a Richmond Symphony concert. It’s pretty much the same question that comes up in this classic comedy bit from Seinfeld. Recent news that the Dallas Symphony Orchestra paid outgoing Music Director Jaap van …

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Befriending Mahler: Walter’s 1938 Vienna Recording of the Ninth Symphony

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“He had the soul of a mystic.” This is how the legendary German conductor Bruno Walter (1876-1962) described Gustav Mahler in a 1950 pre-concert radio interview. The 18-year-old Walter was a rehearsal pianist and vocal coach at the Hamburg Opera when he first met Mahler, who served as the Opera’s chief conductor in the 1890s. Walter spent hours in wide-ranging conversations with Mahler (everything from Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, to music). Later, Walter …

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Finding the Bruckner Sound

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From the buoyant, carefree musical laughter of Mozart, to the richness and heft of Brahms, to the hazy, dreamlike pointillism of Debussy, the music of each composer comes with its own distinct voice. Great orchestras have the ability to change on a dime and quickly lock into the style and sound appropriate to the music. In this old clip, you can hear Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache shaping the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic …

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Composers on Holiday: Five Pieces Written on Summer Vacation

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Summer is here. For professional orchestral musicians, that means a brief respite from the weekly routine of the main concert season. Soon it will be time for summer seasons and music festivals, many featuring outdoor concerts in such idyllic locations as Chautauqua, Vail, and the Tetons. Summer has typically been a productive time for composers. Gustav Mahler, one of the most prominent conductors of his time, retreated to isolated rural settings in …

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Roy Harris’ Symphonic Memorial to Gettysburg

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Awakening, Conflict, Dedication, Affirmation…These are the subtitles of the four movements which make up American composer Roy Harris’ Symphony No. 6 “Gettysburg.” Written in 1944 during the height of the Second World War, the movements of Harris’ Symphony draw inspiration from the outline of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. They celebrate a mythic vision of American progress in which growing pains give way to the possible future realization of the nation’s loftiest ideals. There are programmatic elements in …

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Disney’s Debt to Camille Saint-Saëns

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Over the weekend, I played Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, the zany chamber orchestra work which has found its way into the children’s canon alongside Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The suite’s thirteenth movement, The Swan, is surely Saint-Saëns’ most recognizable music, a reality which probably wouldn’t have pleased the French Romanticist. For Saint-Saëns, writing The Carnival of the Animals was lighthearted fun, and perhaps self-therapy, after an unsuccessful …

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