Week Thirteen: March 27
How many cases of tuberculosis can you fit into the opening weeks of a year of opera study? Let’s just say, “a few”, at least. Today we welcome La Traviata to the stage. It’s a piece whose name I am more familiar with than its content. There are a few moments I will recognize, but aside from those, and a podcast episode summary I heard a year or so ago, this will be some pretty new territory for me, and I welcome it. So far this year, I have experienced the Verismo, Buffa, and Comique schools, and now we move on to—whatever this is.
During my first run-through, I’m struck that it would be pretty fun to do a live-blogging of my introduction to a piece sometime. But, in lieu of that kind of time today, I’m left to say that here in the first act, this does not sound like the virtuosity you’d expect of someone who knows she’s dying soon!
We’ll also be adding Francis Poulenc’s Stabat Mater, as we are entering Holy Week, and I thought it would be nice to find something appropriate. I’m not familiar with this particular setting, so it will be a good opportunity to reflect this week, and learn something new.
Update: After my first run-through, with score on the reading rack of my elliptical machine, I was pretty impressed by the piece. Mostly, I guess I’d say, by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus’ performance, no doubt from memory, of this very challenging piece. Repetitive patterns on which you’d expect octaves and steps, but instead you get sevenths. Strange accentuation in familiar meters. You name it. This is a complicated score.
And, finally, this week I’ll take a look at my first Beethoven piano sonata, Op. 26, the Ab “Funeral March” sonata. I came the piece, unaware of it by title alone, but as with most Beethoven, the first listening revealed to me many familiar passages, or at least, recognizable as Beethoven’s, if not actually known to me already. I tried my hand at a few of the slower, less florid passages. It still boggles my mind, after all these years, that there are people “out there”, in fact in my closest circles, who could sit down and read this nearly from sight, and pull together a sound performance within a few days. Alas, I was not blessed with those hands at the keyboard, but I sure can appreciate when I hear a good performance!
Week Fourteen: April 3
So hard to believe it’s already April. We had a very tough winter here, and signs of spring are starting to come through. This week, I’m going to tackle Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, the “Tragic”. It’s the first symphony that I’ve studied since the first year, 2012. It’s a towering piece, at 80 minutes, but my other two are in good shape at this point, so I think I can manage to make some sort of a dent in it this week.
Week Fifteen: April 10
This week, I’ll be spending some time in the mountains, and have chosen the suite from Francis Poulenc’s ballet Les Biches as inspiration. I know that this piece isn’t literally about deer, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of those where I’m heading, so thought it would be a fun juxtaposition. Furthermore, I’m just coming off a fun time with his Stabat Mater, so thought it would be a nice opportunity to experience a bit more Poulenc.
Chorally speaking, I’ll be listening to John Rutter’s Mass of the Children, a five-movement missa brevis written in 2003 for premiere at Carnegie Hall. Other than that, I know very little of it.
By coincidence, my church choir performs a lot of Rutter every spring. For some reason, it is our Mothers’ Day custom to sing one of his anthems (this year it is “All Things Bright and Beautiful”) and this time around I have programmed “For the Beauty of the Earth” for our Earth Day service. Lots of good Rutter going on in my head.
Week Sixteen: April 17
I’ve been trying to focus on some of the most popular operas this year, in an effort to get the big, cultural landmarks out of the way, before digging deeper toward the end of the year, or in subsequent years. But, I’ve had an urge the past week to listen to a Russian opera, so I am breaking my trend a bit, and heading toward Borodin’s Prince Igor. According to Operabase‘s listing of the top 50 operas performed this year, it doesn’t even place, but hey, it’s my game, it’s my prerogative.
Update: It’s a bit hard to get into this one, in large part because Borodin left it unfinished at his death and, in so doing, did not put his authoritative stamp on what constituted the proper performance of it. In fact, there seem to be multiple editions floating around, because there are times when one recording skips a section entirely, or replaces a section with one from another act. It’s also been hard to find an English libretto that I can reliably use, and since my Russian understanding goes only as deep as fundamental pronunciation, I’m not able to use clues in the text to let me know which part of a synopsis I’m lined up with. It’s been frustrating. But, the music, my God, the music! There is some very profound material here. And I just love hearing Russian male voices.
I also decided this morning that I’d be interested in some Schubert, so I’m heading to my first string quartet of the year, with his “Death and the Maiden” Quartet No. 14 in Dm. Back in grad school, I sang the song that bears that name. At this point, I’m not sure which movement it will feature in. As I mentioned back in Week Two, I don’t have a lot of experience with the chamber music sound. One thing that excites me about it, is that, like unaccompanied choral music, it is very easy to read the score, what with no transpositions, and with it being a top-to-bottom sonic landscape that matches what you hear. (At first, orchestral scores are shocking to some people, because they are grouped by section, top-to-bottom, rather than top-to-bottom for all instruments represented. As such, you may be following the lowest sound, a contrabassoon, for instance, and it’s only about a third of the way down the page.)
Update: Well, I quickly figured out which movement features the Lied that I had sung as a student. This piece is tons of fun. I say that with a large degree of surprise, because, as mentioned above, I haven’t had a lot of exposure to chamber music in the past. I did a bit of analysis of some portions, and over all, it’s been nice, as I’d expected, to read the score, which is so easy to digest, compared to some of the more massive efforts I’ve taken on. (Mahler, anyone?)
Week Seventeen: April 24
This week, I’m working on two pieces that stem from my interests in listening to other pieces. I love when that happens, as I really start to learn particular characteristics of these composers. Inspired by Prince Igor, I guess, this week I’ve chosen Rachmaninov’s choral work, The Bells, which I’ve had in consideration since before Lent. During those weeks, I tried to stick to liturgical texts, and then I thought the Rutter would be fun for my vacation (it was), and now I’m about to learn about this piece, inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s verses, with which I have a small amount of familiarity.
Beyond that piece, this week, I’m returning to the music of Béla Bartók, who made his first appearance on the SSS playlists this New Year’s Day, with Concerto for Orchestra. I had a lot of fun with that piece, and was listening to it, in fact, when I just perused my iTunes library, and found a recording of “Two Portraits”. It seems rightly-sized, in relation to the other things on my plate this week, so I chose it blindly. Hopefully I’ll find a lot of enjoyment from it.
Week Eighteen: May 1
In the coming week, I’ll be on vacation at the ocean. Last year, I used that as an opportunity to listen to La Mer, this year I will work with Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, which is a very short piece, compared to many of the others I’ve listened to, but my personal time for study will be scant, and there is still a bit of backlog with some other recent pieces that I haven’t dedicated as much time to as I’d have preferred. This is a very popular piece, appearing on the program listings for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra (both available online) in recent seasons. I have in fact listened to it, but still would not recognize it, so what better time?