Russian Bells, the toll will be tremendous!

In the Russian Orthodox Church bells are seen as singing icons that have the power to banish evil. Some of these bells were huge, the doomed Tsar-Kolokol bell weighed in at 180 tons!

With this preponderance of bells in Russian society it is not surprising bell sounds and the pealing of same show up in Russian music. On the Piano this Sunday the first part of an exploration of these bell themes starting with some Western examples and then moving on to composers like Anton Rubinstein, Sergai Liapunov and moving on to familiar music by Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. The program ends with Alexander Scriabin's "Holy Bells" that are part and parcel of his Piano Sonata No. 7.

Bells, Holy and otherwise, heard on the Piano this Sunday afternoon at 5 on KPAC and KTXI.

host, Randy Anderson

Tchaikovsky at the start

In preparation of the upcoming San Antonio Symphony Tchaikovsky Festival, we want to share as much about the composer and his works.  Today we'll start with his symphonic career, and the First Symphony:




We're looking forward to the festival, do you have a favorite on the programs? Let us know in the comments below!

Trouble with Tchaikovsky!

As San Antonio prepares for a Tchaikovsky Festival getting underway this week, there is a dispute about an orchestra with a claim of Tchaikovsky:

The Web site photograph depicted an elegant array of orchestra musicians in a glowing hall. A video clip showed an earnest young conductor leading players in a Tchaikovsky symphony. Below the picture, an official biography described the “Tschaikowski” St. Petersburg State Orchestra as “an ensemble with unlimited musical possibilities.”

But according to one of Russia’s best-known conductors, Yuri Temirkanov, there is a problem: The images depicted were of orchestras unrelated to the Tchaikovsky. The photograph was of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and the video showed the St. Petersburg State Academic Symphony Orchestra. Both were playing in the city’s Philharmonic Hall, where the Tchaikovsky orchestra does not perform.

The materials appeared on the site of Columbia Artists Management in advance of a major American tour planned for next year.
“This Tchaikovsky orchestra doesn’t exist,” said Mr. Temirkanov, the music director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, a storied orchestra that recently finished its own American tour. “Nobody knows who plays there. Maybe they got some sort of band. Maybe students. But they put the word ‘state.’ But there is no such orchestra, neither private or state.”

Read more here.

Beginning of the end

For a "Music Monday" ala twitter, enjoy this live performance of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony:




The San Antonio Symphony will play all six symphonies later this month at their Tchaikovsky Festival - learn more here.

Tchaik please!

Over the next few weeks, we'll look at Peter Tchaikovsky as San Antonio prepares for his music with the San Antonio Symphony, Texas Public Radio, Trinity University, Camerata San Antonio and others!

We'll kick off our online coverage with our friend Dick Strawser:

It's often joked that Tchaikovsky wrote three symphonies: No. 4, No. 5 and No. 6. Or, as others put it, he wrote one symphony three times, since they're all Fate-dominated and similar in character and content.

This post is the first in a series about each of these three symphonies: this one, more of a prelude to the set, contains background information about the composer and his historical context at the time he was composing the 4th. You can read about the 5th Symphony here, and about the 6th, here.

*** ***** ******** ***** ***

Neither Tchaikovsky nor his 4th Symphony really need much in the way of “explanation” for a concert-goer to be able to enjoy the music. In these “Up-Close & Personal” posts, I’m usually looking for something behind the music, something that was going on in the composer’s life at the time the music was written or maybe about the times it was written in, whether that impact is direct or seemingly indirect. You can always argue that a work of art stands independently of any of the extraneous and technical details involved in its creation, but you can also argue that a work of art is something you can come to time and time again and each time discover something new, something that may make you listen to it in a different way or appreciate it from a slightly different angle, that the more you know about it the more you can appreciate it.
If you’re not familiar with the events of Tchaikovsky’s life at the time he wrote this symphony – his disastrous marriage and the voluminous correspondence with the rather mysterious Nadezhda von Meck – you can read about that in Part 2 of this post. There are some other ideas I’d like to look at, for now.
Tchaikovsky is a Russian composer which, to an American listener, may seem obvious but actually implies a number of often conflicting ideas. It also implies a debate similar to that around Aaron Copland and the “American Sound” – how much of what we identify as the “Russian Sound” is really what we think of as being Tchaikovsky’s sound? What is it that makes Russian music sound Russian? When I asked a famous Soviet-era sociologist this question back in the ‘70s, she thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know – perhaps the long cold winters?”
Culturally, putting it into a glib nutshell, there are at least two Russias. As a political nation, it has been on the edge of Europe and never really a part of the general European culture. As a geographical entity, it straddles both Europe and Asia and much of its ethnic and social back-history is more Asiatic than European. While there are people who had always lived in the area we think of as Russia, much of its history was crystallized first by Scandinavian migrants who set up ancient kingdoms and converted to Christianity, then by Asians ranging from the Tatars and Mongols who conquered them. A long ingrained xenophobia aside, the lack of trade routes to connect them with Western Europe and the lack of a viable marketplace for European goods created little need for contact between these cultures until the 18th Century when one of these rulers – known to us as Peter the Great but not considered “Great” by the Russians themselves – forcibly turned his backward empire toward the West, imposing on them European attitudes and customs after conquering a miserable stretch of swampland where he built a grand city that, within a few generations, created a seemingly artificial world of wealthy aristocrats living in a mirror image of the royal courts of France and Germany while the greater percentage of Russians lived in a peasant culture of extreme poverty. There was little else, then, in between.
A century after Peter the Great built his new imperial capital St. Petersburg, Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. At that time, few if any aristocrats spoke Russian. The language of the court was French, the literature and theater they enjoyed was in French. Much of the architecture of Peter the Great’s brand new city was the result of Italian architects trying to encompass something that looked Russian combined with something they were familiar with. Much of the music the aristocrats listened to was written and performed by Italian-born musicians who began teaching Russian-born musicians how to write and play in a European style. Even in Tchaikovsky’s youth a generation after 1812, there were still no Russian music schools: everybody was an amateur who studied privately with musicians imported either from France or Italy.
The “first” Russian composer (or at least the first one to be recognized as one), Mikhail Glinka, generally referred to as the “father” of Russian music, learned the rudiments of music and composition by way of correspondence with a theory teacher in Berlin, not by studying with a composer first-hand or by attending a school. Another important composer with a national awareness, Alexander Dargomyzhsky, learned not directly from Glinka but essentially by borrowing his notes.
In the mid-19th Century, the Russian musician Anton Rubinstein was one of the greatest pianists of his day, usually placing 2nd to Franz Liszt, but as a composer he was too German for the Russians and too Russian for the Germans. He was too much of a Futurist for the Conservatives and, for the Futurists like Liszt and Wagner, too conservative. As a Jew who’d converted as a child to the Russian Orthodox church, he was also regarded as a Christian by Jews and as a Jew by Christians, therefore, as he put it, “neither fish nor fowl – a pitiful individual.”
In 1862, Rubinstein and his brother Nikolai opened the first music school in Russia – first in St. Petersburg and then another in Moscow – making a point that courses would be taught in Russian, not in French (one grand lady retorted “Music in Russian? That’s a novel idea!”).
Tchaikovsky, who had discovered classical music as a child through a music-box reproduction of some Mozart pieces, wanted to become a musician but lacking any chance of good training ended up going into law. After becoming a law clerk, he decided it was too boring and he joined Rubinstein’s newly opened conservatory as one of its first students. He did well enough upon graduation, grounded in solid European-style training but without much practical experience, he was immediately set up as a teacher in the new Moscow school.
This was all happening around the same time young composers gathering around Mily Balakirev began formulating ideas about creating an authentic Russian musical style. They became known as “The Russian Five” or “The Mighty Handful” and their attitude about what Russian music should be was directly opposed to Rubinstein’s.

Dick's article continues here: http://dickstrawser.blogspot.com/2011/01/tchaikovskys-4th-symphony-up-close.html

Pro/Am this weekend

"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned." - George Bernard Shaw

The first event for the San Antonio Symphony's Tchaikovsky Festival is this Sunday!

TCHAIKOVSKY FESTIVAL PRO-AM
January 30, 2011
Sebastian Lang-Lessing, conductor
A FREE event at Municipal Auditorium, 3:00 p.m.Come hear amateur musicians perform side-by-side in this unique concert experience with San Antonio Symphony musicians and Music Director Sebastian Lang-Lessing in Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy.
Music workshop and rehearsal will begin at 3:00 p.m. with the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy in full concert at approximately 4:30 p.m.


This idea falls from the Baltimore and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestras, as an outreach, celebration and fundraiser.  You can read abou the BSO's Rusty Musicians here and here.  They have even gone so far to create a summer music academy!

"It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose business men to talk to, because artists only talk of money." - Jean Sibelius

The San Antonio Symphony announced their plans last fall for a Professional/Amateur rehearsal and concert, so KPAC Host John Clare filled out the forms, and learned in December he would be playing first violin!
Clare says, "I am looking forward to working with friends, and at the same time feel a little weird, maybe a bit nervous, having this chance to perform with the Symphony.  My most recent dealings are artist interviews and acting as Santa Claus and Jack O'Latern, not with my violin!
It will also be a chance to see the other side, literally, of Music Director Sebastian Lang Lessing."

See you Sunday at the Municipal for the kickoff of what will be a rousing Russian work! The San Antonio Symphony's Tchaikovsky Festival continues April 29th through May 8th.

"Every artist was first an amateur." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Christmas classic in a new performance

Before Warner Bros. figured out that cartoons could reach two audiences simultaneously, the writer Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann was composing stories that had philosophy and life lessons for the parents and for the kids, action and fantasy that borders on the hyperbolic.

One story that Hoffman wrote that will forever be associated with this time of year is Nussknacker und Mausekönig or The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Peter Tchaikovsky took this tale of the helpful god-father Drosselmayer, the evil mouse king and children in peril and turned it into a Christmas classic.

Hear Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker this Sunday afternoon, featuring a new recording with the

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and their music director, Simon Rattle. The curtain rises at 3pm

right here on member supported KPAC and KTXI.

Round Top: Dancing

Here's a sampling from Round Top of their ballet program.

You can see the Nutcracker this December and there are dance classes offered as well!

Pistols at 10 paces?

One of the most famous feuds in Classical Music occurred between Tchaikovsky and his one time teacher Nicholas Rubinstein. The composer causally asked what Rubinstein thought of his first piano concerto and Rubinstein responded as if Tchaikovsky were a student asking for advice. That story is well known, but what happened afterwards? Find out on the Piano this Sunday afternoon at 5 on KPAC and KTXI.

host, Randy Anderson

Chance for Tchaik

For a limited time, you can listen to a live recording of Janine Jansen play Tchaikovsky's Violin Cocnerto with the LA Philharmonic from NPR Music. Take a listen here.

Her new Beethoven & Britten concerti comes out later this month (just twenty days away, 9/29)!

John Clare had a chance to speak with Jansen about playing (mp3 file) and about musical style (mp3 file)

Sleeping Beauty waltzes onto DVD & Blu-Ray

“Sleeping Beauty” is celebrating 50 years this fall with a new DVD release featuring an incredible restoration of this animated classic. It was unlike any Disney movie before or since. Tchaikovsky’s balletic setting of the classic fairy tale inspired the whole production. George Bruns adapted the Tchaikovsky ballet score for the film, and the popular song “Once Upon a Dream” was written to the tune of the waltz from the ballet. It’s impossible now to divorce Tchaikovsky’s music and the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty.

Filmed widescreen in 70mm, the striking, stylized images and backgrounds in “Sleeping Beauty” are among the richest and most colorful the studio ever produced. From the magnificent castle interiors to the final showdown between Prince Phillip and the evil Maleficent in her dragon form, Sleeping Beauty is a joy to experience.

The DVD is of course chock full of special features like documentaries and art galleries, but again for classical music fans, one of them stands out. “Grand Canyon” is a 35-minute long CinemaScope widescreen film that utilizes Ferde Grofe’s “Grand Canyon Suite” as its soundtrack. Never mind that the movements are played out of order. The music is a splendid accompaniment to footage of the canyon and the Colorado river below, and the various animals that inhabit the area, from big cats, to birds, snakes and spiders, but shockingly – no mules!

Sleeping Beauty is available on standard DVD, and also in high definition, on a Blu-Ray disc. If you have a Blu-Ray player, high def is the way to go. This DVD is a most welcome treat for animation fans, lovers of classical music, and kids of all ages.