A Proposal for Ten Pieces III

Martha:            I didn’t know you could play.

The Doctor:     Oh, well, you know, if you hang around with Beethoven, you’re bound to pick a few things up.

Martha:            Hmm. Especially about playing loud.

Doctor Who S3 E6, ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ (2007)

Ten Pieces is a BBC initiative aimed at encouraging young people to engage with classical music. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before on my blog, and if you know me in person I imagine I might have brought it up in conversation too, because I’m a big fan. There are two instalments of Ten Pieces, the first aimed at primary- and the second at seconary-school-age children: in both, each of ten pieces of orchestral music is introduced by a different celebrity presenter, who explains a bit about the piece’s composer, its context, and what it’s supposed to be about, with some nice visuals – either live-action or animated – to illustrate the same information. I think this all serves as an absolutely brilliant ‘in’ to the world of classical music, which can sadly often seem a bit pretentiously impenetrable, and so it’s only natural that my idle thoughts occasionally stray onto the matter of which pieces I’d include in a third instalment of the initiative, were such a thing ever to exist.

 

The Ankara Youth Symphony Orchestra, apparently. Thanks to DemirezerBaris for uploading this lovely picture to Wikimedia Commons under the conditions specified here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

The first criterion for choosing is, of course, that none of the composers featured in the first two instalments should recur again. These are as follows:

Ten Pieces I:

1)    Gustav Theodore Holst (1874-1934, English) – ‘Mars’ from the Planets Suite

2)    Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907, Norwegian) – ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ from the Peer Gynt Suite

3)    Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky (1839-1881, Russian) – ‘Night on Bald Mountain’

4)    John Coolidge Adams (1947-present, American) – ‘Short Ride in a Fast Machine’

5)    Edward Benjamin Britten (1913-1976, English) – ‘Storm’ from Peter Grimes

6)    Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827, German) – Symphony no. 5

7)    Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791, Austrian) – Horn concerto no. 4

8)    George Frideric Handel (1685-1759, German and British) – ‘Zadok the Priest’

9)    Anna Meredith (1978-present, British) – ‘Connect It’

10) Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971, Russian) – The Firebird Suite

Ten Pieces II:

1)    Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883, German) – ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from The Ring of the Nibelung

2)    Gabriel Prokofiev (1975-present, Russian and British) – Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra

3)    Georges Bizet (1838-1875, French) – Carmen

4)    Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809, Austrian) – Trumpet concerto

5)    Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975, Russian) – Symphony no. 10

6)    Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750, German) – Toccata and Fugue

7)    Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958, English) – ‘The Lark Ascending’

8)    Anna Clyne (1980-present, English) – ‘Night Ferry’

9)    Guiseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901, Italian) – ‘Dies irae’ from Requiem

10) Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990, American) – ‘Mambo’ from West Side Story

Fortunately, there are still lots and lots of brilliant composers left to choose from.

The second criterion is that each chosen piece has to be orchestral; it can’t be for, say, solo piano or unaccompanied choir or whatever. It can include a piano or a choir or whatever alongside the orchestra, but the orchestra has to be there. That’s just the way the initiative is set up – creates some consistency, you know.

The third criterion is that the ten pieces should all be different: different composers from different parts of the world and different musical eras, with different musical styles. This is important because the thing is designed as an introduction to the classical genre, and so it should showcase something of the breadth of styles encompassed by that genre. The orchestra provides the consistency; everything else is up for grabs. This is the criterion I’m most likely to have a bit of trouble fulfilling, because at the end of the day, I have a particular musical taste, and I’m not going to include music I don’t like in my proposed set of pieces. Still, I can have a stab at getting a variety of stuff in there, and we’ll see how it turns out.

So here, in alphabetical order by composer’s surname, is my humble suggestion for Ten Pieces III, with a little bit of commentary as to what each piece is like in case you’re not familiar with it, that might provide the odd bit of direction for how this stuff might be presented as well.

1)    Antonín Leopold Dvořák (1841-1904, Czech) – Symphony no. 9 (‘From the New World’)

It was a tough choice here between Dvořák’s eighth and ninth symphonies, but the ninth is his most famous and it seems to be part of the principle of Ten Pieces to include some really well-known bits of music alongside the odd more obscure one. Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City from 1892 to 1895, and spoke of how Native American and African American musical styles, along with the landscape of America itself, influenced what he wrote while he was there, including the aptly-named New World Symphony.

2)    Edward William Elgar (1857-1934, English) – ‘Nimrod’ from Enigma Variations
I ummed and ahhed over which of Elgar’s works to include in my proposed set of pieces. Personally, I’m a big fan of his cello concerto, and of course his Pomp and Circumstance March no. 1 (aka ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, as sung at the Proms) is legendary, but then I decided my list was a little lacking in the way of slower and gentler pieces, and ‘Nimrod’ was the obvious solution. The story behind the name is apparently that once when Elgar was feeling very depressed and on the brink of giving up composing, his friend Augustus Jaeger came and encouraged him; Jäger is German for ‘hunter’, so in honour of his friend, Elgar named the piece after Nimrod, who Genesis tells us was ‘a mighty hunter before the LORD’.

3)    Arturo Márquez (1950-present, Mexican) – Danzón no. 2
When you pull Arturo Márquez up on Spotify, his entire top five tracks list consists of different recordings of Danzón no. 2. Danzón is a dance style which originated in Cuba but gained great popularity in Mexico; it counts English country dance among its ancestors, and mambo and cha-cha-chá among its descendants. Márquez’s Danzón no. 2 is an irresistibly motionary bit of music (if that’s a word), crammed full of tempo changes and driving rhythms, and it’s also got some really nice solo bits for lots of different instruments.

4)    Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953, American) – Symphony no. 1

I discovered Price’s first symphony this week and I’m obsessed; it’s filled with irresistible little melodies that properly take hold of you, and somehow it just puts images of the American South in your head. Even if, like me, you’ve never been there and have very little idea how authentic those images are. Apparently much of Price’s work was nearly lost as society’s tastes changed: some of it, we only have because a bunch of her papers were retrieved from a dilapidated abandoned house in Illinois in 2009.

5)    Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakof (1844-1908, Russian) – Scheherezade

Scheherezade is the storyteller in the Thousand and One Arabian Nights; Rimsky-Korsakof gives her the most gorgeous up-and-down violin leitmotif that sounds like spinning a yarn, as it were, while the evil sultan who beheads every wife he marries immediately after the wedding night gets this bombastic series of threatening brass notes. Those themes recur, woven in and out of the stories Scheherezade tells as she persuades the sultan that maybe women aren’t so terrible after all.

6)    Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828, Austrian) – Symphony no. 8 (‘Unfinished’)

A symphony, according to the traditional model, is supposed to have four movements: an introduction, a slow movement, a dance movement, and a finale. Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony only has two, hence its title. Maybe he just didn’t feel as if he needed any more after all the lovely syncopated melodies and hold-your-breath slow strings and sudden tutti interruptions of the first two.

7)    Jean Sibelius (1865-1957, Finnish) – Symphony no. 2

Yes, I know ‘Finlandia’ is more famous (you might know the main tune of that one as the hymn ‘Be Still, My Soul; The Lord Is On Thy Side’), but have you heard Sibelius’ second symphony? It’s really quite magnificent. Granted, it’s horrid to play if you’re unfortunate enough to be a violinist (like me) and not a very good one either (like me), but then you hear the brass section absolutely killing those big, dramatic fourth-movement fanfares behind you and think, you know what, never mind that I made an absolute dog’s breakfast of the third-movement fugue; this is epic.

8)    Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893, Russian) – Swan Lake

Swan Lake is a ballet about the unfolding romance between a prince called Siegfried and a swan – who is, I hasten to add, actually a woman called Odette who’s been cursed and can only return to human form at night. Tchaikovsky’s score is a proper bit of romantic-era stuff, all totes emosh, really loud then really quiet, builds and builds and feints until you feel almost frustrated by it before hitting the climactic return to the main theme. A right drama queen, that Tchaikovsky.

9)    Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (1678-1741, Italian) – Four Seasons

The Four Seasons is a series of violin concertos, which only just squeaked past the second of my three criteria as outlined above, because they’re backed by a chamber orchestra rather than a full one, but I was looking for a bit of baroque representation in my theoretical Ten Pieces III and this just had to be it. Baroque stuff is very neat and orderly, sometimes almost predictable, but don’t let that convince you that it’s boring: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is just beautiful – perfectly formed, shall we say. As you can probably guess, each section is designed to evoke a different season – so spring, for example, is all fresh and lively and hopeful, winter is sort of spiky and unforgiving, and summer is really slow because everyone’s lolling about feeling too hot to move. No, really, that’s what Vivaldi intended to evoke: there’s an accompanying sonnet that confirms as much.

10) Xian Xinghai (1905-1945, Chinese) – Yellow River Piano Concerto

This piano concerto was actually arranged by a pianist called Yin Chengzong, based on Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata, which he composed, along with a number of other patriotic works, during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s. The piano is perfect for conveying the movement of the water, though, and the interactions between it and the orchestra – which for this piece is required to include a dizi (Chinese transverse flute) and pipa (Chinese plucked lute) as well as all your standard orchestral instruments – are just a treat to listen to.

So there you have my suggested set of works for Ten Pieces III. If anyone from the BBC is reading, you might want to get on that. Although I’m sure my wonderful readers have their own ideas as well; if you’re lucky, they might leave one or two in the comments – and then I’ll be lucky enough to have a few recommendations to follow up as well. As I’ve said before, I’m no expert in classical music: I just love it. And what further qualification than that should there be for praising and recommending something?