400 Days and some Saint Saëns

Some­times you miss when the odome­ter turns to a par­tic­u­lar­ly impres­sive sequence of num­bers. I missed when our car hit 6666 kilo­me­ters a cou­ple of weeks ago. On the oth­er hand, back in July, I did take notice when the cal­en­dar hit 07–07-07 (although I did­n’t head over to the Riv­er Rock Casi­no in Rich­mond to play craps as appar­ent­ly many peo­ple did).

Today, how­ev­er, is sig­nif­i­cant for a cou­ple of rea­sons: first, it’s Beethoven’s birth­day (he’d be 237 years old today, just shy of three 80-year old life­times, one after the oth­er, if one could man­age such a med­ical feat.)

How­ev­er, today’s date means some­thing even more impor­tant, look­ing for­ward, than it does look­ing back­ward or numerologically:

As of today, George W. Bush, or WPIUSH, as I often refer to him, has just 400 days more in office. Now, that’s some­thing to look for­ward to.

What I’m Lis­ten­ing To
Some fel­low blog­gers (Gene, M.J. and Nan­cy) have request­ed that from time to time, it might be nice if I not­ed what I was lis­ten­ing to and wrote a lit­tle bit about it, since my tastes in music are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from most people.

(By way of expla­na­tion, for those who don’t know, I tend to lis­ten to a lot of Clas­si­cal music, and very lit­tle pop­u­lar songs, main­ly because I nev­er learned how to lis­ten to Pop or Rock music, as I was brought up in a house­hold that nev­er had any of that on. This some­times makes me feel a lit­tle bit like some­one from a dif­fer­ent plan­et, and despite my attempts to get to know pop­u­lar music more, I fear it’s a los­ing bat­tle, because I’m always lis­ten­ing for the wrong things. I can’t under­stand the lyrics, and my taste in musi­cal lan­guage has always been toward music that has a rel­a­tive­ly com­pli­cat­ed and rapid har­mon­ic rhythm [har­mon­ic rate of change]. This is pret­ty much the oppo­site for what peo­ple lis­ten to in pop­u­lar music, from say, 1955 onward. I’m OK with some Jazz, and even have been known to ‘get’ the odd pop bal­lad or folk music — even some Coun­try West­ern, but I’m most com­fort­able with reper­toire that rarely is played out­side of NPR or CBC Radio 2. For­tu­nate­ly, there are sev­er­al cen­turies of music by thou­sands of com­posers to choose from, and the genre is far from dead, as there are indeed, liv­ing com­posers all over the world writ­ing what some peo­ple now refer to as ‘con­cert music’, for lack of a bet­ter term.)

So giv­en today’s birth­day, you would expect that I’d be lis­ten­ing to Lud­wig Van. As it turns out, the piece I had run­ning through my head this morn­ing is one that I’ve some­times heard on 2‑piano recitals and even at par­ties my par­ents would have, since in the evening, they would some­times play (or have guests play­ing) their 2 pianos, either in their liv­ing room, or now in their teach­ing stu­dio. It’s ‘Vari­a­tions on a Theme by Beethoven’ by the com­pos­er who is, for bet­ter or worse, known for a chil­dren’s clas­sic, The Car­ni­val of the Ani­mals, Camille Saint Saëns (which, odd­ly enough, also includes 2 pianos, so I guess there is some­thing of a pat­tern going on there).

This piece make the most of the effect of switch­ing the music from one piano to anoth­er, a tech­nique called ‘antiphonal music’ which goes back as far as the Renais­sance — if not fur­ther. Com­posers like Hein­rich Schütz and Gio­van­ni Gabriel­li wrote church and sec­u­lar music that took great advan­tage of groups of per­form­ers, some­times sig­nif­i­cant dis­tances from each oth­er, with the music alter­nat­ing between the dif­fer­ent groups. Despite the fact that pianos are usu­al­ly placed next to each oth­er on the stage, record­ings can real­ly make them dis­tinct from each oth­er, and a recent record­ing by the Turk­ish Iden­ti­cal Twins Güher and Süher Pekinel, makes it so that one piano is sit­u­at­ed at far left and the oth­er at far right in space (or at least, it sounds that way). Besides all of this spa­tial enter­tain­ment, this piece is every­thing that Vari­a­tions should be about: how to take a sim­ple theme and play with it. Like a pair of chil­dren try­ing on all sorts of dif­fer­ent out­fits, the 2 pianos in this piece go through all sorts of moods and acro­bat­ics, but can’t escape the fact that it’s the same theme, no mat­ter how it’s dressed up. In the end I have to admire both Saint Saëns inge­nu­ity and his sense of dra­ma. The piece includes a pre­req­ui­site almost-Fugue, a Baroque peri­od cre­ation that 19th Cen­tu­ry com­posers like Saint Saëns (and oth­ers) delight­ed in riff­ing on to show that they too were well schooled in com­po­si­tion­al tech­nique, and a great rol­lick­ing big finale that hops away to a com­plete­ly sat­is­fy­ing (if a lit­tle pat) finish.

It’s a shame that Saint Saëns is main­ly known for what’s essen­tial­ly a work for chil­dren, as well as his Organ Sym­pho­ny, which was used for the music for the movie ‘Babe’. Maybe there is some­thing child­like about him, but nev­er­the­less, I like these Vari­a­tions, which prob­a­bly aren’t so famous. Debussy was­n’t a big fan of Saint Saëns, who he felt was too sen­ti­men­tal and old-fash­ioned. Indeed, Saint Saëns is one of those Parisians who were in atten­dance in 1913 for Stravin­sky’s Rite of Spring, and I don’t know if he con­tributed to the riot, but he report­ed­ly stormed out. (He report­ed­ly said that he did­n’t like the high bas­soon solo that starts the bal­let) I can for­give him, as he was 78 years-old by that time and def­i­nite­ly a man of the last cen­tu­ry, not Stravinsky’s.

About that record­ing by the Pekinal twins: It’s great fun, and avail­able from the iTunes music store, but unfor­tu­nate­ly, you have to buy the whole album. In this case, that’s not such a bad thing, because it includes a fierce per­for­mance of Brahms’ two piano ver­sion of his Quin­tet in F‑Minor (a piece I def­i­nite­ly grew up with, as my father per­formed it many times), and 5 of his op. 39 Waltzes, which they play with a lit­tle too much ruba­to for my taste (it isn’t a drunk­en per­for­mance, but maybe a lit­tle tip­sy) and some Hun­gar­i­an Dances. Here’s a link to the Album (pic­ture to art, but­ton to iTunes):