107: Ah, Paris!

An album of bonbons and a sketchy Russian dude

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Marcello. Here’s your hint: This composer died in the same year that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific premiered on Broadway. No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 106
Bartók, Four Orchestral Pieces

Listener Kevin wrote in with the exact answer (because of course he did) and Listener Laurie correctly guessed Bartók.

Correct guesses are all well and good, but what makes me (Will) happy is to see spirited, insightful attempts, even if they’re not spot on. In that category, we had Listener Eric guessing Revueltas and Shostakovich, and Listener Jeremy guessing Barber. Listener Tammy went a little too hard in the direction of my personal biography by guessing Schnittke, and this threw Joey into a headspin, guessing Gubaïdulina, Ustvolskaya, and Ligeti.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Album Review

Impressions parisiennes by the Quatuor Van Kuijk (Alpha Classics)

This group of four young Frenchman was new to me (Will), but they’ve recorded extensively for Alpha, and their new album is as stylish and enjoyable a collection as one could hope for (with one caveat which I’ll get to.) Having formed in Paris in 2012, they’re already an accomplished group, having won all manner of major awards which you can read about in their bio.

This album presents the music of Poulenc, Ravel, Debussy, Satie, and Fauré, but it does not include any of those composers’ canonic string quartets; rather, all the selections are arrangements of their songs and lighter works, including some real bangers like “Les chemins de l’amour,” “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” and “Mandoline.” The transcriptions were written by Emmanuel François (the quartet’s violist), Jean-Christophe Masson, and Gildas Guillon, and there’s not a clinker in the bunch.

Interspersed between these pieces are original compositions by the jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon, a suite of works called Ces Messieurs, with movements titled “Francis,” “Maurice,” “Claude,” “Erik,” and “Gabriel.” I can’t say I found any of these pieces “bad,” but I can’t say I really enjoyed any of them, and they interrupted the flow of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable listening experience. If you’re going to listen to the album, give them a shot — you may well like them them more than I did.

Welcome to Shorworld

The dogged team at VAN Magazine has done it again, this time profiling the Russian hedge fund quant-turned-composer Alexey Vladimorovitch Kononenko (aka Alexey Shor) who has used his vast resources to create a parallel universe of classical music infrastructure devoted to his work. Several prominent musicians have found their way into his nexus, including Steven Isserlis, Ray Chen, Maxim Vengerov, James Ehnes, Daniel Lozakovich, and Gautier Capuçon.

More from the article:

Like a town built around a mine, an entire ecology has sprung up around the seemingly inexhaustible resources of Kononenko’s fortune and Ishkhanov’s energy as an organizer. That ecology is Shorworld: a labyrinthine network that intersects with the mainstream classical music industry while duplicating many of its structures. And though the organizations have left Malta, they seem to have found a suitable new base in Dubai, which has become a hub for Russian intelligence and business interests following the invasion of Ukraine.

Shorworld encompasses celebrity musicians who have endorsed Shor and Ishkhanov (though sometimes in evasive terms). It includes orchestras, from the London Symphony Orchestra to the Tokyo Philharmonic, whose performances of his music Shor has collected with Pokemon-worthy completism. It has its own circuit of festivals where Shor is featured, and its own network of competitions where Shor is required repertoire. And it produces a steady stream of sponsored content in the classical music publications.

From VAN’s publicity surrounding this article, it looks like they had a knockdown, dragout legal fight to get this article published, and it’s quite a tour de force.

Tone Praise

Timo Andres, Tangent

It’s always an exciting day when Timo drops a new upload.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)