CGF Newsletter 4: Evergreen
German concert halls dim the lights; a new album by Caroline Shaw; the Queen's funeral features covers and originals
Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener JT. Here’s your hint: The composer is best known for a hit Broadway musical and a classic Christmas song. 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 know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter #3
Gian Carlo Menotti, Piano Concerto
We had one out-and-out winner: Listener Kevin (of the Jorja Fleezanis encomium) did the right thing and ID’d the piece to me offline. Congratulations! (Although, on a philosophical level, I wonder: if you just recognize the tune, is that really “winning” per se? Like if you didn’t Do The Work? Discuss.)
The rest of you fell right into my trap: you guessed Shostakovich, just as I hoped you would! Listener Eric also proposed Korngold, and Joey went with Britten. Fair enough!
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.
Winter is Coming
According to BR Klassik, concert halls and opera houses in Germany are being asked to prepare for the privations of the fuel war currently waging between Russia and the EU. I’m sure we’ve all heard about Europeans privately bracing for a lack of heat this winter, but I have to admit, I hadn’t thought about how it would hit the culture sector, and particularly classical music.
Many government and government-adjacent committees and task forces have been assembled across the country to best figure out how to save energy but keep culture afloat. Newer concert halls that are built along modern, passivhaus principles (as all new construction should be) have less to concern themselves with, but older halls are even trying to figure out ways to harness the heat from the spotlights. (A great NYT article about classical music spaces and their relation to environmental sustainability is here.)
One option nobody seems to be considering is the Beethovenian one: just don’t heat the hall!
Album Review: “Caroline Shaw: Evergreen”
As one of the most popular living composers in the classical tradition,* Pulitzer Prize-winning Caroline Shaw’s album releases probably receive among the highest volumes of reviews in classical music. And who are we at the Classical Gabfest to ignore her most recent offering, a collaboration with the Attacca String Quartet entitled Evergreen? A mixture of pure string quartet music and music including her voice, the album is a delightful and interesting showcase for Shaw’s unique musical style.
The album opens with the three-movement Essays, the highlight of the album in my opinion. The ASQ shines especially brightly in these pieces, demonstrating an uncannily well-blended sound and sparkling rhythmic sense that cannot be solely attributed to good sound engineering. The Essays explore creative uses of the string quartet without recourse to (much) extended technique, showing Shaw’s inventiveness within tradition. That the music is unabashedly harmonically gorgeous is icing on the cake!
The rest of the album is much the same, to its credit and detriment. Shaw’s writing is always pleasant, and I didn’t particularly want to turn off the album or even skip forward. But the homogeneity of style made it hard to focus on just the music for an hour. To be fair, this is the case for any number of albums of works by a single composer in a single medium, and the few tracks including her vocals break up the monotony somewhat.
All in all, I recommend the album for lovers of the most palatable contemporary classical music. And who isn’t a lover of that??
—Joey
*Mostly - she has dipped her toes into popular music, notably collaborating with Kanye West in the late 2010’s.
Fit for a Queen
After glancing at many articles covering this topic including one written before the funeral by my colleague here at University of Florida Imani Mosley (a retrospective on the tradition of music at monarchs’ funerals in Britain), the outlet with by far the most legible coverage of this topic was… Classic FM. There are others, of course — I feel that this article with Aleteia provides some nice details about the value of music in Queen Elizabeth’s eyes and that of her nation (She apparently really loved Oklahoma!), in addition to a playlist with all of the selections from the actual service.
And of course you can view the processional and funeral on YouTube. I enjoyed the brass bands’ funeral marches (including famous ones by Beethoven and Chopin) and the bagpipes in the processional, actually, and this is not covered in either of the articles above.
In the service itself: Elgar appears robustly in the set list, which also includes Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Gibbons, and any number of hymns Will can speak to probably with a lot more understanding than I! But of note were the two text settings commissioned specially for the occasion, the first of Psalm 42, “Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks: so longeth my soul after thee, O God” set by Master of the King’s Music Judith Weir; and the second was the closing anthem, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” by Scottish composer James MacMillan, who holds the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was named a Knight Bachelor by the Queen in 2015.
—Tiffany
Classical Mixtape
Joseph Canteloube, Chants d’Auvergne: “Baïlèro”
Dawn Upshaw, soprano; Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon conducted by Kent Nagano
As I slowly and painfully transition myself from a night owl to a morning person, I am constantly in search of music that embodies the peace and calm I love about being awake for the dawning hours. When I first heard "Baïlèro" from Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne (“Songs of the Auvergne”), I was completely entranced. Chants d’Auvergne is a large collection of 30 folk songs gathered from the Auvergne region of France split into 5 volumes, or series, with each series containing around 5-8 songs arranged for soprano and orchestra and sung in the beautiful Occitan Auvergnat dialect.
"Baïlèro" (The Shepherd’s Song) is, understandably, the most famous of these songs. It begins with the strings setting a lush pastoral scene with the oboe evoking a shepherd’s call. Then a young woman depicted by the soprano soloist sings out to a shepherd on the other side of the valley, asking him to bring his flock to join her where the grass is greener.
“Pastré, lou prat faï flour,
li cal gorda toun troupèl,
dio lou baïlèro lèrô.
L’èrb ès pu fin’ ol prat d’oïçi,
baïlèro lèrô.”
“Shepherd, the field is in flower,
bring your flock over here,
sing the baïlèro lèro.
The grass is finer in the field here,
baïlèro lèro.”
—Listener David
I don't know enough about broadway musicals or christmas songs to have a clue so I'm staying out of this one.
But I have other things to weigh in on....
Regarding the prompt to discuss whether recognizing the tune in question counts as winning Name That Tune, I would like to point out that if we are saying it is NOT winning, then we have to strip our hosts of several of their wins on the podcast.
As for heating concert halls...why do orchestras not simply burn their violas? (S/O to episode 97)
With the hint given, I am extraordinarily tempted to just privately name the composer I believe it to be and forgo any analysis, especially since my analysis skills are threadbare. But how shall I improve without practice? The opening melody sounds very… vocal, in the sense that it could be easily sung, so I am tempted to say this is from a work that involves voices somehow. The “Broadway musical” part of the hint leads me to believe it’s for (American) stage, as do the rhythmic feel and the brass- and string-heavy orchestration. The contrapuntal section that follows does throw me a little, but I’m not too familiar with Golden Age and pre-Golden Age musicals; maybe they had more contrapuntal material for interstitials than modern musicals? My basket: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern.