Tone Prose 59: Post-Mortem

A bite out of the Big Apple

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: the New York Philharmonic programmed this piece in its 2022-2023 season.

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 58
Florent Schmitt, Sonatine en Trio for Flute, Clarinet, and Piano

Listeners, did this one sound familiar? Well it should have, because this clip was accidentally recycled from Tone Prose 51!

I (Will) was the only one to hazard a guess on this (Poulenc & Françaix) but in my defense, when edition 51 came out, I was on my work/travel trip to the UK and wasn’t weighing in on the guessing game. But I did listen to the clips that came out then, and I did think I had heard this before.

I was in New York this weekend (more below) and so I was happy to give Young Joseph the back of my hand!

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.

Concert Report

New York Philharmonic
Friday, October 13, David Geffen Hall

This is a slim concert report because I (Will) only went to the first half of this concert, in spite of the fact that I would very much like to have heard the second half. I was in New York this weekend (more below) and a friend had a pair of NYP comps drop into his lap and invited me to come along, so I did.

My impressions of the newly renovated Geffen Hall remain the same as my first visit: it has very clear, modern acoustics that let you hear every detail of what is being played on stage. With a lesser orchestra, this would present a challenge, but with a virtuoso ensemble such as the Phil, I’m happy to hear every little thing the musicians are doing.

I heard two works: Raminta Šerkšnytė’s De profundis for string orchestra and Robert Schumann’s piano concerto. The guest conductor was Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the pianist was Daniil Trifonov.

Raminta Šerkšnytė is a Latvian composer born in 1975 whose De profundis dates from 1998. It was her bachelor’s thesis composition and it apparently turned into a breakout hit for her. I quite liked the piece, though I think a bit of dust has settled on this style, a sort of sped-up, Arvo Pärt-influenced tintinnabulism with extra dramatic flair that was all the rage among Baltic musicians around the turn of the millennium. (It reminded me, for example, of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Illusion from 1993, perhaps infused with a touch of Penderecki — but I don’t mean to imply that any of this is bad!)

As for Trifonov, he gave a fine enough performance of the Schumann, but I’m just so over this guy, who seems to fetishize his peculiar mannerisms and persona over his music making. If you want to dig into this further, I would direct you toward episode 64 of the Classical Gabfest, wherein we discussed his completion of Bach’s The Art of Fugue along with the highly eccentric music video made to accompany it.

I thought Mirga was excellent and I really wish I could have stayed to listen to the second half (about which, more below.) The Times seems to agree with my overall impression.

Unfinished

As I (Will) mentioned above, hearing the NYP concert was a bit of a fluke; the real reasons for my trip to New York this weekend were twofold: 1) to work with Joey on recording a new solo piano work that I wrote for him this summer (about which more, hopefully, next week) and to attend the world premiere of the final, unfinished work from Stephen Sondheim’s pencil, Here We Are.

As longtime Listeners will know, I am a bit of a nut for classic musical theater, and I worship Sondheim as a king among all musical deities. I am convinced that he is one of the true inheritors of the great classical tradition as practiced by Ravel and Rachmaninoff (listen to CGF 67 for more on that.)

However, I freely acknowledge that Broadway is at best tangential to classical music, and thus not really within the purview of this newsletter. If you’d like to read more about my take on this show, and how this production fits into the history of unfinished classics by the likes of Mozart and Schubert, I invite you head over to willcwhite dot com where I have a post about just that.

Tone Praise

Jean Sibelius, Lemminkäinen Suite

There is a strong case to be made that Jean Sibelius composed nine symphonies rather than the customarily numbered seven. First, there is the early Kullervo, a choral symphony in all but name. Second, there is this piece, the Lemminkäinen Suite, a major instrumental work in four movements which includes the haunting “Swan of Tuonela,” often performed separately.

Lemminkäinen formed the second half of the NY Phil concert that I attended this past Friday. Well, excerpts from the Lemminkäinen. For whatever reason, Mirga decided not to program the entire suite. The concert didn’t seem especially long to me, but I’ll defer to her judgment.

The piece is not uniformly gripping, but it includes some first rate Sibelius and it’s well worth a listen. I’m disappointed to have gotten so close to hearing it live but just missing it, because it’s rarely programmed and I’ve never heard it in concert. Thank goodness for Thomas Edison and his newfangled phonograph machine!

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