Fairy Tale Music

[Lance]

Ah yes, Fairy Tales. Many composers have contributed music in this vein: Prokofiev, Suk, Medtner, Scriabin, Enna, Weyse, J. P. Hartmann, Louis Glass, MacDowell, Grandjean, Langgaard, Bortkiewicz, and countless others.

I've been listening to a disc of Fairy Tale Music for Piano, 4-Hands performed by the Heidelberg Piano Duo (Adelheid Lechler and Martin Smith at the Steinway). This was FAIRY TALE MUSIC I didn't know, except for the inclusion of Maurice Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye [Mother Goose].

On this disc is György Ránki's [1907-1992] Two Wonder Oxen (with narration by Tünde Nagy), Carl Reinecke's [1824-1910] The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, Op. 46; Florent Schmitt's [1870-1958] The Sandman, Op. 58, and Maurice Ravel's (1875-1937] Mother Goose. I got the disc primarily for the Reinecke because I had never heard it before and I have a passion for Reinecke's music. The piece lasts 22'34" and is beautifully played by the Heidelberg Trio. Of course, Ravel's Mother Goose was originally written for piano four-hands in 1908 and in 1912 it was used as ballet music. Ránk's piece was new to me as is the loosely translated The Sandman by Schmitt.

All four works appear on the German Ars Produktion label 368 333, recorded in 1993.

Anyone else aware of the Reinecke piece?

[stenka razin]

Yes, Lance, I know the work. Here is a chance for our fellow CMGers to hear a little bit of the sadly neglected Reinecke's 'The Nutcracker and the Mouse King'', my friend.


http://us.dada.net/music/chamberorchest ... 9704m.html

[piston]

Baba Yaga, Anatol Lyadov. Not very long, but good ol' story of a hut on fowl's legs.

Kikimora, Anatol Lyadov. Another nice orchestral mini-work.

[piston]

Now I'm ready for a bed-time story!

[some guy]

Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, of course.

[Sylph]

Lachenmann's Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern, of course.

Lachenmann: Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern


Though the recordings are mounting up, and some of his larger-scale works have been heard in this country (he was a featured composer at the Huddersfield festival two years ago), Helmut Lachenmann remains a shadowy figure even among the new-music cognoscenti. Now 67, the Stuttgart-born composer has been a major player in the German avant garde since the late 1960s - as a vigorous polemicist, and a composer who has consistently questioned the basic precepts of western art music and the way it is both performed and perceived.

Lachenmann started his career as a card-carrying member of the post-war avant-garde, attending the Darmstadt summer schools in the late 1950s. There he met and befriended Luigi Nono, and it was Nono's insistence that music should take on a social responsibility as well as a purely musical one that has influenced the way in which he has approached composition ever since.

Every musical device he used, Lachenmann decided, had to be questioned, tested, and purged of its historical baggage. That led him to create a language that was often deliberately alienating: instruments were required to produce unorthodox sounds, voices broke down texts into isolated syllables. All these techniques were strictly organised according to serial principles, while Lachenmann's aural imagination and discrimination created a sound world of endless fascination and spellbinding rigour.

Someone who took such a uncompromising stand on tradition, and who had done his best to expunge all traces of its legacy from his music, was also likely to take a pretty jaundiced view of opera, the most hidebound of all the genres. But in the 1990s he finally produced a stage work. Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern (The Little Match Girl), which Lachenman describes as "music with images", was first performed in Hamburg in 1997; this recording is taken from a production in Stuttgart last year.

The basis of the scenario is Hans Christian Andersen's tragic fairy tale about the match girl who freezes to death on New Year's Eve, which Lachenmann reads as an indictment of society's indifference and lack of concern for the poor and disadvantaged. But Das Mädchen does not merely set out to tell the story. Elements of the narrative are interleaved with a huge range of other literary, musical and historical references as well. In particular, the fate of the match girl is twinned with that Gudrun Ensslin, one of the German Baader-Meinhof terrorists of the late 1960s, who was a childhood friend of Lachenmann's. Extracts from her prison letters are woven into the score, as well as a text by Leonardo Da Vinci on the nature of understanding, that Lachenmann also used in one of his key works of the early 1990s, "...zwei Gefühle...", Musik mit Leonardo.

There are no characters identified in the cast list, just two solo sopranos, a female speaker, a chorus and a group of three solo instrumentalists, leaving the stage to the "images" mentioned in the work's subtitle. What they all offer is a commentary upon the story, just in the same way that all of Lachenmann's works have been a commentary on the whole musical tradition.

The sounds are extraordinary, and the dramatic intensity they generate hard to pin down, yet totally absorbing. There are references to non-western musics (one of the soloists plays the Japanese sho) as well as to key works in the classical tradition - near the beginning of the two-hour work, for instance, a series of violent orchestral chords borrows in rapid succession from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Beethoven's Coriolan, Schoenberg's Variations, Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, Mahler's Sixth Symphony and Berg's Wozzeck. And though the whole piece appears to be seamless, the continuous fabric of text and music is underpinned by a series of "numbers" - 24 of them altogether, each with its own title.

I can't pretend that Das Mädchen is easy listening, or that one exposure to this singular piece is going to reveal all its subtleties and layers. That comes only with familiarity and a willingness to accept Lachenmann's unexpected yet wonderfully refined musical world. But even a small sample ought to convince an unprejudiced listener that something extraordinary is going on here.

The chances of this piece getting on to a British stage in the foreseeable future are vanishingly small, given the timorousness of the opera establishment here. Given that, these discs, which preserve a wonderfully dedicated performance under Lothar Zagrosek, become even more valuable.

[Sylph]

Le jardin féerique?

[EarlyCuyler]

Does Poulenc's L'Histoire du Babar count? The orchestral version at least, the piano only version is dreadful.

[jbuck919]

Corlyss and I are particularly fond of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bolAOqgOLI

[dulcinea]

What do you think of the movie version of A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM in which James Cagney plays Bottom and Mickey Rooney plays Puck? Some of the cast members were criticised as not suitable for their roles, but Mendelssohn's music was unanimously praised.

[jbuck919]

What do you think of the movie version of A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM in which James Cagney plays Bottom and Mickey Rooney plays Puck? Some of the cast members were criticised as not suitable for their roles, but Mendelssohn's music was unanimously praised.

A marvel, a classic--and Mickey Rooney in his greatest role.

[EarlyCuyler]

What do you think of the movie version of A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHT DREAM in which James Cagney plays Bottom and Mickey Rooney plays Puck? Some of the cast members were criticised as not suitable for their roles, but Mendelssohn's music was unanimously praised.

Also happend to be the first movie that Erich Wolfgang Korngold worked on. He reorchestrated Mendelssohn's music for this film.

[Sylph]

[Corlyss_D]

Corlyss and I are particularly fond of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bolAOqgOLI

Spot on! Loved it. Iolanthe is my favorite G&S. It's my guide to government. The ladies in the clip are too . . . um . . . slender and attractive, as are these from Stratford (presumably Ontario, whose G&S productions are justly famous). They are supposed to be portly sendups of Wagner's Walkyries.