Tetragrammaton.What should we begin with today?
Let's try some Stravinsky, neoclassical period.
What were the different periods of Stravinsky?
Stravinsky is always experimenting with new ideas.His teacher was Rimsky-Korsakov, who wrote Scheherazade.We can listen to a bit of that later.Rimsky-Korsakov was very ornamented, very, you could say, classical, trying to create a sound of glamour.
writing operas.He was in a sense trying to make Russian music more like European music.I don't think this enterprise ever succeeded.
Was he the first Russian composer to try to sound European?
Well, you could say Glinka, which is more or less the 1840s, is the first Russian composer to create a Russian classical music.And he wrote two well-known operas and many other pieces.And he was trying to bring Russian music into his own.
And he is the fount from which a lot of later Russian music comes. Glinka.He's not listened to that much anymore, but it's actually pretty good.Rimsky-Korsakov, we still listen to Scheherazade and Flight of the Bumblebee.That's a very famous piece.
Let's hear some Rimsky-Korsakov.Here's Fritz Reiner with the Chicago Symphony.He created very nice recorded sounds. Is he very ornamented, very lush?
That's very commanding, very dramatic, right?Just beautiful, flat outright, wonderful.
It sounds like the kind of sounds you'd hear in Hollywood movies, maybe from the late 40s or 1950s.
And they drew on Rimsky-Korsakov explicitly.
Absolutely. Now there's another major strand in Russian music in the mid to late 19th century, and that's Mussorgsky.So he's drawing upon folk songs, and he was considered a kind of untutored barbarian, Mussorgsky.
So Rimsky, it's all very perfectly in place, wonderfully played.When Mussorgsky put his music out, people hated it.In fact, Rimsky-Korsakov took one of Mussorgsky's pieces and reorchestrated it so it would sound correct. He ruined it, in my opinion.
We can listen to that in a moment.But you can think of Stravinsky as having his teacher, Rimsky, who taught him how to actually orchestrate, which he did learn.And then Mussorgsky, who's luring him toward the Russian folk traditions.
So we're here in Italy, of course.There's a longstanding Italian tradition of music from the cities.Were they both from the same place in Russia?I don't think so, but I couldn't tell you offhand.Stravinsky's from near St.Petersburg.
a lot of Russian music was more likely to be from St.Petersburg than from Moscow.So Stravinsky is longing for the folk tradition.
And unlike Germany, Italy, which had these well-developed urban musics for centuries, Russia never quite had that because its cities were immature.So the folk tradition was always the lure
sort of luring each and every Russian composer into doing things that were weird and then at the same time you have a lot of the Russian composers worried that their status was inferior to that of Europe and being schizophrenic as to whether they should embrace that difference
or somehow try to overcome it and fight back.And that's another lens through which you can understand Stravinsky, that he's trying to integrate all the different traditions into the life of one composer, so to speak.
Let's see if we can hear a good Mussorgsky song.And that recording of the Scheherazade, even though it's from 1956, it still sounds wonderful.It's before all orchestras started sounding the same.
Have you ever been to hear classical music in Russia?Yeah, fantastic.How was the experience going from country to country hearing the music made in that country in the orchestral setting?
In Russia, just the quality of performers you've never heard of is through the ceiling.My favorite place to hear music would be Germany and Berlin, just the discipline imposed, the quality of the audience, but basically St.
Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna would be the greatest of musical cities to hear live music.Vienna is a bit more ruined by tourist demand.There's a lot of Mozart and 60 minutes sort of concerts in the churches.
Oh, let's see, which one of these Mussorgsky songs shall we try?Let's see how the cradle song will do for The Nursery.
Gay!Go, go, go!Go, go, gay!Gay!Gay!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go!Go! Come play today, but I'm late.But you, Gop!Gop!
Farewell, Vasya, I'll see you off.Only in the evening, I'll be there.I'm very glad to see a stranger.Come, look!Hey!But you, Gop!
Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!
Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay!Gay! Oy, malchik, shto za gorye?Upolnaplakat'.Praydyot, moy druk, paskoyka vstany varoshki prava.Vot tak, ditya.Pasmatry, kakala prelost'.Vidzish, v kusta. Well?Is it over?Is it over?I've had enough of you.
I'm going home to you, cockroach.
Is that typical of Mussorgsky?
Playful, perverse, never delivering quite the pleasing moment, confusing you a bit.How do you like that one?Interesting.Very interesting.To me, he's the great Russian composer of the 19th century, not Rimsky.
But we'll play a bit of Rimsky reorchestrating Mussorgsky and you can see what the change this is.But this is Mussorgsky's most famous piece because it was featured in a 1940 Disney movie called Fantasia that you've probably seen.
Maybe even showed to your kid.Leopold Stokowski was conducting that.And this is Night on Bald Mountain and here's Dudamel doing it.Let's see how this recording goes. This is Pictures at an Exhibition, also orchestrated by Rimsky.
And is this as Mazursky intended it?
No, not at all.We can hear that in a moment. It's like Hollywood music again, isn't it?Nice, but it bothers me.And now let's hear it as Mussorgsky intended it.
Now that opening part, Mussorgsky intended it as Russian church bells, but it's obscured by the orchestration.And the piano version, this is Richter playing, is again eccentric and willful.
See how he doesn't release the tension?
It sounds like it's scoring a story.It feels very narrative-based.
And it is.It's fully narrative-based.Each movement of this piece is about different characters.This is the gnome. The bells return.
Is it always played this fast on piano?
This is one of those pieces, every pianist plays it differently.And Richter had this highly eccentric style, which I think matches Mussorgsky perfectly.Horowitz and Richter are the two greatest recordings of this piece.And this is Richter's.
How different is the Horowitz?
Let's see if we can find it.I think the Horowitz recording was 1952.Yeah, Carnegie Hall.Here we go. Each pianist is just refusing to smooth out the piece.They're nervous, they're jittery, the energy comes through.
I believe Emerson, Lake, and Palmer did a album of Mazursky.
They called it, was it Pictures at an Exhibition?
Let's see if Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
I think Mussorgsky would have liked this better than the Rimsky version.So 1970s.Really fun.Yeah.Now one other element in Russian music we can't leave out is Tchaikovsky.Where was Tchaikovsky on the timeline?
I think Tchaikovsky's dying in the 1890s, I believe.So he's the second half of the 19th century.At the time of his death, he's probably the most famous composer in all of Europe.He makes Russians proud of themselves again.
He's very much a Russian nationalist.When the Ukraine war started, a lot of concert halls canceled his music, which I think was a big mistake. But people were mixing something from culture from say 1880 with a war being fought today.
And Tchaikovsky got canceled another time because he very much enjoyed erotic liaisons with young boys. And even he felt he was doing the wrong thing.You see this in his correspondence.
But he was gay and had a proclivity, age-wise, in very much the wrong direction.So he's just been a controversial figure.But just his sheer ability to compose was so strong. And it's aggressive and it's driving, it's wonderfully orchestrated.
I think it's what Strunsky wanted to avoid in a way.But let's hear a classic Tchaikovsky piece, which is not too long.March Slav.And this also communicates the nationalism.
If you knew nothing about this piece and you heard it and someone said, where is it from?In half a second, you would know where it's from.Okay.
Again, the connection to movie music.You can hear the Rimsky influence.It's so seductive, isn't it?
Yes.It sounds beautiful, sad, labored, hardworking.And then at the part where we stopped, it sounded like it blossomed into something more beautiful.
which is common in Tchaikovsky.That was by Abbado, an Italian conductor.Let's see if we can find a Russian conductor doing this.Here's a name that appears to be Russian.
That one, the quality of the orchestra isn't nearly as good, but in many ways, I prefer the faster interpretation.The 10-minute piece, this one is more than a minute faster.
I preferred the first one.This one sounded more multidimensional, but I liked it less.
Yeah, well, there are many different ways of doing the March Slav, but it's definitely Russian music.Now, another early influence here is Scriabin.
Stravinsky and Scriabin knew each other, and Stravinsky was a big admirer of Scriabin's last two piano sonatas.But let's see if we can find a short piece here.Opus 42, number 5, is a Scriabin classic.And it's very mystical.So Scriabin
you can think of as glorifying the individual will, some kind of union of all things.He worshiped the orgasm.He was in a way an early precursor of raves.He thought a concert should have sight and sound and scent and be a multi-sensory experience.
And it should just allow you to immerse yourself in the ecstasy of being.And what year was he?Very early 20th century are his best works. He has a fairly short period of being at his peak.Let's see.
Same time as Reich?Because you know, the orgone sounds very much tied into what you're describing.
But he is first, chronologically.And Scriabin was strange.People thought he was strange.At the time, no one knew what to make of it.
And this etude, it just keeps on moving and a bit scurries off into nowhere, but it's just pulling you along and it keeps on confusing you. And there's one version here with Horwitz playing, who was of course a great Scriabin player.
He was the first pianist to really introduce Scriabin to America and convince people there was something to it.So let's see what this performance.
Sounds more like a descendant of Mussorgsky than Rimsky.
Absolutely.And you, you hear the bells a bit.There's also a lot of Chopin influence in there, but it's a piece that scatters itself.
Yeah.Scriabin had a great influence on 20th century music.He also could be satanic.So my favorite Scriabin piece, it's Sonata number nine.Someone else later called it the Black Mass Sonata.Let's hear it.There's a lot of good recordings of this.
I preferred that piece to the first one.
He just gets better and better, Skryabin.He's realizing more and more his vision.
Yeah.It still feels aimless to me, but maybe that's part of his trip.
That's part of his trip, I think.
Yeah.It feels like it's going somewhere, but never arriving.
The piano sonatas 5 through 10, I think, are the greatest of Skryabin works.And Stravinsky thought the best two were 9 and 10, and that was 9 that we just heard. So that's 1913.
So in that year, culture in Russia is maybe more vital, more innovative than anywhere else.And people are really taking chances, you know, put out a piece like that pretty different.
But it happened and a lot of people were doing it.So you're a Stravinsky.
Yeah. It was the visual arts then, dancing, ballet, was all quite fearless until a bit after the Bolsheviks took over.So that's one of the great cultural tragedies of human history, I think. is that all these traditions essentially were lost.
So even Stravinsky, he's gonna leave Russia at the time of World War I, a mix of not wanting to fight and not wanting to be in a country that might lose.And he goes to Switzerland, later he goes to Paris, much later he ends up living in Los Angeles.
But that whole environment was just torn apart by the two wars and the communists.
Does his music change when he leaves Russia?
Oh, absolutely.But with Stravinsky, it's changing every piece.So one thing Stravinsky does, so he's stuffed with all this Russian music.He studied French music very carefully, knew all the classics, Beethoven and so on.
And like, what can you do that's different?So he, in part, wanted to rebel against Thai culture.So Rimsky, for instance, writes many operas.Even Mussorgsky writes two operas, Kovachina and Boris Godunov.
And Stravinsky by doing ballet, which we now take for granted, but at the time it was a radical anti-establishment statement that we're not going to do opera.There's something about ballet that's closer to the people.
And he's also going to inject ideas from French music and what was later called primitivism into his ballets.And furthermore, the ballets gave rise to artworks.
So the people who would design the sets were some of Russia's greatest artists, like Baxt. and Benoit.And instead of doing paintings, they thought they're going to do something sort of low class in art, which is just design ballet sets.
But a lot of the greatest works of Russian art are these designs of ballet sets, which are not paintings, but quite incredible. And there's this whole movement to just do everything differently, which is peaking.
You could say, you know, the 1910s up through first world war.So let's hear part of one of Stravinsky's ballets.This is the Firebird Suite.
This is when he was still living in Russia.
Yes.He revised a lot of his work.So what year exactly something was composed, but this would be a little bit before Scriabin piece, which was 1912, 1913. And here he's not fully radical, but you can see he's up to big changes.
Here's a James Levine version.We'll play a bit of this.This was also in the Disney movie Fantasia.And this starts as slow and creeping, and then it's going to blossom into something a bit lush.
So you're going to hear a lot of Rimsky in this piece too. It sounds more English.And Debussy is a huge influence, and Rimsky too.
The fully radical move is going to come with Rite of Spring, which is 1913.
And it takes a little while for that piece to get going, but that's when Stravinsky really is breaking with his past and bringing primitivism and just ritual and this idea of sacrifice into music.
Some people have said this was a precursor of World War I. When it was first performed, the reports were that the audiences rioted and threw chairs and made trouble and were violent.
I'm not sure we know exactly how true that was or if it's apocryphal.But some weird things are going to happen.So let's let this one rip. Now we get to the second movement.
Now that, the second movement of Rite of Spring, is maybe the most important movement in all of 20th century classical music.The idea that you take what was music and organize it as blocks of sound.
It's a precursor to John Cage, precursor to electronica, points the way for how classical music and later rock and roll might be integrated.Noise music comes from that.
and Stravinsky had all that Russian music in his background, and he came up with something that topped it, that was more original.
Was this before George Gershwin as well?
Because I hear the Gershwin, I hear Gershwin in this.
Absolutely.You hear a lot of movie music coming from it.Bernard Herrmann influenced by this.
Yeah.So just everything is coming from Rite of Spring, a bit Petrushka, and in particular, that second movement, it's most obvious. with something so radical and sound that it falls them over.And if you hear that movement live, it's just phenomenal.
And to see that performed with the ballet, where people are basically performing ritual sacrifice, the whole visuals, the whole everything together, unbelievable.One of the best musical experiences of my life was to see that live.Yeah.
Fantastic.Where did you see it?
at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.It was a good performance.And the notion that terrible things were going to happen in Europe, you also hear in that music.And people just couldn't go back to making music the old way after they heard that.
So they heard that, they heard Schoenberg, and they heard Varese.Let me play you a little of Varese.Varese is coming from Stravinsky, and most people don't like it.
but it's very percussive, and you can just see where Stockhausen, Cage, many other things in classical music will be coming from.
Here's a short bit from Amérique, and then we'll do a short bit from Ionization, but you can see where 20th century music is headed, and a lot of this would be from the 1920s. Very closely related.
Then Varis thought, well, why even bother with melody at all?Let's just organize the sound percussively.Here's ionization.
Is this at the time where the visual arts were getting abstract as well?
Absolutely.And most people today don't like to listen to that, but, you know, Paul McCartney was a big fan of all the music in that direction, including Varese, and the idea that rock and roll would incorporate sound effects that were sound.
And then John Cage, music is only sound, Brian Eno.Coming through Varese, which came from Stravinsky, which is coming from the earlier Russian works, but with Stravinsky's own innovations,
Can we listen to a late Stravinsky piece you like just to hear his, uh, the arc?
Sure.Let's listen to something from Stravinsky's neoclassical period.So Stravinsky in his memoir, my life, which is a fun book, he said, well, when I did write a spring, everyone hated it at first, but it actually fit the time.
And within a month or two, you know, people came around and they accepted it and then they loved it. He actually made his career when he lived in the U.S.He'd go around and he would conduct his famous ballets.
And that's what they paid him for, not actually for composing.But he so rebelled against himself.And there was a famous trip he had through Italy, in fact.He and Picasso were traveling together.Too bad there were no podcasts back then.
Those must have been phenomenal conversations.And they heard some music, and Stravinsky did starting in the 20s, what is called his neoclassical turn.
He got fed up with his earlier directions, or he felt he had done everything with them that he could.And he said, my audiences always hated the neoclassical turn, even though it was quite melodic and more or less sounded entirely normal.
Let's see if we can find a piece from Pulcinella. This was very stripped down music.So here's a one minute segment called Tarantella.
You'll still hear some of the rhythmic propulsion and short sharp phrases of earlier Stravinsky, but it's turned into something quite different.And what year would this have been?Pulcinella he revised a few times.The first draft I think is 1920.
The seminal draft I think is 1926.Which one we're hearing now, I would guess 26, but it's the 20s.So 10 years later.Right.
It involves spinning, and the big influence here is Mozart, of course, in the 18th century.
So do you think he was looking backwards and finding a new way to interpret what he liked about old music?
That is what I think, but you still hear the Stravinsky in it, don't you?Yes.And I'll play you the opening bit of Pulcinella, which he took from a early 18th century theme by Pergolesi.And, uh, Pergolesi was a great composer of his time.
He died, I think at age 26.Let's see.
Absolutely.Is he mocking us?Is it satire?Is it synthesis? All of the above?
Or maybe he just came around to realizing it was really good.
Yeah, it was fun.The rhythmic jolts are still in there though.
So I guess I interpret him as somehow in his head trying to bring all his music together, and he just kept on trying, trying, trying, and that meant every piece shifted and was quite different.
And I've played just a few pieces for you, but you see, like, none of them are like the others.
None of them were like the others, yes.
His very last piece I think he actually was conducting this in Venice.I think he died in Venice.He's buried in Venice.In his whole life he had this rivalry with Arnold Schoenberg, who was the other great innovator.
Eight-tone music, twelve-tone music, which for most of his life Stravinsky either hated it or he claimed to hate it.But when he got to the very end of his life, it was where he turned.I'll play you a very short bit of this. Requiem Canticles.
So Stravinsky, he's born in 1882, dying in 1971. And let's just do a short bit from Requiem Canticles.
This is going to be- How late was it written, this piece?Would you guess?1960s.60s.
Yeah.So he's active.He lives, uh, you know, to be basically 90 and he's active his whole life.So the complete Stravinsky is about 23 or so compact discs.There's a box you can buy.It's conducted by Stravinsky himself.
But this will sound really different.
And you've listened to the entire, all of the Stravinsky by Stravinsky.
And listened to it sequentially in order, which is a fascinating thing to do.
And how many hours of music is it?
23 discs, 70 minutes on average a disc.It adds up, right?Yeah.So almost 30 hours.Here's Requiem Canicles.
Also very Bernard Herrmann-esque.Yes. It was quite good.
Yeah.I liked that piece very much, but, uh, again, not for everyone, but he was always experimenting and just to close before I need to get off to the airport to see Stravinsky's own influence on Russian music, even through the age of Stalin.
Let's hear a little bit of Shostakovich.Let's try the second movement of the string quartet number eight. And when would this have been from?About 1940.
So Shostakovich called this the Dresden, maybe a little later, but during the war, he called it the Dresden Quartet.And it was a kind of memoriam to the suffering of victims of the war.
How would you describe the Russian music versus the European music of the era?How do you describe the differences?
The rest of European music is so much more urban-oriented.So you have Bach going around to different cities, Monteverdi, being in Mantua, and it's court music of a kind, or church music, or urbane.
And the Russian music, it's earthy, it's drawing from the folk traditions, folk songs.Oh, let's see if we can close with one Stravinsky song.I don't know if it's in your system, but it's called Tilly Bomb.
It's one of my favorite short Stravinsky pieces.There's a few versions of this.Here's a one minute version.
Tim-pom, tim-pom, take a seat, who's coming?Open your eyes quickly, turn off the gas.You see, the glass is sharp, it will forget to help people.The cat is chasing the bells, the elite is running to the fire.Tim-pom, tim-pom, hurry up, who's coming?
The chicken runs with the wind, the house is full of birds, and behind it, the rooster, the golden rattle.The bird is singing a song, the telephone, the telephone, the telephone is ringing.
People, let the man's eyes shine, and the beard, let everyone tremble.The goats are running to help, the people are calling to help, running after themselves. foreign foreign
That's what Russian music has and a lot of other music stuff.And do you think it has to do with the conditions that lead to the writing of the music?
I think so.Surrounded by all that folk music, late urbanization, there is a church music, but it's more purely liturgical and something like Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, which is, composed a long time ago.Nothing like that is being done in Russia.
So you have these primitivist influences.You then have romanticism, nationalism, and a lot of weirdness.And Russian culture, very tolerant of weirdos, I would say, in a good way.So people like Skryabin, Stravinsky could do their thing.
And then it just all blossomed.
