Classical Music Thread

Uuno Klami is one of the "modernist" Finnish composers who emerged in the generation after Sibelius. Klami's "modernism" stemmed from his stay in Paris, where he acquainted himself with the music of French impressionists, in particular Ravel, and those of émigrés such as Manuel de Falla and the unavoidable Stravinsky.

This piece, 3 Bf, started off as a standalone but was later incorporated as the finale of the orchestral suite Sea Pictures. The title refers to the Beaufort scale of wind speed; three Bf would be a comfortable breeze. The music makes a direct quote of Ravel's Bolero.


Many Finnish composers are drawn to their national epic Kalevala, but they understand that Sibelius has already made it his own, they approach it with tepidation. In the case of Klami, the hesitation is reflected in the decade long gestation of his Kalevala music and the frequent change in genre. The final form is this orchestral suite, not sounding a bit like Sibelius but has more of a kinship to The Rite of Spring.

 
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The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a sculpture garden in Scotland created by the architect and sculptor Charles Jencks, the pieces are all inspired by science and mathematics. The garden itself in turn inspires composer Michael Gandolfi, who composes a large and ongoing orchestral suite bases on the landmarks.

The Universe Cascade, pictured below, is a waterway embedding a staircase, each landing of which represents an epoch of the history of the universe.
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Gandolfi's musical response is a big orchestral statement that literally starts with a "big bang" and ends with electronic dissolution. Along the way there are 28 musical quotations, from plainchant to Miles Davis and Steve Reich. A few quotations, such as the opening of J. S. Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, are easy to spot, but most are harder to pin down, because at least half are from music before the 1600s -- an allusion, perhaps, to the fact that we know precious little about the early history of our Universe.

 
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New year, new hope. So I unwrapped the CD of Andrzej Panufnik's Sinfonia di Speranza and I was transfixed by the "filler" piece, his Concertino for Timpani, Percussions, and Strings.

Panufnik's intent in this work is to show off the "singing" of tuned percussion instruments (much like Claude Vivier's gamelan-infused Five Songs for Percussion), but what is special in this work is the emphasis on the sheer poetry of sounds: Panufnik eschews most preoccupations of percussion writing -- rhythmic complexity (or its opposite, minimalist repetition), extended techniques, or ethnic influences. The result is a work that sounds as traditionally romantic as it is ravishingly beautiful.

Incidentally this concertino was written as a test piece of a percussion scholarship and launched the career of Evelyn Glennie.

As for Sinfonia di Speranza itself? Well, it is a 40-minute single movement work permeated with Panufnik's idiosyncratic mysticism, this time about the form and colors of the rainbow. I need more chewing to understand the piece.
 
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