Varying
May 20th, 2009 Posted in classical music, tchaikovsky, youtube
Oh yeah. Forgot to stick this in the very exciting and meaningful and touching discussion about acquired tastes yesterday… the ROCOCO VARIATIONS. Mister Tchaikovsky. Here’s the youtubey experience for you crazy kids who can’t concentrate without some audio/visual accessories thrust in front of their grinning face:
Part two:
Aaaaaaand part three:
T’sky (c’mon, his name doesn’t abbreviate well, give me some slack) is one of the ultra-famous composers who I don’t mesh with so well. If he was in my class at school I’d probably hang out with him, but when it was just us, without anyone else, it’d be hard to make conversation. I can see why people might get really into his music — and there are some pieces I really like: certain movements of the symphonies, Marche Slave, etc. — BUT in general, ennnnh…. he doesn’t really do it for me.
BUT (again), recently the rococo variations have slipped and slided and skidded into the front bit of my perception. The first time I heard the piece properly (as in, not as an incidental piece on a CD which got glossed over as background music) was at the ROM in Toronto with G, when we got given free tickets to an unexpected concert on a Friday night. There were kids crying and people walking around the museum about 50 feet away, but that performance sowed the seed of future recognition.
You know how sometimes there is particular mote which catches your eye in a piece? A snippet of melody, or a key modulation, or weird orchestral texture — something small which ends up being the spoon on which the rest of the piece gets fed to you? Well with the Rococo variations it’s the orchestral bit at the end of the variation. Or is it? I can’t tell if it is the end or the beginning (but then, I’m fairly musically retarded) and that sort of adds to the mystique…
It’s the bit between 2:35 and 2:50 in the first video above. Particularly the last three seconds. It rocks!!!
May 23rd, 2009 at 4:17 am
Re the challenge of abbreviation: “Tchaik” has been the long-standing solution in my neck of the woods, as in “Let’s go and hear the XSO play Tchaik 4 tomorrow night.”
May 25th, 2009 at 3:53 am
Here’s my crazy abbreviation: since DSCH stands for Shostakovich, coming from the German spelling “Schostakowitsch”, I use the same for Tchaikovsky: TSCH standing for “Tschaikowski”.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Nice! I want more abbreviations… I’m going to start mentally collecting all these short versions of composer names and stick ‘em in a post…
May 27th, 2009 at 3:13 am
“Rach” for Rachmaninoff is an easy one to guess.
A more curious one is for Beethoven. Since I would call Bruckner’s 9th as “B9″, Beethoven’s cannot be B9 so it became “Bee9″ for me.
May 27th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
the four most common ones that i’ve heard/used are Prok, Rach, Shost/Shosty and Tchaik. (now we just need a russian composer whose name starts with a Q)
i’ve also heard “wolfy” for mozart. …might want confirmation before putting it on the list
June 12th, 2009 at 12:21 am
I would call the passage you refer to a bridge between the theme and the first variation. But I wouldn’t swear to it.