Classical Convert

Classical that kicks arse: “Iron and Steel”

Rap should not have a monopoly on being blasted from car stereos. Although classical music isn’t typically well suited to in-car listening — you lose the ability to hear about half of what is happening, and what you can hear is pretty wet and muddy — there are some pieces which shine when the volume is cranked up. This automotive appreciation is not your typical classical listening experience. Gone is the following of themes, the stealthy interplay of instruments; all the delicious subtleties are shot. You have no hope to hear what is really going on with the music when the windows are rolled down and the engine is revving a few feet from your lead foot.

But the pleasure of driving is visceral, and the appropriate soundtrack is feeling, not thinking. Parsing apart a piece is for headphones, for an easy-chair and mug-of-tea; not for rollicking and rolling down the roads. A good classical driving piece is still full of power even when you’ve skinned off the top of the music — when you’ve compressed the hell out of it. It’s probably already pretty fortè. It’s oozing rhythm. It’s got so much drive it’d be out cruising the streets if it wasn’t already in your car.

Here is one of my favorites:

Prokofiev – Symphony No. 2 “Iron and Steel”

This is a hidden gem. After it’s not well received premiere in 1925, Prokofiev claimed that neither he nor the audience understood anything in it, and promptly started doubting his compositional skills. I think it is a beautiful mechanical beast. It’s fierce, but frequently playful. The “Iron and Steel” moniker is so suitable: it has the aggressive, angry beauty of a blast furnace.

The start of it is a blatant, blaring example of good driving accompaniment:

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Especially those obnoxious little initial blasts on the brass. It’s like sixteen steel wheels of Soviet locomotive bearing the hell down on you.

A healthy dose of rhythm from the drums is particularly driving-apropos, like this bit from the end of the first movement:

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While the beginning of the next movement (theme and variations, YES) might start off a little quiet for the road:

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It builds and riles and roils and gets violent again in fairly short order:

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And you have to hold on tight to your steering wheel through the climax just to avoid running people off the road in exhilaration:

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If your appetite got all whetted up by that, you can download it from Deutsche Grammophon for a hair under $8 here, or go the luddite route and pick it up from Amazon. It might be on iTunes also, but unfortunately I have an Apple allergy.

Tags: classical music, driving, prokofiev

Prokofiev Through the Phone Line

On Friday I did one of those guess the piece competitions, which was guessed almost immediately, so in revenge I did one which seemed like it would probably be a lot harder. And it was. No-one guessed it. Well the answer is the opening notes of Prokofiev’s 2nd piano concerto, one of my favorite pieces:

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Now, I wanted to put up a bunch of other Prokofiev openers up for me to blab on about. However, the ease of doing this is greatly reduced by it all having to squeeze down the rather small and rather invisible tubes connecting my laptop to the internet through my cellphone. So that’ll have to wait.

The point I wanted to make was that the 2nd piano concerto is one of Prokofiev’s fairly rare calm openings. A lot of his pieces start out totally in and all over your face, sort of like he wants to ensure that you get how wild he is right from the get go. Some of those I enjoy (e.g. the 5th piano concerto and the 2nd and 4th symphonies) but sometimes it feels all a bit too… well, predictable in all it’s deliberate unpredictability.

Unpredictability isn’t quite right. Barely in control is perhaps more accurate. Prokofiev liked to make his music sound all wrong notey, like tonality is barely holding a slippery grip on a piece (and according to the authoritative source of “some book I flicked through in the music library” he would in fact write out a “regular” melody and then adjust some of the notes afterward to wrong them up).

That technique makes me like a lot of his stuff, but it also prevents me from loving it. Most of my favorite pieces of his are ones which use it in a more restrained fashion, R&J, the 6th symphony, and the 2nd PC above. Conversely though, I love the all-out fury of it in the 2nd symphony, a piece which no-one ever seems to talk about.

Man, this would be so much more awesome with samples to listen to. I need a 3G phone, pronto.

Tags: classical music, guess the piece, prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev’s Grandson is a Badass

I was just reading this piece in the Guardian which is a review of ‘classical music for the hoodie generation’, at the Scala in London. That’s the Scala, not La Scala. Anyway, it was a performance of Prokofiev’s Concerto for Turntables (and snippets of a performance here) The astute might’ve guessed that it wasn’t a piece by the old Prokofiev, but a newer more shiny one. His grandson, actually, Gabriel Prokofiev.

It turns out that Gabriel is all about blending electronica with classical setups, as in the piece mentioned above in which a chamber orchestra competes with a DJ on a deck as the soloist. I can’t say that I really like it much (at least from the brief snatches in that video), unfortunately, as much as I’d like to sound avant garde.

I’m a big old fan of electronic music (most of my non-classical collection is in that kind of genre) but the turntableist, scratching kind of stuff sounds so harsh over the top of an orchestra. An even more horrible example of this painful kind of interference is here.

Gabriel P. also wrote at least a couple of non-turntable-messed-up pieces. These actually sound listenable. They’re spiky and modern and actually sort of sound a bit like electronica played by string quartet, which might not be terribly surprising since he seems to be into that kind of thing. There are a couple of camcorderesque videos on youtube of his dance and last movement of his string quartet. Additionally, the Elysian Quartet (who are intriguing themselves, and might be hot) have a performance on their website here.

Lessons in Listening

Ooo I kind of like this. These two musicians have decided to run “lessons in listening” out of their home: they pump you full of light refreshments and then play classical music at you. Well sort of. The idea is to experience classical music without the snobbery, but with a pretty expert guide leading the way a bit. Now if they could stick some of their classes up online it’d be pretty great and I’d gush over it.

And if that isn’t an incentive I can’t possibly conceive of what is.

Admittedly their webpages could do with a little tad of touching up – the text is all overlapping everything when I view it in Firefox, but that doesn’t really detract much from the niceness of the concept. I hope it’s successful. Also, The Green Hornist is a pretty cunning name.

You can read a bit more about their aims an, errr, stuff where I read about ‘em originally, on Kenneth Wood’s blog here and here.

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On a completely unrelated note – I just listened to Prokofiev’s violin sonata no. 1 for the first time and it kicks arse. I think it has certain standard Prokofievy elements to it (there’s something frequently common in the scales he uses, and of course there are the omnipresent slow-fast changeups) but instead of sounding all “Ahh yes, Sergei’s at it again. How cute.” it’s a little more biting, a little sharper. It has a mouth packed full with a little more teeth.

When my new headphones get here tomorrow I’ll be able to listen to it a lot more, they bloody died by accidentally getting crushed into a knot in my hand luggage on my recent Trip of Doom and Despair.

Youtube for Classical Music

I feel kind of stupid for only just discovering this, but YouTube is a wildly excellent source of performances of classical pieces. In fact, instead of putting up two minute long samples in my pages about each of the composers I should start linking to the YouTube performances instead, since they are the full versions of the piece. Either that or put up a separate page with links for each composer. Here are some prime cuts I discovered in my initial explorations:

Shostakovich Violin Sonata – Calligopoulos

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaFqfIzKrQ8[/YOUTUBE]

2nd movement, 3rd movement pt. 1, 3rd movement pt. 2

Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 2 – Lugansky

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3scIbziHJA[/YOUTUBE]

1st movement pt. 2, 2nd movement, 3rd movement, 4th movement pt. 1, 4th movement pt. 2