Alexander Glazunov – Saxophone Quartet, Op. 109 (1923)

Not only hadn’t I heard a note of Glazunov’s music before I listened to this piece, but I didn’t even know anything about him, so I checked out the Wikipedia article. Pretty juicy stuff, assuming it’s accurate: apparently he was an arch-conservative who described Debussy, Prokofiev and Shostakovich as “contemporary degenerates” and “recherché cacophonists” and said that Pétrouchka (which seems to be the absent center of this blog) was “not music.” The article also describes him (probably violating the Neutral Point of View policy) as “academic” — a word I find interesting because its meaning in music seems to be so specific. Large chunks of this quartet, a sketch of mine that a teacher described as “pendantic,” the music that inspired another teacher of mine to emphasize the “suck” in “ASUC” (the American Society of University Composers, now rebranded as the Society of Composers, Inc.) — all of that music is very focused on eighth and sixteenth notes and four-bar phrases. In other words, academicism is, above all else, rhythm that doesn’t flow naturally. (Although “academic” has a different meaning when you put “modernism” after it; in that case it mostly seems to mean giving your pieces titles like “Configurations” or “Paradigm Exchanges.”)

But the odd thing about this piece as a work by the Grand Old Pedant of Early 20th Century Russia is that the first movement doesn’t fit that narrative at all. It is, in a word, weird, and if there’s one thing that academic music isn’t, it’s weird. Specifically, it’s ultra-chromatic, to the point that it can barely be considered functionally tonal. It’s full of chromatic wedges, pivot chords and triadic transformations; I could probably count the number of V-I cadences on one hand. And it’s not like, say, Hugo Wolf, whose unexpected key-shifts are usually textually motivated and move in a clear direction — this just wanders around in a daze, alighting briefly in all sorts of keys but never staying long, always packing up and moving on after a measure or two. And this guy considered Debussy a degenerate? I mean, look at this opening progression, stated in block chords: Eb – Db – GerAug6 in Eb minor – Gb || B – A – GerAug6 in B minor – D || G – F – GerAug6 in G Minor… and finally a clear arrival in Bb major. You can stick Roman numerals on that, but you won’t come up with anything meaningful. Glazunov has just come up with a way to modulate a minor third through stepwise voice-leading and done it three times in a row in keys that are themselves a major third apart. Later in the movement, he expands his harmonic vocabulary to include half-diminished sevenths, and suddenly the piece sounds more like Wagner. But despite the movement’s avoidance of clear tonal centers, it comes across as very orderly thanks to a few easily recognizable recurring melodies and Glazunov’s penchant for spinning out sequences seemingly forever. It works on a gut level too: the mood is not just desultory but also mysterious and tender. It’s baffling to me that this composer would have such contempt for the younger generation, even if the piece does sound considerably more Romantic than what most people were writing in the 20s.

The other movements have their moments, particularly an imitative passage in the finale that manages to achieve a Bach-like contrapuntal joy and also shake off the “academic” label with some well-timed cross-rhythms, and the second movement’s final variation, in a very fast 3/4 that reminds me of the scherzo from one of the late Beethoven quartets, I forget which — maybe Op. 127? For the most part, though, they’re considerably more staid and less distinctive than the first movement. The finale even gets wind-quintet cutesy at times, with the help of some “whimsical” grace-notes. I don’t think I’ve ever liked any work of art that has ever been described as “whimsical,” unless someone has applied that unfortunate word to Guy Maddin.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – Capriccio Espagnol (1887)

When I was first getting interested in classical [sic] music, I avoided what Michael Walsh calls “the Franco-Russian bonbon repertoire,” under the assumption that it would be lightweight and fluffy. But it turns out that Capriccio Espagnol is… OK, it’s lightweight and fluffy. Relatively enjoyable, not all that memorable, and at its best when it’s reminding me of other, better pieces. In particular, the fourth movement, “Scena e canto gitano” (“Scene and Gypsy Song”), is full of iv7-V progressions that make me think of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre (1872), and the last movement, “Fandango asturiano,” reminds me a bit of ländler passages from Mahler symphonies, with its 3/4 rhythm, folkish solo violin double stops, frequent flute trills, and heavy use of the triangle. And there’s certainly more to reward repeated listening in either of those than in the Capriccio — not to mention that I have a sentimental attachment to the Saint-Saëns because I used to spend a lot of time playing a Snood clone called Hexx II and one of the levels was accompanied by a MIDI version of it.

That said, the piece does support Rimsky’s reputation as an excellent orchestrator. I was struck especially by the opening of the fourth movement, because as I’ve said before, I normally find it boring when solo instruments play fast arpeggios without any harmonic change, but in this case I was totally there with the music, mainly because it’s clear that the pitches are just an excuse to show off a variety of timbre combinations. Between the initial fanfare — four horns and two trumpets, itself really nice sound — and the movement’s more rhythmic main section, there are a variety of cadenzas for melody instruments accompanied by a quiet tremolos on percussion instrument: violin and snare drum, flute and timpani, clarinet and cymbals, and most strikingly, harp and triangle. Another particularly effective passage happens in the last movement, when Rimsky reduces the texture from full winds and strings plus horns to a crystalline chamber ensemble: flute and one solo violin playing staccato and more or less in canon, accompanied by harp, pizzicato cellos, triangle and the occasional quiet oboe note. There are plenty of other nice orchestrational touches throughout the piece, too — though, strangely, the variation movement barely strays outside the forces that would have been available to Mozart, which hardly helps enliven its rather forgettable basic material.

So, pleasant enough piece. Not sure why it’s about a thousand times better known than the Bumcke sax quartet, but that’s the canon for you.

BRB

Taking the weekend off.  See you Monday!

Franco Donatoni – Rasch (1990)

Well that was awesome.  My friend Carolyn has been raving about Donatoni for a while, but I’ve only heard two pieces by him, this and the also-awesome Diario 76 (1977).  In both cases I’ve been struck by how little he sounds like any other composer I know.  There’s a certain affinity to Andriessen, in that both composers like blocky sectionalization and dissonant rhythmic unison passages, and if you arranged Rasch for piano, celesta, harp and glockenspiel rather than sax quartet it would probably sound a little like Boulez’s Multiples, but overall the impression I get is that Donatoni spent his time off in his own little corner of the music world.

Rasch starts out with a series of short triple-piano bursts of gray micropolyphonic blobbiness, and gradually takes shape from there.  The blobs come in and out of focus:  some are in rhythmic unison except for the abundance of grace notes in each part, while others mix sixteenths and dotted sixteenths so that the saxophones get out of sync with each other.  Suddenly there’s a shift:  everyone’s playing short groups of thirty second notes, separated by rests, in parallel motion, forming juicy dissonant chords.   The music is now only pianissimo.  The group lengths and pause lengths shift around:  is the basic unit two or three sixteenths?  It’s the same rhythmic ambiguity as in the blobs, but refined, clarified, distilled.  Long chords, sometimes surprisingly tonal ones, break through the rustling;  they crescendo from pianissimo to piano, which in this context seems incredibly loud.  Then suddenly everything explodes — still pianissimo! — and everyone’s offset from each other, like a canon without any literal repetition, a perpetuum mobile split among four instruments so that nobody plays more than four notes in a row without taking a breath.

I won’t give a play-by-play of the whole piece.  Donatoni adds plenty of other elements, from trills to slap-tongues to abrupt accents that pop out of the texture — and yes, he does eventually get to triple forte — but the most important thing is that everything is exciting, visceral, sensuous, dramatic, and never anywhere even approaching dry.  I often think that Italy’s postwar modernist tradition, from Dallapiccola to Berio to Sciarrino, is much more connected to human experience than that of France or Germany or Austria, and the little bit I’ve heard from Donatoni has confirmed that impression.  Still not sure about Nono, though…

Gustav Bumcke – Two Quartets (1908)

I’m writing a piece for an ensemble that includes a sax trio, so I thought I’d check out some of the historical mutliple-saxophone repertoire.  I stumbled across this piece because it was on the same CD as another piece I had heard about, the Glazunov Sax Quartet (1932).  I’d never heard of Bumcke before, but according to the liner notes, he was Germany’s first saxophonist and saxophone teacher.  And these two short movements certainly sound like the work of someone with a great love for the instrument.  Rather than using the usual soprano-alto-tenor-bari lineup, the piece is written for alto, tenor, bari and bass sax, giving the piece an incredibly rich, sonorous texture.  It helps that the music is written in a late-Romantic style that’s very much focused on the vertical — as a professor of mine once said about Wagner’s music, melody here is only the horizontal surface of harmony.

Both movements are slow, meandering, luxurious and understated.  They have character-piece titles — “Abendgang” (“Evening Promenade”) and “Klage” (“Plaint”) — but I don’t feel like those words particularly describe the music, which is really more about beautiful sonorities than painting images or conveying specific moods.  The first movement floats around Db major and Bb minor;  the second is a bit more chromatic, and towards the end things start getting a little weird in a typically turn-of-the-century way, with unexpected third relations popping up around the cadences.  What I find most interesting, though, is how much my ear has been trained to associate the sound of the sax with various kinds of pop music.  There are a lot of plaintive, chromatically inflected lines in the piece that I would probably call Wagnerian if I heard them played by the first violin section in an orchestra, but because they have the timbre they do, the first thing that comes to mind is a melancholy neo-noir film score, like Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for Chinatown, or maybe some kind of slightly surreal lounge music, like the act that would follow Julee Cruise at the Roadhouse in “Twin Peaks.”  Obviously I’m not complaining:  anything that defamiliarizes the sometimes too-familiar gestures and tropes of notated music is a good thing in my book.  Plus Bumcke’s writing really is quite beautiful.  But I do find it a bit frustrating to know that it’s basically impossible for me to hear the piece the way audiences at the time would have heard it.

One final thing:  there is something seriously weird going on with clefs in this piece.  The alto sax is just written in treble clef, but the other three instruments have miniature secondary clefs on every stave.  At first I thought they were transposition keys, because the tenor sax has a miniature tenor clef after its treble clef, which correctly provides the transposition down a major ninth.  But the other ones don’t work:  the baritone sax has a tenor clef as well, despite the fact that it transposes down an octave and a major sixth, not a major ninth;  and the bass sax has a bass clef, which suggests a transposition down an octave and a major sixth rather than the correct two octaves and a major second.  Reading a score where every single instrument transposes is enough of a pain;  these mini-clefs had me utterly confused until I realized they weren’t doing what I thought they were doing, and now I’m utterly confused as to why they’re there at all.

Francis Poulenc – Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani (1938)

I actually kind of know this piece, but I saw the score in the library and figured it was worth a closer look.  I’ve got to say, Poulenc doesn’t get nearly enough credit.  He seems to be largely dismissed as a composer of lightweight fluff, but I find him fascinating.  I mean, here you’ve got someone who clearly can come up with a great tune as easily as he can breathe, but he doesn’t need to because’s a radical (for his time) polystylist and is constantly reinventing every one of those tunes in a wide variety of languages, contexts and moods.  His sense of syntax is sneaky and often ingenious, with phrases constantly getting metrically reinterpreted when they appear a second time, and he’s really good at getting from one place to another before you notice he’s going there — just look at the transition back into the opening material in the first movement of the Violin Sonata (1949)!  Sometimes he makes jarring transitions into seemingly unrelated material, only to clarify the connections quite a bit later in the piece.  And in every piece, somewhere along the line, there’s at least a brief dip into French cabaret music.  I don’t think I realized until now just how much the handful of pieces I know by him, and especially my beloved Double Piano Concerto (1932), has influenced the way I think about musical grammar.

As for the Organ Concerto in particular, it’s somewhat darker in mood than is typical for him (I hear he’s got some late religious works that go futher in this direction — gotta check those out sometime), but it’s still got all of the elements I described above in abundance.  At various points it sounds like a Bach toccata, a Mozart symphony (I’ve always thought a particular dotted-rhythm passage was an allusion to the slow movement of the 40th), and, yes, French cabaret music — in one alarming moment, an explosive triple-forte version of French cabaret music, using a descending-fifths sequence as an excuse for abrupt, unnerving key shifts.  In other spots the musical language is closer to Prokofiev’s spiky tonality, or a somber neo-Medieval chorale.  Sometimes it’s just plain perverse, like when he sits on a massive C-major-seventh-chord pedal for eight whole bars while the organ and strings trade sixteenth-note figures.  And sometimes it’s haunting and eerie, especially the final section, in which a muted solo viola plays a plaintive G-minor melody, accompanied by quiet chords in the organ that on this recording (Duruflé on organ and Georges Prêtre conducting) are slightly detuned and glow and shimmer with an eerie dark-green light, while half the cellos play a D drone and the rest of the strings play slow pizzicato figures that sound like water dripping onto the floor of a deep, dank cellar.

The piece is in six movements on my CD, but they’re really six sections of a single movement, with melodies returning again and again.  The Prokofiev-ish material of the first section, originally in staccato sixteenths, reappears in dramatic sixteenth-note triplets in the third.  In the first section, it’s interrupted by a surprisingly diatonic, almost hymn-like tune in 4/4, which is immediately subjected to Poulenc’s typical out-of-nowhere transpositions;  that tune comes back as a gentle 3/4 melody in the second section.  The bombastic opening of the first section’s slow introduction returns at the end of the piece, but it’s condensed to just one measure, not even a return so much as a non-functional symbol of a return, before Poulenc switches back to his contemplative chorale side.

There’s a passage in the fourth section that to me represents everything I like about Poulenc’s style.  We’ve been listening to mournful minor-mode music full of suspensions, when the music suddenly moves to major, allowing a little bit of light to shine through the clouds.  The violins play a beautiful high Ab major melody in divisi octaves;  the harmony makes a lush Mahlerian shift, and a group of solo cellos echoes the violins’ melody, but chromatically.  But wait — it’s a bar of 5/4, and the next downbeat comes before the cellos can complete the consequent phrase.  And suddenly we’re in 4/4, still slow and easy but reoriented somehow, with two groups of cellos playing alternating pairs of pizzicato eighth-notes under a new, unrelated violin melody.  The melody rises and starts to take on that cabaret feel, climaxing on an F over a Gb major chord — but then the organ enters again, set to a strange, nasal, ugly stop labeled “P. Clarinette” in the score — playing a melody that had previously appeared in the first section as part of that big loud C-major-seventh pedal.

I heart Les Six.

Anton Webern – Cantata #1, Op. 29 (1939)

Now that I’ve reminded myself just how sensuous and beautiful Webern’s music is, let me strengthen the statement in my previous post and say:  Feldman’s De Kooning is really disappointing.  The thing about Webern is that for all his structural games and ingenious innovations in the use of the twelve-tone method — which, to be honest, I don’t care about all that much — his work always seems to be motivated by musical concerns.  On top of that, if anyone doubts that he was a Romantic, all they need to do is take a look at this piece, with its texts about thunder and lightning, maple keys falling through the air, and the music of Apollo.  There are even some unexpected moments of madrigalistic word-painting:  the entrance of the choir in the thunder-and-lightening movement is preceded by a startling fortissimo attack in the timpani and cymbal, and in the third movement, the words “im Dunkel” (“in darkness”) and “als Tau” (“as dew”) are set to eerie, mystical harmonies — including two very unexpected major sixth chords.

I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced by the text-setting in the second movement, the one about maple keys.  It’s for solo soprano and orchestra rather than choir and orchestra, and although it doesn’t use Sprechstimme technique, the way the melodies flow reminds me a lot of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), especially on the words “Erde Dunkel sinken” and “kleine Flügel” — the latter in particular reminds me of the setting of the phrase “Erinnerung mordend” in “Nacht.”  This kind of leapy atonal singing full of major sevenths always sounds nervous and anguished to me, and I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to set a description of the beauty of nature in that style.  Even the choir’s leap of a major seventh in the previous movement, on the word “folgt nach,” strikes me as unnecessarily dramatic, but at least there the fact that many people are singing — without vibrato, of course — gives the music a more abstract quality.  When it’s a solo soprano, I can’t help but wonder what she’s so upset about, even as the orchestra, playing very similar music, seems to suggest the clockwork that secretly underlies the functioning of the natural world.

Morton Feldman – De Kooning (1963)

I don’t know Feldman’s music too well, but I’ve always had a positive impression of it.  I love Three Voices (1982), and I remember liking The Viola in My Life (1970) and Rothko Chapel (1971), though I have to admit that I haven’t heard them in years and don’t remember them too well.  De Kooning, though, I’m not so sure about.

The piece is for horn, percussion, piano/celesta, violin and cello, and it’s written almost entirely in Klangfarbenmelodie style, unmetered, with dotted lines to indicate how phrases move between instruments.  The performance notes say that “each instrument enters when the preceding sound begins to fade,” which poses some interesting problems for the performers, since the percussion instruments, piano and celesta are decaying instruments, while the horn and strings are sustaining instruments and thus have to choose how long to hold their notes before fading.  Feldman also says that each sound should start with “a minimum of attack,” which poses a similar problem, since there’s no way to fade in on a celesta or vibraphone.  So part of what makes the piece tick is the difficulty of creating coherent phrases when the physical nature of the instruments acts as a block.  And in fact, the first recording I listened to — don’t know who was playing, it’s something I downloaded ages ago and stupidly didn’t write down enough information about — didn’t succeed, and I really had no idea what was going on.  I found another recording on YouTube — here and here — and found it considerably more effective;  suddenly I noticed that there weren’t dotted lines between every single pair of consecutive notes, but that there were actually separate phrases of anywhere from two to nine notes in length, which are hard to perceive at first due to the slow tempo.  Suddenly the debt Feldman owes to Webern became very obvious, and I remembered what I said the first time I heard the latter’s Symphony, Op. 21 (1928) — that it was like “freeze-dried Mahler.”

Feldman is not part of the German Romantic tradition, but there is a sense in which this piece too is about a distillation of something big, loud and intense.  According to this article by John Warnaby, Feldman wrote De Kooning after watching the painter work and being surprised by how slowly and methodically he worked to produce such violent-looking results. Presumably, then, the piece is meant to sound like a slow and methodical reflection of some never-heard violent-sounding music.  I have to admit, though, that I only caught glimpses of that idea here — certainly it was never as clear to me as it often is in Webern’s music.  Actually, a lot of things are unclear to me about De Kooning.  Such as:

1.  Why the enharmonic respellings of repeated notes?  The piece opens with a G# in the antique cymbals followed by an Ab in the piano.  Later the piano plays two C#s three octaves apart, followed by a Db in the cello.  Is this supposed to mean something?

2.  Why the octaves and diatonic references (at one point the cello plays G-F-Eb in descending ninths) in a piece that mostly goes for a “chromatic field” aesthetic?  To my ears, these sound like “wrong notes” in an atonal context.  And I thought the reason Fedlman abandoned indeterminate pitch in his scores was that he felt players used too many materials familiar from the tonal repertoire!

3.  Why does Feldman start up little patterns and then abort them before they get off the ground?  At one point the music goes:  dissonant low piano chord – D in the chimes – low G# in the cello – same dissonant low piano chord, same D in the vibraphone… and then it goes off in another direction.  Earlier the note Eb is passed from chimes to celesta to cello harmonic to vibraphone … and then the music abandons that bit of timbre-play.  I find these passages quite beautiful and find it frustrating that I don’t get to hear more of them.

4.  Why on earth are the only metered passages long rests?  Three measures of 3/2 at half=76, two measures of 5/4 at quarter=76, two measures of 6/8 at quarter=52?  Is there some kind of numerological process at work?  Is Feldman trying to manipulate the players’ sense of time in ways that aren’t communicable to the listener?  Because I can’t for the life of me figure out why he didn’t just write a rest with a number of seconds over it — or how he even knew how long the rests should be given that the rest of the piece is unmetered.

I’m going to check out some later Feldman soon, I think.

Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony #3 in A Minor, Op. 56 “Scottish” (1842)

What the hell?   I know Mendelssohn can write a killer piece when he wants to — see the First Piano Concerto (1831) — but he sure didn’t do it here.  First of all, lot of the piece is just plain boring and unimaginative.  In the last movement, for example, it takes 37 measures before there’s a single chord other than i and V, and that chord (vii°6/V) is followed immediately by another nine measures of the same two harmonies.  Every time the music modulates to a new key, it focuses once again on tonic-dominant alternation, often forgoing pre-dominant harmonies entirely for long stretches of time. And while the first movement is somewhat more harmonically varied, but it beats its opening rhythm — a quarter note, two sixteenths and three eights in 6/8 — into the ground.

Second, a lot of the piece is awkward.  In the outer movements, Mendelssohn frequently uses a i chord when another chord would have made for a smoother line or a more satisfying resolution. To name just a couple of examples:

• First movement, slow introduction, mm. 25-27.  A sinuous line played by the first violins arrives on fi, harmonized as V7/V.  This is followed by V7 and V/iv — a descending fifths sequence.  But then instead of going to iv, Mendelssohn flats the mi to me and goes straight to i.  That’s not a resolution, that’s a cop-out!

• First movement, mm. 182-189.  The chord progression of the second theme:  i – i – vii°(4/3) – i, repeated twice.  In both cases, the melody over the last two chords goes ti-do-re, sol.  That sol is positively crying out to be harmonized with something other than i, especially since it’s followed immediately by two bars of i when the chord progression repeats.  How about V?  Not very creative, but at least it would give the phrase some forward motion.  Or how about I, the major tonic?  That’s got character and style!  Or how about some inversion of vii°/iv?  That could be used to move into iv, extend the phrase, and get out of the four-bar box that Mendelssohn seems to be stuck in.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.  Like I said, the piece is awkward.  And it’s not just awkward on the local level, either.   The slow movement, for example, starts off with some chromatic music full of half-diminished seventh chords, which is actually quite touching and even romantic, but it keeps drifting into diatonic music with a sort of “after the battle” quality — think second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth (1808) — and the way it wanders between the two feels confused rather than ambiguous.  Actually, “confused” is probably the best word I could use to describe the piece.  It doesn’t feel like a work that has clarity of thought behind it.  I’m going to assume that this was a rush job for Mendelssohn, because I don’t understand how someone capable of writing the E Minor Prelude and Fugue from Six Preludes and Fugues (1837) could turn this out unless he didn’t have time to apply his craft carefully.

All of that said, I do like the scherzo quite a bit.  (Don’t I always?)  It’s based on a cute folky tune full of dotted rhythms that for some reason makes me think of seafaring, and it’s quite a bit more inventive and clearly organized than the other movements.  There are some great abrupt shifts between major and minor, and a passage in which Mendelssohn gets to show of his contrapuntal chops, with the oboe and clarinet playing Bachian melodies in super-staccato sixteenths over gavotte-like music in the strings.  That then leads into a strange and original passage in which the winds, brass and timpani play what would be a triumphant fanfare — if it weren’t all staccato and all pianissimo.  I wouldn’t call the movement a great masterwork, but it’s technically and artistically so far above the other three that I don’t know what to think.

Ottorino Respighi – Pines of Rome (1924)

Lately everything seems to remind me of the early Stravinsky ballets.  In this case, though, the influence is undeniable, and I’m sure Respighi was well aware of it himself.  The first movement of Pines of Rome, “The Pines of the Villa Borghese,” has Pétrouchka written all over it:  simple, cheerful, repetitive modal melodies, with an emphasis on winds and percussion, and contrasting phrases juxtaposed without any transitions between them.  Maybe it’s a little shinier thanks to the presence of the glockenspiel and celesta, but there’s no way anyone familiar with early 20th century notated music could possibly hear the passage at rehearsal 7 —a dorian-mode melody in eighths and sixteenths, based mostly on the minor tetrachord, played by the trumpets in similar motion over staccato repeated chords in the harp, celesta and piano, accompanied by tambourine and triangle, and accented by grace-note bursts in the winds — and not think of the Shrovetide Fair.  And then there’s the opening of the last movement, “The Pines of the Appian Way,” whose snaky English horn melody, full of grace notes and constantly returning to a single pitch, set over a low martial-sounding ostinato, clearly evokes the “Ritual of the Ancestors” section of The Rite of Spring.

Evoking Stravinsky’s Russian ballets isn’t usually a good move for a composer, because you’re bound to come up short.  And while I do like the piece, it can’t compete with Igor on his own turf.  But the third movement, “The Pines of the Janiculum” — that’s another story entirely.  It was intended to represent a hill in Rome as seen in the moonlight, but what I hear is something different:  the perfect fusion of surrealism and cheesiness, the effect that I tried to achieve in my recent chamber orchestra piece Dayglo Attack Machine but was unable to pull off.  It starts simply enough:  a virtuosic but quiet piano flourish that leads into a long clarinet melody, all accompanied by muted strings playing a chorale-like accompaniment based on a combination of B-major tonality and stacked fourths.  But then something strange happens:  solo strings and celesta enter in another key, playing lush, thick, chromatic music in parallel motion, as Bing Crosby’s backup band were practicing off in the distance.  This leads to an oboe solo that drifts loose over a texture of pianissimo string trills and mechanically ticking celesta and harp.  Harmony becomes unmoored, moving by thirds without any real modulation, every chord made pungent with added sixths and seconds.  At the climax of the movement, there seem to be multiple unrelated layers of music going on at the same time, as the strings wander aimlessly in a chromatic world that’s somewhere between Wagner and Vertigo, the winds continue the diatonic melodies of the piece’s first half, and the celesta, harp and piano explode into a virtuosic frenzy — but still pianissimo!  At the end of the passage, the flutes, oboes, violas, celesta and piano play disjunct major triads while the violins and cellos continue to play a long, slow melody, creating a distinctly Messiaen-like effect.  And at the end of the movement, the musicians are instructed to play a gramophone recording of a nightingale singing.  In 1924.  Eat your heart out, Einojuhani Rautavaara.

There’s other good stuff in the piece.  At the end of the last movement, Respighi manages to make big and triumphant, maybe my least favorite musical affect, appealing to me thanks to some unexpected rhythms and harmonies.  Really, I enjoy the whole thing except for the bombastic second half of the second movement, “Pines Near a Catacomb.”  (Seriously, isn’t being loud and in-your-face in a graveyard in bad taste?)  But that third movement seems to have been written for me personally.