Skip to main content

Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet and Symphony #4

Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra
Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Romeo & Juliet
Symphony #4 in F minor
Telarc, 1993
*******************************

Today's post brings back memories. Terrible memories.

Romeo and Juliet was a piece our high school symphonic band played, and in the arrangement for concert band, inexplicably, the trumpets had to play a lot of the technically demanding runs that would have been assigned to the strings in the orchestral/original version.

Now, anybody who knows high school music programs knows that high school trumpet players, mostly boys, don't practice like the predominantly flute- or clarinet-playing girls.

So our band director, Mr. I, growing increasingly frustrated with our muddy sound, went "down the line." Meaning, he made each individual trumpet player play the run by himself. In front of the rest of the band. Which included all the girls in the clarinet and flute section in front of us who turned around to look and watch us screw up.

I was a freshman in high school at this point and was in over my head musically at this stage of my music career. I was a 14 year old kid who wasn't even sure he belonged in the "good band" in high school. This was the most terrifying moment in my music career up to that point.

And of course I screwed up the run when it was my turn. I wanted to crawl under my chair and die right there.

Funny though, that was a catalyst for me. I vowed never to embarrass myself again like that. And I'm not sure if it was because of this specific event or not, but I had improved enough by the following year that very little of the music we played in high school after that point challenged me.

Amateur listeners like me will of course recognize the famous melody in Romeo and Juliet that's parodied by Hollywood love scenes in zillions of movies. But the piece has some fascinating fugue-like sections, a surprising amount of complexity, and it is quite emotionally stirring to listen to all the way through.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does Bach Suck?

It's not often that you see a classical music-related comment that makes you spit out your coffee : "Bach sucks because he was not a true composer. A true composer hears the music before he writes it. Bach composed using a mathematical system of numbers which he tought[sic] his students. After his death one of his students published a book “How to write a menuet[sic] with little or no musical knowledge”. Frankly, the result of his work is not musical, the opening bars always sound musical because he copied someone else’s melody, broke it down into numbers and wrote counterpoint from it. Handel did not even like Bach, because Handel wrote music. Anyone who does like Bach does so because they are told to. For a comparison, listen to music by Frescobaldi, Rameau, or Couperin, then listen to Bach. The difference? Something that is musical throughout the entire piece, and something that is musical for 10 seconds and quickly loses interest." Once I'd finished mopping the co

Why Classical Music Writing is So Difficult to Read

Have you ever read the liner notes of a classical music CD and scratched your head wondering what the heck the writer was trying to say? Or attempted to read a classical music concert review in your newspaper and felt totally illiterate? One of the things that frustrates many people about classical music is its perceived elitism. It's unfortunate, but most of what gets written about classical music only worsens that perception. Most of the classical music writing I see out there--either in symphony concert program books, in concert reviews in major papers like the New York Times, or worst of all in the little essays in the booklets accompanying most classical music CDs--is quite simply terrible. Often, it is pretentiously written, it is full of industry jargon (yes, even the classical music industry has its own jargon), and it reads like an intellectually insecure liberal arts student's PhD thesis. There are a few reasons for this. First, there's the fundamental difficulty

Shostakovich: First Symphony

I can't help it. I just don't like Shostakovich. This is the second time I've tried my hand at a Shosty symphony, after listening to and heartily disliking his Eleventh Symphony . Unfortunately, I felt no emotional connection to his First Symphony either. The music seems random and arbitrary to me--and to be honest, I even caught myself rolling my eyes at a few of Shosty's musical devices. And as I'll show in the listener notes, it's more film score music than symphony. ********************** Leonard Bernstein and the Chicago Symphony Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 7 Deutsche Grammophone, 1989 ********************** Lucky me: I've still got three more of his symphonies left to listen to: his Second, Seventh and Twelfth. A little historical background before we get to the listener notes: Shostakovich wrote his First Symphony in 1925 at the shockingly young age of 18. It was his graduation piece at the Leningrad Conserva