This has been one of my favorite concerted works -- in fact, one of my favorite works, period -- ever since I first heard it many years ago. Some of the things in this movement that always strike me are its lack of an introduction (the soloist comes in, playing the main melody of the movement, in the second bar), the placement of the cadenza in the middle of the movement instead of toward the end, and one of my very favorite passages in all of classical music, which comes at about the 2:50 moment, when the soloist climbs to a very high note, holds it a bit, and then arpeggiates back down to a very low note, which he then sustains while the clarinets play a lovely countermelody. It's not only a gorgeous moment, but an ingenious one as well.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Thursday, November 05, 2009
Something for Thursday
Nettl used this the other day, and it's sufficiently good for me to pass on to you all. Here's the first movement of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto:
This has been one of my favorite concerted works -- in fact, one of my favorite works, period -- ever since I first heard it many years ago. Some of the things in this movement that always strike me are its lack of an introduction (the soloist comes in, playing the main melody of the movement, in the second bar), the placement of the cadenza in the middle of the movement instead of toward the end, and one of my very favorite passages in all of classical music, which comes at about the 2:50 moment, when the soloist climbs to a very high note, holds it a bit, and then arpeggiates back down to a very low note, which he then sustains while the clarinets play a lovely countermelody. It's not only a gorgeous moment, but an ingenious one as well.
This has been one of my favorite concerted works -- in fact, one of my favorite works, period -- ever since I first heard it many years ago. Some of the things in this movement that always strike me are its lack of an introduction (the soloist comes in, playing the main melody of the movement, in the second bar), the placement of the cadenza in the middle of the movement instead of toward the end, and one of my very favorite passages in all of classical music, which comes at about the 2:50 moment, when the soloist climbs to a very high note, holds it a bit, and then arpeggiates back down to a very low note, which he then sustains while the clarinets play a lovely countermelody. It's not only a gorgeous moment, but an ingenious one as well.
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4 comments:
Beautiful. That's one of my favorites too.
If you want to write something profitable this could be your genre. I even have a title for you:
"Rock and Roll Recovery: transitioning from Rock to Classical"
People are starving for this type of tutorial.
This is one of my favorites too. For me, it's really a bridge piece between the Classical and Romantic eras in music, at least as far as concerti go. (The concept of an "introduction" for symphonies got thrown out much earlier, with the later Mozart symphonies and the Beethoven symphonies beginning with #3).
I recently picked up some of his EARLY stuff...that he wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. Quite different from his later horror work. I HATED Cujo. Loved Bag of Bones. Don't always like his plots or characters but his use of language is lovely. He has some sentences that just make me grin.
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