Chrysanthemum

My goal is to search out the unfamiliar in music, listen intently, and write about it. Thus, writing up the things I'm playing in orchestra seems a little counter-productive. But, until I can get up to a library to get cds out/collect recommendations from people, I had to start somewhere.

*On that note: On the left sidebar, I have a widget where you can submit listening suggestions to me! Please use it!*

So I started with the most recent piece to tug my heart strings out. Puccini's string quartet, Crisantemi. It was written in 1890 as an elegiac string quartet. The legend goes that Puccini wrote the piece in a single night after the death of a friend.

So why hadn't I heard this lush, mournful, wonderful piece? Well, it's just not that common as string quartet repertoire. There was an arrangement for string orchestra, and it was in this form that I was introduced to the work. So, after the initial sight-reading, I ran to my computer and hit up iTunes for a recording. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with Sir Neville Marriner has such a dark core. The sound has so much weight and depth. I just adore this recording.

The B section at 2:55 (on the aforementioned recording) is what makes the piece for me. The beginning has a sighing quality and rich chordal voicing between the sections, but there is just something so gripping about the change in texture here. The violas switch to a low sixteenth-note ostinato pattern backed by a steady low pizz in the celli that gives the section a heavy feeling. It creates such plaintive urgency in the violins that is doubled in the second iteration of the theme, when the cello joins the first violins and the ostinato shifts to the second violins.

I'd post a youtube video demonstrating this piece, but I just couldn't find another version with quite the same depth as the St. Martin in the Fields recording.

I have a romantic side to me. I don't mean the color pink and Jane Austen novels; Romanticism with a capitol R. Highly chromatic, tension through dissonance, rich orchestration, sturm und drang. I like dark keys; f minor is a favorite. Because f minor is four flats, string instruments won't play open strings (B flat-E flat-A flat-D flat in the key signature vs. the violin tuning of E, A D, G). This creates a muffled sound which darkens the overall effect. It's a stormy little key. Try Beethoven's string quartet, op. 95. Or Mendelssohn op. 80. You'll see what I mean.

On a related note: I just tried to listen to snippets on iTunes, and in both Mendelssohn and Beethoven, the examples from the first movement were of the major key, contrasting second themes from the sonata form. Does this make any sense? I know that iTunes rarely uses the very opening of a piece in the sample, but I just find it strange, especially in classical music where people tend to recognize the first theme more than the second.