Jacco Nefs

Audio Available

Component

Delivery

Eprint Folders

Format

Grade

Instrument

Item Sequence

Large Print Edition

Marketed Status

Minimum Sell Quantity

MINTS Data Available

Product Line

Prop65

Score Available

Video Available

Respighi settled in Rome in 1913 when he took up an appointment as professor of composition at the Santa Cecilia Academy, the city’s famous conservatory. He met and married his wife there -- she was one of his students -- and the vibrant concert life in Rome spurred Respighi to action. The Fountains of Rome was the first result of his efforts.

Fountains is in four movements, each representing one of Rome’s fountains at a different time of day. The opening movement depicts the Valle Giulia at dawn. Now enveloped in the suburbs north of Rome, the Valle Giulia was, during Respighi’s lifetime, a pastoral landscape. The orchestra gradually awakens, murmuring strings joined by plaintive oboes and English horn as cattle pass through the mists in the distance.

In the second movement, the majestic Triton Fountain on the Piazza Barberini springs to life in the morning light. The fountain was created by the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and his work -- and Respighi’s as well -- was inspired by the story of the end of the flood from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “The ruler of the seas sets his trident aside, smoothes the billows, and summons the sea-blue Triton who towers up over the depths ... and commands him to blow into his sounding shell and by his signal recall the waters and the rivers.”

The third movement represents what is undoubtedly the grandest of Rome’s fountains, the Trevi Fountain, at midday. Respighi’s majestic writing for brass over swirling strings and cresting waves of percussion captures the fountain’s sheer scale, with its central depiction of Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch.

The finale depicts the modest fountain in front of the Villa Medici, which sits atop a hill overlooking St. Peter’s, at dusk. Respighi’s orchestra provides the rich atmosphere of graceful birdsong, gentle evening breezes, and twinkling stars through a combination of sumptuous writing for strings and woodwinds and his use of percussion instruments such as the celesta and the orchestra bells. The work ends as gently as it began.

Fountains of Rome

Concert Band Score & Parts

The huapango is a lively Mexican dance of Spanish origin that is especially popular in the lands along the Gulf of Mexico. Performed by singers and instrumental ensembles ranging from a duo of guitars to a full mariachi band, it is characterized by a complex rhythmic structure mixing duple and triple meters which reflect the intricate steps of the dance. The huapango is danced by men and women as couples: the men sing, the women do not. Nicolas Slonimsky explained that the word huapango "is derived either from a native vocable meaning ‘on a wooden stand’ (the huapango is danced on a platform), or it may be a contraction of Huaxtecas de Pango. Huaxtecas means a tropical valley, and Pango is the ancient name of the river Panuco."

Moncayo’s Huapango of 1941, his first important work for orchestra, is based on three authentic folk dances: Siqui Siri, Balajú and El Gavilán. The piece is arranged in three sections, with fiery music at beginning and end recalling the manner of huapango singing in coplas (i.e., the song is shouted alternately between two men singers, here transmuted by Moncayo into a trombone—trumpet dialogue) surrounding a slower central portion based on a lyrical melody. Huapango is a brilliant study in orchestral sonority and vibrant dance rhythms about which the French composer Darius Milhaud once told José Antonio Alcaraz, "When in the grey light of a Parisian winter, I want there to be sun in my flat, I listen to a record of Huapango."

Huapango

“There is inside me a very peculiar understanding of nature: Everything is rhythm,” Revueltas wrote. “The poet’s language is everyday language. Everyone understands it or feels it. Music alone has to perfect its own language. All of that together is what music is to me. My rhythms are booming, dynamic, tactile, visual. I think in images that are melodic strains, that move dynamically.”

Thinking in dynamic images is a productive quality in a film composer, so it is fitting that films became the mainstay of perennial outsider Silvestre Revueltas’ career. After his first score, for the film Redes (1936), Revueltas scored or contributed music to eight more films before he died in October 1940. One of the last of these was La Noche de los Mayas, adapted by the director Chano Urueta from a story by Antonio Mediz Bolio, who was born in the state of Yucatán and became an important advocate for Mayan culture. Shot on location in the Yucatán jungles, the film concerns a tribe of Mayans still living in traditional ways and their meeting with the modern world in the form of an Indiana Jones-type explorer. Tragedy ensues, of course, romantic as well as cultural.

Although it received some appreciative reviews in Mexico, the film has been generally neglected, if not scorned. Its music, however, has long attracted notice. In 1960 the composer and conductor José Yves Limantour arranged music from the 36 cues of Revueltas’ score into a four-movement suite. (Paul Hindemith made a two-movement suite of his own, and the composer and conductor Enrique Diemecke later wrote a percussion cadenza -- based on motifs from various Revueltas scores -- to fill the indicated moment in the final movement of Limantour’s suite.)

This suite has the shape of a symphony. The first movement opens as a powerful ritual, a brooding evocation of rooted history with a gently awakening middle section. The second movement is a dancing scherzo, genial rusticity interrupted by urban sass. (“Jarana” indicates both uproarious partying and a type of Mexican dance.) Following is an almost Mahlerian nocturne, with a central interlude for flute and light percussion based on a traditional Yucatán evening song. Following a foreboding introduction, the finale (Night of Enchantment) is a fluid theme and variations, a sacrificial frenzy that exhausts itself in an orgy of percussion.

La Noche de los Mayas

Capriccio Italien, Op. 45, is a 15-minute fantasy for orchestra by Pyotr Ilyich Tschaikovsky. Composed between January and May 1880, it premiered on 18 December that year in Moscow with Nikolay Rubinstein conducting the Orchestra of the Imperial Russian Musical Society. The dedicatee was cellist Karl Davydov. The work's initial name was Italian Fantasia, after Mikhail Glinka's Spanish pieces. TYhis piece was inspired by a trip Tchaikovsky took to Rome with his brother Modest as respite from the composer's disastrous marriage with Antonina Miliukova. The brothers were there during Carnival, and, despite calling it "a folly," the composer was able to soak up Italian street music and folk songs which he then incorporated into his Capriccio. This enables some "bright primary colors and uncomplicated tunefulness."

Capriccio Italien op. 45

Pini di Roma (Pines of Rome) is the second of three tone poems written by Respighi between 1917 and 1929. These tone poems are the most well-known works in his oeuvre. Pines of Rome combines his skill for colorful orchestration with his interest in early music, particularly medieval music and folk songs. This work is based on children’s folk tunes, which he learned from his wife. Premiered on December 14, 1924, at the Teatro Augusteo in Rome, Pines of Rome initially received boos and hisses from the audience at the end of the first movement due to its “discordant trumpet writing,” and the nightingale sound at the end of the third movement wasn’t appreciated much either. The rest of the piece was well received, rewarded with a standing ovation. The work was premiered in the United States by Arturo Toscanini in 1926 and has since become a staple of the repertoire.

In four movements, Respighi notates specifically in the score how he envisioned each movement. He offers the following:

I. Pini da villa Borghese (The Pines of Villa Borghese)
Children are at play in the pine groves of Villa Borghese; they dance round in circles. They play at soldiers, marching and fighting, they are wrought up by their own cries like swallows at evening, they come and go in swarms.

II. Pini presso una catacomb (Pines Near a Catacomb)
Suddenly the scene changes -- we see the shades of the pine trees fringing the entrance to a catacomb. From the depth rises the sound of a mournful chant, floating through the air like a solemn hymn, and gradually and mysteriously dispersing.

III. I pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum)
(Lento, 4/4; piano cadenza; clarinet solo). There is a thrill in the air. The full moon reveals the profile of the pines of Gianicolo’s Hill. A nightingale sings.

IV. I pini della via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way)
Misty dawn on the Appian Way: solitary pine trees guarding the magic landscape; the muffled, ceaseless rhythm of unending footsteps. The poet has a fantastic vision of bygone glories: trumpets sound and, in the brilliance of the newly risen sun, a consular army bursts forth towards the Sacred Way, mounting in triumph to the Capitol.

Pines of Rome

In one programme note, Revueltas gave a rather conventional programmatic description: "Ventanas is sharply romantic music. Who does not remember a window by the light of the moon, or without it?" In another, better-known one, however, he demurred:
"Ventanas is music that has no program. Perhaps, in writing this work, I thought of expressing some definite idea. Now, several months after writing it, I can't remember what it was.
The name doesn't mean anything; it might be called "Skylights" or anything else. It all depends on the good or bad will of the listener.
Nevertheless, a window does offer a fertile literary theme, and it might satisfy the taste of some persons who can neither understand nor listen to music without a program, without inventing something more or less disagreeable—but, fortunately, I am not a literary man.
I am a musician with technique and without inspiration".
Although not so indicated in the published score, Revueltas dedicated Ventanas to Ángela Acevedo, whom he married in the year of its premiere.

Ventanas

George Enescu composed his enormously popular Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 when he was just 19 years old, drawing on his prodigious musical memory to create a sparkling orchestral medley of traditional Romanian folksongs he had heard and played as a child. George Enescu was born in Liveni, Romania, on August 19, 1881, and died in Paris, France on May 4, 1955. He composed his two Romanian rhapsodies, Opus 11, in 1901; they were premiered on the same concert in Bucharest on February 23, 1903, the composer conducting. The first Romanian Rhapsody became his signature work. It earned him a place in the musical Olympus of his homeland, but its popularity also tends to overshadow his later compositions and he eventually saw it as both a curse and a blessing. The work clearly follows the model established by Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, a series of pieces for piano based on Hungarian folk themes (or what were thought to be such).

Roumanian Rhapsody Nr. 1

Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld) is a comic operetta composed by Jacques Offenbach. The operetta is an irreverent parody and scathing satire on Gluck and his Orfeo ed Euridice, and culminates in the risqué 'Galop infernal' which is famous outside classical circles as the music for the can-can (to the extent that the tune is widely, but erroneously, called 'can-can'). This 'Galop' shocked some in the audience at the premiere.
The overture made prominent use of the operetta's best music, most obviously the concluding can-can. This overture rapidly gained popularity on its own account, and it remains a favourite piece for orchestral concerts.

Ouverture Orpheus in the Underworld

Egyptischer Marsch (Egyptian March), Op. 335, is a march composed by Johann Strauss II. It was commissioned for the inauguration of the Suez Canal, celebrated on 17 November 1869 in Port Said, where Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria officiated at the ceremonial opening, though it was first performed on 6 July 1869 in Pavlovsk, Saint Petersburg, under the title "Tscherkessen-Marsch" (March of the Circassians). Strauss later dedicated the work to Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden.
In musical terms, Johann Strauss' "Egyptian March" has been described as a "representative example of an "alla turca"composition... characterised by melodic arabesques and metric syncopations".

Egyptischer Marsch op. 335

Richard Wagner finished the opera Lohengrin in 1848. It tells the story of Elsa, a princess in Brabant (a province in the north of Belgium and the south of The Netherlands), who is rescued and wedded by a knight in shining armor who insists on remaining nameless. Drama and tragedy ensue, ending with the death of several characters in typical Wagnerian fashion. We all are familiar with the traditional wedding march from the opera, but more honestly, Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral in Act II is the actual wedding march, expressive of our young woman's innocent yearning and growing expectation, as 'a long train of ladies, magnificently attired, proceeds slowly, finally ascending the steps of the cathedral in Antwerp' (cue the pipe organ). Even in its original form, this section is almost a band piece, dominated by winds and percussion.

Elsa's Procession to the Cathedral

Capriccio Espagnol, Op. 34, is the common Western title for a five movement orchestral suite, based on Spanish folk melodies, composed by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1887. Rimsky-Korsakov originally intended to write the work for a solo violin with orchestra, but later decided that a purely orchestral work would do better justice to the lively melodies.

The work has five movements, divided into two parts comprising the first three and the latter two movements respectively. The first movement, Alborada, is a festive and exciting dance, typically from traditional Asturian music to celebrate the rising of the sun. It features the clarinet with two solos, and later features a solo violin with a solo similar to the clarinet's. The second movement, Variazioni, begins with a melody in the horn section. Variations of this melody are then repeated by other instruments and sections of the orchestra.

The third movement, Alborada, presents the same Asturian dance as the first movement. The two movements are nearly identical, in fact, except that this movement has a different instrumentation and key. The fourth movement, Scena e canto gitano (Scene and Gypsy Song) opens with five cadenzas — first by the horns and trumpets, then solo violin, flute, clarinet, and harp — played over rolls on various percussion instruments. It is then followed by a dance in triple time leading attacca into the final movement.

The fifth and final movement, Fandango Asturiano, is also an energetic dance from the Asturias region of northern Spain. The piece ends with an even more rousing statement of the Alborada theme. A complete performance of the Capriccio takes around 16 minutes.

Capriccio Espagnole op. 34

Busoni wrote his Tanz-Walzer in 1920 and it's a homage to Johann Strauss, although it's not clear which one: senior or junior. The harmonies are very uncharacteristic and full of surprises. Busoni wrote some very challenging works for orchestra – but also very stimulating. It’s a pity this music is not performed more often.

Tanz-Walzer for Orchestra op. 53

The Sorcerer's Apprentice (French: L'Apprenti sorcier) is a symphonic poem by the French composer Paul Dukas, completed in 1897. Subtitled "Scherzo after a ballad by Goethe", the piece was based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1797 poem named "Der Zauberlehrling". By far the most performed and recorded of Dukas' works, its notable appearance in the Walt Disney 1940 animated film Fantasia has led to the piece becoming widely known to audiences outside the classical concert hall. The premiere was given in Paris on May 18, 1897 by the Societe Nationale de Musique with the composer himself conducting.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

España, rhapsody for orchestra (French: España, rapsodie pour orchestre or Rapsodie España) is the most famous orchestral composition by French composer Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894). Written in 1883 after a trip to Spain, it was dedicated to the conductor Charles Lamoureux, who conducted the first public performance on 4 November 1883, at the Théâtre du Château d’Eau for the Société des Nouveaux Concerts in Paris. Although at first Chabrier worked on the piece for piano duet, this evolved into a work for full orchestra. Composed between January and August 1883, it was originally called Jota but this became España in October 1883. Encored at its first performance, and received well by the critics, it sealed Chabrier's fame overnight.

Espana

Global Sections - CORE [DO NOT TOUCH]*

Favicon

Need Help? Contact Us or call 1-800-345-6296    Live Chat

Header

Don't have a business account? Create one

Products