Music Assembly: Caprice No. 24 by Paganini

If you're about my age (and let's face it, if you're here then you probably are), when you hear the opening bars of Paganini's 24th Caprice you'll be looking for a couple of giant hands to touch fingers and for Melvyn Bragg to hove into view. That's because The South Bank Show used Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Variations as its theme... and that was very much based on Caprice No. 24.

Paganini's source material was composed for strings, but here's an arrangement for classical guitar performed by Japanese guitar prodigy Haruna Miyagawa, in which her hands defy the laws of physics. Whether you like the music or not, if you are any kind of guitarist you know that this is almost unbelievably exceptional.

Music Assembly: Escape

It took me a while to track this down but as ever the inestimable Tunefind came to my rescue. It's Escape, an orchestral piece by the composer Craig Armstrong. It starts with anticipatory strings, almost menacing, the sort of thing you might hear as background music in a Craig-era Bond movie or a Nolan-helmed Batman. But as more and more voices get added, the scope of the piece swells too - it takes on grander proportions. And then the percussion kicks in around the four and a half minute mark. The whole thing ends up leaning heavily into "epic" territory.... which is probably why it got picked up for this old Top Gear review of the BMW M5, where I first heard it. So here it is is context, from Clarkson pressing the M button at 1:05

And here's the piece in its entirety. How does Armstrong not do more soundtrack work?

Music Assembly: Ravel's Piano Concerto in G Major, M. 83: II. Adagio assai

In which I continue to haemorrhage readers...

I don't know much about Maurice Ravel, to be honest, aside from the one thing everyone my age knows: Torvill and Dean and Bolero. But this piece has nothing to do with ice dance or Sarajevo or 1984.

Perhaps if I'd paid more attention in actual Music Assembly at school, I might have learnt something else about Ravel. As it is, I learnt about this piece by listening to Stephen Mangan's Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. Stephen talked movingly about sharing it with his father during the latter's last days, and described it as a musical embodiment of living moment to moment. I don't think I can add much to that, really, other than to say I think it is a beautiful thing. Oh, and there's a bit about five minutes in that reminds me of Howard Shore's soundtrack to David Fincher's The Game, a film I absolutely love. So it works, for me at least, on multiple levels.

Adagio assai is a musical direction meaning very slow. It's like being back in Music Assembly after all.

You can hear the lovely Lauren Laverne casting Stephen away right here. And if this piece isn't to your taste, there's always yesterday's post...

Music Assembly: Asturias

Disclaimer: this post was written in December 2023, and scheduled for future posting. Its contents may no longer be accurate or appropriate.

Isaac Albéniz (29th May 1860 – 18th May 1909) was a Spanish virtuoso pianist, composer, and conductor. He was one of the foremost composers of the Post-Romantic era, and also had a significant influence on his contemporaries and younger composers. So says Wikipedia, and who am I to argue? Whatever, whilst he is remembered for his piano works based on Spanish folk music, it's Asturias that he is probably best known for, especially the guitar transcription thereof (despite the fact that it wasn't originally written for guitar).

If we'd had Croatian guitar prodigy Ana Vidovic playing this to us, as we sat through another Wednesday music assembly at school, I certainly would have sat up and paid close attention. Am ever so slightly beguiled, even now.

There. Don't we all feel a bit more cultured now? Despite the guy in the audience with the percussive cough?

Music Assembly: La Mamma Morta

This might be the last Music Assembly post I do for a while, as my blog stats tell me they're not very popular, and they generate very little discussion in the comments. Not that blogging is a popularity contest (I'd be last if it was) but, you know. Anyway, here goes.

I've mentioned Philadelphia here before, Jonathan Demme's 1993 response to the AIDS crisis. And you all know the story, don't you: when a man with HIV (Tom Hanks, as Andy) is fired by his law firm because of his condition, he hires a homophobic small time lawyer (Denzel Washington, as Joe) as the only willing advocate for a wrongful dismissal suit. It scooped an Oscar for Hanks, and another for Bruce Springsteen's title song.

Anyway, there's a scene two thirds of the way through the film when, after a party, Andy and Joe are prepping for their next day in court. Andy puts on some music and asks Joe, "Do you like opera?" And Joe is me and nearly everyone I hold dear when he hesitantly replies, shaking his head, "I am not that familiar with opera." Whereupon Andy goes on to explain why he loves this piece so much, translating the storyline as he goes and highlighting the musical highpoints ("Oh, that single cello!") Now depending on your view of Hanks, you might think this is a terrific scene in a powerful film, or borderline hammy, or somewhere in-between; either way, you have to admire the lighting with credit, presumably, to cinematographer Tak Fujimoto. I remember thinking, when I first saw it all those years ago, that it was a scene that reinforced the fact that a man with so much to live for was going to die - there would be no happy ending, of course. You might also argue that it's a scene in which straight character Joe is momentarily enraptured by a gay man. But I don't really want to turn this into a film studies class on early 90s cinema. It's the music we're here for. It is, as Andy says, Maria Callas singing an aria from Andrea Chénier by Umberto Giordano. It's La Mamma Morta, literally The Dead Mother - a song of death and sorrow, and misplaced hope. What makes it for me, though, beyond Callas's voice or the story, are the swooping key changes between 2:26 and 2:56 in this film clip. and again from 3:39 onwards. For here it is, in its cinematic context...

...and in full.

Music Assembly: Vesti la Giubba

I love The Untouchables, the Kevin Costner vehicle directed by Brian De Palma, ostensibly telling the tale of how Eliot Ness brought down Al Capone on charges of tax evasion. For all its faults, it is, as critic Pauline Kael once wrote, "like an attempt to visualise the public's collective dream of Chicago gangsters." Andy Garcia is superb in this film too, and of course Robert De Niro got to play Capone, wielding a baseball bat to memorable effect. Billy Drago, as hitman Frank Nitti, is also underappreciated. Even Costner's occasional woodenness can be excused, as it lends Ness a buttoned-up, stoic air. And of course there is Sean Connery's turn as Irish beat cop Jim Malone, for which he won an Oscar, despite criticism of his Scottish Irish accent. Whatever, for my money the film is beautifully shot, excitingly paced, and well acted across the board. It also has a quite brilliant, evocative score from Ennio Morricone - what more could you want?

Of course one piece of music in the film is not by Morricone. Whilst Nitti is off [spoiler alert] killing Malone, Capone is very visibly at the opera - the perfect alibi. Now I have always struggled with opera, and can't imagine that I would ever go to see one in its entirety. But I can appreciate certain pieces, such as that which Capone watches in The Untouchables. The piece is from Pagliacci (literal translation, "Clowns") by Ruggero Leoncavallo, and is called Vesti la Giubba ("Put on the costume"). In the opera, the protagonist Canio, a clown, must prepare to laugh and perform, despite being heartbroken. This dichotomy of emotion suits the Untouchables scene well, as Capone appears tearful watching the opera, whilst joyful at the news of Malone's demise.

Now I don't know if the music has stayed with me just because I love the film, or because I can actually appreciate it standalone, despite my ignorance of, and general ambivalence towards, opera. Either way, here's Vesti la Giubba in its cinematic context...

...and in full.

Music Assembly: Night on Bald Mountain

Night on Bald Mountain was a 1867 tone poem, whatever that is, by 19th Century Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. I like the idea that, somewhere out there, another composer labours unsuccessfully under the name of Boastful Mussorgsky, but let's not get sidetracked. Mussorgsky's work was not a success, and was never performed publicly during his lifetime... which makes what happened next more surprising. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov re-arranged Bald Mountain in 1886, five years after Mussorgsky's death, and it is that arrangement that subsequently became very successful. Fast-forward 54 years and the Rimsky-Korsakov mix was soundtracking the scary bits in Disney's Fantasia.

And you might think that was where I first knowlingly heard today's piece, but you'd be wrong. Instead, I have Maxell and Pete Murphy of Bauhaus fame to thank to introducing me to Night on Bald Mountain (RK remix).

Here it is in context...

...and in full (albeit in two parts), courtesy of the House of Mouse.

Music Assembly: Gayane ballet suite (adagio)

In about 1983, I won a competition in Look-In magazine. The prize was a CED player and two excellent films: Logan's Run and 2001: Space Odyssey. Not a bad haul for a 12-year old, and a pretty mature selection of films. Being a sci-fi fan, I had already read Arthur C. Clarke's novel of 2001 and, if memory serves, had seen Kubrick's film once on television. But this gave me my first chance to watch, and re-watch, Stanley's masterwork on demand.

A quick point of order on CED players: Capacitance Electronic Discs were analogue video discs that were played not with a laser, but with a stylus! Essentially, they were very high capacity records. They were also a short-lived format, overtaken by VHS and Betamax somewhere between their invention (1964) and actually hitting the market as a consumer product (1981). These discs couldn't be handled - they came in a rigid plastic sleeve, which you inserted whole into the player, whereupon the disc would be extracted and you could withdraw the sleeve. I can still hear the droning noise of it all loading up. I think I may still have the player somewhere, along with the films and a CED of Goldfinger that I picked up later. I hope I do, anyway, it's probably quite collectable now. But I digress: back to 2001.

Although Kubrick had commissioned a score from composer Alex North (who had previously worked on both Spartacus and Dr Strangelove), he later rejected it in favour of the temporary soundtrack he had assembled himself from existing classical pieces. Stanley subsequently explained this choice in an interview, saying, "However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time?" Ouch! But anyway, Kubrick's soundtrack is how I first came to hear the adagio from Aram Khachaturian's Gayane ballet suite. Used in the film to great effect, this achingly sad piece perfectly reflects the isolation and loneliness, the separation of a long space flight. So perfectly, in fact, that it was later referenced in the soundtrack to Aliens, to reflect a similar mood.

There are other more famous pieces in the 2001 soundtrack; indeed, the use of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra has become iconic, a shorthand pop-culture reference and oft-parodied. Likewise, the inclusion of Ligeti's choral works brought a whole new audience to that composer's work, a fact that certainly softened his initial displeasure to his music being used in an edited, modified form. But, for me, the haunting, contemplative strings of Khachaturian's adagio bring the film to mind as much, if not more, than all of the rest. It is simply beautiful.

Here it is in context...

...and in full.

Music Assembly: The Liberty Bell

When I was at school, Wednesday's assembly was always the music assembly. Quite apart from being later in the morning than other days, for timetabling reasons, it also meant that 650 boys got to listen to classical music once a week. Our unfortunately-named (but who shall remain nameless) camp music teacher would take to the stage, bang on for a bit about the composer, or Glyndebourne, or some such, then introduce a piece of classical music which we would more often than not endure, before staff notices and an assistant head boy announcing that the detention list would be "up by break" and that "all boys should check to see if they are on it."

At this point, I should add that I loved my school - it gave me an enviable education, seven fantastic years, and my best friend.

That said, music assembly would invariably be terribly dull. The aforementioned Wednesday timetabling anomaly as least meant that the music would be playing at 11am so, boys being boys and this being the mid-80s i.e. peak-Casio, some would amuse themselves by ensuring their watches' hourly chime would go off during whatever classical piece was being played. I know, I know... and when the camp music teacher later read a piece from a Glyndebourne programme reminding the audience to switch off any digital alarms, well, that only made it worse, of course. What can I say, it was a different time - a different, wonderful time.

Anyway, all this serves to introduce a new and very occasional series in which I'll introduce a piece of classical music and, since I know very little about that subject, the context by which I came to know the piece. To kick off the first Music Assembly, I'm going to draw on the most memorable actual music assembly from my schooldays, in which there was a guest presenter: one of the French teachers. I won't name him either - let's just call him Board-Rubber. He had been my form tutor in my first year at the school, was still my French teacher, and I thought he was excellent. Board-Rubber took to the stage to give a dry and straight-faced introduction to The Liberty Bell, explaining that it was written by John Phillip Sousa at the tail-end of the 19th Century. Perhaps he also spoke briefly about the bell that gave the march its name, I don't recall exactly. I do recall that it was an uncharacteristically serious presentation. All of which changed as his speech concluded, and with a nod to the sound booth stage-right to cue the music, Board-Rubber pivoted on his heel and marched off in an elastic-limbed silly walk that would make Cleese proud. Here is The Liberty Bell in context...

...and in full.