Der Erlkönig But on Violin? o.O

Sorry for the clickbait title. Gotta do it sometimes though. Anyway, let's start off with a creepy picture then get into an extra insane moment that's gonna knock your metaphorical socks off.

So what is this? Good question! This is artist Albert Sterner's depiction of Goethe's poem "Erlkönig". Go read it yourself here, but I'll give you the sparknotes version. A father is riding through the night holding his son. His son starts seeing the Erl-King (a German romanticist figure, the king of the fairies) who tries to get the boy to come with him. The child is relating this to his father, and tells him that the Erl-King has seized/harmed him. The father thinks he's making things up, telling the son that the Erl-King he's seeing is actually a streak of fog, or old willows. When the father finally arrives, he finds the boy dead in his arms. Soooo pretty intense poem - thanks Goethe! 

         Anyway, Schubert went ahead and thought this was such a lovely story that it deserved a musical setting. He wrote a piece for voice and piano that depicts this story, which you can listen to here. In his setting, you can hear four distinct characters - the horse (constant triplets galloping through the whole piece), the father (usually still in a minor key) the son (really stressed out and scared, as shown by the music) and the Erl-King (who has a completely different happy, enticing, kinda creepy melody). The way Schubert sets each character is INSANELY well done and conveys emotion so well. 

       ANYWAY enough of that, here's the moment. It comes from an arrangement for solo violin by Heinrich Ernst. The performer is Ning Feng, and the performance is here. 

This entire piece is ABSURDLY difficult. I mean, Ernst kept every part in the transcription. The constant triplets? Got those. Other characters talking while the horse is still galloping? Yep! So the violinist is playing both hands of the piano and then the singer's part. So uh yeah it's really really hard!

THE INSANE MOMENT

The part in question comes towards the end, at 3:32 - in line with the text, it's when the boy says to his father "My father, my father, he seizes me fast, For sorely the Erl-King has hurt me at last." This gets SUPER intense and Ning Feng does such a good job of showing the boy's fear here. Ok but go forward a little bit and we get the coolest part. To me the most jaw dropping moment of the whole performance is 3:40 with these octaves. The insane clarity and power is just ridiculous, especially given that he has to still worry about the triplets. And then his phrasing to the cadence at 3:45 is ahhhhhh insane!! HE'S SO GOOD and he makes this sound sooooo clean.

       Also, his bow hand is so relaxed yet so powerful this whole time. His left hand is so well put together. Not to mention that he breaks a bow hair about a minute in and plays with it hanging off for the next three and a half minutes. An absolute legend.

TL;DR - Ning Feng destroys the octaves in this section and somehow makes it sound SUPER clean while also really powerful and conveying emotion unbelievably well. 

Here are some timestamps of when the different characters are talking. Enjoy, and as always, hope you have an insane week!

0:19 - The horse riding through the night! 

0:39 - Singer starts, introduces us to father and son.

1:12 - Son sees the elf king, father says nahhh you're delusional.

1:43 - The Erl-King tries to get the boy to come with him, says he has colorful flowers on a beach.

2:05 - Son gets more stressed, father still thinks he's faking it.

2:29 - Erl-King back at it again trying to steal away the boy.

2:43 - Boy says uh don't you see him, but dad is still in denial

3:15 - Erl-King says come with me OR ELSE. Uh oh....

3:32 - EPIC PART here we come - the boy says the Erl-King hurt him. 

3:49 - Dad FINALLY gets worried and they get to their destination.

4:13 - "In his arms, the child was dead" o.O

Henselt Piano Concerto Mvt. 2 - Raymond Lewenthal

Hellllloo everybody we're back at it again with another INSANE music moment. The case in point today comes from Raymond Lewenthal's performance of Adolf Henselt's Piano Concerto in F-minor, a lesser known piece that isn't played very often because, well, it's obscenely hard! We'll definitely see that in the moment we're looking at today.

Here's the guy himself. If he were around today, I would compliment his compositions and then proceed to question his hair choices and strongly advise him to go to the nearest Great Clips. I mean... what on earth is this?

This moment comes in the 2nd movement of his F-minor piano concerto.The 2nd movement of a three movement concerto is usually slow, which is the case here. It starts with a beautiful, lyrical, grateful theme in Db major, the submediant of F-minor. After a minute, the tone shifts completely to a sneakily epic secondary theme in C#-minor, which is enharmonically the same as Db-minor. The score gets incredibly messy here, with the piano having four different lines/staves/parts to play (two playing the melody in the bass, and two playing chords up higher to make the melody sound fancy).

OK SO HERE'S THE COOL PART (and better timestamps are down below). At 16:13, a development of the sneakily epic theme starts. At this point, especially at 16:22, the bass parts of the piano start absolutely GOING OFF. I mean, Lewenthal is just destroying the piano at this point. I can imagine this must be absurdly hard, and Lewenthal just blows this part out of the water. Such cool chords, the rhythm makes it 100x more epic, just really insane.

At 16:32, we have this weird but EPIC modulation, where we go around a carousel of different keys before landing in F-minor at 16:37, continuing on with this same minor theme that's been developed. The way that the orchestra builds in here and Lewenthal's energy and INSANE volume make it my favorite part of the whole piece. Here's a picture of the piano after Lewenthal finished this section.

 

OK just kidding... maybe.

TL;DR - Lewanthal absolutely destroys the minor theme of the second movement, and Henselt's bass hands and modulation in this section are insane.

Timestamps are below. Thanks for reading and I hope you all have an INSANE week!

12:50 - 2nd movement starts.
15:21 - Sneakily epic secondary theme starts.
16:13 - INSANE bass part starts.
16:22 - HELLOOOO epic bass part?
16:32 - Weird epic modulation + ORCHESTRA COMES IN.

Welcome!

I've been wanting to write a consistent blog for a while now, but that desire hasn't been realized until now! So, you may ask, what is the motivation, the impetus, the prompt for this blog's creation? Well, maybe you weren't going to ask that. That's alright! I'll tell you quickly anyway.

I love music. I especially love orchestral music and anything relating to string instruments. I love how I feel when I listen to music, the theory behind compositions, the way harmonies fit together, the ability some performers have to so clearly convey emotion, the technique, the complexities of intonation, the way a bow looks on a violin string, I love everything about it.

When I was younger, maybe starting when I was 14, my brother Mattias and I (both home schooled at the time) would sit at our clunky old desktop computer in the dining room and spend hours on YouTube watching video after video of classical music performances. We'd memorize the timestamps of our favorite parts, and then go through a dozen violinists and see how they all played that part. We'd re-watch the same five or ten seconds, over, and over, and OVER. Maybe it sounds geeky and dumb, but I don't really care, because for me there are some music moments that just make my jaw drop, eyes go wide, and mind explode as I fall over in my chair and all I can say or think is "THAT'S INSANE". 

So... This is going to be a collection of "that's insane" moments. Not my favorite pieces, not my favorite performers, not my favorite composers, zip, zilch, none of that. This will be narrowed down to those few seconds in a piece that, at some point, have elicited a "that's insane" reaction from me. 

So... a quick one today because I've already taken up lots of your time!

Fritz Kreisler's Praeludium and Allegro - played by violist Lionel Tertis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFsbmIa28uY

Lionel Tertis is an absolute LEGEND. I mean, look at him. He and William Primrose revolutionized the viola as a solo instrument (which can be seen as a bad or good thing... I learn towards the latter).

The start of this piece, the "praeludium", if you will, is just straight quarter notes. The whole time. OK so now that that's established, just listen to the first 40 seconds of Tertis' recording. 

        The amount of phrasing is ABSURD. I mean, nothing about his performance would line up with a metronome. It's so good. He makes this sound like the most expressive passage on earth... even though it's, uh, really not notated that way at all.

        My fave part of this is the ascent, starting at 0:23, up to a high C before coming down to a deceptive F-major cadence at 0:30. The harmony is absurd, the phrasing is INSAAAAANE, and the shifting and vibrato are just absolutely unbelievable. Again, the fact that he can make this so expressive, given just quarter notes, is just mind blowing.

TL;DR - Tertis' phrasing, vibrato, and shifting are mind bogglingly good and lead to an insanely beautiful moment in the opening of this piece. 

Well... that's all for today folks. If you've read any of this, thank you for your time. If you have any "that's insane" moments, please send them my way, it would make my day. I hope your week is as insanely good as Tertis' phrasing!