Suites for the Sweet
Evening Music | May 6, 2010
Airs Saturdays and Sundays at 8PM on 93.9 FM
Spanning the centuries from the Baroque to the twentieth centurytwo suites for the sweet are on the table for your delectation in our first hour.
Glenn Gould offers Bach’s French Suite No. 4, and Sir Neville Marriner and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra give us Respighi’s “Ancient Airs and Dances”: Suite No. 3. Both works are comprised of dances from earlier days, Bach borrowing from an earlier French tradition of organizing peasant dances from all over Europe into suites, and Respighi reprising that idea in his own “archaized” group of dances.
Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Symphony No. 4 over the years from 1930 to 34. The tone is stark and anguished, and sounds like it is about war. Well, war did break out, but not till 1939, but there is no doubt that the political situation in Europe during the years of the symphony’s creation was troubling and turbulent. So perhaps the music was prescient. Vaughan Williams wrote of it, “I don’t know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.” Well, we do like it, especially in Andrew Davis’s gripping interpretation with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Spanning the centuries from the Baroque to the twentieth centurytwo suites for the sweet are on the table for your delectation in our first hour.
Glenn Gould offers Bach’s French Suite No. 4, and Sir Neville Marriner and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra give us Respighi’s “Ancient Airs and Dances”: Suite No. 3. Both works are comprised of dances from earlier days, Bach borrowing from an earlier French tradition of organizing peasant dances from all over Europe into suites, and Respighi reprising that idea in his own “archaized” group of dances.
Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Symphony No. 4 over the years from 1930 to 34. The tone is stark and anguished, and sounds like it is about war. Well, war did break out, but not till 1939, but there is no doubt that the political situation in Europe during the years of the symphony’s creation was troubling and turbulent. So perhaps the music was prescient. Vaughan Williams wrote of it, “I don’t know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.” Well, we do like it, especially in Andrew Davis’s gripping interpretation with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
