/ Piano
SKU: LM.24159
ISBN 9790230941594.
Sonnerie de trompette - Berceuse - Marche - Complainte - Chanson - Cloches - Valses I et II - Escalade - Duo - Danse paysanne - Chasse - Dors, petit ours - A la maniere de J.S. Bach - De Bonne humeur - Danse polonaise - Calvaire breton - Ronde dans le pre - Melodie - Ariettes du temps passe I et II - Espagne - La Neige tombe - Le Jardin endormi sous la neige - Glissades.
SKU: PR.16400272S
UPC: 680160588442. 8.5 x 11 inches.
My third quartet is laid out in a three-movement structure, with each movement based on an early, middle, and late work of the great American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Although the movements are separate, with full-stop endings, the music is connected by a common scale-form, derived from the name MARY CASSATT, and by a recurring theme that introduces all three movements. I see this theme as Mary's Theme, a personality that stays intact while undergoing gradual change. I The Bacchante (1876) [Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] The painting shows a young girl of Italian or Spanish origin, playing a small pair of cymbals. Since Cassatt was trying very hard to fit in at the French Academy at the time, she painted a lot of these subjects, which were considered typical and universal. The style of the painting doesn't yet show Cassatt's originality, except perhaps for certain details in the face. Accordingly the music for this movement is Spanish/Italian, in a similar period-style but using the musical signature described above. The music begins with Mary's Theme, ruminative and slow, then abruptly changes to an alla Spagnola-type fast 3/4 - 6/8 meter. It evokes the Spanish-influenced music of Ravel and Falla. Midway through, there's an accompanied recitative for the viola, which figures large in this particular movement, then back to a truncated recapitulation of the fast music. The overall feeling is of a well-made, rather conventional movement in a contemporary Spanish/Italian style. Cassatt's painting, too, is rather conventional. II At the Opera (1880) [Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts] This painting is one of Cassatt's most well known works, and it hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting shows a woman alone in a box at the opera house, completely dressed (including gloves) and looking through opera glasses at someone or something that is NOT on the stage. Across the auditorium from her, but exactly at eye level, is a gentleman with opera glasses intently watching her - though it is not him that she's looking at. It's an intriguing picture. This movement is far less conventional than the first movement, as the painting is far less conventional. The music begins with a rapid, Shostakovich-type mini-overture lasting less than a minute, based on Mary's Theme. My conjecture is that the woman in the painting has arrived late to the opera, busily stumbling into her box. What happens next is a kind of collage, a kind of surrealistic overlaying of two different elements: the foreground music, at first is a direct quotation of Soldier's Chorus from Gounod's FAUST (an opera Cassatt would certainly have heard in the brand-new Paris Opera House at that time), played by Violin II, Viola, and Cello. This music is played sul ponticello in the melody and col legno in the marching accompaniment. On top of this, the first violin hovers at first on a high harmonic, then descends into a slow melody, completely separate from the Gounod. It's as if the woman in the painting is hearing the opera onstage but is not really interested in it. Then the cello joins the first violin in a kind of love-duet (just the two of them, at first). This music isn't at all Gounod-derived; it's entirely from the same scale patterns as the first movement and derives from Mary's Theme and its scale. The music stays in a kind of dichotomy feeling, usually three-against-one, until the end of the movement, when another Gounod melody, Valentin's aria Avant de quitter ce lieux reappears in a kind of coda for all four players. It ends atmospherically and emotionally disconnected, however. The overall feeling is a kind of schizophrenic, opera-inspired dream. III Young Woman in Green, Outdoors in the Sun (1909) [Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts] The painting, one of Cassatt's last, is very simple: just a figure, looking sideways out of the picture. The colors are pastel and yet bold - and the woman is likewise very self-assured and not in the least demure. It is eight minutes long, and is all about melody - three melodies, to be exact (Young Woman, Green, and Sunlight). No angst, no choppy rhythms, just ever-unfolding melody and lush harmonies. I quote one other French composer here, too: Debussy's song Green, from Ariettes Oubliees. 1909 would have been Debussy's heyday in Paris, and it makes perfect sense musically as well as visually to do this. Mary Cassatt lived her last several years in near-total blindness, and as she lost visual acuity, her work became less sharply defined - something akin to late water lilies of Monet, who suffered similar vision loss. My idea of making this movement entirely melodic was compounded by having each of the three melodies appear twice, once in a pure form, and the second time in a more diffuse setting. This makes an interesting two ways form: A-B-C-A1-B1-C1. String Quartet No.3 (Cassatt) is dedicated, with great affection and respect, to the Cassatt String Quartet, whose members have dedicated themselves in large measure to the furthering of the contemporary repertoire for quartet.
SKU: BA.BA08812-01
ISBN 9790006543182. 33.1 x 26.5 cm inches. Text Language: French. Preface: Münzmay, Andreas. Text: nach Jean-Francois Marmontel.
Annette et LubinJustine Favart and Adolphe Blaise'sAnnette et Lubinwas premiered on 15 February 1762 at the Paris Opera-Comique - the first new production at that theater following its merger with the Comedie-Italien. It was a resounding success: by the time the season came to an end, on 3 April, it had been almost continuously on the program with no decline in interest from the public, and it remained in the repertoire for more than thirty years. Countless new editions, translations, and parodies of the play bear witness to its impact far beyond the borders of Paris. Like all of Favart's works, it deals with the subject of natural love, unencumbered by considerations of money or social status endangering it from the outside through powerful aristocratic or wealthy rivals. The plot is based on a literary model, the like-named tale by Jean-Francois Marmontel, which is in turn based on a contemporary occurrence. Annette and her cousin Lubin are sharply reprimanded for their love by an estate administrator (Le Bailli) who himself has designs on Annette. He takes advantage of Annette's illegitimate pregnancy to extort her: only by marrying him can she escape condemnation by society and the church. But Annette and her lover are able to gain the protection of the local squire (Le Seigneur), and the story ends happily with a conciliatory gesture from the lord of the manor.The second volume in our series OPERA, Annette et Lubin, consists of a cloth-bound book and an Edirom file stored on a USB card in credit-card format. The number of simultaneous users of the edition's digital component is unlimited.Further information on the work and the OPERA series can be found at http://www.opera-edition.com/en/annetteetlubin_en.htm.OPERA: Spectrum of European Music Theatre in Separate Editions is dedicated to critical editions of outstanding works of European music theatre from the 17th to the 20th centuries. Compositions of French, Italian, German, English, Scandinavian and Slavic origin are being edited. These include specific genres which have seldom been given attention in editorial undertakings until now and which present their own editorial problems, such as ballet, theatre music, melodrama or operetta.A new feature is the form of the presentation in so-called hybrid editions. While the scores appear in traditional cloth-bound volumes, the musical and textual sources, the editions of the dramatic texts, as well as the critical commentaries are prepared and presented on an electronic platform (Edirom).Thanks to this ability to access the underlying sources, the editorial decisions are completely transparent to the user. This special editorial access being implemented by OPERA's editions uses the software Edirom, which was developed in a project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) based at the University of Paderborn. All components of the electronic part are encoded according to the modern standard of XML. The text components follow the standard of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
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SKU: PR.164002720
UPC: 680160573042. 8.5 x 11 inches.