20 min listen
100. Music and the Great War
100. Music and the Great War
ratings:
Length:
20 minutes
Released:
Aug 15, 2010
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Works for solo piano and piano quintet performed by pianist Jean-Frederic Neuburger and Musicians from Marlboro.Ravel: La ValseFranck: Piano Quintet in F minorWorld War I truly changed the way people saw the world around them, and that shift was particularly evident in art and music. On this episode we’ll hear French works from before and after the war. Franck was a full-fledged Romantic who never lived to see the war. His Piano Quintet exhibits the intense passion that characterized music of his era. Biographers have suggested that Franck was infatuated with one of his students at the time—a love that was not returned—and that emotional strife may explain this work’s extremes of feeling. Ravel, on the other hand, experienced the Great War firsthand, as an ambulance driver on the front lines. His La Valse, written just after the war, begins as a seeming homage to the waltz. But, as it progresses, the dance spins further and further out of control, the waltz itself becoming a stand-in for all the excesses of pre-war Austria, and its musical unraveling a metaphor for the destruction wrought by war.
Released:
Aug 15, 2010
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
2. Mozart Mini-Marathon by The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum