OOPS! I'm late with this! Turns out I had to travel last week, and as a result, I'm behind with a few things -- including my review and rating for this piece. Fret not, dear reader! I shall get caught up with things by the end of the week! ; ) ONE WEEK LATER:
Well, as you can see from that brief statement above, I’ve been quite busy lately. My wife and i traveled to New York City; our daughter from Chicago visited us for a short while; I accepted a job as a long-term substitute Language Arts teacher for a middle school where a teacher quit; and as the King of Siam in the “King and I” would say, “Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” As a result, I'm behind in various activities – including critical ones like housework, grocery shopping, and laundry and frivolous ones like blog posts about classical music – but surely though slowly, I’m getting to a point where I’ll be somewhat “caught up.” (Is one ever truly “caught up”?) My recent posts on this site have centered on pieces written by underrated – and in my case, unfamiliar – composers. However, I have heard of Jan Paderewski, for as a piano student in my youth, I played his very-well-known Minuet. That’s the only work I know of his, though. To me, he could certainly be classified as a “one-hit wonder.” However, he has a catalog of more than three dozen pieces online, HERE, and I selected his Nocturne in B Flat. A nocturne is basically a short, gentle piece for piano that is evocative of the night. Chopin wrote close to two dozen nocturnes, and his Nocturne No. 2 in E Flat is perhaps his most memorable. I’m sure you’ve heard it (HERE). That’s probably not the case with the piece by Paderewski. My guess is that it’s more than likely you have not heard it. It’s a serene, lovely piece – though it’s just not as memorable as Chopin’s work in E Flat. I was researching the piece to find out when it was written, and I discovered that his Opus 16 is a series of seven piano pieces referred to as “Miscellanea” composed between 1886 and 1896 (info HERE). I also found this apt description of the piece from the USC Polish Music Center: “(Paderewski’s nocturne) rests upon a rhythmical figure consisting of two sixteenth notes and an eighth, which is repeated twice in every measure in the composition save when, as an accompaniment of the second subject (which appears in the tenor voice) it is modified temporarily into a sixteenth rest, sixteenth note and eighth. A tender song rises, like incense, from this figure at the outset and twice is answered with two notes from above, which, like the strain with which Duke Orsino fed his love, have a ‘dying fall.’ This fall is characteristic too of the sustained melody which anon soars up above the accompaniment figure with its persistent, yet tender beat.” It is a lovely piece – though just not as memorable as the No. 2 by Chopin nor his own enduring Minuet.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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