On Thanksgiving, my wife and I visited my brother and his wife in the northern Virginia area, and for a time in our car we listened to WETA's annal Thanksgiving countdown of Top 100 classical music favorites. Of course, we only heard a few of the selections while we were in the car, so later I checked the WETA website to see the complete list (HERE).
I was not familiar with three of the pieces on the list, so I listened to them as part of this site. I listened to Marin Marais' "The Bells of St. Genevieve" during the week of 11/27 (HERE), and I listened to Vasily Kalinnikov's Symphony Number One during the week of 12/4 (HERE). This week I listened to the final of the three pieces, Symphony Number Three by Florence Price. I've listened to the piece a few times, and Imma be honest -- I vacillated between rating the piece BLUE ("Okay, It Was") and YELLOW ("Liked It, I Did") -- but I ended up rating it YELLOW because I did like the 3rd and 4th movements -- and much of the first movement -- so that put me over the top to give a final rating of YELLOW. The symphony is composed in four movements:
"Mrs. Price, both in the [piano] concerto and in the symphony, spoke in the musical idiom of her own people, and spoke with authority. There was inherent in both works all the emotional warmth of the American Negro, so that the evening became one of profound melody satisfaction. In the symphony there was a slow movement of majestic beauty, a third in which the rhythmic preference of the Negro found scope in a series of dance forms, and a finale which swept forward with great vigor." To me, though, the four movements did not seem particularly cohesive, and (LOL) it reminded me of words of advice I hear often on my favorite reality show, "Top Chef." I've been binge watching "Top Chef" for a few weeks now -- and I'm up to the current season, 19 (so I"ve witness a lot of cooking!) -- and two things I've learned from the show (and these are important lessons for chefs to grasp who aspire to be on the show), (1) the contestants should concentrate on one meal/preparation during an "elimination challenge" and not spread themselves to thin by preparing too many disparate aspects for the dish and (2) if/when preparing a multi-course meal, the menu items should be cohesive. As a multi-course "meal," so to speak, Price's four movements in this symphony just seemed too disparate with little cohesion. I liked the first movement, but it just didn't seem to fit with the third. The second movement? It was okay. The third movement seemed out of place with the second and fourth -- but as a stand-alone piece, it "worked." As the King of Siam in "The King and I" would say, "et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." However, like I said earlier, I did like the third and fourth movements, and there was enough about the first movement that I did enjoy that that "pushed it over the edge" for me when I was considering whether to land on a rating of BLUE or YELLOW. YELLOW it is. ; )
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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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