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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><rss xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"> <channel> <title>50 greatest symphonies | The Guardian</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/series/50-greatest-symphonies</link> <description>Tom Service's survey of the 50 symphonies that changed classical music</description> <language>en-gb</language> <copyright>Guardian News &amp; Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2024</copyright> <pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 03:35:16 GMT</pubDate> <dc:date>2024-05-03T03:35:16Z</dc:date> <dc:language>en-gb</dc:language> <dc:rights>Guardian News &amp; Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2024</dc:rights> <image> <title>The Guardian</title> <url>https://assets.guim.co.uk/images/guardian-logo-rss.c45beb1bafa34b347ac333af2e6fe23f.png</url> <link>https://www.theguardian.com</link> </image> <item> <title>50 essential symphonies: what have we missed from our list?</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/09/50-essential-symphonies-blog-what-have-we-missed-from-our-list</link> <description><p>As Tom Service’s symphony blog reaches its conclusion with <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/09/symphony-guide-beethoven-ninth-choral-tom-service">Beethoven’s Ninth</a>, we asked the rest of our classical critics what they’d like to add to the list. Do you agree with their suggestions? Tell us what you might have included – or excluded – in our symphony survey in the comments below</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/series/50-greatest-symphonies"><em>All articles in this series</em></a><br></p><p>Dedicated to the memory of Debussy and originally written for 24 (later reworked for 23) wind and brass instruments, Stravinsky’s 1920 masterpiece is determinedly not in symphonic form and was laughed at during the first performance. But its spartan originality has changed musical thinking and, at under 10 minutes, rewards repeated listening. <strong><em>Fiona Maddocks</em></strong></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/09/50-essential-symphonies-blog-what-have-we-missed-from-our-list">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 14:05:10 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/09/50-essential-symphonies-blog-what-have-we-missed-from-our-list</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/9/1410271492219/4ad6779c-e889-46f4-8e94-2a24b5b88463-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f8e827d8831d874c676c6ed179d1dbf8"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PAUL MILLER/EPA</media:credit> <media:description>The Sydney Symphony Orchestra</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/9/1410271492219/4ad6779c-e889-46f4-8e94-2a24b5b88463-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e00fc896fcbb8564a4ce8198e2695035"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PAUL MILLER/EPA</media:credit> <media:description>The Sydney Symphony Orchestra</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Fiona MaddocksTim AshleyGeorge HallMartin Kettle, Andrew ClementsKate Molleson</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-09T14:05:10Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Beethoven's Ninth ('Choral')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/09/symphony-guide-beethoven-ninth-choral-tom-service</link> <description><p>Tom Service’s symphony guide concludes with what is arguably the central artwork of Western music, the symphony to end all symphonies</p><p><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/sep/09/50-essential-symphonies-blog-what-have-we-missed-from-our-list">Talk about it: What have we missed from the list? </a><br></p><p><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Beethoven-Symphony-Cambridge-Music-Handbooks/dp/0521399246/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1410159858&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=nicholas+cook+beethoven+9">Nicholas Cook</a> puts it well: “Of all the works in the mainstream repertory of Western music, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPt7eiVCTxk">Ninth Symphony</a> seems the most like a construction of mirrors, reflecting and refracting the values, hopes, and fears of those who seek to understand and explain it … From its first performance [in Vienna in 1824] up to the present day, the Ninth Symphony has inspired diametrically opposed interpretations”. Those interpretations include those earlier listeners and commentators who heard and saw in it evidence that Beethoven had lost it compositionally speaking; that the piece, with its incomprehensible scale, nearly impossible technical demands, and above all its crazily utopian humanist idealism in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChygZLpJDNE">choral setting</a> of <a href="http://lucare.com/immortal/ode.html">Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy</a> in its last movement, amounted to madness. On the other side, Hector Berlioz thought it the “culmination of its author’s genius”.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHDXdbSWu0E">The Ninth Symphony</a> is arguably the single piece that inspired the methodology of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Musical-Analysis-Nicholas-Cook/dp/0198165080">musical analysis</a>, a discipline of forensic musicological close-reading of the score that tried to prove just how unified and coherent a conception this symphony truly is underneath its chaotically diverse surface. It’s been held up as the central work of Western classical music both by those who imagine it as the <em>ne plus ultra</em> of symphonic, technical, and compositional imagination and mastery, and by those who want to say that classical music can embrace the world outside the concert hall as well as within it, and that the piece is a sounding bell of social change, of emotional hope, and even of political reform.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/09/symphony-guide-beethoven-ninth-choral-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/ludwig-van-beethoven">Ludwig van Beethoven</category> <pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 06:00:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/09/symphony-guide-beethoven-ninth-choral-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/8/1410191642442/ce69c5a1-1687-463a-8cf5-c6f5e99bdcc0-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=bb373fc0ae967130da378815482ddb68"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Josef Karl Stieler</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/8/1410191642442/ce69c5a1-1687-463a-8cf5-c6f5e99bdcc0-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=897ceae5a36952ef7b24e19743a0cdef"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Josef Karl Stieler</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-09T06:00:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Dvořák's 9th 'From the New World'</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/02/symphony-guide-dvorak-9th-new-world-symphony-tom-service</link> <description><p>Dvořák’s final symphony, with its famous Largo, is one of classical music’s best loved works. <strong>Tom Service</strong> separates its facts from its fictions</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCa4Hjzy7B4">Dvorak’s New World Symphony</a>: as legend has it, the sound of a music that heralded a new dawn for American music, the product of the <a href="http://www.antonin-dvorak.cz/en/new-york">then-New-York-based composer’s own statement</a> “in the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music”.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wepiak4q8Tk">This E Minor Symphony </a>was the first that Dvořák completed in his two-and-a-half year stay in the US. He was brought over by a wealthy patron of the arts to set up a music conservatory, the forerunner of today’s Juilliard School. And the fact that Dvořák was influenced by the spirituals and songs that he heard from one of his most important pupils, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Burleigh">Harry T. Burleigh</a>, is not in doubt. But apart from a strong allusion to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUvBGZnL9rE">Swing Low, Sweet Chariot</a> in the second main melody of the first movement (<a href="http://youtu.be/DCa4Hjzy7B4?t=4m7s">compare them</a> yourself!), it’s astonishing that Dvořák’s own clear statement to the New York Herald at the time of the symphony’s premiere – at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic on 16 December 1893 – was not properly attended to. “It is merely the spirit of Negro and Indian melodies which I have tried to reproduce in my new symphony. I have not actually used any of the melodies”. Later, in 1900, he said in a letter: “leave out that nonsense about my using Indian and American motifs – it is a lie!” and again, “It was my intention only to write in the spirit of these national American melodies”. That “lie” went so far as imagining that the soulful cor anglais melody in the slow movement (which may have associations of different kind of folk spirit for anyone of my vintage, of a kid on a bicycle struggling up a cobbled street with batch of wholemeal loaves in a prelapsarian vision of the country-bumpkin-far-west – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE">that Hovis ad</a>, basically!) was itself an authentic “American melody”: in fact, the words of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9smSP1dq-A">“Goin’ Home”</a> were added to the tune years later by another of Dvořák’s pupils.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/02/symphony-guide-dvorak-9th-new-world-symphony-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:57:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/sep/02/symphony-guide-dvorak-9th-new-world-symphony-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/2/1409655640078/07b2fd34-3cd1-47eb-8607-68a3a6adecb8-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c39be4a08d805991015dbdcbda1f070f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/2/1409655640078/07b2fd34-3cd1-47eb-8607-68a3a6adecb8-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=461b2b8f6c85b3f32157c3b1a5bae537"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-09-02T11:57:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Tchaikovsky's Sixth ('Pathetique')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/26/symphony-guide-tchaikovsky-sixth-pathetique-tom-service</link> <description><p>Forget, first of all, its mis-translated moniker. Tchaikovsky’s final symphony might be about death, but it’s the piece he termed ‘the best thing I have composed’ and is a confident and supremely energetic work</p><p>Let’s get this clear: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcJzjB8bwqE">Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony</a> is not a musical suicide note, it’s not a piece written by a composer who was dying, it’s not the product of a musician who was terminally depressed about either his compositional powers or his personal life, and it’s not the work of a man who could go no further, musically speaking. It shouldn’t even be called the Pathétique, strictly speaking, with its associations of a particularly aestheticised kind of melancholy. Tchaikovsky himself, having supposedly approved his brother’s Russian word Патетическая (“Patetitčeskaja”) for the work (a better translation of which is “passionate” in English), and having decided against calling the piece “A Programme Symphony”, sent his publisher the instructions that it was simply his Sixth Symphony in B Minor, dedicated to his nephew Bob Davydov. That’s how the piece appeared when Tchaikovsky himself conducted the premiere in St Petersburg on 28 October 1893. It was only in its first posthumous performance, three weeks later, that it was called the “Pathétique”, a moniker that has stuck ever since.</p><p>Instead, the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRvrDWzJpew">Sixth Symphony</a> is a vindication of Tchaikovsky’s powers as a composer. It is the piece that he described many times in letters as “the best thing I ever composed or shall compose”, a work whose existence proved to him that he had found a way out of a symphonic impasse, which represented a return to the heights of his achievement as a composer – away from what he thought of as the numbing, written-by-numbers populism of his ballet The Nutcracker or the trivial “pancakes” of the piano pieces he was also writing in 1893 – and brought a deep, personal satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in years. Having recently sent the score of the Sixth Symphony to his publisher, his brother remembered “I had not seen him so bright for a long time past”.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/26/symphony-guide-tchaikovsky-sixth-pathetique-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2014 06:00:11 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/26/symphony-guide-tchaikovsky-sixth-pathetique-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/25/1408959683549/206fcf03-cebf-4b11-92ea-6bd1a51fd47d-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=ead3fe2781d17038f4487a523e86ae4f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Portrait of Tchaikovsky Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) standing by a piano looking at a score. Photograph: Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/25/1408959683549/206fcf03-cebf-4b11-92ea-6bd1a51fd47d-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=83124ed09415f463691c9482f9592e36"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Portrait of Tchaikovsky Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) standing by a piano looking at a score. Photograph: Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-26T06:00:11Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/19/symphony-guide-hector-berliozs-symphonie-fantastique</link> <description><p>The most innovative symphony of the 19th century was born from diabolical passions<br></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/19/symphony-guide-hector-berliozs-symphonie-fantastique">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/hector-berlioz">Hector Berlioz</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2014 06:00:09 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/19/symphony-guide-hector-berliozs-symphonie-fantastique</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/18/1408376636307/35d8397a-f083-4914-9b5b-894198f23977-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=c3038c6fd8d9c6872254cd656fe648b2"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty</media:credit> <media:description>Delerious desire … Berlioz's passion for Irish actor Harriet Smithson was the inspiration for the Symphonie Fantastique Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/18/1408376636307/35d8397a-f083-4914-9b5b-894198f23977-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e414558cc76c83dd1d1ebc10bf07b01f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty</media:credit> <media:description>Delerious desire … Berlioz's passion for Irish actor Harriet Smithson was the inspiration for the Symphonie Fantastique Photograph: Universal Images Group/Getty</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-19T06:00:09Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony</link> <description><p>The word “pastoral” disguises the true intentions of Vaughan Williams’s third symphony, which confronted the horrors of the first world war</p><p>“It’s really wartime music – a great deal of it incubated when I used to go up night after night in the ambulance wagon at Ecoivres and we went up a steep hill and there was wonderful Corot-like landscape in the sunset. It’s not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted.”</p><p><a href="http://www.rvwsociety.com/images2012/bio_pics/army.jpg">Ralph Vaughan Williams</a> was talking about one of his most controversial and misunderstood pieces, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vD-yJ66Qses">A Pastoral Symphony</a>, his third, which he completed in 1922. It’s easy to see where the confusion comes from: here is that master of nostalgic evocation calling a piece “pastoral”, immediately asking audiences to hear it – you’d have thought – as the acme of all things quaintly, gently rustic, the sound of an imagined idyll of English landscape turned into sound.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/world/firstworldwar">First world war</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/ralph-vaughan-williams">Ralph Vaughan Williams</category> <pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2014 14:40:09 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/11/symphony-guide-vaughan-williams-pastoral-symphony</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/11/1407752246149/183f6594-d57d-439a-8f89-e153641688cd-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=84b8119405c24a74583acbc595abdec2"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Ralph Vaughan Williams … Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/11/1407752246149/183f6594-d57d-439a-8f89-e153641688cd-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=727705d54ead37cd550bfb1194b34657"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Ralph Vaughan Williams … Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-11T14:40:09Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Beethoven's Third ('Eroica')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/05/symphony-guide-beethovens-third-eroica-tom-service</link> <description><p>The story of the dedication of Beethoven’s Third is the stuff of symphonic legend. Whatever the truth, the victory at the end of the piece doesn’t just stand for Napoleon, or Beethoven, but for the possibilities of the symphony itself</p><p>Imagine if events hadn’t intervened, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNBBIzi-eKA">Third Symphony</a> had been called the “Bonaparte”. Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that would have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist ideals and its all-too-human historical realisation. Yet that is what Beethoven wanted the piece we know now as the Eroica symphony to be: this piece, during its composition and at its completion in 1804, and even when he was negotiating its publication, was a piece for and about <a href="http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/bonapartenapoleon/a/bionapoleon.htm">Napoleon</a>. Beethoven designed the piece as a memorial to the heroic achievements of a ruler who he hoped would go on to inspire Europe to a humanist, libertarian, egalitarian revolution. That’s why the piece, you could say, describes Napoleon’s heroic struggles (the huge <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-uEjxxYtHo">first movement</a>), then narrates the sorrow of his death in grand public style (the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l_bPmJifV4">funeral march</a> slow movement), and, with the open-air energy and teeming imagination of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0eWcb1_uGM">scherzo</a> and<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1xqShTQCc"> finale</a>, demonstrates how his legacy and spirit were to have lived on in the world.</p><p>Instead, the story of how the piece’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._3_(Beethoven)#mediaviewer/File:Eroica_Beethoven_title.jpg">original dedication to Bonaparte</a> was defaced by Beethoven is the stuff of symphonic legend, based on Ferdinand Ries’s memory of what happened when he told the composer that <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Jacques-Louis_David,_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_edit.jpg">Napoleon had styled himself Emperor in May 1804</a>. With that Napoleon became, for Beethoven - as Ries reports the composer saying - “a tyrant”, who “will think himself superior to all men”. (In fact, it’s even more complicated than that,<a href="http://www.beethovenseroica.com/Pg2_hist/history.html"> since Beethoven the apparently great revolutionary was also willing to change the symphony’s dedication in order not to jeopardise the fee due from a royal patron</a>.) Yet that scrawling out of Napoleon’s name doesn’t change the specificity of Beethoven’s inspiration in writing this symphony, the longest and largest-scale he had ever been composed, and the profound human, philosophical, and political motivations behind the musical innovations of this jaw-dropping piece.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/05/symphony-guide-beethovens-third-eroica-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2014 06:00:26 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/aug/05/symphony-guide-beethovens-third-eroica-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/4/1407162476183/fd9af9d2-f752-41d0-b82d-b970becb85a0-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6f02e087d5a51b8e6013a628b4d66a67"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>The illustration (1882) of French Empress Josephine and Napoleon I in their coronation robes in 1804. Photograph: Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/8/4/1407162476183/fd9af9d2-f752-41d0-b82d-b970becb85a0-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=6dc416dfeb1240be77f97172a7f39119"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>The illustration (1882) of French Empress Josephine and Napoleon I in their coronation robes in 1804. Photograph: Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-08-05T06:00:26Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Mahler's Ninth</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/29/mahlers-ninth-tom-service-symphony-guide</link> <description><p>It's usual to interpret Mahler's last completed symphony as a prefiguring of his death. But different conductors make the work mean very different things</p><ul><li><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/series/50-greatest-symphonies">More from 50 greatest symphonies</a><br></li></ul><p>Let’s begin at the end. <a href="http://www.johnwesleybarker.com/blog/files/mahlers9th_1.jpg">The final page</a> of the last, cataclysmically slow movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is one of the most famously <a href="http://youtu.be/wWxX-kf-2MI?t=1h18m10s">death-haunted places</a> in orchestral music, a moment in which the music slowly, achingly, bridges the existential gap between sound and silence, presence and absence, life and death. The very last bar is even marked, pianississimo, with a long pause – “ersterbend” (dying), as if its message wasn’t already clear enough.</p><p>As musical ideas that have dominated this movement, the whole symphony, and even other works by Mahler, dissolve into the ether – becoming slower, quieter, emptier, and more stunningly, breathtakingly etiolated and gossamer-thin in sound and substance – it all amounts to convincing evidence to support <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDW1qQYcjto">Leonard Bernstein’s view</a>, shared by many of his conductor colleagues and listeners, too, that this music stands for a whole suite of deaths. There's Mahler’s own, since this is his last completed symphony, after he had witnessed the death of his daughter and when he knew that his life would be cut short by his heart condition. There's the death of tonality, which – in the musical context of 1910, this piece emblematically signals. It even heralds the death throes of the figure of the artist as hero in European culture.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/29/mahlers-ninth-tom-service-symphony-guide">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/gustav-mahler">Gustav Mahler</category> <pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2014 06:00:11 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/29/mahlers-ninth-tom-service-symphony-guide</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/28/1406554322025/d4aa8b75-eaf2-4b0b-8906-d335d43265b3-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=cdc44dec5c093f569364c2e45c1fc7fd"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Gustav Mahler … Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/28/1406554322025/d4aa8b75-eaf2-4b0b-8906-d335d43265b3-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=010080c4daec14411008d3c6ecd519bc"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Gustav Mahler … Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-29T06:00:11Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Beethoven's Sixth ('Pastoral')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/22/symphony-guide-beethovens-sixth-pastoral-tom-service</link> <description><p>Beethoven's Pastoral is no musical cul-de-sac, writes <strong>Tom Service. </strong>It's a radical work, and in its final movement is music more purely spine-tingling and life-enhancingly joyful than almost anywhere else in his output</p><p>This week, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQGm0H9l9I4">Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony</a>, his Sixth. Well, it does what it says on the tin, doesn’t it? A sentimental romp through the Viennese countryside, a programmatic sideline to the central sweep of Beethoven’s development, a gentle counterpart to the fire and brimstone of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv2WJMVPQi8">Fifth Symphony</a> and the bacchanal of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiG31BRHWkA">Seventh</a>.</p><p>But that’s only because history, and music history in particular, likes its battles to be epic, its progress to be heroic, and its most important leaps of imagination to be noisy, radical, and aggressive. It’s as if the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW0y6upEhGk">Fifth Symphony</a> is the “real” Beethoven – Beethoven as all-conquering hero – whereas the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8U_-xGgreY">Pastoral</a> is a sort of musical and biographical cul-de-sac. And whatever its veracity, the image of Beethoven the nature-loving hippy has proved a much less enticing idea for historians to appropriate than Beethoven storming the gates of revolution in a blaze of C major glory, as he does at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHYBoG7hiZk">the end of the Fifth</a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/22/symphony-guide-beethovens-sixth-pastoral-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/ludwig-van-beethoven">Ludwig van Beethoven</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 22 Jul 2014 06:00:01 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/22/symphony-guide-beethovens-sixth-pastoral-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/21/1405978523612/c8bd3e45-5146-4ed1-9950-8478bce844da-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=5f8811606dcbf6e60813e0b391532ebb"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image</media:credit> <media:description>Engraving of Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) after painting by J. C. Stieler. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Time &amp; Life Pictures/Getty Image</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/21/1405978523612/c8bd3e45-5146-4ed1-9950-8478bce844da-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=34fd64eaa99fac7ee7d341e910094a6e"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image</media:credit> <media:description>Engraving of Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) after painting by J. C. Stieler. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Time &amp; Life Pictures/Getty Image</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-22T06:00:01Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Mahler's 6th</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/15/symphony-guide-mahlers-6th-tom-service</link> <description><p>In the first of 10 symphony guides to coincide with performances at this year's Proms, Tom Service looks at the triumphs, tragedies and controversies of Mahler's Sixth Symphony.</p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrhsSYhuoUQ">Mahler’s A-minor Sixth Symphony</a> is a mythical piece. Mahler may or may not have subtitled it “Tragic” at some stage of its composition, and it could, possibly, contain music that consecrates and depicts his wife Alma. It may be “the first nihilist work in the history of music”, as conductor <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKpjJCvWxRg">Wilhelm Furtwängler</a> described it. Conductor and friend of Mahler’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUKpw21ASc">Bruno Walter</a> found the piece too expressively dark for him to conduct, since it “ends in hopelessness and the dark night of the soul”. Most significantly, it’s a work you are always told is dangerously, prophetically autobiographical, above all in its <a href="http://youtu.be/PDYizOtNIYI?t=52m10s">final fourth movement</a>, that half-hour-long hallucinogenic, emotional nightmare-scape. When he revised the piece in 1906, Mahler deleted the third of the movement’s <a href="http://youtu.be/PDYizOtNIYI?t=1h4m44s">hammer-blows</a> – a literal thumping of a gigantic box with a wooden sledge-hammer, as you can see in the <a href="http://youtu.be/PDYizOtNIYI?t=1h4m47s">Vienna Philharmonic's performance</a>! – supposedly because he was trying to avoid a three-fold jinx of fate. His revisions were futile – the next year in 1907, Mahler had to cope with the death of his daughter, the end of his relationship with the Vienna State Opera, and the diagnosis of the fatal heart condition that would kill him four years later.</p><p>Most notoriously of all, this work – we are always told – is the symphony that its composer couldn’t make up his mind in which order to place the movements, whether the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADN2QeeY7Bc">scherzo</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvUego50gVg">slow movement</a> should come second. The piece was initially published in one order, but first performed, with Mahler himself conducting, in another. The result has been confusion and consternation for conductors and for listeners about the meaning, structure, and function of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zvfh_mjPLlQ">the Sixth</a>.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/15/symphony-guide-mahlers-6th-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/proms-2014">Proms 2014</category> <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2014 06:00:13 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/15/symphony-guide-mahlers-6th-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/14/1405342602189/205522e7-1ecc-4357-91e0-cebb96aaf63a-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=89edb9e518d2b75b30145c8779eb7e4f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Gustav Mahler portrayed by Moritz Nahr in foyer of Vienna Court Opera, 1907. Photograph: DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/14/1405342602189/205522e7-1ecc-4357-91e0-cebb96aaf63a-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=e1f41ca220a605e31c33b67b6da5a242"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>Gustav Mahler portrayed by Moritz Nahr in foyer of Vienna Court Opera, 1907. Photograph: DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-15T06:00:13Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Knussen's Third</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jul/08/symphony-guide-oliver-knussen-third-symphony-tom-service</link> <description><p>Knussen's third symphony is only 15 minutes in length but it covers a massive musical and emotional spectrum</p><p>Fantastic, and fantastical abstraction. In a sense, that’s a pretty good definition of what this whole “symphony” idea is all about, but it’s especially apposite for this week’s work, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnol0WRWt6A">Oliver Knussen’s Third Symphony</a>. The piece was completed in 1979 after six years of working, thinking, revising, and refining. Knussen hasn’t added to his symphonic canon these last 35 years, but the principles that this piece embodies - its way of thinking and feeling made into sound, its connections, compressions, and concentrations of musical discourse and music-historical references – are still signature phenomena of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGyg6l7-FHM">Knussen’s music today</a> just as they were then.</p><p>To put the achievement of the Third Symphony in context: at the age of 27, when Knussen completed a version of the piece with which he was satisfied, he was already a vastly experienced composer. In fact, even among history's (in)famous musical prodigies, Knussen’s precocity is outstanding. His First Symphony, written when he was 15, was already a virtuosic essay in serialist aesthetics; his Concerto for Orchestra (now renamed the Symphony in One Movement) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIKhAdj3tb0">Second Symphony</a>, a song-cycle for solo mezzo-soprano – all completed before he was 20 – demonstrate a preternatural musical digestion. Barely out of his teens, Knussen had already come to terms with the legacy of the musical avant-garde, he had confronted and confounded the behemoth of symphonic tradition, and found his own expressive and poetic language in an unerringly dazzling deployment of large orchestral forces, and fused it together in music of astonishing richness and communicative power.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jul/08/symphony-guide-oliver-knussen-third-symphony-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 08 Jul 2014 06:00:08 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/jul/08/symphony-guide-oliver-knussen-third-symphony-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/7/1404741431453/2a25d4e3-9f2d-4d1e-afc0-38a2fd42dd72-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=0ec5c62dd03ca7e27c756328bba40f5d"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian</media:credit> <media:description>Oliver Knussen conducts the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in rehearsal at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham. Photograph: David Sillitoe</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/7/7/1404741431453/2a25d4e3-9f2d-4d1e-afc0-38a2fd42dd72-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=df80c06aff1e7e20ce5bed4bb90ef0ae"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian</media:credit> <media:description>Oliver Knussen conducts the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group in rehearsal at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham. Photograph: David Sillitoe</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-08T06:00:08Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Liszt's Faust Symphony</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/01/symphony-guide-liszt-faust-symphony-tom-service</link> <description><p>Liszt's Faust Symphony blows the bogus symphonic vs programme music debate out of the water</p><p>A notional “symphonic principle” has implicitly underscored much of the discussion of the pieces in this series thus far. The idea of symphonic “integrity” (another word that needs to be in quotation marks!) is often contrasted in music-historical writing with its orchestral antipode in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, “programme music” - music that sets out to tell an “extra-musical” narrative, such as attempting to describe a work from literature, or a natural phenomenon, or a painterly image in sound; as if the former were the one true faith of music history, and the latter were a somehow less “pure” (quotation marks again, sorry) form of music.</p><p>Now, I hope I’ve demonstrate that those boundaries are much more fluid than that simple-minded distinction suggests, and that symphonies that are supposed bulwarks of “purity” or “integrity” are as porous to meanings, interpretations, and story-telling – often more so! – than orchestral pieces that really do set out to tell a story, whether a pre-existing one, such as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INceRhl05mo">Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony,</a> or a new narrative, say <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANmiGCLWA_w">Strauss’s Sinfonia Domestica</a>. And more than that, I hope this series, above anything else it might do, has demonstrated how the “symphonic principle” is always about telling stories and doing cultural work; and that any symphony – even the most apparently abstract – is never, ever, about just pushing notes around a piece of paper in a hermetically sealed cultural vacuum, but is an active engagement with the world of the composer who wrote it, the time and place it was written in, the way it’s been received, and the range of its interpretations.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/01/symphony-guide-liszt-faust-symphony-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 06:00:14 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jul/01/symphony-guide-liszt-faust-symphony-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/30/1404130052278/357a2f27-4253-44d2-a386-7827ab608b47-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=718262b7f01a0f44fe64431ee901fb9d"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>portrait of Franz Liszt Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/30/1404130052278/357a2f27-4253-44d2-a386-7827ab608b47-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a873af5190cfbb7c562844de7fc9e8b5"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>portrait of Franz Liszt Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-07-01T06:00:14Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Louise Farrenc's Third</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/24/symphony-guide-louise-farrenc-third-symphony-tom-service</link> <description><p>Farrenc’s symphony is as impressively energetic and structurally satisfying as any of Mendelssohn’s or Schumann’s symphonies – so does that make it “male” or “female”? Who cares? Enjoy getting to know this shamefully neglected work, writes <b>Tom Service</b></p><p>This ain’t no special pleading.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZeYHeXnNdo"> Louise Farrenc's Third Symphony</a> is the only one by a woman in this series, by a composer active in the mid-19<sup>th</sup> century, who contributed three remarkable symphonies to the canon of French instrumental music, who was admired in her lifetime by Schumann and Berlioz, who was at the centre of Parisian musical life as a teacher, composer and scholar, but whose posthumous reputation has hardly done her or her music the justice it deserves.</p><p>But there is something special about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Farrenc">Farrenc </a>and her music, and especially this G minor symphony, written in 1847. Before I take the piece on its own terms, it’s important to understand something of the context of Farrenc's life, to appreciate why she faced particularly severe battles in getting her music to public performance in the first place; conflicts that are not exclusively to do with the inherent gender inequalities in musical life in patrician Paris. (Although those were a huge issue: it was only after she had been Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire for seven years that she finally received the same pay as her male colleagues. She went on to hold the post for 30 years, becoming one of the most successful and sought-after piano pedagogues of her time, and the only female professor at the Conservatoire in the entire century.) There were systemic problems in French musical life that made it pretty well impossible for symphonic music to flourish. In the absence of orchestras for hire, composers had to either put together pick-up bands at their own expense, or otherwise hope that their work was picked for performance by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, where her G minor symphony was at last played in 1849.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/24/symphony-guide-louise-farrenc-third-symphony-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jun 2014 06:00:07 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/24/symphony-guide-louise-farrenc-third-symphony-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/23/1403560704683/17ffa20b-7204-445b-94cb-30f0bc0001cb-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=d859eaca372d20edc6d1a94b05389d86"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Guardian/Bibliothèque nationale de France</media:credit> <media:description>Louise Farrenc, composer. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/23/1403560704683/17ffa20b-7204-445b-94cb-30f0bc0001cb-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=b6afabc96a0b8e22eacb1a4333fbf1f9"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France/Guardian/Bibliothèque nationale de France</media:credit> <media:description>Louise Farrenc, composer. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-06-24T06:00:07Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Schubert's Ninth ('the Great')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/17/symphony-guide-schubert-ninth-the-great-tom-service</link> <description><p>Schubert's ninth symphony quotes Beethoven's own ninth. An homage - ironic or not - or his own statement of grand symphonic intent? Tom Service unpicks Schubert's great, and final, symphony <br></p><p>Here’s the thing about Schubert. Far from the <a href="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2012/3/29/1333039185204/Portrait-of-Schubert-in-V-008.jpg">chubby little mushroom </a>(“Schwammerl” was his mates’ nickname for him) that history has largely turned him into, Schubert was a person of huge creative ambition, who knew what was at stake for him in early 1820s Vienna. With a looming sense of his own mortality, especially after his devastating bout of syphilis in 1822 (an experience that may have been the catalyst for the other of his symphonies in this series, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jan/14/symphony-guide-schubert-unfinished-tom-service">the Unfinished</a>), Schubert’s feeling of the necessity of doing the things he had to as a composer, and doing them right now, was one of the driving forces of his virtually ceaseless creativity all the way up to his death, at the age of 31 in 1728. <br></p><p>And that meant, for Schubert, coming to terms with the achievement of the most famous composer in the world, a neighbour of his in his home city, Ludwig van Beethoven. In a few short years, Schubert (27 years younger than Beethoven) had to pay homage to Beethoven’s gigantic influence, but also – crucially – he had to have the courage to realise that what he could do as a composer was radically different from what Beethoven could, and then have the gumption to go ahead and do it.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/17/symphony-guide-schubert-ninth-the-great-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:00:02 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/17/symphony-guide-schubert-ninth-the-great-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/16/1402958015557/ad7c9df2-5bfa-4f63-9696-8a6b350d4e69-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=9b302f0f3327388bc29756a2a9ee6fd8"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>'Courage and gumption...' an engraving (circa 1820 of Franz Schubert. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/16/1402958015557/ad7c9df2-5bfa-4f63-9696-8a6b350d4e69-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=070c810bbd16665dbf0016040a3107c1"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>'Courage and gumption...' an engraving (circa 1820 of Franz Schubert. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-06-17T06:00:02Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Lutosławski's Third</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/10/symphony-guide-lutosawski-third-tom-service</link> <description><p>This most convincing of post-tonal symphonies, can we hear Lutosławski's work as a protest piece? One thing is certain: the more you enter its symphonic labyrinth, the more you’ll discover.</p><p>Polish composer <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2013/jan/15/contemporary-music-guide-witold-lutoslawski">Witold Lutosławski</a> may well not have approved of my attempt to talk about his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0aJHZ7LBMc">Third Symphony</a>, one of the few postwar pieces that managed to invent a discourse that’s at once a rejection of symphonic conventions yet is also a bracing renewal of the idea of “the symphony”. Premiered in 1983 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and George Solti, it's music that’s definitively “symphonic” even if it doesn’t sound like many – or any – previous works in the genre.<br></p><p>My nervousness is because Lutosławski (who died in 1994) always resisted attempts to connect his life’s work with the circumstances of is creation, either in terms of his personal life or the broader context of the precipitous Polish politics through which he lived. But his Third Symphony was composed and premiered at a time when Lutosławski’s involvement in Polish public life had been suspended, when he was growing more sympathetic to and supportive of the Solidarity movement. Having been Poland's most feted and most powerful figurehead as composer, conductor and creative, Lutosławski left the public stage in Poland when martial law was declared in the country in December 1981, the same period in which the Third Symphony was being written and prepared for its premiere; after which, Lutosławski accepted an award from Solidarity’s Committee for Independent Culture later in 1983.</p><p>“The work consists of two movements, preceded by a short introduction and followed by an epilogue and a coda. It is played without a break. The first movement comprises three episodes, of which the first is the fastest, the second slower and the third is the slowest. The basic tempo remains the same and the differences of speed are realised by the lengthening of the rhythmical units. Each episode is followed by a short, slow intermezzo. It is based on a group of toccata-like themes contrasting with a rather singing one: a series of differentiated tuttis leads to a climax of the whole work. Then comes the last movement, based on a slow singing theme and a sequence of short dramatic recitatives played by the string group. A short and very fast coda ends the piece.”</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/10/symphony-guide-lutosawski-third-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 06:00:22 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/10/symphony-guide-lutosawski-third-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/9/1402317660227/2949b1c7-3274-4d9c-a4fd-e9afb6cb53e4-620x372.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=69d16bf10bb6866464e8ed6e7edf369f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: REX</media:credit> <media:description>'Unique musical grammar': Witold Lutoslawski. Photograph: REX</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/6/9/1402317660227/2949b1c7-3274-4d9c-a4fd-e9afb6cb53e4-620x372.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=3f4a4d179ac7912717c078d439cf4bc0"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: REX</media:credit> <media:description>'Unique musical grammar': Witold Lutoslawski. Photograph: REX</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-06-10T06:00:22Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Bruckner's 6th</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/03/symphony-guide-bruckners-6th</link> <description><p>Bruckner's "saucy" sixth is the symphony that disproves those lazy received opinions about his music</p><p>“He wrote the same symphony nine times.” "His one-dimensional orchestration is all thanks to his training as an organist.” They're "cathedrals of sound.” "They sound like Schenkerian middlegrounds” … and other such clichés. (Full marks if you got the last one, by the way, but I promise that’s what some musical analysts, especially those disciples of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schenker">Heinrich Schenker</a>, think of the symphonies. What it means in essence is that Bruckner’s symphonies move like great undigested wodges of harmony rather than being fully finished in proper compositional finery: it’s saying they’re great symphonic lumps, basically, calling to mind Brahms’s hoary old gag that Bruckner’s symphonies sound like “symphonic boa-constrictors”.</p><p>So this week, a Bruckner symphony – <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgggUyaeZVI">the sixth</a> - that disproves these lazy received opinions about his music (he wrote 11 symphonies, in any case, not nine: check out numbers <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YzKeVYhMxI">“0”</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNlbYSgzDkQ">“00”</a> – seriously, the “Doppelnullte” or Study Symphony in F Minor !), and which proves, I think, that his symphonic concerns weren’t always - and I don’t think they ever were – about constructing neo-medieval sonic edifices of mystical contemplation, but rather about connecting the earth with the cosmos, the human with the spiritual, the saucy with the sublime. Saucy? Well, yes, that’s one translation of how Bruckner himself described the Sixth: “Die Sechste ist die keckste”. And the “sauce” of the Sixth Symphony is its dynamism, its astonishing rhythmic invention and subtlety, and the unique orchestral colours in the Bruckner canon. So instead of focusing on its monumentalism or the largest scale of its macro-tonal adventure, I want instead, by focusing on a handful of moments, to try and show how strange and subtle this symphony is.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/03/symphony-guide-bruckners-6th">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2014 06:00:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/jun/03/symphony-guide-bruckners-6th</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/1/1396353878639/Anton-Bruckner-007.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=5b7a54e0fae02f852880206415d65d95"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>‘A death-obsessed maniac’ … a portrait of Anton Bruckner from 1893. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/4/1/1396353878639/Anton-Bruckner-007.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=2c37a1156ee34222f196b7b1e6df4d69"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:credit> <media:description>‘A death-obsessed maniac’ … a portrait of Anton Bruckner from 1893. Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-06-03T06:00:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Mozart's 41st ('Jupiter')</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/27/symphony-guide-mozart-41st-jupiter-tom-service</link> <description><p>Mozart's 41st symphony - the last he composed - is full of postmodernism, palimpsests, and pure exhilaration<br></p><p>“You’re a little dull/ My dear Pompeo/The ways of the world/Go study them”. The words of the aria, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn4Ww17oXko">“Un bacio di mano”</a> (“A kiss on the hand”), composed as an insert for Pasquale Anfossi’s opera Le gelosie fortunate by Mozart in 1788, to words probably by Lorenzo da Ponte. And what, pray, has that got to do with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5UHKFI25YE">Mozart’s C Major Symphony K551</a>, known since the early 19<sup>th</sup> century as the “Jupiter”? Well, rather a lot, actually: the music that accompanies <a href="http://youtu.be/pn4Ww17oXko?t=22s">those words</a> in the aria also makes a cheeky and unexpected appearance <a href="http://youtu.be/O-tuoUD86YI?t=2m30s">just before the end of the first section</a> of the first movement. This is a self-quotation that’s completely unnecessary according to the tonal and harmonic drama of the symphony so far. Mozart has got himself into the right key, he’s done all the hard work of modulating from C major to G major, and he’s already written one of the most memorable first sections to a symphony that anyone had conceived up to this point, the summer of 1788. So why risk interpolating yet another tune into the concatenation of ideas that he’s already given his listeners, and asked his orchestra to dramatise; and a melody, what’s more, that comes from a different expressive world, the low comedy of <i>opera buffa</i> as opposed to high-minded symphonic discussion? Mozart puts the whole structure of this movement on the line, seemingly for the sake of a compositional joke. It’s a piece of postmodernism avant la lettre, and the kind of thing that Beethoven, for all his iconoclasm, hardly risked in the same way in his symphonies.</p><p>This musical intervention is usually passed over in the way the symphony is performed and heard today. It’s as if this music has become too familiar, so we don’t often hear what I think the Jupiter symphony is really about. For me, this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOy_fTkt-U8">C major symphony</a> is written at the furthest edges of the possible for Mozart, in terms of seeing just how many different expressive and compositional contrasts he can cram into a single symphony. And he’s not doing that for the sake of reconciling these opposites or to create a greater unity (the kind of thing that we like to imagine Mozart was up to, because we prefer to think of him as<a href="http://us.123rf.com/450wm/hakne/hakne1205/hakne120500013/13455364-vienna-austria--march-31-2012-statue-of-wolfgang-amadeus-mozart-in-burggarten-in-vienna-monument-was.jpg"> a romantic idealist </a>rather than an 18<sup>th</sup> century humanist). Rather, I think he’s trying to achieve a complexity of emotional experience and richness of invention that is poised – sometimes on this side, sometimes on the other! – of a musical cliff-edge of coherence. A bit like the mixed metaphors of that sentence; what I mean is that this is a symphony of extremes, something that’s symbolised in the juxtaposition of the martial and the plangent in the two ideas you hear in the symphony’s very first four bars (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK5295yEQMQ">Nikolaus Harnoncourt</a> dramatises that initial collision best of all in his recording.)</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/27/symphony-guide-mozart-41st-jupiter-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2014 06:00:04 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/27/symphony-guide-mozart-41st-jupiter-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/25/1401050268338/209c99b3-3900-49c5-a5d6-f51ab1399142-2060x1236.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=092f17864e0673183b8889d95d28f16d"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PhotoBliss / Alamy/Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Photograph: PhotoBliss/Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/25/1401050268338/209c99b3-3900-49c5-a5d6-f51ab1399142-2060x1236.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=093689742443384f0669e3ab894b42ff"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: PhotoBliss / Alamy/Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Photograph: PhotoBliss/Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-27T06:00:04Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Janáček's Sinfonietta</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/20/symphony-guide-janacek-sinfonietta</link> <description><p>With its military bands, dazzling fanfares, and cinematic jump-cuts, Janáček's Sinfonietta is a unique symphonic proposition, sounding as new now as it did at its premiere in 1926.</p><p>The clue’s in the title, surely: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PScaxSwGa6o">Janáček’s Sinfonietta</a> is precisely that; an orchestral divertissement and an occasional entertainment rather than an actual “symphony”. If you think that a piece that begins and ends with a phalanx of military fanfares, performed by an additional ensemble of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCXRqgXiARA">13 brass players</a> - including nine trumpets – can’t possibly be taken seriously as one of the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s most compelling symphonies, then look away now. But I’m here to make the case for Janâček’s work (one of his final masterpieces, premiered in 1926, two years before his death) as the product of a unique approach to symphonic form, for the 1920s – or indeed for any other time.</p><p>Some background before we get to the music. The Sinfonietta is among the only orchestral pieces – and it’s certainly the best of an admittedly small field – to have been composed for a “gymnastic festival”, a movement called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokol">“Sokol”</a> that celebrated youth, sport and independent nationhood. That self-confident nationalism, of which Janâček was a lifelong proponent, is symbolised by the work’s dedication, to the “Czechoslovak Armed Forces”, and with music that he said embodied the ideals of “contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory”. It might seem an uncomfortably bellicose sentiment today, but that spirit of earthy independence is a crucial part of the musical fabric of the Sinfonietta, not least in those fanfares that open the work and crown its five-movement progress <a href="http://youtu.be/PScaxSwGa6o?t=21m16s">20 minutes later</a>. This is music that Janâček wanted ideally to be played by a military band like the one he'd heard a few years prior to the composition of Sinfonietta, and whose music he wrote down in the composing notebook he took everywhere with him. If you had to perform the Sinfonietta without a military ensemble, Janâček said (as it almost always is in concert halls these days), make sure the brass players sound as rough, brash, and bright as an army band. (And given what happens when you ask a massed group of trumpeters to <a href="http://laldy.com/">give it laldy</a>, they usually do!...)</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/20/symphony-guide-janacek-sinfonietta">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/leos-janacek">Leoš Janáček</category> <pubDate>Tue, 20 May 2014 06:00:33 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/20/symphony-guide-janacek-sinfonietta</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/19/1400500475850/4574dad2-ba2b-45fe-9d1e-5b91b7f8ce1f-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=33b54897ac8eab12b5103f4bb7570199"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: INTERFOTO / Alamy/Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Leos Janacek, 1854-1928. Photograph: INTERFOTO/Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/19/1400500475850/4574dad2-ba2b-45fe-9d1e-5b91b7f8ce1f-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f20acb1a86320a5ba37d1b5921f4d63f"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: INTERFOTO / Alamy/Alamy</media:credit> <media:description>Leos Janacek, 1854-1928. Photograph: INTERFOTO/Alamy</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-20T06:00:33Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Brahms's Fourth</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/13/symphony-guide-brahms-fourth-tom-service</link> <description><p>This symphony might a reliable and over-familiar staple on concert programmes, but listen to it with fresh ears. It contains some of thedarkest and deepest music in the 19th century<br></p><p>The very first people to hear or see any part of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxB5vkZy7nM">Brahms’s Fourth Symphony</a> in 1885 had some surprisingly heretical things to say about the piece. Brahms and a friend played through the symphony on the piano to a group of his closest confidants, critics and collaborators, but the reaction was one of those devastatingly uncomfortable silences. Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s critical champion, broke the uneasy atmosphere after the first movement with the unforgettable comment, “I feel I’ve just been beaten up by two terribly intelligent people”. As Brahms’s biographer <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Johannes-Brahms-Biography-Jan-Swafford/dp/0333725891/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1399838589&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=jan+swafford+brahms">Jan Swafford</a> reveals, another friend, the writer Max Kalbeck, turned up at Brahms’s apartment the next day to recommend that the composer should not release the piece to the public in its current form. Instead, he suggested, he should keep the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZGWB93-mmI">finale </a>as a stand-alone piece, and replace both the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdazsCz7bZE">slow movement </a>and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlbRPGPUqis">scherzo</a>. Riven by self-doubt, Brahms was unsure that he would allow the piece to have any life beyond its premiere in Meiningen that October. Only the work’s positive reception there, and the gradual, grudging change in his friends’ attitude to the piece at its Viennese premiere, convinced Brahms that the Fourth Symphony could survive.</p><p>That less-than-straightforward gestation seems hard to believe nowadays, when Brahms's Fourth Symphony is trotted out on concert programmes as a sure-fire way to put bums on seats, with its comfortingly familiar melodies and melancholy, its promise of satisfying symphonic coherence, and its apparently easy appeal to musicians, conductors and audiences. But I think those early commentators were on to something – not in terms of the work’s failure to live up to the promise of its three symphonic predecessors, but in the sense of the uncompromising intellectual complexity and refinement of this music, and its expressive implacability and even tragedy. You hear that above all in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9iXypvP_k">final movement</a>, the passacaglia, which ends with one of the bleakest minor-key cadences in symphonic music.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/13/symphony-guide-brahms-fourth-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 06:00:08 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/13/symphony-guide-brahms-fourth-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/13/1399958955147/c55b62c5-6351-4173-a313-9169f5b178a8-1020x612.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=290b6eb1abb00fd7163988a7136a7efd"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) seated in his study, with his work desk at the right. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/13/1399958955147/c55b62c5-6351-4173-a313-9169f5b178a8-1020x612.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=866557db3d49a83ba435899739bcaeb9"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) seated in his study, with his work desk at the right. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-13T06:00:08Z</dc:date> </item> <item> <title>Symphony guide: Mozart's 29th</title> <link>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/06/symphony-guide-mozart-29th-tom-service</link> <description><p>The 18-year-old composer's 29th symphony in A major might not have changed musical history, but it changed <b>Tom Service</b>'s life.<br></p><p>There are many specifically musical reasons why this apparently unselfconscious piece ought to be part of this series on its own terms, but my reason for including <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=252rUDLTkMs">Mozart’s A Major Symphony, K201</a> in the series is a simple one. This was the first piece of music that I ever heard in an orchestral concert, and it was an experience that had the immediacy of an epiphany, a revelation of a new world of feeling and being. Not that I thought any of that consciously when I heard it played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox, in the early 1980s; but this music symbolises, for me, the potential power of the musical experience and the start of a never-ending journey of discovery.</p><p>This symphony might have changed my own musical history, but I'm not going to argue that it changed musical history from the moment it was first written, in Salzburg in early 1774 by the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juMDUtIWnto">18-year-old Mozart</a>. It’s music that crystallises the young man’s emerging compositional self-confidence, and that shows him spreading his wings in symphonic music just as he had already started to do in the opera house and in his chamber music. It’s a work that sums up everything he had heard and learnt about symphonic form up to this point in his life (the influence of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/apr/14/johann-christian-bach-g-minor-symphony-op-6-no-6">JC Bach</a> was still crucial for him, whose music he had first heard as a child in London) but which is much more than the sum of those influences, and is something that only Mozart could have written. For <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GlYCO5TI7o">not-quite-but-almost</a> the first time, this is Mozart’s individual symphonic voice that you hear loudly and clearly.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/06/symphony-guide-mozart-29th-tom-service">Continue reading...</a></description> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/classical-music-and-opera">Classical music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/music/music">Music</category> <category domain="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/culture">Culture</category> <pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2014 07:46:30 GMT</pubDate> <guid>https://www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2014/may/06/symphony-guide-mozart-29th-tom-service</guid> <media:content width="140" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/5/1399308524115/6d420d1d-4096-4827-956c-e180823d9e82-620x372.jpeg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=89e3c53f21e4c8a4c5d7d33a199b0115"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis</media:description> </media:content> <media:content width="460" url="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/5/5/1399308524115/6d420d1d-4096-4827-956c-e180823d9e82-620x372.jpeg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=4d62c7213ebe61e2f68b36ec3d527e86"> <media:credit scheme="urn:ebu">Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS</media:credit> <media:description>Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Photograph: Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis</media:description> </media:content> <dc:creator>Tom Service</dc:creator> <dc:date>2014-05-06T07:46:30Z</dc:date> </item> </channel></rss> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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