Inextinguishable Masterpieces at the Pacific Symphony

REVIEW

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Costa Mesa
DAVID J BROWN

Rune Bergmann.

Overture/concerto/symphony: the time-honored concert formula, and why not, so long as the actual selection isn’t chosen simply as an audience-safe and hackneyed set? For its second program in the Pacific Symphony’s celebratory 40th anniversary season, the young Norwegian Rune Bergmann as guest conductor opted for that classic line-up, with an overture and a concerto that might reasonably be called audience-safe but adding a relatively unfamiliar symphony that, for this listener at least, was one of the anticipated highlights of the whole season. 

Maestro Bergmann’s opener was very familiar, Mozart’s overture to Don Giovanni K. 527, somewhat underplaying, to my ears, the initial dramatic D minor plunge of the opening, and then proceeding to a very crisply articulated account of the D major Allegro that forms the overture’s main body. Overall, it seemed to me efficient and well-played, but rather glib in effect. 

Don Giovanni and the Stone
Guest, by Fragonard.

As part of a spoken introduction to the program, Bergmann noted that in the overture he had the strings play with minimal vibrato, embracing one aspect of historically informed performance (HIP) practice. Why then, I wondered, did he not also divide his first and second violins left and right—as almost always happens with “period” performances—so as to make the most of the antiphonal effects between the two groups that Mozart builds into his score? 

He did, however, reduce the string forces from the PSO’s full strength by a couple of desks in each section, as is commonly done nowadays in performances of orchestral works from the Classical period, whether on period or modern instruments. What was not usual was that he left this smaller number of strings unchanged for the concerto filler in the time-honored sandwich, and one that is often treated as a full-bore romantic blockbuster, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major Op. 35. Philippe Quint was the soloist. 

Philippe Quint.

For some, the relative absence of heart-on-sleeve romantic rhetoric may have made this performance seem a bit low-calorie, but the gain was in delicacy and precision, from the properly piano and carefully judged Allegro moderato lead-off by first violins, into Mr. Quint’s assumption of the solo role, as sweet-toned and poetic as you could wish for, and carefully observant of the text and spirit of Tchaikovsky’s score throughout.

In his pre-concert interview by host Alan Chapman, he had emphasized the danger of learning this concerto from the performances of great past interpreters, in his case from those by Oistrakh and Heifetz; you had to find your own voice—and this Mr. Quint undoubtedly had. 

Tchaikovsky, at the time
of the Violin Concerto's
composition.

The performance was as much the conductor’s success as the soloist’s, with Tchaikovsky’s many detailed adjustments to orchestral tempi meticulously observed—and to leave it at that would be unfair to the orchestra, both individually and collectively. For example, the principal flute’s solo reintroduction of the main theme immediately after the first movement cadenza was an object-lesson in accenting and phrasing, while the woodwind interplay around the solo line in the Canzonetta second movement would surely have made the composer beam with pleasure (indeed, the woodwind covered themselves with glory throughout).

As for the orchestral tutti, the reduced string forces enabled the Allegro vivacissimo at the start of the finale to be brilliantly alive and joyful rather than engender the sudden barnstorming effect it sometimes has, and the whole movement thereafter remained airborne (and I think without any of the cuts that are sometimes made). Unsurprisingly, the performance was received enthusiastically, and the audience was rewarded with an encore—Piazzolla’s Oblivion, in a super-cool arrangement for violin with orchestra. 

Carl Nielsen in his garden at Vodroffsvej, Copenhagen
 in 1914, the year he began The Inextinguishable.

It will be a long time, if ever, before a program that ends with a Nielsen symphony can be described as audience-safe and hackneyed and, sadly, on this occasion there were more empty seats than I’d previously seen for any concert on a PSO Thursday opening-night. Presumably the prospect of the Tchaikovsky concerto was insufficiently enticing to some of those for whom Nielsen remains an unknown quantity. 

Outside of his native Denmark, as well as Germany and Sweden, Nielsen’s music has perhaps reached its greatest familiarity in Britain (despite some pioneering American recordings by Bernstein and others in the 1960s, and Herbert Blomstedt’s championship of Nielsen during his tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1985-1995). Indeed as far back as 1952, the English composer and scholar Robert Simpson wrote the first non-Danish, book-length study of Nielsen’s music, Carl Nielsen, Symphonist. 

Robert Simpson
(1921-1997).

In his definitive 1979 revision of the book, the rigorous and prescriptive Simpson included in his chapter on the Symphony No. 4 Op. 29 FS 76 Det Uudslukkelige (The Inextinguishable) more than a page detailing interpretative pitfalls, mostly concerning tempo relationships, in the work. As ever, I may have been to some extent seduced by the sheer power and beauty of the PSO's playing in the Segerstrom Hall’s glorious acoustic, but I noticed few such stumbles in what for me was a well-prepared and convincing interpretation by Maestro Bergmann and the orchestra of Nielsen’s most frequently (or least infrequently) performed symphony. 

True, the initial appearance early in the first movement of what, by the end of the symphony, becomes a mightily triumphant “motto-theme” was played at an expansive tempo that Simpson might have deemed “sentimentally dragged”, but how tender and immaculately in unison were the two clarinets, descending in stately 3rds, to which Nielsen first entrusts this marvelous melody, fixing it firmly in listeners’ minds as profoundly significant in the progress of the work to come. Most importantly, the performance as a whole captured the symphony’s sense of limitless power and dynamic conflict, evoking, as Nielsen stated, “the most primal sources of life and the wellspring of the life-feeling.”

Bergmann’s elasticity of tempi, in tandem with the precision of the playing and the clarity of the sound, exposed detail after arresting detail of Nielsen’s wonderfully imaginative scoring: from the abrupt angry buzz of the violas towards the end of the first of the four linked movements; to the lugubrious half-smile, half-shrug of the clarinets and bassoons as they introduce the main theme of the gentle Poco allegretto second movement; to the sudden intensity of the sforzando on unison violins (now at the PSO’s full strength) as they heralded the return of conflict at the beginning of the third movement; and—in the most celebrated orchestral feature of the work—the antiphonal onslaught of Nielsen’s two pairs of timpani about one-third the way into the headlong Allegro finale. 

The final statement of the “motto-theme”, cascading magnificently across and through the whole orchestra with the inexorability of a melting glacier, felt wholly earned through the many-faceted, sometimes perilous, but always sure-footed existential journey that had been traversed in this account of The Inextinguishable. To judge by the standing ovation, Nielsen gained more than a few audience converts that evening, and I hope that Maestro Bergmann is invited back for a future season, ideally to give us the composer’s (arguably even greater) Fifth Symphony. 

---ooo--- 

Pacific Symphony Orchestra, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Thursday, November 15, 2018, 8 p.m.
Images: Flames: Courtesy Denver Philharmonic; Rune Bergmann: Kristin Hoebermann; Don Giovanni by Fragonard: Wikimedia Commons; Tchaikovsky: Courtesy Russiapedia; Nielsen: Courtesy Odense City Museums; Simpson: Courtesy Discogs.

Mozart and Brahms Violin Sonatas at Rolling Hills

Left: Varty Manouelian; right: Steven Vanhauwaert.

REVIEW

Varty Manouelian and Steven Vanhauwaert, Second Sundays at Two, Rolling Hills United Methodist Church
DAVID J BROWN

The third of this season’s “Second Sundays at Two” recitals brought together a newcomer to and a veteran of the series in a program that might have been short on playing-time at barely 40 minutes (including the encore), but scored strikingly high in terms of sheer polish and insight. RHUMC first-timer, violinist Varty Manouelian, and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert—who has appeared at least a half-dozen times there and will be giving the very next recital as soloist in January—treated us to gems of middle-ish Mozart and latish Brahms.

Listening to the first movement of Mozart’s 1778 Sonata for Pianoforte and Violin No. 18 in G major K. 301 (the original title listing the instruments in that order), I was struck—and far from the first time—by the conviction that sonata design really is one of the greatest of all human artistic creations. Paradoxically, it cannot itself be said to have been “designed” at all, but rather evolved from before 1750 on through the next two-and-a-half centuries in ways that are still being explored, in the process informing much of Western civilization’s finest music. 

Posthumous painting of Mozart by Barbara
Kraft, based on images from his lifetime.

The first movements of Mozart’s sonata and that of Brahms’ Sonata No. 2 in A major for Pianoforte and Violin Op. 100 (yes, that order again), composed 108 years later, together illustrate the flexibility and resourcefulness of this marvelous structural template. Both are, overall, amiable and uncombative in tone: the Mozart begins determinedly forward-moving and aspirational, the Brahms more contemplatively, and they proceed harmonically and melodically quite different from each other. 

But in both movements it is their sonata structure, with its juxtaposition and development of first and second subject groups of different themes in tandem with nudges of harmonic resourcefulness and changes of key, that enables their expressive progress to unfold, and gives them depth, breadth, variety, and contrast. And these are just two out of countless thousands of examples across the history of “classical music” where sonata design has enabled composers to give voice to their deepest thoughts and experience. 

To my ears, the performances of both works by Ms. Manouelian and Mr. Vanhauwaert were beyond criticism, their awareness of and responsiveness to each other’s handling of their respective parts unfailingly acute, and perfectly in service to the way Mozart and Brahms treat the two instruments very much as equal partners. 

In the Mozart they observed the long and complex exposition repeat in the first movement, vital to allowing listeners to get a firm handle on the array of themes to be developed and then recapitulated in the remainder of the movement. And though this sonata has only two movements, with pretty similar initial Allegro con spirito and Allegro markings, the performers’ lilting pace for the finale’s opening 3/8 rondo theme underlined its marked contrast to the first movement, with its sprightly 4/4 first subject, and thus avoided any sense of a slow movement being missing. 

Brahms in 1886 at Lake Thun, Switzerland,
where he composed his Second Violin Sonata.

If anything, their account of the Brahms was even finer, with plenty of rubato before the second subject in the first movement enabling an emphasis on the music’s increased drama here, without compromising the movement’s overall lyrical and beneficent mood.

This sonata does have a slow movement, centrally placed, and the players contrived to conjure not only a raptly ruminative mood in its opening Andante tranquillo section but also ideally spontaneous-seeming transitions to the Vivace that follows and then back to the more sober and reflective Andante with which it concludes.

Though during the finale Brahms makes no major modifications to the Allegro grazioso (quasi Andante) marking with which he heads it, Ms. Manouelian and Mr. Vanhauwaert introduced a certain expressive hesitancy to its opening measures, giving the feel of a slow(ish) introduction to a much more propulsive motion for the remainder of the movement. The fact that it could be convincingly done thus differently from some other performances simply paid tribute to Brahms’ multi-faceted genius and the interpretative insights of these players. 

For encore, they chose a much earlier fragment of Brahms — the brief but punchy third-movement Scherzo that he contributed to the portmanteau “F-A-E Sonata” conceived in 1853 by Schumann as a tribute to the violinist Joseph Joachim, with its Intermezzo second movement and finale both by Schumann himself, and large-scale (sonata form) first movement by Albert Dietrich; not for the first time I wished that some day we could have a live performance of the whole sonata. The audience enthusiastically applauded this little fire-cracker of a movement, as they had the major works that preceded it. 

---ooo--- 

Rolling Hills United Methodist Church, Sunday, November 11 2018, 2.00 p.m.
Images: The performers: Courtesy RHUMC; Mozart: Wikimedia Commons; Brahms: Courtesy Styriarte.

Brazilian Recorders at "The Interludes"

Quinta Essentia: l-r l-r: Gustavo de Francisco,
Pedro Ribeirão, Francielle Paixão, Renata Pereira. 

REVIEW

Quinta Essentia,
“The Interludes”,
First Lutheran Church,
Torrance

David J Brown

The fact that the South Bay has several chamber music series, most of them master-minded by Jim Eninger, means that—like the weather in New England—if whatever is current is not to your taste, then just wait as something different will be along shortly. And usually that something different is really different…

I don’t know about in America, but way back when I was in post-war English primary school the last resort of hopeful music-teachers faced with a class of terminally unmusical kids was to hand out an armful of treble recorders and hope for the best. As one of those kids, it was quite a few years before I realized that those wayward plastic whistles had larger, deeper, and more respectable cousins, but I’d not comprehended quite the sheer range of instrument types and sounds that come under the heading “recorder” until last Saturday’s recital in Classical Crossroads’ “The Interludes” series by the Brazilian group Quinta Essentia.

Daniel Wolff.

After the first couple of items, by the Brazilian contemporary Daniel Wolff (b. 1967) and his countryman from an earlier generation Radamés Gnattali (1906-1988) (yes, he was named after that character in Aida), Gustavo de Francisco as spokesperson for Quinta Essentia explained about the unusual square cross-section of their largest recorders. These were the invention of a mid-20th century German recorder builder named Joachim Paetzold, who modeled his innovatory design on square wooden organ-pipes, with keys so that they could be played over two octaves.

The extraordinarily deep, woody sound of these instruments featured in all nine of the works (all Brazilian) included in the recital, though in the first, Wolff’s Flautata Doce composed in 2013, light cheerful dance rhythms rather than particular timbres dominated the outer parts of its aural landscape, enclosing a cool, slower central section of arching melody on the treble recorder.

Radamés Gnattali.

Unlike those of his older contemporary, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Gnattali’s music and reputation seem not to have traveled much beyond Brazil, and this was my first encounter with his music.

His affinity with dance rhythms was everywhere apparent. The brief Lenda (Legend) from 1936 that followed the Wolff laid in flourishes of brilliant tone-color alongside lugubrious close-packed harmonies and a wayward melodic line on tenor recorder, all over a foundation of basso burblings on the big Paetzold instruments. In his 1930 Seresta (Serenade) No. 1, the samba came specifically to the fore as the work’s subtitle, though the piece also included some surprising dissonances.

Heitor Villa-Lobos.

The three works by Villa-Lobos in the program were all arrangements for recorder ensemble by Senhor de Francisco. First up was the familiar “Ária” that is the first of his 1938 Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5’s two movements. This was an interesting experiment, but not one that I would look forward to hearing again in preference to Villa-Lobos’s original scoring for wordless soprano and an orchestra of ‘cellos.

Even more extensive and bewilderingly wide-ranging in style, scale and scoring than the Bachianas Brasileiras is Villa-Lobos’ earlier series of Choros, ranging from the colossal Choros No. 11 for piano and orchestra, which out-bulks any piano concerto in the repertoire apart from the one by Busoni, down to small single-movement pieces like the Choros No. 4 from 1926, originally scored for three horns and trombone.

Choros No. 4 segues from cool contrapuntal musings to a kind of village dance-band tune, and to my ears worked just as well on recorders as on brass. The same was even more true of A lenda de caboclo (1920), its dreamy, repetitive melody even more hypnotically drowsy as breathed through the recorders than in its original keyboard form.

Radamés Gnattali in later years.

Quinta Essentia played no less than five works by Gnattali, of which the most extensive—indeed the largest piece in the whole recital—was his four-movement Quartet No. 3 (1963). 

Here I felt that the string quartet original might have given more of an insight into this composer’s sound-world than Senhor de Francisco’s transcription, though maybe I should have spent less time trying to envisage on four stringed instruments its progression from staccato playfulness in the first movement, through angular high-flying tango in the second, a wayward solo against insistent triple-time rhythms in the third, and back to airborne staccatos in the finale, and instead simply enjoyed the timbres on offer, from the piercing treble to the extraordinary depths emanating from the contrabass.

I’m not sure whether Gnattali’s short Cantilena from 1939 that immediately preceded the quartet, or his Seresta No. 2 (1932) that closed the recital, were transcriptions or not. Either way however, the recorder quartet conveyed with equal vividness the arid, haunting mood of the first (apparently a lament from the desert area in the north-east of Brazil), and the alternately chirpy and boozy wit of the latter.

This was a fascinating recital, though I confess that by the end of around an hour and a quarter’s continuous music my ears were growing a little tired of undifferentiated recorder tone, however skillfully played; maybe it would have been better to omit one or two of the pieces.

What was not at issue was the disarming charm of Quinta Essentia who clearly as much love their instruments as they are adept at playing them (the "quinta" in their name refers to the four players plus the recorder!). To round everything off came perhaps the most charming touch of all, in which Senhora Pereira called out her three companions in turn by name, while they repeated again and again the inimitable chugging rhythms of the Brazilian folksong transcription that formed their encore. 

---ooo---

“The Interludes”: First Lutheran Church, Torrance, 3.00pm, Saturday, November 17, 2018.
Photos: Quinta Essentia: artists’ website; Daniel Wolff: Musica Brasilis; Gnatalli: Courtesy Marco Antonio Bernardo; Villa-Lobos: Courtesy Virginia Commonwealth University; Gnatalli in later years: Courtesy Opera Musica; Performance: author photo.

Two Knowns and an Unknown Unknown at Long Beach

Roger Wilkie, Eckart Preu, and the Long Beach Symphony play Brahms' Violin Concerto.

REVIEW

Long Beach Symphony at the Terrace Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center
DAVID J BROWN

I wonder if it’s possible to define what differentiates a concerto performance where the soloist is a section principal of the orchestra concerned from one with a “star” soloist who’s flown in specially for the occasion? This thought crossed my mind while listening to Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major Op. 76 in the warmly satisfying account last Saturday by Roger Wilkie, Concertmaster for the past 27 years of the Long Beach Symphony, together with the LBSO under its Music Director, Eckart Preu. 

Roger Wilkie and Eckart Preu discuss Brahms'
Violin Concerto before the concert.

Maestro Preu noted wryly in remarks at the reception after the concert that there are concertmasters who think they can be soloists but actually can’t manage it, and then there are those that can… and no-one listening to Mr. Wilkie’s performance from his very first entry could have been in any doubt that he is among the latter. 

That particular entry, though, might point the answer to my initial question. Many a “star” performance makes a great dramatic business of it—delayed as it is until 90 measures into the first movement after an elaborate exposition of the first and second subject groups—but this was not Mr. Wilkie’s way. Rather, he emerged from the dotted fpp orchestral tutti with which that exposition ends not (like some star virtuosi) as a spectacular point-maker making a sudden interruption, fist-shaking or finger-wagging, but as the natural leader, first amongst equal colleagues, of a long and intricate discourse that unfolds throughout the remainder of the work. 

Brahms (left) and his close friend, the
violinist Joseph Joachim, in 1855,
some 23 years before the composition
of the Violin Concerto.

And thus the performance continued, which is not to say that Mr. Wilkie did not make the most of the great moments for the soloist with which this concerto abounds. The whole passage between his solo reintroduction of the first subject themes until he reached the one second-subject melody that Brahms does not introduce in the opening exposition (and arguably the most beautiful of all) was memorably spacious, unaffected, and pointful, and supported by some truly dolce playing from the strings.

After the cadenza (I think by Joachim, but stand to be corrected), the final part of this long, complex first movement—with its structure as clearly elucidated by Maestro Preu as I’ve heard it—was as tranquillo as Brahms in his marking might have wished for, and the following far briefer Adagio and Allegro giocoso movements were respectively as seamless and ebullient as anyone could want.

Only the clarity and homogeneity of the overall orchestral sound left something to be desired, and that could have been down to the effect on Brahms’ sometimes rather thick orchestration of the Terrace Theater’s acoustic, which could be generously described as generous, or less flatteringly dubbed as “tubby.”

To my ears this was not the case, though, with the big work that filled the concert’s second half, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor Op. 70 B. 141, which Maestro Preu laid out in a masterfully inexorable progress from the ominous Allegro maestoso opening theme in the depths on violas and ‘celli against a rumble on timpani, basses and horns, to the final tumultuous and tragic weight of the finale’s coda, some 39 minutes later.

Antonin Dvořák in 1882, three years before
the composition of the Seventh Symphony.

With the fewest measures and (along with the three-movement Third) shortest duration of any of Dvořák’s symphonies, not to mention being the most economical in its orchestration—no “extra” woodwind or percussion added to the 2222, 4230, timp, strings line-up—the Seventh can fairly be said to punch way above its weight. This was projected at full octane by the LBSO, their woodwind and horns particularly piquant and colorful throughout, and there was no sense of the heft being sucked out of the strings, as had sometimes been the case with the concerto.

Afterwards I had an interesting chat with an esteemed friend and critical colleague who felt that Maestro Preu’s handling of the third, Scherzo, movement lacked something in charm and Bohemian lilt. To me, this was one of those instances of music that is so great that quite small differences in tempo and emphasis simply reveal other facets of its manifold nature. Slow the tempo and turn up the warmth a little, and this movement becomes a smiling interlude in otherwise grimly serious surroundings. Drive it a little harder, as here, and it remains wholly a piece with its companion movements as a stage in Dvořák’s drama. Either way, what a symphony!

Lilian Elkington, from a 1920s
concert program (date unknown).

Thus the two “knowns.” As for the opening “unknown unknown” item in this second concert of the LBSO’s 2018-19 season: herewith Full Disclosure. It was I who way back in the 1970s discovered—as I was invited to discuss with Maestro Preu as part of the pre-concert talk—the original manuscript of the "orchestral poem" Out of the Mist by Lilian Elkington (1900-1969), so I suppose that in a way rather disqualifies me from but also uniquely qualifies me for writing about their performance of the piece!

Rather than repeat here the history of Out of the Mist, its composer, and its rediscovery, I’ll just refer to the article I wrote some 10 years ago in Signature, the Journal of the Maud Powell Society. which can be downloaded here. At that time the work had received only five performances in its 87-year history, the most recent being the fully professional studio recording in 2006 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Lloyd-Jones that is still available on the UK’s Dutton record label.

H.M.S. Verdun, which carried
the casket containing the
body of the Unknown Warrior to
Dover on November 10, 1920.

Since then, it will have received six more performances by the end of this year, all but one in 2018 alone and unsurprisingly so, given its subject-matter of the return of Britain’s Unknown Warrior by the destroyer H.M.S. Verdun, accompanied by a flotilla of battleships, up the foggy English Channel from the World War 1 battlefields (the moving history of this event can be found on Wikipedia). (That other pre-2018, post-2008 performance, given live at London's Cadogan Hall on 11 November 2010 by the Orion Symphony Orchestra under Toby Purser, has just reappeared on CD on the Lyrita label.)

The tomb of Britain’s Unknown Warrior
in Westminster Abbey, London.

It’s equally unsurprising that a highly talented young composer should have sought to immortalize this in music but, as the spacious and eloquent performance by Maestro Preu and his fine orchestra again showed, what is surprising is that in her first and only orchestral work she did it with such masterful economy. There’s not a redundant note in Out of the Mist’s scant 71 measures, from the halting, upward-reaching pianissimo on solo 'cello (played in this performance by LBSO Principal Cécilia Tsan more eloquently than I’ve ever heard it before) against ppp divided lower strings, harp arpeggio, timpani and horns, to the seismic fff conclusion.

Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946) was not only a notable
musical educator but also a gifted and prolific composer.
He gave the first British performance and was dedicatee
of Sibelius’s Third Symphony, which Eckart Preu
and the LBSO will perform on March 9, 2019.

Elkington originally marked this conclusion Largamente Appassionato, but on the manuscript Appassionato is crossed out and Trionfale substituted in a different hand—that of her composition teacher, Sir Granville Bantock, who was principal of the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music, where she studied.

Her manuscript bears other expression marks by Bantock; whether these were added during her tuition or at the time of the first performance, conducted by him with the Institute orchestra in June 1921, we shall never know.

In the otherwise model program note for the LBSO concert, the only error was the statement that her daughter “hadn’t known her mother had been a composer.” What is true is that Mrs. Mary Williams thought that all of her mother’s music had been destroyed, as she made clear in a letter of July 1984, when the material I discovered was included in an exhibition at the Barbican Music Library, London, of music by British composers associated with World War 1 which received some publicity in a local newspaper that she chanced to see.

The only other extant photo of Lilian Elkington
(date unknown).

Mrs. Williams also clarified in that letter that the four works I discovered were the only ones by her mother that she had known of, and so it’s as certain as can be that Lilian Elkington’s oeuvre remains one of the tiniest in all of music.

Apart from Out of the Mist (to be performed next on 9 December 2018 by the Beethoven Orchester under Dirk Kaftan in Bonn University Auditorium), there is a song entitled Little Hands, dated 1928, to a (very sentimental) text by one S. J. J. Wise, and rather more substantially, a Romance and a Rhapsodie, both for violin and piano, and undated. None of these three has been performed… 

---ooo---

Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, Terrace Theater, Saturday, November 10, 2018, 8 p.m.
Photos: Roger Wilkie and Eckart Preu: Caught in the Moment; Brahms and Joachim: Conservatory Culture; Dvořák: Wikimedia Commons; Lilian Elkington: author collection, from the composer’s family; Tomb of the Unknown Warrior: Wikimedia Commons; HMS Verdun: Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia Commons; Bantock: Wikimedia Commons.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony: A Journey in Graphics

A wonderful line-drawing journey of Beethoven's 5th Symphony: fun, respectful of the composer's vision. A marvelous way to visualize what happens within the music itself. Click here.

Thanks to Jenine Bsharah Baines for finding this one.