PARTITIONS GRATUITES : 2 PIANOS 4 MAINS (DUO)
CLASSIQUE
- The Night

SKU: BT.PWM5363020

The Third Symphony occupies an special place in the evolutionary process of Szymanowskis style. The Symphony The Song of the Night, Op. 27, is a setting of the poem of the same title, from the second divan of Mawlana Jalal-ad-din Rumi, for tenor solo, mixed choir and orchestra. It was completed in the summer 1916. Szymanowskis interest in oriental music at this period is not so much , as far as the Third Symphony is concerned, an attempt at some formal stylisation of eastern music, but rather an indication of his search for some mode of expression which would best reflect the conflicts of his aesthetic and artistic ideas. It was the direct contact made with the art of the Grecian and Arabic worlds during his travel to Sicily and North Africa in 1911 and 1914 that provided the external stimulus for this interest. The Third Symphony can be classed with those symphonies for chorus and solo voices so often favoured by the neo-romantic and expressionist composers. It is written in a free ternary form, the thematic material being the basic unifying structural element, which imparts a conciseness to the form, and retaining the function despite the significant changes that occur in the melodic character of the music. The texture is polymelodic, and a score reveals a masterly interweaving of the multiplicity of parts, melodic lines and patterns of sound. This symphony is consummation of all Szymanowskis mastery in instrumentation and colour, and a superb study of orchestral polyphony. Here, Szymanowski liberates himself from the rigid relations of the functional harmonic system. In the place of tonal progressions, he shifts chromatically from one sound lane to another, of which the smallest units are chords made up of tritones and seconds, using only a free intervallic structure, far more remote in Szymanowski from the dominant centralistic harmony then Debussy. In style, the Third Symphony belongs to the neo-romantic period, if this can be broadly defined as including modernistic and expressionistic trends, and to musical impressionism. (based on the Preface to the ''Works'' by Teresa Chyli ska, PWM 1985).

SKU: HL.14028052

ISBN 9788759870853.

Rude rs writes: NIGHTSHADE is an instrumental dark-room, a grave-yard of low-pitched, tight-knitted, crawling chords sliced asunder by the cold extremely high positioned movements of the oboe and violin in particular: tones sustained to near-immobility and then scared into startling velocity, like geckoes on a Southern garden wall. Shades in the night are pale and gloomy phenomenons to behold; treacherous beauties in the mighty realm of invisibility and blackness. Belladonna (beautiful lady) is the morbid christening of that fearsome variety of flora: the deadly nightshade. The piece is, on one hand, a study in extreme sonorities; the infrequently used contrabass clarinet is being employed along with the contra-bassoon, forming the ultra-low foundation of the score and the bottom-register of the French horn and the trombone is set against the serene clarity of high violin and oboe. On the other hand, the piece is a tone-poem of sorts, on the various associations as they form within the mind of the individual listener when confronted with the very word NIGHTSHADE. Personally, I come to think of pale moonlight, tombstones, the compelling as well as frightening spell of a dark forest. A Study in black the piece has been called.