Continuing my survey of music along the circle of fifths, looking for music by composers unjustly neglected for reasons other than the merit of their compositions, such as their race or their gender. Also in this series I try to highlight women performers, whether performing obscure repertoire or the most overplayed music.
With four sharps, E major is getting far away from C major. Like C-sharp minor, it strikes me as a key particularly well suited to the piano, as in, for example, Clara Schumann’s Impromptu in E major.
Bethany Reeves has a much slower performance in a church, but even at that tempo the piece is more technically demanding than I could manage.
Clara’s husband, Robert, wrote an Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Opus 52, that begins in E minor, though it is more correctly said to be in E major.
Cécile Chaminade wrote 6 Études de concert, Opus 35, the third of which, “La Fileuse,” is in E major. This video with Jas Ogiste on piano also includes the fourth etude, in C minor.
Haven’t found a video on YouTube with the whole half dozen yet, maybe I post that later as an update.
I had already posted Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor in the E minor open thread, in a recording by Alondra de la Parra conducting the Queensland Symphony. Now I post the same recording again, but this time I’ve cued it up to start at 35:39, just before she gives the first downbeat for the finale, in which the opening E minor clarinet melody is now transfigured to E major.
But if I’ve cued it up wrong and you don’t mind listening to the whole thing, just let it keep going all the way through. You might have to skip one or two ads, though.
Both of the Haydn brothers wrote symphonies in E major. They both wrote for natural horns in E, which they wrote transposing a minor sixth up. Or a major third down? I get confused on this point. Fortunately, the valved horn in F, which the French call “cor à pistons,” is now the standard orchestral horn, regardless of the key of the music. That one transposes a fifth down from the written notes on the treble clef, and a fourth up from written notes on the bass clef.
Both Bruckner and Tchaikovsky wrote for horns in F even when writing in E major. Tchaikovsky wrote the horns without key signatures, filling in the sharps of B major as accidentals as needed, whereas Bruckner wrote them with B major key signatures but frequently needed to cancel those. It would have made more sense for Bruckner to write the horns without key signatures like Tchaikovsky, and for Tchaikovsky to write them with key signatures like Bruckner.
The idea for the beginning of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E major came to the composer in a dream. But the idea for the Adagio, in which he writes for Wagner tubas for the first time ever, in a funeral C-sharp minor, came to him when he was awake and pondering Richard Wagner’s then-impending death, as I mentioned in the thread on C-sharp minor.
Saddened to learn that Ozawa Seiji died a couple of months ago. Barry Millington for The Guardian:
Seiji Ozawa, who has died aged 88, was one of the leading conductors of his generation. Though his place in the pantheon of truly great conductors was questionable, Ozawa was for several decades a major player on the international scene and a figure of some historical significance on several counts.
He was, to begin with, the first conductor from Japan to achieve recognition in the west, the only one to date to attain superstar status, the longest serving music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1973-2002) and one of the longest serving of any American orchestra. He had a prodigious memory and habitually conducted with the score unopened in front of him.
The obituary writer does take issue with Ozawa’s excessively slow tempi. But, at least in the case of Bruckner, Georg Tintner is the only conductor who I can think of right now whom I can fault for taking Bruckner too slow, for his sluggish performance of Bruckner’s Zeroeth Symphony.
In memory of Ozawa Seiji, a toast to his recording with the orchestra of Saito Kinen of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E major. The Saito Kinen, an orchestra he founded in Matsumoto, now has a festival named in his honor.
Well, there are a few spots already in the opening Allegro moderato that I do wish he’d taken slightly faster. But for the most part, I rank this interpretation high up and close to the ones by Herbert von Karajan, whom, as the Ozawa obituary mentions, he studied with for a time.
I still regard Karajan as the foremost interpreter of Bruckner, his recordings for Bruckner’s Symphonies No.s 1 to 8 with the Berliner Philharmoniker are reference recordings. Everything about these recordings sounds right to me, even though recent musicological research has revealed lots of errors in the editions Karajan used.
Karajan’s recording of Bruckner’s Ninth lacks the finale, but during his lifetime pretty much everyone had bought into the myth that Bruckner had failed to do any work on the finale beyond a bunch of vague, hopelessly indecipherable sketches. The reality was that Bruckner had gotten very close to a finished score that he would have handed to a professional copyist if he had just lived a couple more months.
It is only for the lack of a finale that I don’t recommend Karajan’s Bruckner Ninth. But his Bruckner Seventh, whether in Berlin or Vienna, I highly recommend. Karajan’s interpretation was fairly consistent throughout his career, so you can’t go wrong with whichever recording of his you choose.
My favorite sonata by Domenico Scarlatti happens to be in E major, the K. 380 if you subscribe to that catalog. Although he wrote it for keyboard (maybe harpsichord, usually played on piano nowadays), he was clearly inspired by guitar mannerisms in this and many of his other sonatas. Given that the guitar’s strings are usually tuned E A D G B E, it follows that E minor and E major are particularly well suited to the instrument.
Here it is played by Ana Vidović, a brilliant guitarist I actually had the privilege to hear live in concert at Wayne State University’s Old Main many years ago.
The open thread question: What’s your favorite music in E major?