Romantic Virtuoso Violin Music

Pablo de Sarasate was born today in 1844 in Spain. He was a virtuoso violinist and composed some amazing show-pieces for the violin.

His most famous is "Zigeunerweisen" ("Gypsy Airs"), a fiery one-movement work for violin and orchestra. Listen to it here played by violinist Jascha Heifetz.

The other piece I'd like to mention is his "Carmen Fantasy", a work for violin and orchestra based on George Bizet's beautiful suites derived from his famous opera, "Carmen". Listen here and here (divided into two videos). This is not only really impressive violin playing (and extremely difficult!), but they are timeless beautiful melodies, at least some of which are very widely familiar.

More Spanish Music

I just found out that YouTube has tons of clips of musicians playing entire pieces (instead of just excerpts that I've been linking to on the previous blog-entries). This was a gold-mine for me and I spent several hours looking up this and that pianist playing pieces I'd wanted to hear them play. My CD wish list just decreased because I have no need to buy a lot of them now!

Anyway, today in 1876 was the birthday of Manuel de Falla, one of Spain's most important composers of the 20th century. One of his most popular pieces is the "Ritual Fire Dance" from his ballet, "El amor brujo" (Love, The Magician). Watch Artur Rubinstein (a pianist to whom de Falla had dedicated other works) play a piano transcription of the piece here and decide for yourself if the name fits the piece's character.

I'm thankful for classical guitar music

Today in 1901 was the birthday of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo. Apparently he was a pianist, but the only music I've heard of his is written for the guitar. His most famous work is the Concierto de Aranjuez, for solo guitar and orchestra. I've never purchased a recording of it, yet I think I've heard it about 10 or 15 times on the radio alone. My brother also got a copy of the sheet music and we've played through a lot of it (me playing the orchestra part on the piano), but it is so incredibly difficult, we kind of fizzled out before getting too far. Listen to excerpts from movements 1, 2, and 3, taken from here. It's a superb piece of music in many ways. Hummable melodies, striking harmonies, catchy rhythms, impressively difficult guitar passages... and the list goes on. Probably the best classical guitar concerto ever written (although I don't know many).

Apparently Rodrigo was blind since the age of 3. Pretty amazing to be such an accomplished composer and musician in spite of not having vision. Though I suppose being deaf from the age of the 3 would probably be worse. He lived to a ripe old age of 97, leaving this world just 8 years ago.