Stravinsky, or known by many in my country- Sharlunia- “Igor the Great”, wasn’t a virtuoso pianist, though his main instrument was the piano. He didn’t write many exclusive pieces for the piano, but his transcription of three movements of his ballet music, Petrushka, for the piano made these three short pieces of the most difficult pieces for the instrument. Since then –late 1920-, these three pieces where challenged by virtuoso pianists to show their brilliant technique.
Maurizio Pollini, known as many as the best living pianist of the world, has played these pieces in a wonderful way. I’ve chosen the last movement of these three, Shrovetide. I’ve also included the scores, so that you can look at them as the music goes on. Honestly I couldn’t even play the first measure properly!
Files size: music in .wma format:6,246,069 bytes
score in .pdf format:1,657,182 bytes

Modern classical music was started with the piece “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” by Claude Achille Debussy. So he needs a complete not post by series of posts. But as in this festival my main purpose is just on writing a small note and let everything else to you, so we’ll put that for another time.
My selected piece for this post is “Clair de Lune“, or in English “moonlight“.
Generally I oppose the idea of imagining a scene for a piece of music. I believe in music as pure as possible and not making understandings of it with help of other senses. But for this especial piece, I have my own imagination. And I confess that it wasn’t originally mine, but took the idea and I liked it. First think of the difference between shadows made by sun and those made by the moon. Those mode up of sun light have distinct borders between lightness and darkness, but shadows made by the moon don’t. Then this uncertainty is heard in the music, as sounds are woven into each other. Then I bring this scene into my mind that it is full moon, and you’re walking in between trees, and moon appears and disappears as leaves move. Next there’s a breeze coming from the sea to the shore where trees are, with very slow movement of the water.
File Size:3,821,469 Bytes

I’ve accepted my first apprentice for teaching her the piano. I use apprentice exactly with Emperor in Star Wars in mind and Darth Wader being his apprentice :grin:
I was satisfied from the first session and I think I was a good teacher.
So you can drink wine to salute me, and listen to this beautiful piece from Aram Khachaturyan’s Gayaneh Ballet: From Act I, Spring Scene, Lezghinka-Dance of the Boys, Allegro Vivace.

This post isn’t a normal one. In some ways, it isn’t a post for Musicolunia. Maybe I should have written it in Englunia or my Persian weblog, 5th Movemement. Anyhow… I feel a little strange. I have a Danish friend, Elora, whom I found her exactly because of that Muhammad cartoons. She’s such a lovely person, I like her characteristics, being really open minded and one thing I like a lot, (as it appears to me, and in a way I like) being crazy!
Her father had cancer, and he died tonight. I knew that would come sooner or later, but this feeling is a strange one. I haven’t seen her. We’re kilometers away from each other. We are of two different cultures, and yet I regret for the way she feels now.
This post’s music is exclusively for Elora. It’s from Stravinsky’s Fire Bird suite, the last part, Final Hymn. And from the 1945 version, conducted by the composer himself.
Stravinsky wasn’t a great conductor, but he was able to make orchestra play what he wanted his music sound like. So his recordings of his works are the exact way he wanted them to be performed.
Fire bird suite, a very revolutionary work, was the first of ballets which made Stravinsky a famous and leading composer. The original version was written in 1910 and he made two revisions in 1919 and 1945. I’m not going to write much about the piece in this post, as it needs a more complete series of posts.
Anyway, in my imagination, the Final Hymn is Hope. It may not be that one Stravinsky thought of for the ballet scene, but I like to think of it in that way. Small sparkles of hope shines, and then strengthen. They grow and get stronger and stronger, but suddenly fogs of uncertainty and indeterminacy come and fill the whole atmosphere, but at last the light comes out even stronger and hope wins the battle!
That’s it, Stravinsky’s Fire Bird, Final Hymn, 1945 version, as performed by Columbia Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer… for dear Elora.

I tried a lot to have more visitors for this weblog, especially for the Farsi version. Unfortunately classical music doesn’t have many audiences in my homeland, and so I didn’t succeed.

I don’t want to nag or anything like that, just to tell you that I won’t update this weblog anymore. I had in mind to give more attention to 20^th century music. As I won’t reach 20^th century composers, for example in our concerto’s series, just for a beautiful goodbye, I’ve chosen a Russian Song from my favorite composer, Igor Stravinsky. The fourth and last of these russian songs, Tilim-Bom.

Hope you’ll enjoy it,

Bye :)