Word: scherzo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...though in a few places he smothered the low register of the flute. The Lento was the most appealing movement, with its recurring effective series of chord clusters on the harpsichord and its busy, feathery middle section, which seemed to be Carter's idea of a modern Queen Mab scherzo...
...ghostly sonorities and harplike trills to ringing double octaves that cleave the orchestra like a sword. He can shape passages with tension and excitement, turn the weariest warhorse into a spirited charger. He is not above rewriting, as in the chorale section of Chopin's C Sharp Minor Scherzo, where he fills out the harmonies with extra notes ("I think Chopin would forgive...
Adagio to Scherzo. Jean Sibelius molded his ideas in the post-romantic Germany of the 1890 While he was studying in Berlin he was exposed to such famed symphonists as Bruckner and Brahms (whom he described as "an unsavory-looking fellow, untidily dressed"), and he went home to Finland imbued with Germanic musical vision, but with a style of his own. His early music-En Saga, Finlandia and other tone poems-is filled with striding themes, echoes of folk tunes, broadly brooding melodies that reminded listeners of the good Finnish earth and established Sibelius as the composer of unfettered nature...
...Scherzo to Finale. His life was without outward struggle. A doctor's son, Sibelius had been back home after his studies in Germany for only six years when the Finnish government gave him a 2,000-marks-a-year pension (about $400) so that he could devote all his time to music. He settled down with his wife in a white clapboard house at Lake Tuusula, where they raised five daughters. By the early 1920s, he had turned out 13 tone poems, seven symphonies, countless songs and choral works. He attempted an opera with no success ("I like opera...
...this is an attractive and conservative work, readily accessible on first hearing. The traditionally shaped first movement is graceful and neoclassical.. The second movement, somewhat more adventurous stylistically, offers a theme and several clearly separated variations. The finale is bright and perky, with much the character of a scherzo...