Word: timpani
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...walloped his bass drum and cymbals, zipped out a few flams, drags, rolls and paradiddles on the snare drum, tinkled the xylophone, banged the triangle and tambourine and rattled the castanets, shook a string of sleighbells in his teeth like a dog and wound up lying exhausted across his timpani. The kids enjoyed it as much as Goodman...
Professional Pride. Goodman took to drumming as a Boy Scout in Brooklyn (he thinks "Americans have special imagination and aptitude for drumming"). When he was in high school, he heard a concert by the Philharmonic, and was so fascinated by the timpani that he dashed backstage and asked to become the timpanist's pupil. Six years later his teacher retired, leaving 20-year-old Saul in charge of the percussion section...
Conductor Richard Burgin reserved the humor for the end, probably quite unwittingly. Anyone familiar with Brahms' superb piano quartet could not help but be wary of a Schoenberg orchestration calling for two flutes, a piccolo, three oboes, five clarinets, four bassoons, full brass, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, eymbals, triangle, tambourine, Glockenspiel, xylophone, and strings. At the very best, these extra instruments were entirely superfluous to Brahms' musical intentions. At the worst, which was most of the time, they sounded like something Richard Strauss would have reconsidered even in his most beery moments. The percussion thumped, whanged, crashed, and tinkled...
...from the force of the medium is hard to tell on first hearing. It seemed to me that much of the percussion part was only reinforcement, especially in the first movement. The two elements have a clearer relation to one another, however, in the last two movements, when the timpani picks up a theme from the pianos, or the xylophone introduces one of them for development. Whatever the magic, it is an over-whelming work, and it is not surprising that the enthusiasts were carried away by the superb performance...
...noisy, patriotic hullabaloo is Peter Ilich Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture. Depicting Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, it ends with a mixture of the Marseillaise, the Imperial Russian anthem and - so reads the score - a terrific salvo of artillery fire. Although most orchestras dub in cymbals and timpani, the 1812 has sometimes been performed with real cannon. Last week in Philadelphia, Conductor Eugene Ormandy's decision to blitz the 1812 gave the Philadelphia Orchestra a cute little publicity story...