The museum ("Orchestra" Edition)

No. 368 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast368

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Blogger’s Note: As we review our many musical shares from our musical forum activities under our ongoing “222 Day Binge Challenge”, the Friday Blog and Podcast will revisit some themes from past Tuesday Blogs. Today’s montage is part of that exercise. The Tuesday post in question was issued on August 22, 2011. The programme is identical and the below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

In August of 2011, I shared an early montage of piano music inspired by painters and paintings. The three works on today’s montage are orchestral works also inspired by painters and paintings. To begin, here is a somewhat cheesy montage I found on YouTube that sets paintings to music…

Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter) is an opera by Paul Hindemith which focuses on the life of Matthias Grünewald, an actual historical figure who flourished during the Protestant Reformation, and whose art was an inspiration to many creative figures living in the early 20th century. Hindemith composed his Mathis der Maler symphony in 1934, before he had completed work on the opera.

(Matthias Grünewald - Half length portrait of a man with a pinfeather looking up, 1529)

Aldo Rafael Forte was a long-time member of the United States Air Force, the last 16 years spent as Composer/Arranger with the Air Combat Command Heritage of America Band based out of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, renamed USAF Heritage of America Band about 10 years ago. Forte wrote a number of challenging wind band works for his charges, one of his most ambitious being Impressionist Prints, inspired by six Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. The work consists of six contrasting sections depicting the work of the six painters. Impressionist Prints is dedicated to Major Larry H. Lang and the USAF Heritage of America Band. The group premiered and recorded the composition in October 2000, and was awarded First Place in the 2001 National Federation of Music Clubs American Music in the United States Armed Forces Composition Competition.

Here are a couple of the paintings depicted in Forte's work:

(Claude Monet - Le Parlement de Londres, Effet de Brouillard, 1903)

(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - Au Moulin Rouge, 1892)

Isle of the Dead (German: Die Toteninsel) is the best known painting of Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin . Prints of the work were very popular in central Europe in the early 20th century - Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau all had prints of it in their offices.

(Arnold Böcklin - Die Toteninsel, c. 1880)

 

Rachmaninov wrote a tone poem inspired by the painting, and it closes the montage.

I think you will (still) love this music too.