In My Changer, 10/24/04: Underrated

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Symphony no. 2, "Antar"

St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, Andrey Anikhanov, cond.

Naxos

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I had the good fortune to get paid to describe this symphony in detail for allclassical.com, but they appear not to have included it in their new site, so I'll quote it at length here:

…Rimsky-Korsakov's program opens with Antar wandering the ruins of the ancient desert city of Palmyra. Rimsky-Korsakov portrays the desert with grim, bare woodwind chords and elusive, chromatic fragments of melody sweeping over them. Antar's them enters on the strings, in a lush, resigned harmonization, as he has come to the desert to renounce humanity. Suddenly, a beautiful gazelle appears, which Antar chases. A huge black bird swoops down on the gazelle, but Antar repels it with his lance. He then falls asleep, and in his dream he meets the Queen of Palmyra, Gul Nazar, who had taken the form of the gazelle that Antar saved. The Queen is represented by a lovely, winding wind theme. Gul Nazar promises Antar the three joys of life in exchange for his good deed; as Antar contemplates his newfound good fortune, he wakes up to the strains of the harp and the Gul Nazar theme, amid the ruins of Palmyra. So ends the first movement.

The second and third movements are devoted to depicting the joys of revenge and power, respectively. Rimsky-Korsakov uses nervous tremblings in the strings and puts the Antar theme in defiant brass to suggest revenge, while the Antar theme is played sweetly on the strings and in fanfares by the brass to depict power.

In the last movement, Antar is allowed to experience the ultimate joy, the love of Gul Nazar. He insists that she kill him when she feels his passion cooling; this she does, and Antar dies in her arms. This movement features some of Rimsky-Korsakov's finest orchestration, including transcendently poignant blends in the woodwinds which depict the two lovers as their passion swells and fades, ultimately ascending to heaven on a swirling harp and lying to rest with a few final chords. Anyone who enjoys "Scheherazade" should try "Antar" next, as this symphony is almost as inspired as that peak of Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic oeuvre.

Well, that was a little cheap to drop all those words on you. Since I wrote that description, though, I've become convinced that "Antar" is underrated because much of its musical evolution is achieved through modulating tonalities. The final movement starts out with lush winds, for example, playing longing melodies, and the oboe, in its piercing registers, becomes more and more prominent in the repetitions as the movement progresses towards its ultimate programmatic end. Similarly, what might look on the page like nearly undifferentiated repetitions of the Antar theme in the second and third movements take on a completely different tone due to the instruments Rimsky-Korsakov employs to play them.

It really only applies when a composer is as good at orchestration and as inconsistent at everything else as Rimsky-Korsakov is, but I think a facility for orchestration tends to get a composer shorter shrift than an equal facility at (say) counterpoint would, because t's harder to quantify the effect of skillfully using sounds. (Berlioz, Debussy, and Wagner, the only composers who are, in my opinion, R-K's equal at employing the Romantic orchestra had better skillz in other arenas.) Anyway, as implied above, "Antar" deserves to get about 15% of the symphony-orchestra spins "Scheherazade" does, and presently it gets about 0.1% of those spins, with a 0.1% margin of error. Let's have some equity here, people.

Some dude on Amazon hates on this performance, but I think the tone-coloring is more vivid here than in the Svetlanov, whose jock the Penguin Guide rides. You do get the vapid First Symphony on Anikhanov's recording, but it's not actively unpleasant to listen to, either.

Sergei Rachmaninov

Symphonic Dances

St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariss Jansons, cond.

EMI

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Someday I really do plan to hit the library at Maryland and read a bunch of primary and secondary sources and learn more about this work, because it's so odd and so compelling at once. Rachmaninov was revered by opponents of modernism and mocked by those avant the garde for his lush orchestration, his clinging to 19th-century forms, his generally Romantic-style neurosis. This work, Rachmaninov's last for orchestra after a seven-year drought, gives the audiences by turns brutal foot-stomping marches, laments so cold and bleak they're almost Sibelian, a weird half-smiling, tipsy waltz as a slow movement, and a characteristic statement of the Dies Irae amid a flurry of Orthodox Church mottoes blasted out on the brass. The most romantic subject is played once on a saxophone with acrid wind background and once on bare strings with piano chords underneath; the most modern thing about it is probably that slow movement, which could have been written by Berlioz on a forward-looking day (that's intended as a compliment). As you might expect, it pleased absolutely nobody at its premiere, and it's remained the red-headed stepchild of Rachmaninov's oeuvre since, when it truly does surpass everything else he wrote. And I love Rachmaninov to death. This is why I want to study the Symphonic Dances at further length.

It is music so genuinely sad and chaotic and driven that it comes almost immediately to mind when I think of the apocalypse — when I was in high schoo, I would drive through Bethesda after work and play it loud and think of the buildings falling, to feed my native animosity towards that rich, white suburb. That is probably not what Rachmaninov intended.

A Tribe Called Quest

Beats, Rhymes and Life

Jive

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Some people (mostly people who listen a lot to many genres of music) feel that hip-hop should be first and foremost party music, devoted to (as Tribe put it in the title of their concert video) the art of moving butts. Those people did not like this album, which was the group's first following Q-Tip's conversion to Islam and which tried to relate hip-hop cliches and modern pathologies to a moral life in a very personal way.

As Q-Tip went, so Tribe always went, but more than ever this was Q-Tip's album. Jay-Dee subbed for Phife on production duties (the trio of Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and the interloper from Detroit was known as the Ummah for production purposes), and the sound they created on Beats, Rhymes and Life pulsed with the Fender Rhodes, guitar snaps, and quick, rounded bass stabs, but also had a surprisingly strong snare and hi-hat that never let the beats start feeling soggy. (Later, hip-hop groups such as Jay-Dee's Slum Village would delete the mighty drums and make a bunch of albums that sound nice for five minutes but over the span of an hour are nearly unlistenable.) The beats mirrored the rhymes: constant, recurring stresses, with an equally constant and strong melodic base that ran throughout the song.

Phife shines more on the brag tracks, where he was always more convincing than Tip, but Tip's issue tracks are what linger in one's mind: "Crew" is, I believe, the only time Tip has carried a gun on record, and his struggle with whether to use it is truly gripping, while "Mind Power" somehow manages to make its platitudes to mental toughness convincing from Q-Tip's sincerity and the beautiful beat. "Separate/Together" reaches out to women without descending into playerism or preaching. The only sore spot is Consequence, who messes up every track he's on with unimaginative whines, in particular wasting the astonishing cascades of dissonant, layered bass on "Stressed Out" with pointless noodling on lame catchphrases. (Phife only got to rhyme on the remix of "Stressed Out," which is a damn shame, although that means he did get to be on Bjork's amazing remix thereof.)

Beats, Rhymes and Life is commonly accorded fourth place in Tribe's five-disc oeurve, but I would take it over any Tribe record except The Low End Theory, which is the quintessential innocent party record. Hm.

Blahzay Blahzay

Blah, Blah, Blah

Fader

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Back in the feverish early days of my enthusiasm for hip-hop, I told a friend of mine that this album imitated cantata form, in which the last movement (track) was known and beloved by all and the previous movements (tracks) all referred to the finale in some more or less overt way. Nowadays, I do not think this was on purpose. Still, the anticipatory effect enlivens the album and separates it from the other contenders among mid-90s hip-hop albums not by Jay-Z, Nas, Biggie or Tupac. Of course, that last track packs quite a punch itself.

That last track is "Danger," which stormed the hip-hop charts in a development completely unanticipated by anyone, including Fader, which initially released the "Danger" single in spartan packaging better suited to generic cornflakes. The track, produced by Brooklyn DJ and mixtape stalwart P.F. Cuttin, both bumped your car's bass and stayed in the mind using two samples of someone singing "Mmmmm" a major third apart, two similarly related guitar snippets, thumping drums, and the following scratched-in chorus:

[from Jeru the Damaja's "Come Clean"] When Medina's in the house/[extremely detached voice] Oh my God/Danger!

When Medina's in the house/Oh my God [scratch] God

[repeat]

Blahzay flowed authoritatively over the beat; his voice had a certain Biggie-like largeness and detachment, and he occasionally dropped a lyrical gem like "Sooth/Rappers talking sooth to a rugged/But I don't plug it/When my semantics hit your lung it/Explodes." It was a real underground-type hip-hop song that just happened to be the catchiest thing in 1995. It comes last on Blah, Blah Blah, and almost all the songs before it (also produced by P.F. Cuttin) contain some reference to it: scratched interpolations, quotes by Blah or guest MCs, songs where the entire chorus is drawn from "Danger" like "Long Winded." There's even a "Danger - Part 2" that precedes "Danger." Better yet, the songs preceding "Danger" are predominantly minor-mode, while "Danger" itself is as major as you can get, creating a sun-through-the-clouds effect when it finally plays. If you are someone who just ate up "Danger," like me, it creates a mighty cantata-esque musical structure as you listen, waiting for the Ur-text to come atcha.

The amazing thing about Blah, Blah, Blah is that you're not just twiddling your thumbs while you're waiting but nodding your head. There is one skit, but it's quite dramatic, and it needs to be there in order to lead into "Good Cop/Bad Cop," a gripping tale of a racially prejudiced policeman overcoming his partner's instincts towards justice. "Danger - Part 2" cannot match the original but features a showstopping rhyme from Smoothe Da Hustler in which he rhymes, then drops the same rhyme in reverse. "Pain I Feel" and "Posse Jumpa" both speak eloquently to the eternal hip-hop problem of sucker MCs. Even in the weaker songs Blah's rhyme skills grade out as above-average.

In addition, there are no weak beats on this album; P.F. Cuttin, who is shamefully underemployed as a producer in general, contributes beats that rely on materials very similar to "Danger" but with a few new touches: the raindrop piano riff in the title track, the siren goosed into serving as musical material on "Good Cop/Bad Cop," the casino electronics grabbed as a bassline on "Jackpot." In short: an extremely satisfying album that currently garners negligible critical appreciation and languishes out of print, meaning Blahzay Blahzay has done almost nothing since. Check, check it out and maybe we can get some more.

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