She also had a rather disturbing habit, when you looked like you were going to faint (an occasional hazard for a young oboist), of reaching out to snatch your instrument off you (“If you collapse, you won’t break, but your oboe will”). So, it was a relief, when, aged 13 he ‘retired’ and I got a new oboe teacher, who actually was a professional oboist, and was as far removed from an unstable WWII veteran, being both slightly mousy and quiet, and very refined in a posh-English lady manner – to the point of affectedly pronouncing the word ‘elastic’ as ‘elaaahstic’, and the word ‘tooth’ so that it rhymed almost with ‘tough’. To an 11 year-old he was quite intimidating, and you would hope that you didn’t have your lessons with him in the afternoon because he would spend his lunch-breaks down the street in the public lounge of the local tavern, and come back in a strange mood, with an even stranger medicinal smell on his breath, and veer alarmingly between barking angrily at you, and demanding you sat on his knee. He wasn’t an oboist, but one of those old school ‘bits-and-pieces’ music teachers who had trained at Kneller Hall, the Royal Military School of Music. Consequently, we were able to learn any instrument, and so I did seven years’ worth of oboe lessons – the first two of which was with a highly eccentric former army captain, actually a clarinettist, who had played in Louis Armstrong’s band (or so he claimed). More like a stiff whisky.Ģ The lyricist of Teddy Bears Picnic, Jimmy Kennedy, also wrote the more amusing lyrics of “Istabul (not Constantinople)” – interesting factoid of the day.Īt my high school, we were lucky enough to have a range of good music teachers, most of them professional orchestral players (I remember the excitement when our brass teacher played the obligato trumpet part in Shostakovich’s first piano concerto played by Christina Ortiz). Why you might want to avoid it: See above, but you are performing open heart surgery.ġ Perhaps, given the rather serious and passionate nature of the work, lollipop seems inappropriate. Why you might want to listen to it: This is music to listen to when you feel like you need someone to tell you to hurry up with what you are doing There some more passionate semiquaver arpeggios and runs, before return to tune A for the last time, now accompanied more skittishly by the piano (orchestra), eventually leading to a satisfying short coda where the cellist gets to show off a bit more and makes sure they get a big round of applause, and you can go and grab your cup of tea from the kettle that’s just boiled. This section is expanding on with runs of semiquavers interspersed by more lyrical segments – before recapitulating to the first bumblebee tune, albeit with some different harmonic shifts, to end up back at tune B now in C major. There’s a nice bit of melodic fragment shortly later (my favourite part of the piece) which is slightly yearningīefore we coming to a more humdrum second motif in D major (B) where the cellist gets to double-stop for about the only time in the piece. After a brief few bars of introduction (which coincidentally has the identical dropping bass-line of ‘Teddy-Bears Picnic’ 2) we settle to the main tune (A) in B minor introduced by the cello which essentially is kind of a bit flight-of-the-bumblebee urgency, if a bit repetitive. Interestingly, this is one of his more played obscurer pieces because it is a staple of the cello repertoire for students at Grade 8 level – with just the right mix of difficult flashiness and lyricisms, making good use of the full range of the cello. Listening to it again many years later, it’s grown on me a bit, but I still wouldn’t rank it highly for Saint-Saens. Truth be told, it was one of my least favourite pieces that I played with my friend as it seemed the main melodies were just a bit short of inspired, and frantic. Originally for cello and piano, but orchestrated (the version below) a year later, there’s not much too it, at just under 5 minutes. This short ‘lollipop’ 1 was written in the productive year of 1875 for Jules Lasserre, an English-based cellist for whm Saint-Saens also wrote his first cello sonata. Anyway, we regularly used to play cello and piano pieces together, and is was through her I got to know (and play) the cello sonatas of Brahms, Beethoven and Grieg, plus shorter staples of the repertoire such as Bruch’s Kol Nidrei and the piece that is the subject of today’s epistle, Saint-Saens Allegro Appassionato, Op.43.
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