Product Description
Arranged double wind quintet/bass.
Preview is an mp3
The Impressions de Music Hall suite comes towards the end of Piernés long and distinguished career - a composer and executant at the height of his powers. It demonstrates the composers catholic tastes and capitalizes on the breadth and fluency of his creative experience.
Although he was influenced by Satie, Chabrier, Milhaud, and Stravinsky in borrowing musical elements from popular entertainment such as parody, burlesque, music-hall, ragtime, jazz, circus, and Spanish influences, his music remains rooted in the mainstream French tradition inherited from his teachers, Thomas, Franck, Massenet, and Saint-Saens, making it a little more refined, perhaps, than that of his younger contemporaries.
That he loved to write for the ballet and held a special affection for the music-hall and other forms of popular entertainment is certain.
The present score, originally conceived as a piano suite in the summer of 1925, was transcribed for orchestra a year later. It was then performed as a ballet score (à la Americaine), and transcribed yet again in a version for violin and piano in collaboration with the eminent virtuoso Samuel Dushkin.
This is my arrangement of the first movement : "Chorus Girls" (subtitled "French Blues")
The first movement, Chorus Girls, opens with a descending chromatic motif before settling into a bluesy foxtrot.
The theatre ambience is enhanced by the scoring. It is immediately obvious that these girls are not intending to dance a Can-Can, but something much more slinky and seductive.
A skipping motif provides contrast before the initial theme repeats with varied scoring.
A change of key (G major) strikes up a more forceful mood but a couple of raucous outbursts quell the musics spirit, resulting in a more subdued iteration of the main theme, complemented by a lyrical counter melody. The opening section returns with subtle decoration.
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