In August came the surprise announcement that the popular children’s television program Sesame Street will be moving to HBO. (Reruns will still appear on PBS). The show’s nonprofit producers reached a five-year agreement with HBO. For 45 years Sesame Street has been freely available to the community on Public Broadcasting.
Sesame Street‘s controversial move has raised broader questions about the commodification and privatization of the arts and education at the expense of the public realm. The effect on future programming remains to be seen. But a quick glance back shows that classical music has long been at home on Sesame Street, perhaps giving some children their only exposure to the art form.
Here is a sampling of some of the prominent musicians who have appeared on Sesame Street over the years. Many of these skits involve wacky and unsophisticated comedy. (When Isaac Stern asked for “an A” as a tuning note, he was presented with the letter A). The muppets seem to be asking the questions children might ask if they were there.
Here is Yo-Yo Ma’s recording, with pianist Emanuel Ax, of Beethoven’s complete Sonatas for Cello and Piano, first released in 1987. At times shrouded in mystery and fire, this is music which captures the soul of the cello. Beethoven was the first major composer to write sonatas in which the cello and piano are equals. The early sonatas were written in 1796. The “Late Sonatas” were written in 1815.
Listen to Volume 2 and 3 to hear the complete set of sonatas.
Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto
Here is Dmitri Shostakovich’s ferocious First Cello Concerto (written in 1959 and dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich) from a 1983 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Eugene Ormandy.
From the taunting opening, the music is imprinted with the “DSCH” motive, Shostakovich’s initials translated into their corresponding pitches in German musical notation: D, E-flat, C, B natural. (In German notation Es is E-flat and H is B.), The four note “DSCH” motive defiantly appears throughout other Shostakovich scores. (See this earlier Listeners’ Club post). There are echoes of Shostakovich’s 1948 score for the film, The Young Guard, which depicts the execution of Soviet soldiers by the Nazis. The Concerto also directly quotes a dark lullaby, sung to a sick child by Death (disguised as a caretaker), in Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death.
The first movement is propelled forward by an unrelenting, and almost inhuman, bass line. Amid sardonic statements from the woodwinds, the music feels simultaneously comic and terrifying. The sombre second movement, given the simple marking, Moderato, opens as a lament, gradually building into a prolonged scream of anguish. Here, in the Concerto’s interior, away from the sarcasm of the outer movements, we’re able to glimpse the music’s most profound and terrifying essence. The movement concludes with haunting stillness (beginning at 14:52). After descending into a lonely, prolonged cadenza (the third movement), we’re plunged into a fiery dance (the fourth movement).
The Swan
We’ll conclude with the serene beauty of The Swan from Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals:
A belated happy birthday to Itzhak Perlman who turned 70 on Monday.
Perlman rose to prominence during the second half of the twentieth century, displaying musical warmth, technical panache, and an unusually thick, singing tone, rich in overtones. He is one of only a handful of front rank musicians who have also achieved celebrity status. In 1964, at the age of 18, he captured public attention with an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. He went on to perform on Sesame Street, on the soundtrack of the movie Schindler’s List, and at President Obama’s first inauguration. Here is a clip from a 1980s performance at the White House, and here is another from 2012. Warm, fun-loving and unpretentious, he is the perfect ambassador for classical music. In recent years, he has focused more on teaching (watch masterclass clips here and here) and conducting.
Here is Perlman playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto with Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIB03fS179s
Perlman’s recording of the complete Brahms Violin Sonatas with Daniel Barenboim is still one of my favorites:
Here is Pablo Sarasate’s Zapateado with pianist Samuel Sanders:
