Rainy Mood Violin [Cafe Romanticism 11]

[Cafe Romanticism]
［Previous］<<<［Table of Contents］>>>［Next］

In the alleys of Kamakura, hydrangeas can be seen at many houses, making for a beautiful walking path even under the rainy season sky. There is a wide variety of types and colors, so it is pleasant to walk even in light rain.

The five or six hydrangeas in my wild garden have also bloomed in various colors this week.

I find lacecap hydrangeas more elegant and prefer them over mophead hydrangeas, but it is a pity that they droop within a day of being cut and arranged. I will decorate by pairing those lacecap hydrangeas with an old violin and enjoy the music of a rainy mood.

The tone of a violin can sound a bit annoying during extreme heat, so I want to fully enjoy it while it is still cool during the rainy season.

The film music album featuring 20th-century masters John Williams and Itzhak Perlman has quite good sound quality despite being an old recording.

This album, conducted by John Williams, includes not only his own compositions but also masterpieces of 20th-century film music. "I Will Wait For You" from "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" by Michel Legrand, which I am introducing this time, is one of those tracks. This record, which features the violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman as a soloist, has elaborate arrangements and is never boring. John Williams' masterpiece, the "Theme from Schindler's List," is also included, and this version is much better than the soundtrack version.

Perlman, who is called the "model for all violinists," has a beautiful tone above all else. Listening to Perlman's rich performance, one can reaffirm that the greatest charm of the violin is the beauty of its tone. Perlman is also exquisitely skilled in double-stop techniques and vibrato, but there are almost no violinists who can rival him in the depth and richness of his sound alone. This difference is especially clear when listening to Romantic miniatures and famous film music.

Michel Legrand studied in Nadia Boulanger's piano class at the Paris Conservatory, making him a grand-pupil of Fauré. Because of this, although Legrand himself is a pianist, many of his film scores, such as "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "Summer of '42," strangely have better performances in their string versions. It seems that the aesthetic performance of Perlman was a good match for "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" this time as well.

John Williams' conducting also brings out the beauty of the melody and the lyricism of the film music to the fullest. It was an album that clearly showed that John Williams was extraordinary not only as a composer but also as a conductor.

At the Kamakura-gu antique market last month, I found a small Yokohama-ware plate with a Taisho Roman design.

It is a picture plate of a violinist under a gas lamp and a young lady in a Taisho-era hakama, which has such an atmospheric feel.

In the Taisho era, phonographs and records were rare, and instruments like pianos and organs were very expensive. Violins were more affordable than those, so they seem to have been quite popular.

There are many pieces in the Romantic period with titles like "Elegy" or "Romance," making them hard to distinguish, but it is a picture of a street violinist that truly suits such music.

The Taisho era was also a time when so-called "fragile" things were popular, such as the paintings of Yumeji Takehisa and the nursery rhymes of Ujo Noguchi. While Ujo Noguchi's lyrics are not as refined as those of Yaso Saijo or Hakushu Kitahara, they certainly possessed a lyricism befitting the name "Ujo" (Rainy Mood).

During the season when rainy days continue, it is nice to enjoy the damp lyricism found in such legacies of the 20th century.

[Cafe Romanticism]
［Previous］<<<［Table of Contents］>>>［Next］