Recent from talks
The Rio Grande (Lambert)
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
The Rio Grande (Lambert)
The Rio Grande is a secular cantata by English composer Constant Lambert. Written in 1927, it is a setting of the poem by Sacheverell Sitwell. The piece achieved instant and long-lasting popularity on its appearance on the concert stage in 1929. It is an example of symphonic jazz, not unlike the style of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, although it is very much Lambert's individual conception. It combines jazzy syncopation with lithe Latin American dance rhythms that create an air of haunting nostalgia. The Rio Grande takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to perform. It was dedicated to Angus Morrison, who played at its first (broadcast) performance.
No other work of Lambert's achieved the level of popularity achieved by The Rio Grande. It is still performed regularly today, at the BBC Proms (including the Last Night) and by choral societies in the UK and abroad.
The idea for this piece began when in 1923 Lambert attended a performance by Will Vodery’s Plantation Orchestra. He later wrote: ‘After the humdrum playing of the English orchestra in the first half, it was electrifying to hear Will Vodery’s band in the Delius-like fanfare which preluded the second. It definitely opened up a new world of sound.’ That "new world of sound" is the syncopated jazz sound that he would incorporate in The Rio Grande. While George Gershwin was clearly a major influence, Vodery's mention shows us that besides Gershwin, the entire jazz and Broadway zeitgeist of the day served as the influence for this piece. Frederick Delius also served as an inspiration. The chorus’s fortissimo opening statement is a direct transcription of the fanfare that appears frequently in Delius' work (the famous "Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo and Juliet, to quote just one instance, has it in almost every bar). Delius knew much about spirituals from living among African-Americans in Florida.
The Rio Grande is scored for alto soloist, mixed chorus, piano, brass, strings and a percussion section of 15 instruments, requiring five players. It combines jazzy syncopations, ragtime and Brazilian influences, harmonies and rhythms inspired by Duke Ellington, with a traditional English choral sound. The outer sections are brisk, surrounding a central nocturne, which is introduced by a virtuosic solo piano cadenza with percussion. The piano part often plays triplets against duplets, redolent of a rumba. The coda is based on material from the central section.
Lambert noted in a 1928 article:
The chief interest of jazz rhythms lies in their application to the setting of words, and although jazz settings have by no means the flexibility or subtlety of the early seventeenth-century airs, for example, there is no denying their lightness and ingenuity … English words demand for their successful musical treatment an infinitely more varied and syncopated rhythm than is to be found in the nineteenth-century romantics, and the best jazz songs of today are, in fact, nearer in their methods to the late fifteenth-century composers than any music since.
Music critic Christopher Palmer said of this piece that:
Lambert would be the first to concede, today, that some of the harmonic and rhythmic clichés he decried in others had slipped into his own work. Yet, for all that, The Rio Grande retains a pristine quality. Now hard, now soft, it sparkles and glitters one moment, then seduces us the next with the kind of bluesy urban melancholy to be found in deeper, richer measure in a quite different context in Summer's Last Will and Testament. It is above all the work of a poet, and Lambert’s poetic sensibility has ensured the survival of his best music. The free-fantasy form is simplicity itself: first section (allegro) – cadenza for piano and percussion – slow central section, in the style of a nostalgic tango – recapitulation – tranquil coda.
Hub AI
The Rio Grande (Lambert) AI simulator
(@The Rio Grande (Lambert)_simulator)
The Rio Grande (Lambert)
The Rio Grande is a secular cantata by English composer Constant Lambert. Written in 1927, it is a setting of the poem by Sacheverell Sitwell. The piece achieved instant and long-lasting popularity on its appearance on the concert stage in 1929. It is an example of symphonic jazz, not unlike the style of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, although it is very much Lambert's individual conception. It combines jazzy syncopation with lithe Latin American dance rhythms that create an air of haunting nostalgia. The Rio Grande takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes to perform. It was dedicated to Angus Morrison, who played at its first (broadcast) performance.
No other work of Lambert's achieved the level of popularity achieved by The Rio Grande. It is still performed regularly today, at the BBC Proms (including the Last Night) and by choral societies in the UK and abroad.
The idea for this piece began when in 1923 Lambert attended a performance by Will Vodery’s Plantation Orchestra. He later wrote: ‘After the humdrum playing of the English orchestra in the first half, it was electrifying to hear Will Vodery’s band in the Delius-like fanfare which preluded the second. It definitely opened up a new world of sound.’ That "new world of sound" is the syncopated jazz sound that he would incorporate in The Rio Grande. While George Gershwin was clearly a major influence, Vodery's mention shows us that besides Gershwin, the entire jazz and Broadway zeitgeist of the day served as the influence for this piece. Frederick Delius also served as an inspiration. The chorus’s fortissimo opening statement is a direct transcription of the fanfare that appears frequently in Delius' work (the famous "Walk to the Paradise Garden" from A Village Romeo and Juliet, to quote just one instance, has it in almost every bar). Delius knew much about spirituals from living among African-Americans in Florida.
The Rio Grande is scored for alto soloist, mixed chorus, piano, brass, strings and a percussion section of 15 instruments, requiring five players. It combines jazzy syncopations, ragtime and Brazilian influences, harmonies and rhythms inspired by Duke Ellington, with a traditional English choral sound. The outer sections are brisk, surrounding a central nocturne, which is introduced by a virtuosic solo piano cadenza with percussion. The piano part often plays triplets against duplets, redolent of a rumba. The coda is based on material from the central section.
Lambert noted in a 1928 article:
The chief interest of jazz rhythms lies in their application to the setting of words, and although jazz settings have by no means the flexibility or subtlety of the early seventeenth-century airs, for example, there is no denying their lightness and ingenuity … English words demand for their successful musical treatment an infinitely more varied and syncopated rhythm than is to be found in the nineteenth-century romantics, and the best jazz songs of today are, in fact, nearer in their methods to the late fifteenth-century composers than any music since.
Music critic Christopher Palmer said of this piece that:
Lambert would be the first to concede, today, that some of the harmonic and rhythmic clichés he decried in others had slipped into his own work. Yet, for all that, The Rio Grande retains a pristine quality. Now hard, now soft, it sparkles and glitters one moment, then seduces us the next with the kind of bluesy urban melancholy to be found in deeper, richer measure in a quite different context in Summer's Last Will and Testament. It is above all the work of a poet, and Lambert’s poetic sensibility has ensured the survival of his best music. The free-fantasy form is simplicity itself: first section (allegro) – cadenza for piano and percussion – slow central section, in the style of a nostalgic tango – recapitulation – tranquil coda.
Recent media