Battles of Prague

I included "The Battle of Prague" on two concerts in the last several weeks. The first was at Galilee Lutheran Church in Pasadena, MD. The theme of that concert was the outdoor life and the concert also included Satie's Sports et Divertissements. Both works require narration, and Joel Borrelli-Boudreau (a friend from Peabody who is now in the Naval Academy Band and serves as the music minister at Galilee) did the narration in a spirited fashion.

Another friend, Myja Thibault, rode up to Pasadena with me. He reminded me that I had prepared myself for work in the parlor music world through a series of three Mozart concerts Kathy and I presented in our small house in Richmond during 2006. We invited folks from the neighborhood and church and had refreshments and fellowship after each concert. Those were very fun times.

I showed Myja the place in the score where one hand is labelled "The Prussians" and the other "The Imperialists." I had mostly dismissed this as being a little silly since there is no real conflict between the hands. However, the piece took on a distinguishing layer of interest for Myja once he knew about this labelling. It seems that the two registers in which the hands spend most of their time provide a musical depiction of opposing lines of soldiers facing each other in formal 18th century battlefield style. Then, when one hand crosses into the other's register, we understand it to represent material - cannon or flying bullets - making its way from one line over into the other.

The second concert was at Woodland Heights Baptist Church in Richmond, VA where Kathy and I used to work and where we met Myja. This concert was a part of the church's centennial celebration. My theme there was to think about that church, its community, and my relationship with them. I started my research into the Skinner Anthology while living there. I also played the Satie as the church is full of sportsmen and women.

Myja did a great job with the narration characterised by a spirit of almost mischevious enjoyment. He also added a layer of increasing intensity of delivery as the stages of the battle escalated - an excellent insight into the structure of the piece and how to perform it more compellingly.

The young son of another friend at the concert enjoyed "The Battle of Prague" the most as he said he could hear the cannons.

I reflected a bit on this occasion that the work was written for instruments that sounded really differently than the modern pianos on which I get to play it most of the time. On the modern piano it's a little hard to reconcile the combination of the very polite and elegant-sounding passages and the more expanded descriptive and explosive passages. Thinking of the chaos that could ensue when battle really broke out between two very formal lines helps. But I also imagine the two qualities I've described would come across very differently on the original instruments.

At the end of June, I am playing it once more, this time with string bass and my neighbor Ken Wolfskill doing the narration at the Lasker Summer Music Festival. Dr. Wolfskill teaches literature and writing at Chowan and will be a superb narrator. We are also performing the Satie on that occasion. Another great friend, Ariel Dechosa, will be playing Prokofief's Sixth Sonata - one of Prokofief's "war sonatas." We have entitled the program "War and Peace."

Prague and the Satie could make a nice short program with narrator with the same title.