It's Super Bowl Sunday.... Well, so far as I know there's never been a great piece of classical music written about American football, but there is 'Rugby' by Arthur Honegger, music about an even more violent sport that comes without all those commercials. Does it sound like Rugby? I have no idea, I haven't watched anybody play Rugby since college, but I remember seeing all the bruises on the Rugby players and thinking what a hard sport this is to play, and this sounds like a hell of a piece to play accurately. Honegger described it as:
"It would be wrong to consider my piece as program music. He is simply trying to express, in my language as a musician, the attacks and responses of the game, the rhythm and the color of a match at the Colombes stadium... In Rugby,... I wanted to oppose the diversity of the human movement: its sudden impulses, its stops, its flights, its bends."
I'll be honest, I have no idea what that means.....
Honegger again might be a little too famous for this group, but he's nevertheless as underrated as it gets - a Swiss composer who sounds like Stravinsky, Shostakovich, and Mahler had a child in joint custody. This piece is not particularly well-known, and this recording comes with Hermann Scherchen, who is a top five most underrated conductor in the history of the profession - there wasn't anything he wouldn't play, and whatever he played, he played it differently than anyone else.
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