Grofé - Grand Canyon Suite

I don't currently have any more actual Christmas albums to share with you, so i've decided to invoke the Die Hard Technicality and listen to Bernstein conduct Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

You'll probably hear the celeste solo from the third movement at some point in the next week, because it used for the dream sequence in "a Christmas Story."

Tone-painting suites were Grofé's schtick. The desert, a big river, some waterfall, New York, you name it. If it's a region of our country, Grofé wrote a suite for it. Mostly no one cared too much, but Toscanini took a shine to this one. Disney did a short movie using it as well. It's unapologetically romantic orchestral writing, but you can tell that Grofé likes his orchestrational dissonance as much as Copland and Bernstein himself. It definitely has that same kind of American terroir, pairing the nostalgically idyllic Hudson Valley School -esque landscapes with the violently impressive crash-bang weather our wide open spaces are known for having.

Quite a nice piece. Thumbs up.

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