When winter comes, I always get a touch nostalgic. I have very fond memories of the St. Nicholas and Christmas celebrations. I vividly remember our Christmas tree standing in the middle of the room, and us still having real candles in it for a few years. After dessert was finished, I always begged my mother to light the candles. She usually finally did, very reluctantly, because my mother was very always cautious about these things. And my father stood nearby with a bucket of water in case the tree went up in flames. These are fond memories of a time I associate with clocks, church organs, and bells.
In the piece “Christmas Eve” from my book “Wintery Scenes,” I try to capture some of that atmosphere. In it, I use, among other things, the sound of the church bell from a church I lived next to for five years during my studies in Leiden. Every Sunday, the bell would thunder into my student room. And since Saturday nights were often accompanied by Belgian beer and nightly escapades, it wasn’t always a gentle awakening. But after a few years l started to hear the different tones in the bell; there were actually four of them. And when you play them on a piano they magically sound like churchbells!
I’ve also incorporated a trick from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s lesser-known Fourth Piano Concerto into the piece. It’s not known as his best piano concerto, but I adore it. Rachmaninoff once attended the premiere of George Gerwschwin’s “A Rhapsody in Blue.” He was deeply captivated by it. He was a huge fan of the jazz music on which this rhapsody is built, but he was also fascinated by the piece’s somewhat shorter tension spans. You can clearly hear this in his Fourth Piano Concerto. You often get the feeling: this melody could have been played a second time.
Somewhere in the second movement, he pulls off a beautiful trick that isn’t equally well understood by every performer. He doubles a melody in the middle register with one an octave and a half higher, creating a kind of organ-like sound. I have no idea if he came up with this himself, or who else he might have borrowed it from. I’m certain I got it from Rachmaninoff, though. l steal from the faves.
With these two tricks, I’ve tried to capture some of the Christmas spirit of yesteryear, and I hope you feel it too.
I explain it further in my vlog at the piano:
*** Find the arrangement here on Mike’s Pianobookshttps: //mikebodde.nl/product/mike-bodde-wintery-scenes-pdf-kopie/ ***