Four Cather Tableaux - Mvt. IV - Bel Canto Duo - LIVE
A live performance of the final movement from the Four Cather Tableaux by Bel Canto Duo @FirstPVideo
Nebraska: Post-Settlement channels the joy of Cather's selection from "One of Ours". It portrays the exhaustion of harvest & agrarian society in the 1880s. The oppressive, stifling heat of late-July transitions from a minimalist, solitary English horn to a joyous, energetic fanfare that fades away as the sun rises again.
"The middle of July came, and the farmers were still cutting grain. The yield of wheat and oats was so heavy that there were not machines enough to thrash it within the usual time.
Men had to await their turn, letting their grain stand in shock until a belching black engine lumbered into the field. . . Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things. In great harvest seasons like that
one, the heat, the intense light, and the important work in hand draw people together and make them friendly. Neighbours helped each other to cope with the burdensome abundance of man-nourishing grain; women and children and old men fell to and did what they could to save and house it. Even the horses had a more varied and sociable existence
than usual, going about from one farm to another to help neighbour horses drag wagons and binders and headers. . . The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. Horses and men and women grew thin, seethed all day in their own sweat. After supper they dropped over and slept anywhere at all, until the red dawn broke clear in the east again, like the fanfare of trumpets, and nerves and muscles began to quiver with the solar heat."
– One of Ours, Willa Cather
