The Baroque Beatles Book

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The Baroque Beatles Book
Studio album by Joshua Rifkin
Released	1965
Length	35:31
Label	Elektra/Nonesuch
Producer	Mark Abramson

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The Baroque Beatles Book is a record album created by the American keyboardist and conductor Joshua Rifkin. Released by Elektra/Nonesuch in 1965, it takes musical themes of The Beatles and reworks them into Baroque style. The artwork on the cover is by illustrator Roger Hane.

Overview

Created at the height of Beatlemania in the 1960s, the works on the album share many characteristics with the music of Peter Schickele and his alter ego P.D.Q. Bach. These characteristics include parodies of stereotypical classical music conventions, anachronistic touches, and musical in-jokes that are apparent primarily to other musicians. Rifkin also shares with Schickele a penchant for unusual names and catalog numbers for the pieces.

Despite the primarily humorous nature of the compositions, Rifkin also indicates in the liner notes (written as a parody of an 18th Century composer attempting to curry favor and employment with a monarch) that one of his motivations was to demonstrate how the melodies of John Lennon and Paul McCartney can be favorably compared with those of the great Baroque masters.

The pieces on the album all call to mind similar works by Baroque composers. For example, the opening track The Royale Beatleworks Musique is, despite its name, an almost movement-for-movement parody not of Handel's Royal Fireworks Music, but of the Suite for Orchestra No. 4 in D by Johann Sebastian Bach, right down to the format and instrumentation.

The orchestra on the album is humorously credited as the "Baroque Ensemble of the Merseyside Kammermusickgesellschaft," though it was likely, in reality, an ad hoc group of session musicians.

Track listing

Side one

The Royale Beatleworks Musique, MBE 1963

• Overture: I Want to Hold Your Hand and "You're Gonna Lose that Girl" -- 6:00
• Réjouissance: I'll Cry Instead -- 1:50
• La Paix: Things We Said Today -- 2:02
• L'Amour s'en cachant: You've Got to Hide Your Love Away & Les Plaisirs: Ticket to Ride -- 4:24

Epstein Variations, MBE 69A

• Hold Me Tight -- 4:15

Side Two

"Last Night I Said," Cantata for the Third Sunday after the Shea Stadium, MBE 58,000

• Chorus: "Last Night I Said" (Please Please Me) -- 5:22
• Recitative: "In they came jorking" & Aria: "When I Was Younger" (Help!) -- 5:31
• Chorale: "You know, if you break my heart" (I'll Be Back) -- 1:40

Trio Sonata, Das Kaferlein, MBE 004 1/4

• Grave-Allegro-Grave: Eight Days a Week -- 2:27
• Quodlibet: She Loves You/Thank You Girl/Hard Day's Night -- 1:12

Availability

The album, Elektra EKS-7306, was released on LP and cassette is long out of print. The album was released on CD August 26, 2006, and was released on iTunes on July 14, 2009.

See also

• The Beatles
• Joshua Rifkin
• P.D.Q. Bach

References

External links

• Richie Unterberger liner notes to the CD reissue.