BioBrevia: The Trout

Brown Trout (Salmo trutta)

Illustration: Knepp Timothy (Wikimedia Commons)

For your listening pleassure, Franz Schubert's Trout Quintet (a.k.a. Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667). This was the second of Schubert's works to be named after that venerable European fish, the Brown Trout (Salmo trutta). The first was the song Die Forelle (D. 550), German for The Trout, an allegorical piece warning young women away from the depredations of male suitors, framed as a struggle between angler and fish. The quintet's fourth movement is a series of variations on Die Forelle, thus the transference of the name between the two works. The kind of information that can nail a daily double on Jeopardy...

BioBrevia: Finlandia

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus)

Photo: NASA (Wikimedia Commons)

 

You don't have to be a fan of classical music to appreciate this wonderful celebration of Nordic nature, set to Jean Sibelius's dramatic tone poem Finlandia, Op. 26. To me, a Canadian, Finland's wilderness of spruces, pines, rocks and lakes, looks very much like home. In fact, all of the animals featured in this video, aside from the Siberian Flying Squirrel (Pteromys volans), are shared between Finland and Canada: Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos), Caribou (Rangifer tarandus), Common Goldeneye (Bucephala clangula), Red-throated Loon (Gavia stellata), Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) and Common Raven (Corvus corax).