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| 25 new of 156 responses total. |
coyote
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response 125 of 156:
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Sep 8 17:59 UTC 2002 |
I think I did hear that CD you mentioned, I believe the Ann Arbor library had
if you'd like to take a listen before deciding on it. From what I remember
(it was about 2 years ago) I did enjoy the recording, but I never gave it a
good critical listen. I had mainly checked it out for the Elligton piece on
it, "The Three Black Kings," because an orchestra I was in was playing the
MLK section of it. Sorry that's not a very helpful review!
The Harris recording on the Bernstein CD I just got dates from 1962, so I
wonder if it's the same one...
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md
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response 126 of 156:
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Sep 25 18:17 UTC 2002 |
Morton Feldman: Piano and String Quartet. Kronos Quartet with Aki
Takahashi.
A recent poll on one of my Feldman lists showed this to be the most
popular Feldman recording with the members. It’s an hour and twenty
minutes of piano arpeggios and ghostly string chords, played pianissimo
throughout. Every once in a while one of the instruments will play an
isolated note or small series of notes. About two-thirds of the way
through, the music changes character and becomes a series of evenly
spaced chords by the string quartet against isolated piano notes that
are gradually revealed to be the familiar arpeggios in slo-mo. The
music finally reverts to an "older and wiser" version of the opening
sounds.
Feldman didn’t think his music was “minimal,” and he didn’t regard
himself as a minimalist. And in fact, his music doesn’t remotely
resemble that of any of the minimalists when you hear it played, only
when you read descriptions of it like this one. So don’t listen to it
if you’re a Glass or Reich or Adams or Riley fan looking for more of
same. Here’s what it is: You know the kind of music you sometimes hear
in the background of a movie when the heroine opens the door to an
attic filled with mysterious objects, light from a window streaming in
through the dusty air, the whole scene enigmatic but not especially
menacing or foreboding. Silence. A quiet piano arpeggio in no
recognizable key over a hushed string chord. Silence. Repeat.
Silence. Repeat. Now turn the movie off and let the music go on like
that by itself for 80 minutes.
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coyote
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response 127 of 156:
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Sep 26 05:01 UTC 2002 |
I was looking to buy my first Feldman recording about a month ago and
considered this one that you're talking about, but I decided ultimately on
a recording that featured Coptic Light, Piano and Orchestra, and Cello and
Orchestra. I didn't know what to expect, never having heard Feldman before,
only having heard about him, but I was still very surprised by the music.
It's really not like anything else I've heard. Very hypnotic. I don't know
that I initially liked it, but once I withdrew and listened to the music
on a different time scale I really began to enjoy it. I guess in that
sense the composer it most reminds me of is Gavin Bryers, though with a
certain added complexity and sophistication.
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md
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response 128 of 156:
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Sep 26 12:39 UTC 2002 |
Good choice. I like all three of those pieces, but I'm crazy about
Coptic Light. I think I might've entered an intemperate rave about it
up there somewhere.
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dbratman
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response 129 of 156:
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Sep 26 21:58 UTC 2002 |
"Piano and String Quartet" is the Feldman work I know best, and the
work that originally sold me on this composer. I picked it up in the
first place because I like the quintet for piano & strings as a
combination of instruments.
For what it's worth, it strikes me, while listening to it, as very much
resembling, and in the same spirit as, the music of LaMonte Young, the
original minimalist, and a good bit of Terry Riley's too. It's far
closer to their work in style and spirit than any of them are like
Glass and Reich. Broadly speaking, these three composers are out to
contemplate the universe, slowly; while Glass and Reich are urban
jitterbugs. (Riley's "In C" may at first sound like an urban jitterbug
work, but not taken as a whole.)
None of this is to deny Feldman's distinctive individuality, that all
great composers have, or to claim that anybody necessarily influenced
anybody else.
Of course Feldman denied being a minimalist. So have Riley, Reich,
Glass, John Adams ... all with equally good reason. It's a broad brush
that would call Beethoven, Weber, Brahms, and Wagner all "Romantics".
Nevertheless it's a useful box and it will continue to be used.
Whether you like the term or not, Feldman and the canonical minimalists
were all equally part of a startling revolution towards simplicity, of
making minimal means serve for maximum effect, in complete opposition
to, and against the vehement objections of, the highly complex
expressionist orthodoxy of their day. In that, all these composers are
alike, as much as any group of individual geniuses can be alike, and
really no two more alike or unalike than any other two.
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md
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response 130 of 156:
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Sep 26 22:28 UTC 2002 |
The October BBC Music mag has a review of an Abbado/BPO live
performance CD of Mahler's 9th in which there is 40 seconds (!) of
silence after the end of the adagio before the applause starts. Jeez.
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md
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response 131 of 156:
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Sep 27 12:23 UTC 2002 |
[With five minutes to spare before I had to leave for the evening, I
logged on to enter the above comment about the Abbado/BPO Mahler CD and
there was dbratman's thought-provoking response about Feldman-as-
minimalist. I hate it when that happens. Anyway... I'll enter a new
item where we can resume this fascinating (at least to me) discussion.]
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dbratman
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response 132 of 156:
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Sep 27 20:55 UTC 2002 |
I'd like the occasional company of concertgoers with the combination of
respect and awe evident in the description in resp:130
I find that, after a really moving and gripping performance, an
interval of, not 40 to be sure, but maybe 5 or 10, seconds often
elapses during which I collect myself before I'm ready to applaud.
Needless to say, many of the rest of them are well into it by then.
Worse still are the ones who start applauding before the piece is over,
particularly with "fake-ending" works like Sibelius's Fifth or
Weber's "Invitation to the Dance". Fortunately that habit is a bit on
the decline, at least in concerts I attend. Partly this decline is due
to conductors being more careful to communicate via body language that
it ain't over yet.
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md
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response 133 of 156:
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Sep 27 21:59 UTC 2002 |
Sometimes after a piece like the Mahler 9th one clap in the silence is
all it takes to break the spell and get everyone started. I never like
to be the one to start the applause. Let someone else take that
responsibility. On the other hand, I don't think I could've resisted
in this case. I'd've cracked after 20 seconds, tops. 40 seconds after
the end of Mahler's 9th I'd've had my coat on and been out the door
alfreakinready.
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dbratman
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response 134 of 156:
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Sep 28 00:23 UTC 2002 |
Oh, well, if you're going to be that way <g>, if it was Mahler's Ninth
I'd not have been at the concert in the first place.
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mary
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response 135 of 156:
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Sep 28 11:34 UTC 2002 |
Good, more room for me. ;-)
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dbratman
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response 136 of 156:
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Sep 30 20:23 UTC 2002 |
More room for Mahler, too; he sprawls all over the place. Mahler is
the musical equivalent of the guy on the bus who sits with his knees so
far apart he pushes his neighbors off the program.
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mary
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response 137 of 156:
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Sep 30 22:04 UTC 2002 |
I'll take a guy who lets his legs fall wherever they may over one
who keeps them crossed, anyday. Guys who cross their legs while seated
spend too much time contemplating which socks to wear.
Mahler tells stories. Long stories. Maybe too long for most.
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dbratman
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response 138 of 156:
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Oct 1 00:27 UTC 2002 |
It's not length. It's sprawl. "Tells stories" may be the clue,
because music that tells stories tends to sprawl. (Think: opera.)
Music that just is, like sculpture, tends not to sprawl, however long
it may be.
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md
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response 139 of 156:
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Nov 1 14:34 UTC 2002 |
Morton Feldman: Violin and String Quartet. Rangzen Quartet, with
Christina Fong playing the third violin. It's a two-CD set on the
OgreOgress label, packaged in an attractively flimsy paperboard and
plastic folder from which a "Free Tibet Now!" sticker fell when I first
opened it. ("Rangzen" evidently means "independence":
http://www.rangzen.org/ is the web site of the International Tibet
Independence Movement.)
Two CDs, because this one-movement piece is two hours long. It's
typical late Feldman: little one-, two- or three-note figures in the
soloist against scraps of chords in the quartet, very slow and
deliberate, pianissimo throughout. You have to be willing to let the
music work on your mind at its own pace.
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md
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response 140 of 156:
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Feb 3 14:24 UTC 2003 |
Looks like Harmoney House Classical is staying open a while longer, as
is the bigger store down Woodward from them. I picked up three CDs at
the classical store last week: the latest Samuel Barber CD in the Naxos
series, a Naxos Kabalevsky CD, and a two-CD set of Robert Casadesus
playing Ravel. (I guess that makes it four CDs in total.)
Anyone who is old enough will remember Columbia's three-LP set of
Casadesus performing Ravel's complete piano music. The three LP
slipcovers (sleeves? dust jackets? what did we call them? I've
forgotten already) were a familiar sight to me when I was a kid. One
was pink, one was yellow and one was blue. 1950-style graphic of wire-
figure seated at piano. Huge word "ravel" in lowercase while letters.
Anyway, I had to have this CD remastering, and I'm not disappointed.
The sound is excellent and Casadesus is in top form. He is joined by
his wife Gaby on Ma Mere l'Oye and by Zino Francescatti on the Berceuse
sur le nom de Gabriel Faure. There is also a performance of the "Left
Hand" concerto with Ormandy/Philadelphia which I had never heard. Not
a great recording of that piece (I like Boulez/Entrement), but the solo
piano music is wonderful. These recodings were originally released in
1947, 1948 and 1952.
The Barber CD has the Piano Concerto, Die Natali, Medea's Meditation
and Dance of Vengeance, and the Commando March. Barber, who was a
competent pianist but hardly a virtuoso, played the last movement of
the piano concerto at half speed while he was composing it. He didn't
believe it when the soloist, John Browning, said it was impossible to
play at the indicated tempo. Barber took the score to his friend
Vladimir Horowitz and asked him what he thought. Horowitz pronounced
the finale unplayable. Barber (probably grumbling all the way) rewrote
the worst parts of the finale to accomodate Browning. It still sounds
unplayable to me, despite the evidence of my ears. I have all of this
music on LP, even the Commando March, but the CD is still worth having.
The Kabalevsky CD has Colas Breugnon, The Comedians and Romeo &
Juliet. The Colas Breugnon overture is famous, but the rest of the
piece isn't as good, imho, and isn't heard as much. The Comedians is
an absolutely wonderful piece of light classical music. It's like a
little anthology of Soviet mannerisms. Romeo and Juliet I don't like
as much. The liner notes reveal that Kabalevsky was something of an
informer and a backstabber during the Stalin era. More evidence that
bad people can write good music.
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keesan
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response 141 of 156:
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Feb 4 03:49 UTC 2003 |
White paper dust jacket inside colored cardboard sleeve? Most used records
have them both facing the same direction so you can get the record in and out
faster, which of course lets the dust in.
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dbratman
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response 142 of 156:
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Feb 4 17:28 UTC 2003 |
I've heard some of Kabalevsky's symphonies and other major concert
music. If you haven't, you're not missing too much. He had a minor
gift for lighter stuff, and "The Comedians" is indeed delightful
(better even than most of Shostakovich's work in that vein), but Kab
seems never to have matched it.
I don't think I've heard the rest of Colas Breugnon, but the overture
is played by itself enough to make one suspicious that the rest doesn't
measure up. Of the class of exceedingly obscure larger works with
exceedingly famous extracts, the one case I know where the larger work
is definitely as good as the extract is the "Suite algerienne" by Saint-
Saens, from which comes the "French Military March". The rest of the
suite is good too, but it's remarkably hard to find.
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md
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response 143 of 156:
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Apr 15 17:23 UTC 2003 |
A CD called "Silencio" featuring Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata
Baltica. Here is a review of it from a German web site which I ran
through the AltaVista Babel Fish translator, which is all this piece of
crap deserves. I agree with the deutschesreviewer entirely, aber the
Part as unlistenable as the rest of it I found.
Silencio
Gidon Kremer (violin), Tatjana Grindenko (violin), Eri Klas, Kremerata
Baltica
Nonesuch/Warner Classics 0 75597 95822 5
(68 min., taken up 9 & 11/99)
---------------
I must carry out for the Philip Glass apology instaendig geschmaehten
by me. Yes, I admit it, I him as the most boring all boring composer
had always regarded. When hearing "company" the piece mentioned on
these CD was also first confirmed mine for judgement irrefutably held:
the usual cloudy-intimate Einheitsgedudel for Streicher. Then however I
was instructed painfully, very painfully, a better one: by Vladimir
Martynow and its work "Come in!". Flauschig sweet harmonies to hit
terribly sentimental melodies, which refuse constantly, possibly a way -
in addition troestlich the Celesta rings in regular intervals. Film
scenes urge itself up: After had giving family puts Smith in the
Christamas Eve blessedly to the peace. And then the whole is repeated
also still painful siebenundzwanzig minutes long around other time.
According to introduction text this music represents the search
for heaven in own. The ticking wood block then probably symbolizes a
knocking on the sky gate. May with this Erbauungskitsch become blessed
who wants, I recommends him instead of Schaefchen count as a falling
asleep assistance.
One could check off these CD provided in the supplement with
artistically guaranteed terribly valuable black-and-white photos and
meaning meanings quotations from Kremer to Cage as typical product of
the Meditationswelle, would contain her not also of Arvo Paerts "Tabula
rasa". In these 1977 Paert a masterpiece completed Concerto grosso well-
behaved composition created, whose suggestive strength it later never
reached more. Certainly, also in the second sentence of "Tabula rasa"
nothing develops, but Paert succeeds it here with extremely economical
means to evoke a condition from absolute timelessness to hypnotisch,
asketisch, as it were entmaterialisiert. That is mile far distant for
fashionable music motivated religiously by the devotion float so many.
, here a fascinating bringing in of large mental clarity, which
can be considered from now on as reference, succeeds to the dedication
carriers and interpreters of the premiere, Gidon Kremer, Tatjana
Grindenko and the conductor Eri Klas. But I would have rather seen it
in better neighbourhood.
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md
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response 144 of 156:
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Apr 15 17:52 UTC 2003 |
On a lighter note, I got a deal on a CPO label CD of Roland Kluttig
conducting the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin in a performance of
Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett.
A chamber piece for 23 musicians, For Samuel Beckett is one of the last
things Feldman wrote before his untimely death in 1987. The winds and
strings play overlapping blocks of chords while the tuned percussion
tinkle away arrhythmically and atonally. It is in the same genre as
Coptic Light, but the sound is more solid, less ethereal. It occurred
to me as I was listening to it that in a weird way it resembles some of
the music of Alan Hovhaness, of all people. Not much, but it's there.
But it's true, as one critic put it, that Feldman was "an
unreconstructed modernist," so if you think Hovhaness is the cat's
pajamas you'll probably find Feldman unlistenable.
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dbratman
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response 145 of 156:
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Apr 18 00:01 UTC 2003 |
Re the German review, anyone with that strong an antipathy to
minimalism is useless at reviewing a CD of minimalist music, the same
way someone who hates eggs would be useless at reviewing the quiche or
omelet offerings at a restaurant.
"Einheitsgedudel" is a wonderful epithet, much more colorful than its
English translation (which would be roughly "mechanical doodlings"),
but an essay on "why I hate minimalism," using a given CD as an
example, says nothing about whether it's good as minimalism. My own
reaction is that anything hated so much by someone who hated "Company"
that much, has got to be good. "Company", which of all Glass's works
is surely the one least susceptible to a charge of being too long for
its musical content, is a delicate, poised and balanced work -- and,
ironically, it's Glass's music for a play by Samuel Beckett.
In your own voice, you note that Feldman's Beckett resembles Hovhaness
a little, but you add that "if you think Hovhaness is the cat's pajamas
you'll probably find Feldman unlistenable." Well, I'm very fond of
Hovhaness, less so of Feldman, but I hardly find Feldman unlistenable;
and I wonder if anyone who thinks Hovhaness is the antithesis of
modernism has heard the aleatoric string crescendos that were a regular
feature of his work in the 1960s. In the same weird way, they resemble
something by Scelsi.
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md
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response 146 of 156:
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Apr 18 11:47 UTC 2003 |
I used to love Hovhaness' music more than I do now, but I still like it
a lot. It's been especially gratifying to see the Schwarz/Seattle
series come out with all those pieces I never heard programmed or
recorded. The first thing I ever heard of his was a concert
performance of his Mysterious Mountain symphony back in the 1950s. It
had a powerful effect on my young mind, partly because it proceeded
from the same Renaissance polyphony as Vaughan Williams' Tallis
Fantasia, which I was already smitten by. Talk about lush! But this
wasn't the tedious chromaticism of Strauss or Mahler or the rest, it
was as clean and bracing as the cold mountain water that ripples
throught it in those celesta figures. (When Sibelius was composing his
6th Symphony, which starts with a limpid Palestrina-like passage, he
said it would be "like a glass of cold spring water," as opposed to
the "colored cocktails" being served up by Strauss at the time.)
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dbratman
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response 147 of 156:
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Apr 18 17:10 UTC 2003 |
Michael - yes, that's the distinction I was making in my recent post in
the Bartok topic.
I first came across Hovhaness in a purely abstract way. The
development of my tastes in 20th-century music consisted of a running
battle with the musical orthodoxy of the time, which was circa 1970.
The composers being pushed in the books on modern music I read - the
Impressionists, the Second Vienna school, the Darmstadt school - I
mostly detested. And the modern composers I liked - Sibelius,
Shostakovich, the Cheltenham school, the American "prairie" school -
were mostly dismissed sneeringly in the books.
I had noticed that being dismissed by the academics didn't keep the
second group from prospering in the record catalogs. And I also
noticed that the second group tended to write lots of symphonies, and
the first group mostly didn't. So I took to discovering modern
composers by scouring the Schwann catalog for symphonists; and that, O
nobly born, is how I discovered Hovhaness, who had already written over
20 of them, had a long column in Schwann, and wasn't mentioned in the
books on modern music -at all-. With a record like that, I knew his
music -had- to be good, even before I ever listened to any of it.
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dbratman
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response 148 of 156:
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Apr 18 17:10 UTC 2003 |
(In subsequent years I found that this technique did not always work.
For instance, there is Richard Nanes.)
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coyote
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response 149 of 156:
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Apr 20 04:26 UTC 2003 |
I bought the "Silencio" CD when Harmony House had their massive clearance sale
last fall, and have been quite pleased with it. I especially liked Tabula
Rasa, and in fact it might be my favorite Part work [that I've heard].
There's no accounting for taste, I guess.
I used to love Hovhaness's music a lot, but some of its charm faded on me
after playing one of his compositions. When playing this piece (Lake
Samish), instead of gaining a greater understanding and respect for the
work (which is often the case when I play pieces, e.g. Beethoven 9,
Shostakovich Violin Concerto No. 1), it started to mean less to me. I'm
not sure why, but I think it was that some of the passages were just
unnecessarily awkward, both technically and compositionally. Granted,
this piece was unpublished and so perhaps is uncharicteristically
unpolished (I had to speak to Mrs. Hinako Hovhaness to obtain the score
and parts). It's still a beautiful piece to listen to, but it was a very
different experience to perform it.
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