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| Author |
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| 25 new of 156 responses total. |
md
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response 25 of 156:
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Dec 8 22:40 UTC 1997 |
The BBC Music CD this month is the first part of Handel's Messiah,
in an arrangement made by Mozart, of all people. Mozart updated
the orchestra and did some interesting things with the vocal parts.
He rearranged "For Unto Us" so that the four soloists do all the
heavy lifting ("For unto us a child is bohohohohohohohohohohohohohohoho-
hohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohohoh-
hohohohohorn!") and the full chorus comes in only on "Wonderful
counsellor," etc. It was so fascinating listening to the soloists
struggling that the first chorus entrance took me completely by
surprise. It made my hair stand on end.
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md
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response 26 of 156:
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Dec 12 12:07 UTC 1997 |
There are some well-known compositions of which there exist only
one or two decent recordings. Pieces like Stravinsky's Rite of
Spring and Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra have defeated such
conductors as Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan. (I once
heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Erich Leinsdorf fall
apart during Le Sacre at a Tanglewood concert. Leinsdorf had to
stop them during the Danse Sacrale after the strings entered on the
wrong beat, and then start them up again.) The best recorded
performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra is Fritz Reiner and
the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Incredibly, it's held that title
for 40 years now. I used to think it was just me, but lately I've
read a few reviews that confirm my belief. Pierre Boulez and the
Cleveland Orchestra come close, but no cigar. Boulez/Cleveland
do excel on Le Sacre, however.
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remmers
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response 27 of 156:
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Dec 12 17:54 UTC 1997 |
(Hm, I will have to dust off my 40-year-old vinyl recording of
Reiner's rendition of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra one of
these years and listen to it again.)
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md
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response 28 of 156:
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Dec 13 04:13 UTC 1997 |
Hey, you have that LP with the abstract scrawl on the cover?
That's an icon of my youth. Mine is monaural, alas, so I had
to get the CD rerelease of it.
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remmers
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response 29 of 156:
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Dec 15 15:11 UTC 1997 |
I believe it is that one, and that it is stereo. I'll have to
dig it out to be sure; haven't played it for years, and a lot
of my vinyl LP's are in a hard-to-get-at place.
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md
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response 30 of 156:
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Jan 10 15:06 UTC 1998 |
I just picked up a CD of music by David Diamond, an American
composer now in his eighties. It features the Adagio from his
recent (1991) Eleventh Symphony and his "Rounds" for string
orchestra. The Adagio is a long Brucknerian or Mahlerian slow
movement. It makes me want to hear the whole symphony. "Rounds"
is absolutely wonderful. Diamond composed it at the end of WWII
on a commission from Dmitri Mitropoulos, who said he needed "something
happy." "Rounds" is a sort of cross between Aaron Copland and Roy
Harris, but with a wicked intellectual twinkle in its eye that you
rarely get in either of those composers' music. Definitely worth
trying out. Now I have to start filling in my Diamond recordings,
which have been limited to a couple of chamber pieces.
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md
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response 31 of 156:
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Jan 31 01:55 UTC 1998 |
Albany Records has a new CD of re-releases of three old monaural
recordings issued by Columbia in the early 1950s: Walter Piston's
Symphony No. 4, Roy Harris's Symphony No. 7, and William Schuman's
Symphony No. 6, all by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
This is one of the few mono CDs I've acquired. (The other ones are
along the lines of Duke Ellington favorites from the 1940s, Stan
Kenton's "Cuban Fire," and so on.). I would much rather have spiffy new
digital recordings of these three symphonies, but the sad truth is that
this is the only CD of any of them currently available. As far as I can
tell these were the only recordings of them ever made. If that's the
case, then between 1960 at the latest, and 1997 when this CD was
released, you could not get this music in any format.
So what was lost? Well, the Piston and Harris symphonies are both
lovely. Piston's 4th is an easygoing work, very tuneful and memorable.
It sounds lightweight to my ears, but no more so than, say,
Mendelssohn's "Italian" symphony, and for the same reasons. Harris's
7th is a strange seductive work. There's something sultry, almost
tropical, about the way it opens. There are irregular dance-like
rhythms later on, and the music is violent in some places and almost
childlike in others, but by that time you've been completely hypnotized
and are ready to believe anything Harris tells you.
But William Schuman's 6th is the star of this show. It consists of a
single 30-minute-long movement in which Schuman takes a simple theme and
repeats it in various harmonic, rhythmic and orchestral guises. (The
liner notes refer to the symphony as a "passacaglia," but I'm not sure
it's exactly that.) The tension of the slower sections is periodically
shattered by up-tempo passages featuring big-band-like ensemble playing
and jazzy percussion outbursts, complete with rim shots. The symphony
ends on a note of brooding desolation. After the premiere in 1951, one
critic wrote that Schuman's 6th "might well be called a requiem for the
twentieth century...grim music, terrifying in its psychological
implications, relentless as a Greek tragedy, and irresistibly logical in
its development." Eugene Ormandy called the symphony "one of the most
wonderful and difficult I have ever played." The absence of this
masterpiece from the catalogues for nearly 40 years has always puzzled
me. Maybe someone will record it again now?
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md
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response 32 of 156:
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Jan 31 02:00 UTC 1998 |
The CD in the current BBC Music magazine is titled "Modern Classics,"
but it features only two actual classics: Stravinsky's Les noces and
Barber's Adagio for Strings.
The Barber Adagio is given a surprisingly out-of-tune performance by
Eugene Ormandy and what sounds like fifteen or twenty of the
Philadelphia Orchestra's strings. It's interesting how the performance
tradition of the Adagio has changed over the years. It's a little like
Madonna's journey from The Material Girl to The Diva. This recording is
in the older tradition and valuable if only for that reason -- although
Arturo Toscanini, Vladimir Golschmann and Howard Hanson, to name only
three, all did it better.
The version of Les noces here is the one for solo singers, chorus,
percussion, and four pianos. What makes this CD valuable is that it's
the legendary 1959 recording with Igor Stravinsky conducting, and the
four pianos played by -- get this -- Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Lukas
Foss and Roger Sessions. I've seen snapshots of Stravinsky posing in
the studio with the four American composers, but I've never heard the
recording. Alas, it's kind of disappointing. This is due possibly to
faulty engineering. The voice solos are strident and the pianos and
percussion are all but inaudible in places. There was a wonderful
definitive Les noces LP produced a few years later by Stravinsky/Craft
featuring two or three different versions, including the one for
cimbaloms rather than pianos, which I like best. I think it also had
the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Highly recommended if you can find
it.
There are two other listenable tracks on the CD: The "Maskarade"
Overture by Carl Nielsen and a lushly colorful piece for baritone and
orchestra called Les espaces du sommeil by Witold Lutoslawski. Les
espaces deserves to become a modern classic if it isn't already. I
can't say the same for the remaining music on the CD: two negligible
hymns by John Tavener; a movement from a work called "Glasshole," I
believe, by minimalist merdemeister Philip Glass; and an embarrassing
item called "Song of Peace" from "Symphony 1997: Heaven Earth Mankind"
composed for the Beijing takeover of Hong Kong last year by a composer
named Tan Dun -- which is like being named "Blanche White" or "Melanie
Black," although who knows (or cares, after listening to this) what it
means in Chinese?
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md
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response 33 of 156:
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Mar 26 11:41 UTC 1998 |
I just picked up the new CD of Pierre Boulez conducting the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Mahler's 9th symphony. The last
time I heard this peice all the way through was at a Bernstein/NYPhil
concert 30 years ago. It bored me to death with its schmaltzy
obviousness and its "ooga-booga!" pseudo-scariness in the scherzo,
rather like a tedious not-too-bright uncle who likes to tell
ghost stories you listen to because you're polite. But, as always
with Mahler, the conductors add more scmaltz than the composer
ever put there. If anyone can make me appreciate this music (which
is said to be one of the towering masterpieces of late romantic
symphonic music) it's Pierre Boulez. I haven't gone past the
first two movements yet, but so far so good. It isn't quite as
gripping as the 6th symphony, which is still my favorite, but it's
quite beautiful in places. The sound on this DG CD is awesome.
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mary
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response 34 of 156:
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Mar 26 14:58 UTC 1998 |
We've discussed this piece before so my comments are going
around for about third time here, at least. Mahler's Ninth
is a very personal piece. I've enjoyed listening to it
in concert but where it works best is on headphones, in the
dark, all the way through (only breaking for the disk swap).
Once every few years is about right. I pull it out for when
my heart needs to (again) understand death.
Of course, I'm a sucker for see-it-coming-miles-away ghost
stories too.
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md
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response 35 of 156:
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Mar 26 22:37 UTC 1998 |
DG puts the whole thing on one disk. I don't know if that
means Boulez's tempi are fast or what. The timings are:
I. 29'17
II. 16'03
III. 12'38
IV. 21'25
Total performance lasts 79 minutes and 46 seconds. I'm still
slowly working my way through it.
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mary
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response 36 of 156:
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Mar 27 01:09 UTC 1998 |
I have the 1982 Berlin Philharmonic, at the Berlin Festival,
Karajan conducting.
I: 28'10
II: 16'38
III:12'45
IV: 26'49
I have to get up and change disks. How rude.
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md
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response 37 of 156:
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Mar 27 11:16 UTC 1998 |
Karajan lingers just a bit over the adagio, doesn't he? Hmmm...
Boulez is such a my-way-or-the-highway sort of guy, I can't believe
he would speed up the tempi just to cram the whole thing onto one
disk. Who knows, though?
The current BBC Music magazine is devoted to conductors. Boulez is
mentioned only briefly. I doubt if he's much to the editors' tastes.
They do recommend his recording of Bartok's Wooden Prince and
Cantata Profana as one of the top 50. Karajan fares somewhat better,
at least in terms of words devoted to him, but one of the articles
is rather snide, claiming that Karajan "anesthetized" music in his
later performances and recordings. Part of their rancor toward him
seems to proceed from the fact that he was an unapologetic Nazi before
and during the war. Anyway, my impression of Karajan is that he was
much more literal and much less histrionic with his music than many
people think. In other words, despite his jet-setting glamor-boy
image, he was closer to someone like Pierre Boulez than to Bernstein.
He respected the music too much to use the podium as a dance floor.
[In this same issue, Boulez is quoted as saying he would never
conduct Brahms because he felt Brahms was "bourgeois and complacent."
I know exactly what he means, but I think those characteristics are
virtues. Good topic for an item, if I thought anyone in the world
but me was interested.]
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mary
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response 38 of 156:
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Mar 28 03:26 UTC 1998 |
I'm interested. Not sure I'd have anything to add. But
I'm interested.
Really.
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srw
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response 39 of 156:
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Apr 6 17:24 UTC 1998 |
Same here.
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md
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response 40 of 156:
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May 4 11:00 UTC 1998 |
Sony has rereleased Berstein's recordings of William Schuman's
3rd, 5th and 8th symphonies. The 5th is called "String Symphony."
This is the earlier recording of the 3rd, not the one you see
coupled with Roy Harris's 3rd. Despite the analog sound, I like
it better. Much more dynamic, brings out the youthful energy of
the piece.
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md
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response 41 of 156:
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May 25 20:24 UTC 1999 |
In addition to the 5th, 6th, 7th and 9th symphonies
of Mahler, Pierre Boulez has now recorded the 1st.
I've always liked the 1st, especially the laendler in
the 2nd movement. It's so hearty and outdoorsy.
Boulez takes it on the fast side, which he makes
up for with a slow third movement. This music is
not what I think of when I think of Boulez, but he does
a nice job with it.
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md
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response 42 of 156:
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Sep 17 21:40 UTC 1999 |
I kept seeing this CD at Harmony House of several
different arrangements of Barber's Adagio for
Strings: string orchestra; string quartet; full
chorus (as a setting of the Agnus Dei); flute and
synthesizer; brass choir; massed clarinets; chamber
orchestra; organ. I never bought it, because I have
all three of Barber's own versions (string quartet,
string orchestra, Agnus Dei), and the others sounded
kind of silly. Although I *was* curious what they
sounded like. Not *that* curious, but, well, curious.
So, with a petulant snarl, I pulled it out of the
CD bin at Harmony House yesterday and bought it, finally.
Barber's Adagio for Strings, in case you haven't heard
it, is a slow piece consisting of drawn-out cadences and
long seamless melodic lines. So, the flute, brass and
clarinet versions are all exercises in how long you can
blow into a wind instrument and not take a breath before
you turn purple and your lungs implode and you fall
writhing to the floor. The solutions range from editing
the breaths out electronically, to playing certain sections
really fast, to playing the whole thing really fast. They
are all extremely funny.
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coyote
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response 43 of 156:
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Sep 18 02:13 UTC 1999 |
The fact that a CD of that nature has been produced it quite depressing to
me... I love Barber's Adagio for Strings, but there is such a thing as
overkill. If you listen to a piece of music over and over like that, it will
eventually lose its power. I own the string orchestra version and the Agnus
Dei version, and have heard the brass choir version on the radio, and so far
the string orchestra version is still by far my favorite.
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dbratman
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response 44 of 156:
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Sep 22 17:42 UTC 1999 |
Ah, but have you seen the similar record produced of different
arrangements of Pachelbel's Canon? (The title, appropriately, is
"Pachelbel's Greatest Hit".) That was pretty amazing in its own right,
especially the pop-song version with Cleo Laine.
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md
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response 45 of 156:
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Sep 22 17:57 UTC 1999 |
Long before the pop version was reached, I would've
run twin power drills into my ears.
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mary
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response 46 of 156:
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Sep 22 22:36 UTC 1999 |
(John just came into my study to see what had me roaring
with laughter.)
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remmers
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response 47 of 156:
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Sep 23 16:11 UTC 1999 |
I heard Cleo Laine's pop-song version of "Pachelbel's Canon"
once. Ed Parmentier, my erstwhile harpsichord teacher, played
it for me once. We both thought it was pretty good. Didn't
hear anything else on the album, though.
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coyote
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response 48 of 156:
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Sep 24 22:19 UTC 1999 |
I haven't heard that... but I have heard a 40 minute synthesized version on
one of those 'classical for relaxation' type albums. I couldn't have thought
of a better way to convince somebody that classical music is boring.
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dbratman
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response 49 of 156:
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Sep 27 21:57 UTC 1999 |
There is no sure way to convince people that classical music is
boring. Jim Svejda, the frank-spoken radio critic, has had a long-
running campaign to convince people that minimalism is boring. The
fact that thousands, maybe millions, of people who'd never otherwise
have listened to classical just love Gorecki's Third and Philip Glass
merely infuriates him.
For my part, the first time I heard Yo-Yo Ma, I thought, "This guy is
the most stultifyingly boring performer I've ever heard. He could kill
off the classical revival all by himself." He still makes me feel that
way, even though nobody seems to share that opinion.
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