Mostly I write about popular music, but since I'm married to a classical 
singer I also get lots of classical music in my life.  So I thought I'd 
start a journal, which may amount to little more than a listing of 
artists heard.  Feel free to kibitz.

38 responses total.

The Polish contralto Ewa Podles sang a recital at Mendelsohn on Saturday
night.  Podles made her Ann Arbor debut two years ago when she was 
brought in at the last minute to replace an ailing Cecila Bartoli for 
a big Hill Auditorium concert.  On that program she sang lots of 
coloratura stuff and pretty much wowed everybody.  This year's program, 
however, included no coloratura material -- it was pretty much all 
drama and power.  The program included:  a set of Polish songs by 
Chopin;  a opera-ish cantata on Ariadne by Hayden;  a set of Tchaikovsky
songs;  and the finale was a set of four songs about Death by Mussorgsky.
 
The piano accompanist was Garrick Ohlson.  Curiously, he was a late 
addition to the program: the tickets for the event listed a different
pianist.  Ohlson is a solo performer in his own right -- usually 
recital accompanists don't have their own independent careers --
so I'm guessing that he was doing this for fun.  He had a big smile 
on for much of the evening, he seemed to be really enjoying himself, 
and Leslie was impressed with his playing.

 ((( Classicalmusic #47  <--->  Music #189 )))

I seem to have left out any mention of how expressive and interesting 
Podles is in recital.  Voice recitals can tend to lull me to sleep, but 
she didn't; I had my attention focussed for the entire program.

Podles's usual accompanist, her husband Jerzy Marchwinski, is 
unfortunately no longer able to play the dewmanding concert schedule, 
although he does still teach.  Garrick Ohlsson was introduced to Podles 
via a cassette sent him by UMS' director of programming, Michael 
Kondziolka, and promptly fell in love with the idea of playing with her, 
even though his solo career is so strong that he need not play 
accompanist to anyone.  There is a nice article in a recent Ann arbor 
news about it.

Personally I prefer new age music. Like techno. I like all sorts of it, they
are many different styles such as: trance, house, drum n' bass, jungle and
much more. TO learn more about this music visit http://zap.to/hexion

  That's probably the first time I've heard someone use the term
  "new age" to include techno, drum'n'bass, etc..

  Usually when *I* think "new age" I think Windham Hill, Enya, and
  <shudder> Yanni..

Ramblings from radio I heard on the drive home last night...

A long violin & piano piece turned out to be Beethoven's Violin Sonata #9,
by Anne-Sophie Mutter.  (I'm always getting her confused with the singer
Anne-Sofie von Otter, which does NOT help with web searches.)
I've drifted through an album of Beethoven violin sonatas before -- 
one of those chance encounters in a record shop -- and in general I've
been feeling that Beethoven is one of those pathways which I need to 
pursue.   
 
Everybody's got a web page.  http://anne-sophie-mutter.de/a
And I see in cdnow.com that the new Mutter recording of the Beethoven
violin sonatas is a four (?) disc set, judging by the price.
 
Following that was one of Brahms' Hungarian Dances.  This was an 
orchestral setting, conducted by Fritz Reiner; I'd had a vague 
memory that these were piano pieces originally, and I thought I had 
a recording of them.  Am I wrong?   

I know the Lizst Hungarian Rhapsody started as a
piano piece, but I don't know about the Brahms.

Re the Beethoven violin sonatas, it never fails
to surprise me what a great tunesmith Beethoven
was.  You tend to think of him in terms of vast
structures and noble ideas, but he wrote more
whistleable tunes than any other composer.

Maybe I'm just not listening to the right Beethoven.  I'm a big fan of his
- mostly the string quartets - but I wouldn't call him "most whistleable"...

Brahms's Hungarian Dances were written by him for piano 4-hands.  He 
arranged a few of them for orchestra, but I think most of the familiar 
orchestrations are by somebody else.  I think that his Haydn Variations 
also began as a piano piece.  (Most of the orchestral music by Grieg 
and Satie is arrangements of piano pieces - in Grieg's case, he did his 
own arrangements; for Satie, usually Debussy did.)

MSU's classical radio station left me with a pretty little problem today.
It was a lovely piano sonata they played on my drive to work.
Their website at wkar.org has the playlists nicely arranged, so it 
was no problem to find out that what I had heard was 
Muzio Clementi's "Sonata in f-sharp minor for Piano, Op.25, No.5"
and that the pianist was Maria Tipo, and this was an Angel/EMI 
recording.
 
Alas, it doesn't seem to be in print, and very little by Maria Tipo 
seems to be in print -- just one VoxBox.
 
Any comments on either Maria Tipo or Muzio Clementi would be welcomed...
 
A few minutes later the station played another winner:  violinist 
Gil Shaham playing a "Carmen Fantasy" on themes from the opera.
This turns out to be from a Berlin Philharmonic disc with Claudio
Abbado conducting, and it's a gala with a program of all Carmen material.
This one will be no trouble to buy, if I want it.

According to _The Lives of the Great Composers_, "Muzio Clementi...set modern
piano technique on its way. He specialized in virtuoso work, especially thirds
and octaves" (It's more complimentary about his piano playing than his 
composition; somewhere else it says he anticipated the technique of Chopin,
if i recall correctly)

He was a contemporary of Mozart and once got into a fight with him over
who was the greater keyboard player. (From the same book)

Clementi wrote a bunch of nice Sonatinas, which are often used today in
teaching piano students - I played one of them a few years ago.

Sorry, that's about all I know...

Indeed, teaching Clementi is considered standard piano pedagogy.

Re #11:
This probably won't help you much, but I ran into a similar problem with
hearing something on the radio, looking for it, and finding that it was
out of print.  SKR looked it up for me and said that there was only one
recording made and that it was out of print.  In some strange stroke of
luck, I had gone to King's Keyboard later that week to purchase some sheet
music, and was glancing through their CD collection, when I happened upon the
out-of-print recording I was looking for.  Seeing as the piece you are looking
for is a keyboard piece, it wouldn't hurt to check at King's.

Clementi was a contemporary of Beethoven's.  He lived mostly in England, 
and wrote a lot of very light and very pleasant piano music.  His works 
are so short that catalogs may not tell you whether a particular one 
you're looking for is on a particular CD, so it may take some hunting 
down.  (Same is true for Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas, only 
some of which are quite delightful.)

Re the Carmen Fantasy: if you like orchestral arrangements of the music 
from Carmen, then run, do not walk, and buy a copy of the "Carmen 
Ballet" by Rodoin Shchedrin, which is an arrangement of themes from the 
opera using the most damnably _imaginative_ orchestrations you ever did 
hear.

(Hey, *all* of Scarlatti's harpsichord sonatas are delightful...)

Not necessarily _en_masse_ ...

True, there are about 500 of them.

Thanks for the suggestions on where to find this CD of Maria Tipo playing
a Clementi sonata.  E-mail correspondance with the radio station revealed 
that this is a French disc, and I found a listing which is *probably*
the right album on a French CD shoppe in Switzerland, www.planetelaser.com
or www.planete-laser.com.  It's on order, we should know in a week or two
if I got the right disc.

Argh.  The Swiss/French CD dealer reports that it is out of print.
As no other web searches turned up *anything*, my guess is that my chances
of getting this disc are pretty small.  I'll probably get someone else's
recording of the Clementi sonata.   There is a Hyperion recording 
over at Where House Records; I forget the name of the pianist, no one
I'd heard of before.
 
(I mean, you never can tell what will turn up.  I found a Duke Ellington
LP at Encore Music after looking for it for 17 years....  but I digress...)

Did you try Berkshire Record Outlet? (www.berkshirerecoutlet.com)  
Great source for deleted classical CDs.

Thanks for the recommendation, David; I had not heard of them.
Berkshire does not list Maria Tipo's Clementi sonatas disc, but they 
do list a collection of Bach partitas which I might try.

Back to Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Beethoven Violin Sonatas.  
(resp:7)  The set of four CDs has a premium price on it, *gulp*.  
I'm tempted to substitute the 1974 recording of the "Kreutzer" and 
"Spring" sonatas, by Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Pearlman, which has
just been remastered and reissed at a budget price, $11.

Maybe I should pick that up.  I own virtually no violin sonatas.

Why is it that classical CD prices seem to vary so much more widely than other
CD prices?

Because classical CDs sell more elderly backstock.  Look at the CD 
prices for pop music from the 40s and 50s, and you'll see a lot of 
really cheap reissues.

That's part of it, but there's no pop equivalent to the Naxos line, 
for example, which is usually priced at $5-$6 for modern digital 
recordings, usually recorded by artists you never heard of before, or 
at least ones outside the star system.

Now that I think about it, that may be partly because a recording of the
Moonlight Sonata by someone you've never heard of is still _The Moonlight
Sonata,_ making it a safer bet than an album of original songs by a rock band
you've never heard of.  

OTOH, you've already *got* five recordings of the Moonlight Sonata, no?  So
if you don't already know of some reason that it's worth buying, you may just
decide not to pay $15.

Well, right.....but even the people who don't have five recordings probably
know what it sounds like, and whether they'll like it.  Or even just know that
it's a classic piece with a pretty name that they "should" own.  

Wait, we're arguing the same point, aren't we?

Well, just stick an "also" in up there somewhere.

NP: a Maria Tipo CD which I got in the mail this week.  This is an 
Italian CD, ordered from www.alapage.com in France during their big 
June sale.  The program is Mozart sonatas, a Beethoven sonata, and 
some stuff by Chopin.  Solo piano, of course, in front of an audience.
 
I rather like her expressiveness and will look to see what else I can find
by her.  Information on the web is sketchy; she is from Naples, and one 
brief mention described her as being in the Italian tradition of Toscanini,
which I think means that she takes great liberties with tempos and meter.
She won her first major prize in 1952 but won several more in the late
1990s, so she must be closing in on 70 years old.  The CD I have is an 
analog recording from 1979.
 
(I started my quest for Maria Tipo almost a year ago, see resp:11 above.)

I just peeked in at amazon.co.uk -- been doing a lot of online CD 
browsing today -- and I see that they now carry a two-CD set of 
Maria Tipo playing Clementi sonatas.  This is on the Warner Fonit
Centra label -- I'm not even sure what country this disc would be 
from, Italy maybe?   It's a two CD set so it's not clear that it would
be the same performance as the EMI cd I was originally searching for.
This is a 2000 release.  

NP: a disc of oboe concertos by Johann Wilhelm Hertel.  I heard one of
these on the Michigan State classical radio station in late December
and I liked it enough to scribble down the name.  Hertel's life
overlaps with Bach's, I think, 1727-1789, and so these are pretty
baroque sounding.  I never heard of Hertel before and the liner notes
indicate that he's not often rememebered now.
 
The lead oboe player on this German issue from 1991 is Burkhard 
Glaetzner.  This item might be going out of print; I had a copy in 
my shopping cart at Amazon.com and the next day it was no longer 
in my shopping cart, and all traces of the disk had vanished from 
Amazon.  I got it (for $5 less!) from cdconnection.com.

With a birthdate of 1727, Hertel was close in age to Haydn, and of a 
very different generation to Bach.  (By the time Bach died, in 1750, 
Baroque music was already considered quaint and old-fashioned.)  But I 
don't know his music and can't say more of him than that.

Yeah, Leslie pointed that out, and she says it's Classical in sound.
Never trust anything you read on the Internet.

including resp: 35 ?  ;)

Especially response 35.  

Ba-dum.  Very early Haydn (before 1760) can still have a faintly 
Baroquish tinge to it, especially to the untutored ear.  Could apply to 
Hertel, depending on when he wrote what you heard.

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