This item for my random classical mumblings is linked between
the Classical and Music conferences.   I don't have any particular
expertise in classical music but I bump into a bit of it anyway;
this item might be so I can simultaneously share a few thoughts
with my pals, the rabble in the Music conference, while picking 
the elite brains of the Classical music conference participants.

The previous version of this item is item:classical,47 which is 
also linked as item:music2,189

14 responses total.

BBC Radio 3's program Late Junction played a good bit of Messiaen
this week.  It all seems to have come from one album...
cutting and pasting from what I already wrote:
 
 The Messiaen which "Late Junction" was playing turns out to be 
 two-piano pieces called "Visions de l'Amen."   Interesting stuff.
 The recording they've been playing is a Wergo label issue from 1993,
 with Begona Uriarte and Karl-Hermann Mrongovius playing.  (Who?)
 In catalogs I found a Martha Argerich recording.

So, anybody want to tell me about Messiaen?

No.

I have a nice little Messiaen sampler CD from DG with the rather off-
putting title of "Mystic".  But it's done wonders for my appreciation 
of this composer, who previously rather scared me off.  But I haven't 
yet explored any further.

All I know about him is that he was a devout Catholic, he played organ 
at some church, and he was one of the teachers of Pierre Boulez and 
other French modernists, who revered him like a father.  I tried to 
listen to Turangalila (sp?) but didn't like it much.

He made some interesting attempts at capturing the actual sound of birdsongs,
rather than just writing the sort of cheerful, chirpy flute melody that makes
everyone think "oh, birds."  That makes him pretty cool in my book.  But I
didn't really manage to like Turangalila either.  

In the second movement of his 3rd piano concerto, Bela Bartok used some 
birdsongs he heard while staying at a sanatorium in North Carolina.  
(He suffered from leukemia during his years in the US.)  Two of them 
are distinctly recognizable: the wood thrush (ee-o-lay) and the towhee 
(drink your tee-ee-ee-ee).  The movement has been called a "night 
piece," because that's what Bartok often wrote, but knowing the two 
birds' habits I'd say it's more of a pre-dawn or early evening twilight 
piece at most, if not a broad daylight piece.  There seem to be other 
birds in there, too, but I don't recognize them.  The wood thrush's 
call was also used by Samuel Barber in his oratorio The Lovers.  Barber 
uses it in a much more conventional way, as you might expect, but it's 
still recognizable if you know it's there.  If Turangalila's birdsongs 
are those of actual European birds, I take my hat off to Messiaen even 
though I wouldn't recognize one of them.

Messiaen also wrote a piece called "The Awakening of the Birds" (can't spell
the French title, so I won't bother), that is nothing but transcribed birdsong
for solo piano and chamber orchestra.  It plays birdsongs of French birds as
they would be heard over a 12-hour period from slightly before dawn until
dusk, in order.  It's about 20 minutes long, and it's fascinating.  Messiaen
was also interested in Eastern music and philosophy, as evidenced in such
pieces as the Seven Haikai and the Turangalila-Symphonie.  I love the
Turangalila-Symphony.  Every time I listen to it it feels fresh and new and
I discover new things about it.  The DSO performed it last year, which was
quite a treat, but I'm sorry to report that I've never seen so many people
walk out of a DSO concert before...  Messiaen got into serialism in his later
music, serializing not only pitch, but dynamics, rhythm, articulation, and
other aspects of the music.  I haven't heard any of this phase of his writing,
but I'd expect it to be pretty abrasive.  Messiaen also had synaesthasia (like
Scriabin and... shoot, I'm blanking on other composers), which I had suspected
for a while, since in his writings he frequently describes his music in
colors, but I only learned for sure recently.

I should have talked up tonight's University Symphony Concert
a bit more.  This was a free concert at the Michigan Theater, the
School of Music having been displaced by the Hill Auditorium 
renovations. It included one of my high school
favorites, JSBach's Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor,
and one of my college favorites, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite.
The short opener was one of Beethoven's Leonore Overtures.

Have you ever heard all four of the Leonore/Fidelio overtures in a 
row?  I have an LP with that offering.  Deja vu, see deja vu.

My listening has been turned back a bit towards classical music.
It all started when I had some BBC classical programming tacked on the end of a
 radio recording I was playing in the car.  I was really enjoying having it as
driving music -- remember most of my listening time, two hours per day, takes
place at 75 mph.

About the same time the BBC Proms series of concerts was starting,
and I realized that now that I have Internet access to Radio 3 I 
could listen to some of them.

I'd recommend this BBC site for a series of (mostly) really intelligent 
and interesting programs analyzing and explaining classical pieces.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classical/discover.shtml

Two months and 73 concerts later, the BBC Proms festival is over.
No, I didn't catch all 73 concerts; I don't even think I made it to a
count of 20.  About two-three weeks ago I decided to write off the 
rest of the festival, but then I got roped back in with four real
crowd-pleasers in the last ten days. 
 
#1 -- Anne Sofie von Otter singing Bach and Handel, surrounding an 
      instrumental set by Rameau.

#2 -- A Russian spectacular, with Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements
      (only ok), his ballet Petrushka, and Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade,
      which (this week at least) is my favorite symphonic piece.
 
#3 -- Elgar's Cello Concerto with Yo Yo Ma, and Mussorgsky/Ravel's 
      Pictures at an Exhibition.   I actually missed this show, dammit, 
      because the BBC pulled it down from the replay archives one day
      ahead of schedule, so I went out and bought copies of the pieces
      from that program.
 
#4 -- Last Night Of The Proms.   Someone I was chatting with online had a 
      friend who dismissed the Proms as full of "patriotic twaddle."
      They must have been referring to Last Night, which indeed is loaded
      up with mass-appeal showcases like the Habanera from Carmen.
 
      I got the impression that the end of the show is the same every year:
      a 12-minute setting of British sea songs and a few other folk-oid 
      songs ending with "Rule Brittania," followed by "Jerusalem" and 
      "God Save The Queen."

It was fun.  For next year, can we get the Real Audio bit rate bumped up
a bit, please?  I don't know why "Scherezade" sounded as good as it did;
most of the rest of it, on the replay system, sounded like mushy AM 
radio.

You would be liking Scheherazade even better if you'd heard the San 
Francisco Symphony's performance a few weeks ago.  Bringing the 
orchestra's fine musicianship and Michael Tilson Thomas's massive 
knowledge and sophistication to bear on an old warhorse can really 
bring it to life.  Hearing the solo violin sections on Heifetz's 
Guarneri (now on indefinite loan to the orchestra's concertmaster) was 
only the icing.

BBC Radio 3 has a new gem.  Two hours every weekend of The Early Music 
Show, hosted variously by Lucie Skeaping, Catherine Bott, and one other
person whose name is not familiar to me.  The Saturday show for this 
week -- available on the Radio Player replay system until next Saturday
-- was jaw-droppingly gorgeous recordings by an ensemble called 
L'Arpeggiata performing music by Stefano Landi and Kapsberger.
 
Sunday's show, a live recording by Emma Kirkby, is nice, but not as 
amazing as the L'Arpeggiata stuff.

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