Here's a place to gossip about classical recordings - those performances presumptuously preserved for posterity. New releases, old releases re-released, old favorites, old turkeys ... what's good? What should be avoided at all costs?156 responses total.
Anyone know of a good recording of Bethoven's ninth I might get? I've never heard the whole thing in one sitting, and I just thoght someone might know of a recording that is worth listening to.
I'm fond of Georg Solti's recording of the 9th Symphony, but then I seem to like Solti in general.
Pierre Boulez conducting almost anything. He's made some immortal recordings of Debussy, Bartok, Stravinsky and, recently, Mahler. I'm not even a big Mahler fan and I'm crazy about his recording of the 6th on DGG. He's also recorded the 5th and 7th, but I haven't heard them yet. Lately I've been listening to Mozart piano concertos played by Mitsuko Uchida. She's beyond wonderful. Must be heard to be believed. I recently saw a current classical Top 40 list, and was surprised to see Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto in 1st place. Does anyone know which recording or recordings might be responsible for this? (Everyone and his brother or sister has recorded it in the past five years, it seems, so maybe that's the answer.) I wasn't so much surprised to see it on the list as I was to see ahead of Beethoven's 9th, Rachmaninov's 3rd, etc. It even beat out Pachelbel's Canon.
Btw, what's the best recording of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde? I recently bought Simon Rattle's version, and am not impressed.
Re Mitsuko Uchida, I recently read a review of her CD of Schubert's Impromptus in which the reviewer predicted that in 30 years the CD would be a collector's item. I read another article about her in which she was called a "priestess." If you aren't familiar with her, Mitsuko Uchida was born in Japam about 50 years ago, moved to Vienna with her parents when she was 12, stayed there to become a musician when they returned to Japan (she was 16 at the time) and now resides in London. She wears only black clothes which her brother buys for her, she specializes in Haydn, Mozart, Schubert & Beethoven, and has quite a cult following, it turns out. Check out her recording of Mozart's 24th and 25th piano concertos, or the Schubert Impromptus.
I'm hoping to use this item for a quick question. I'd like to know if anyone has (or knows of) a recording of Vivaldi's Concerto in g minor (F. XII, n.4) I'm part of an ensemble playing this piece and although I don't think I'm going to want the recording when it's over, the violinist does. She says she has been looking all over and asking about without success. Anyone know how to read the "F. XII, n.4" part or know something of the piece? It has three movements, allegro ma cantabile, largo, and allegro molto. (No wisecracks about Vivaldi, Michael.) ;-)
No help on the recording. We have more than one concerto in Gm, but they don't match. As for the F. XII, n.4 part, that's new to me (& not on any recording or listing I've ever seen, I think), but from our Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Vivaldi, part of the little section at the end labeled "Bibliography:": "(General catalog): The complete thematic catalog of Vivaldi, _Catalogo_numerico-tematico_delle_opere_strumentali_, was published by the Instituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi under the direction of Antonio Fanna (1968)." So I'd hazard a guess that it's #4 in volume XII of Fanna's edition, or something like that. Just a guess, but not quite a *wild* guess, this time. Of course, anyone who really *knows* anything about it is more than welcome to jump in & explain where I'm confused!
Looks like a good guess. According to the Fanna listing on the net, at http://www.classical.net/music/composer/works/vivaldi/lists/fanna.html Fanna Ryom Pincherle Ricordi Type Key XII/4 103 402 23 Concerto G minor Perhaps this will help you locate a recording via the Ryom, Pincherle or Ricordi number.
I'd never heard of Fanna listings. Thanks, Steve!
In doing a little browsing thought our bookshelf, trying to find out more
about this piece, I looked up Vivaldi in _The Record Shelf Guide to
Classical and CDs and Audiocassettes_, by Jim Svejda, and found the
following (which I'm entering for Michael Delizia's amusement).
The Four Seasons:
With the possible exception of Pachelbel's Kanon, nothing makes me
want to start throwing things more, and I mean, literally throwing things,
than a half dozen bars of The Seasons. I hate it with the same irrational
intensity that I reserve for peanut butter, for reasons which remain as
difficult to explain. Like all of his other concertos, these four are
exceedingly inoffensive and exceptionally graceful. In me, alas, they
stimulate nothing but violence, and if allowed to go on too long,
peristalsis.
Gloria in D Major, R. 589:
This is the sort of recording that almost makes on believe in
miracles, for, miraculously, I managed to remain conscious to the very
end.
Svejda only reviewed these two works by this composer. In his overview
(apology for paying so little attention to this composer) he refers to
Vivaldi as cocktail party music for yuppies and warns devotees to not
double-park their BMWs.
CBC-Windsor, in an ad for one of their programs, used to feature a (fake) announcer's voiceover on the tail end of The Seasons, saying something like "... and we'll be back with more of Vivaldi's greatest hits right after ..." (followed by sounds of dial moving through several other unattractive options, followed by theme music & introduction for the program being advertised, followed by a contented sigh). Personally, I also like Vivaldi. I prefer some other baroque composers, but not because there's anything wrong with Vivaldi, for sure. (But it was a cute ad, & The Seasons is certainly overplayed among his repertoire.)
Well, Vivaldi's Seasons isn't in the same league as Pachelbel's Canon. In the category of Music for People Who Want the Music They Play to Sound The Way They Want People to Think They Are, we've dumbed down five or six levels from Vivaldi to Pachelbel. Why can't I conceive of someone loving Pachelbel's Canon just because they love it? I can, of course, but the problem is, as soon as you start in on Pachelbel's (or Vivaldi's) yuppie fans they *all* claim to love the music just because they love it. It's MD's Uncertainty Principle. CeCe, the woman who founded AOL's Classical Chat, feels the same way I do about this. Saying you don't like Pachelbel's Canon is like saying you kick kittens, to these people. I wonder why? Btw, for a public swipe at Pachelbel's Canon, see my "CultureBrief" on Ravel's Bolero on the AOL CultureFinder site.
Isn't the usual form of ther expression "(the lesser) isn't in the same league as (the greater)"? You gave me a start, there.
The Seasons is certainly inoffensive, and certainly overplayed. I like the genre, though. If you are bored by the same 4 concerti, but like the concept, you should try the 12 Opus 3 concerti (L'Estro Armonico). They are for 1,2,and 4 violins (in a cycle) and also alternate (for the most part) major and minor keys. Bach loved them, and transcribed one or two for organ. That doesn't mean you should, though. You should love them only if you do. They're similar, but I prefer them to opus 8 (4 seasons). Probably that's because they are a bit more varied, but certainly because they are a lot less often heard. I love the canon because I love it, but it exceeds the 4 season in overplayedness, so even while loving it I get bored by it. Bolero is nearly tied with it for being overplayed, but I'd hate that one even if it weren't. Sorry, I guess I kick kittens.
I think (hope...) that md meant that the *Canon* is inoffensive but overplayed (and, in my opinion, has very little musical content compared to a concerto - any concerto - and especially Vivaldi's).
I like the Canon. Heard an interesting performance of it out in Wyoming a few years ago. The conductor's opinion was that everybody play it about twice as slow as intended; the orchestra took it at a really fast clip. It works well at the faster tempo.
Yes, #14 is all I meant. Re #15, the faster the better. I think a good prestississimo that got the thing over with in 30 seconds would be perfect.
Foof. Oh well, guess I left myself open to that one...
I like canon (and fuge) type music. It's a neat trick when done well. I'd bet Row-Row-Row Your Boat, done by a good acappella chorus, could knock your socks off. If you were cultured enough to be wearing socks, that is. ;-) I guess I'm agreeing with others here that it's not Pachelbel's Canon that is at fault but the way the piece has been overplayed by conductors who believe there is no such thing as too much legato and who have gone on to make it the theme song of weddings and elevators. My favorite experience with hearing the piece was in Chicago, Christmas season of 1990, in the atrium of a grand old department store, as played by a student orchestra. It had heart.
I'm darned proud to kick kittens and push litte old ladies down stairs and whatever other horrible things some one isn't a fan of Pachabel's Cannon in D does. Unfortunately, my opinion of that is colored by my experiences as a performer-- I play the bass. Do you have any idea how boring that is? Its teh same two measures over and over and over until the final cadence. eep! But, I will say that it isn't its fault that it gets over played-- that's what makes it so despised. It isn't a terribly impressive peice (as far as I'm concerned, anyway... but what do I know?), but it isn't bad. Another high on the list of overplayed peices is, assuredly, the William Tell Overture. In my bass lesson the other day, my teacher was talking about it, and he said, "if I had $50 for everytime I've played that, I could have retired ten years ago," my response was, "if *I* had $50 for everytime I've played it, I could retire."
the only real use I've gotton out of cannon would be as relaxation music...
Silly question: I've been made to listen to Pachelbel's Canon many times, but I've never actually heard a canon -- the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" sort of thing Mary mentions. It sounds to me like a passacaglia. Did "canon" mean something else back then, whenever?
<jessi scurries off to the _New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians_ to find that out>
As I recall, it isn't really a true cannon, but was apparenly misnamed. As for what it is, I can only say that I hope faile brings us that definition soon....
I like the slowness of the Canon, esp when it's played with deliberateness,(how's that for a word?) I hate the 4 seasons, but I love Beethovan's Fur Elise and The Happy Farmer. My mother thinks I have all the culture of a cup of spoiled yougurt, but I don't wear shoes and like West Virginia. I also love most all of what Bach and Mozart wrote, including that nauseating little Eine Kleine Nachmuzak. I love the Pastoral Symphony, something I overplay in this house as well as Bach's Two-Part Inventions which I also overplay.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
I'm interested. Not sure I'd have anything to add. But I'm interested. Really.
Same here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Long before the pop version was reached, I would've run twin power drills into my ears.
(John just came into my study to see what had me roaring with laughter.)
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.
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.
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.
It's not the performer as it is the particular music being presented. I have heard some awfully dreadful Wagner, that I fall asleep to about 5 minutes into the CD. I don't care if The Who is playing it at 160 db it is still boring. I more of a Mozart/Bach/Rimsky-Korsakov fan, and I'm of the opinion that there is no boring way to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" That is, unless you're my neighbor. Then it sounds more like "Flight of the Housefly"
I don't think anybody who has heard Steve Reich's _Tehillim_ (a setting of four psalms in the original Hebrew) could think minimalism boring... (However, the program notes to it do say that "Steve Reich has been moving away from the minimalist aesthetic for some time, but with this piece the shift becomes unmistakable." or something close to that.)
Jonathan, that parenthetical comment brings up the problem of the definition of "minimalism". The stuff the term was originally coined to refer to is exceedingly long-breathed and motionless, and while a rare few find it entrancing, to most people it is very boring indeed. Neither Reich nor Glass writes like that now, but none of the stuff they're famous for is like that. When most people talk about minimalism, they mean what Reich and Glass have been writing for the last 25 years, including _Tehillim_, and that's the sort of stuff Sveja is referring to. To his credit, he doesn't usually say "minimalism". By "the minimalist aesthetic", your program note writer means strict minimalism. Dr. Teeth, it can be either the music or the performer. I've heard deservedly forgotten works presented well, with passion and conviction. I've also heard terribly boring performances of Mozart. (Mozart is harder to play well than one might think.)
Right, I know what you mean. I have a version of Pachelbel's Canon which is simply performed way way too fast, and it sounds shitty, well, shittier than it usually is. Then again, there is the version I have on a cheapo record that is really nice. Go figure. The point I was trying to make is that in most cases, you just cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
That's true, but one man's sow may be another man's silkworm.
Just picked up the CD with the premiere recordings
of Elliott Carter's Clarinet Concerto and "Symphonia:
sum fluxae pretium spei." The latter is a 45-minute
piece in 3 movements based on a poem called "Bulla"
("The Bubble") written in Latin by 17th c Brit poet
Richard Crashaw. It is Carter's longest work, and,
after his Concerto for Orchestra and Symphony of
Three Orchestras, his greatest orchestral work. If
you're a Carter fan, you'll understand what I mean
when I say that it has the ability to surprise you
with every single note -- you never would've predicted
what comes next -- and yet, after you've heard it, it
seems inevitable, as if Carter couldn't've done it
any other way. How he does that has been the subject
of much debate and analysis, but I tink it just comes
down to genius. Carter was 88 years old when he
completed these two works, and, as far as I know, is
alive and well and still composing at the age of 91.
An absolutely amazing guy.
Sounds very interesting. I think I'll look to see if the library has any of his works.
An EMI CD rerelease of some Vaughan Wiliams music: An Oxford Elegy; Sancta Civitas; Flos Campi; and Whitsuntide Hymn. Flos Campi is Vaughan Williams in full-blown pantheist/mystical mode. It's almost on a par with the Pastoral Symphony and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. I've always heard the influence of Ravel in this piece. RVW had been studying with him, and was obviously under the spell of Daphnis and Chloe when he wrote Flos Campi. (Wordless choir, wind-blowing-in-the-trees sort of thing.) It isn't easy to get your ears around: you've just sunk into the disorientingly dense bitonal opening, thinking my aren't we modern, when that fruity choir comes in. Gustav Holst, who was a greatfriend and supporter of RVW, claimed he never did "get" Flos Campi. Imho, this is the one piece where RVW comes completely unbuttoned. But it's definitely worth a listen. An Oxford Elegy is one of my all-time favorite RVW pieces. It's for orchestra, choir and speaker. The speaker reads lines from Matthew Arnold's poems "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar-Gypsy," and the choir sometimes sings the words, sometimes vocalises. The music is absolutely ravishing. The only CD of this piece up until now has been one by a horrible American ensemble. This new CD is like a giant sigh of relief for me, since I don't have to dust off my old LP of this performance anymore. Sancta Civitas is a major work for chorus and orchestra. Along with Flos Campi, it was the most "modern" of RVW's compositions until the 4th symphony. Tremendous music on religious themes from a "Christian agnostic."
Thanks for the review, Michael: I saw this disk in the store and was thinking about it. I'd never heard of the Oxford Elegy before.
Re 56: The library did not have that new recording, so I checked out one that had the Holiday Overture, the Suite from Pocahontas, and Syringa on it. I had certain preconceptions about what it was going to sound like from the description of Carter's music in #55, but it didn't match my preconceptions, so I was a little disappointed. I should probably listen to it again now that I'm not expecting any particular sound, to give it a fair chance.
I think those are all older pieces (except maybe Syringa?). Carter's style changed radically in the late 1940s/early 1950s.
Right, Syringa is from sometime during the 70s. Are there any pieces in particular that you'd recommend? I'll make another pilgramage to the library to see if they have any of them.
I would recommend Carter's Concerto for Orchestra, composed in the late 1960s. One British composer has asserted that it occupies the same position with respect to his generation of composers that Stravinsky's Rite of Spring occupied for Carter's generation. That is, it is the aesthetic touchstone against which all one's efforts are measured. I realize that is a huge burden to place on this one composition, but I believe the Concerto for Orchestra supports it. (I'm always reluctant to get anyone started on Carter's music, because unlike Barber or Copland, who were Carter's near-contemporaries, Carter's music doesn't have any popular, much less populist, appeal. Only a snob or a phony could love it, or pretend to love it. Well, I really honestly truly do love it. Really. I swear. I don't know what else to say.)
Picked up a CD rerelease of Ernest Bloch's two Concerti Grossi and the rhapsody for cello and orchestra called "Schelomo," all conducted by Howard Hanson on Mercury. For good measure, I also bought a brand-new CD of Bloch's Avodat Hakodesh performed by a South African orchestra & chorus. The Concerto Grosso #1 was the first Bloch music I ever heard. I liked it immediately, as I suspect everyone does on first hearing this engaging neo- baroque piece. The second Concerto Grosso and Schelomo are both equally listenable, but CG #1 rules. Bloch was a Swiss composer who came to the USA in the late 1930s because he was Jewish and feared for his life. The Jewish element in his music is sometimes criticised as being overly colorful and superficial. That may or may not be. All I know is that I practically wore out my LP of Leonard Berstein conducting the Avodat Hakodesh, which is the Jewish morning service. This new recording isn't as good, but the haunting beauty is still mostly there. It starts out a tiny bit like Brahms' Deutches Requiem, but it is soon suffused with a morning radiance that stays with it until the final section, where the morning changes to mourning for the Kaddish. The tzur yisroel still give me goosebumps. The omein at the end of the yih'yu still brings tears to my eyes. Now I have to see if the Bernstein version has been released on CD yet.
[Btw, in this recording of Avodat Hakodesh, the word "adoshem" replaces "adonai." I know that "adonai" (lord) or "hashem" (the name) are spoken when the word YHVH appears in Jewish prayers and scripture, but "adoshem" is new to me. It's kind of jarring to hear "shema yisrael, adoshem elohenu, adoshem echad." If anyone can explain, please do.]
My apologies for this drift, but I think I might've found the answer on http://www.jewfaq/com/ "Although the prohibition on pronunciation applies only to the four-letter Name [ie, YHVH], Jews customarily do not pronounce any of God's many Names except in prayer or study. The usual practice is to substitute letters or syllables, so that Adonai becomes Adoshem . . ." Bloch's Avodat Hakodesh is not strictly either prayer or study. It's a musical composition that uses the words of the Jewish service as text. Therefore, adoshem rather than adonai. I realize it isn't wise even for a Jew to try and second-guess the rabbinical authorities, much less for a gentile to do so, but that's my theory.
Make that http://www.jewfaq.org/. Sorry.
I am very fond of Bloch's Concerto Grosso No. 1, and wish he'd written more like it. The other work of his I like most is the Piano Quintet, which dates from around the same period. His echt-Jewish music, like the famous Schelomo and the above-mentioned Avodet Hakodesh, is of less appeal to me. The day that it becomes forbidden for Jews to argue with rabbinical authority is the day I turn in my Jewish union card. (No, there isn't really such a thing as a Jewish union card.) Jews are already forbidden to say God's real Name (the Tetragrammaton, the one spelled YHWH in Roman characters); it seems to me silly the way some observant Jews go into contortions to avoid saying the substitutes which aren't even His Name, and "G-d", which they often write, looks like a dirty word (a la "s-x" or "f--k"). God wasn't impressed when Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves under fig leaves; why should he be impressed by a dash? But that's my opinion. Have two Jews: get three opinions.
Re way back there: I was unsuccessful in finding a recording of Carter's Concerto for Orchestra. Oh, well. I've got a large stack of music around here right now that I haven't listened to yet anyways, before I go looking for new stuff.
I recently got a new recording of Steve Reich's _Music for 18 Musicians_, written and originally recorded in 1976. I had previously heard only Reich's later work including _Tehillim_, _New York Counterpoint_, and _City Life_, so this piece was a bit more minimalist and took me a bit longer to get into. I actually found it rather boring the first time I listened to it (it is written in 14 sections, but they don't have as distinct characters as the 4 movements of _Tehillim_ or the 5 of _City Life_), but now I find it simply gorgeous...
I always liked Vladimir Ashkenazy's performance of Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto, so I picked up the 2-cd set of Ashkenazy playing all five Prokofiev piano concertos, Andre Previn conducting. Prokofiev was kind of a lightweight, imho, but still plenty enjoyable. Ashkenazy is amazing in these performances.
I'm not a real Ashkenazy fan, but for some reason when I recently felt like getting some CD collections of Beethoven's piano sonatas and Sibelius's symphonies, I ended up with Ashkenazy playing the Beethoven and conducting the Sibelius. The CD sonata collection conatins the "named" sonatas: Waldstein, Pathetique, Pastoral, Moonlight, Les Adieux, etc. The sound is way superior to my old Alfred Brendel LP set, but the playing isn't as good. I hear something a little vulgar and overdone in Ashkenazy sometimes. It comes close to ruining the Waldstein. It works better on the Sibelius symphonies. In fact, he reins it in to just the right degree on the 6th, where the endings of the first and second movements need to sound as if a beautiful woman has quietly but unexpectedly walked out of the room. I've been working my way through an 8-CD set of Adrian Boult conducting Vaughan Williams' 9 symphonies and selected other orchestral music. Boult is still unsurpassed. His recording of the pretentiously named and very uneven ballet score "Job: A Masque for Dancing" brings out the best in it, which is very nearly the best RVW ever did. The cloud of dissonance that the first theme dissolves into leaves me dizzy.
I dislike Ashkenazy as a conductor, because he hums very loudly. Can't fault his interpretations, though. Boult is certainly the definitive RVW conductor, though I am very fond of Previn's rendition of the Sea Symphony, which treats the voices very much as if they were instruments. The Sea Symphony has always impressed me because it makes Whitman's poetry sound lyrical, which I would have thought was impossible. Job is a masterpiece of its kind: perhaps it comes across as uneven because, unlike a symphony, a ballet is not intended to work as a single entity at a profound level. I am unwure what you consider pretentious about its name. It's called "Job" because it's about him: what's pretentious about that? Surely you don't consider "A Masque for Dancing" to be pretentious: that's about as modest a description of a ballet as ever coined.
Okay I take it back.
With the new BBC Music mag comes a CD called "Baltic Voyage," works by Estonian composers Villem Kapp, Arvo Part and Eduard Tubin, conducted by Neeme, Paavo and Kristjan Jarvi, respectively. (DSO conductor Neeme Jarvi and his two sons.) I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this. The symphonies by Kapp and Tubin and the short "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" by Part all sound like movie music. Very professional movie music, in a Howard Hansonish sort of way, in the case of Kapp and Tubin, but movie music nonetheless. (The Part piece sounds sort of minimalist, sort of Goreckioid. Seven minutes of orchestra without music.) None of these works is even as daring as, say, Soviet or American populist modernism. I am attracted enough to this kind of music to want to listen to more of it. Has anyone else here (if there *is* anyone else here) heard any music by these composers?
I'm curious about the term "movie music." Do you mean disjoint? "Odd" dynamic changes? Some combination of these things?
Think Max Steiner, Miklos Rosza, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith. Music you can enjoy the first time your hear it, but it leaves you wondering how substantial it was. Modal Mahler. Howard Hanson sober. Samuel Barber drunk.
The only name I recognise is Johnny's. His music doesn't seem less "substantial" to me than most others I listen to. Then again, I _do_ like theatre music: Wagner, Rossini, and Handel, for instance. (I wish I could remember which movie it was that credited "Johnny Williams" for the musice; a '60s western is all that comes to mind.)
<vows to use the word "goreckioid" in conversation someday>
Pronounced gor-RET-skee-oyd, you know.
Duly noted.
It doesn't sound like movie music. Movie music sounds like it, if you get the difference. I've got this CD also, and I already knew all the composers on it. Arvo Pärt's "Cantus" is the most (rightly) distinguished piece of Eastern European mystical minimalism, even more than Gorecki's 3rd Symphony, which it does resemble. To call it "orchestra without music" is unfair: you're not listening to it properly. Rather than beguiling you with catchy tunes (which is what movie music does) or telling a story, its aim is to create a sound space, almost like a physical space in which the sound exists. If that's not too goopy a way of putting it. It succeeds brilliantly, and for one thing it's a lot shorter than most such works, and a lot more complex in terms of what's going on harmonically. The other works are much less renowned. Villem Kapp is a deservedly obscure composer. What you're hearing when you listen to this work is A Typical Soviet Symphony. Believe me, I've heard dozens of 'em, and they all sound like that. Like Shostakovich without the genius. Eduard Tubin is a more difficult case. He and George Lloyd are the two late 20C symphonists most beloved of most symphony-collecting record collectors, but I don't quite get it. Their music is pleasant but they just don't strike me as that good. I'd rather listen to Larsen or Zwilich.
"Sound space" music doesn't scare me, although I don't know how fond a composer would be of the term. Also, I think it's out of fashion now. A critic recently complained about how tempting it is for certain conductors to "ambientize" Morton Feldman's music. Speaking of whom, several months ago I picked up a CD of Michael Tilson Thomas conducting three Feldman works, Piano and Orchetsra, Cello and Orchestra, and Coptic Light. I enjoy all three, but Coptic Light towers above the other two, imho. It's utterly, serenely, beautiful. Inexplicably beautiful, as if Feldman had discovered a new way to make beauty. One thing about Feldman's music, and Coptic Light in particular, is that it spoils other music for me. Around the same time I bought the Feldman CD I also bought a Toru Takemitsu CD, including the exquisite From Me Flows What You Call Time. If I listen to it right after listening to Feldman it sounds vulgar and obvious, which in fact is about the last thing it really is.
A BBC Music feature article about trendy young Brit composer Thomas Ades sent to me Harmony House to pick up a CD of his music. Asyla, Concerto Conciso, a couple of others. Silly, gimmicky, not very good. I'm still tempted, however, to buy the recording of his opera Powder Her Face, which is based on a real-life 1950s scandal involving the oversexed wife of a Scottish peer. The soprano sings -- or rather hums -- her big aria wearing only a string of pearls, on her knees, with her back to the audience, while giving the tenor a blowjob. Now, why didn't Puccini think of that?
He did, many times, but kept it to himself.
Ambient, soundscape, and minimalism are not quite the same thing, and the major difference is how you're supposed to listen to them. Minimalism, whether fast New York minimalism or contemplative Eastern European minimalism (Feldman, though from New York, was closer to the Eastern Europeans in style), is more pattern-oriented than soundscape. Listen to the patterns build up and change. Just don't expect the music to be directive the way most Western concert music is. "Ambient" is the word used to describe all musics of this sort when you aren't really listening to them.
I'm not very good with "schools" and "movements" in the arts.
[But I don't think the word "minimalism" works with Feldman's music. He predated minimalism by 15 years or so, and although he continued to compose during the "minimalist" heyday his music never sounded like anything other than Morton Feldman. I don't think you could say even that the minimalists were influenced by *him*. Feldman himself is said to have claimed abstract expressionist painters like Mark Rothko as his primary influences. On the other hand, I've heard younger listeners who know nothing of all this history declare Feldman "minimalist" on first hearing, so maybe in some sense he is.]
"Minimalism" doesn't mean the same thing as "part of the Minimalist movement". NOBODY was part of the minimalist movement: even Philip Glass and Steve Reich will deny it. What they mean is, no composer worth listening to ever sat down and said, "Now I will compose Minimalist music." They wrote what they wanted to write, and "minimalism" is a useful word to describe various works that have a lot in common. If that includes Feldman's, and it does, then "minimalist" he is. Of course his work never sounds like anything other than Feldman's. And Glass's sounds like Glass, and Reich's like Reich, and Gorecki's like Gorecki. I could sort out a pile of unlabeled recordings of works by the four of them with no trouble whatever. Nevertheless they do have certain striking things in common which set them apart from most other composers, and "minimalism" is the word used to describe that.
It's true, even the composers everyone thinks of as "minimalist" not only deny that they are, but also reject the very term. So do I. And if Steve Reich doesn't want that particular can tied to his tail, it most definitely shouldn't be tied to Feldman's. You need to find some other way to sound intelligent when you talk about Feldman's music. ;-)
I'm not so sure about Reich, but Glass draws a sensible distinction which I am trying to draw in the above, between the minimalist movement and music which happens to be minimalist, the latter of which he agrees that his music is. (Leaving aside another layer of complexity, which is that minimalism in the original sense is something he ceased composing around 1975.) I refuse to play cute little word games, in which we search for a transparent euphemism for "minimalist" which means "minimalist" but not "member of the minimalist movement". Minimalist is a standard term in the music dictionaries by now, it has a specific technical meaning which fits Feldman's music, and it's too late to complain about that, as Glass has recognized. You might as well complain about "classical" and "romantic", both of which are equally inaccurate - and some people do. But make up your mind, Michael, do you want to talk about music, or do you want to waste time fighting quixotically against established standard terminology?
I've been discussing categories, the pigeonholes some people like to try and stuff innocent composers like Feldman into. I personally can't imagine what pleasure anyone gets from doing that, but if that's what you like to do, go do it. All I was saying is that in the particular case of Morton Feldman, I don't think he is described as a "minimalist" by anyone who knows his music. I've been reading the topica.com Feldman list since its inception, e.g., and I don't recall a single person ever even using the term. Minimalism is, among other things, tonal music -- repetitive tonal music that generally avoids melody, development of motifs, and the tonic-dominant relationship, but tonal nevertheless. (In fact, avoidance of tonic-dominant in a tonal setting is the minimalists' little secret.) Feldman didn't do that.
Lovers of Feldman's music, talking among themselves, don't need to call
him minimalist or non-minimalist: they already know what he sounds like.
Tonality is not really a requirement of minimalism, or at least of the
things I hear called minimalism. What's common to them all is simple
harmony: this usually takes the form of tonality in Glass, but less so
in other minimalists, particularly non-American ones, which is part of
what I was thinking of when I said that Feldman is more like the
Eastern European mystics than the New York minimalists.
I'm really sorry to see you using the word "pigeonholes". That's
usually just the derisive form of the words "labels" or "categories".
Categorization, since you seem to be bewildered by it ("I can't imagine
what pleasure anyone gets from doing that"), is a natural human
function, akin to gestalt perception, which people use all the time.
Faced with the infinite variety of music, people wishing to find their
way around and make sense of it all will naturally observe that A is
rather like B which is rather like C. And when A and B and C all share
striking similarities not shared by other works, and a word exists to
describe it, they will use that word. Learn to live with this,
Michael, and stop refusing to see the forest for the trees.
It's especially useful when you're trying to describe composers to
people who haven't heard them, and while you may be a Feldman expert,
other people reading this topic may never have heard anything by him at
all. To describe it to them by saying "it's uniquely Feldman", while
true, is of no help whatever; to use a technical description is, I've
found, confusing to non-musicians; to say "it's basically like
minimalism", which is what I'm really saying, can be very helpful.
This only becomes pigeonholing when, having established the category,
the user starts criticizing the composer for not fitting it perfectly,
or more precisely for not fitting the default form. This happens all
the time, but I am not doing it.
The key similarity I see is one I often have to point out in defense of
this kind of music (or "these kinds of music" if you prefer), and one I
believe I tried to describe uptopic. Critics of minimalism complain
about its thinness of intellectual content and that it has no thrust or
forward motion, as most Western music does. It requires a different
kind of listening. And this fundamentally different kind of listening
is a requirement that all the composers we've been talking about share.
It's also shared by some earlier problematic composers, notably
Bruckner, whom I've seen described as a proto-minimalist. Not a
minimalist per se, because of the chronologic distinction and because
he's so different in other respects, but he does have this in common.
It gives me pleasure, Michael, to contemplate the similarities between
Bruckner and the minimalists, because it enriches my experience of
listening to both, and if you call that pigeonholing, I can only regret
your inabiliity to see the great web of similarities and influences in
the vast field of music.
I guess we have to agree to disagree. I understand everything you've said, but I have to repeat that being told that someone thinks Morton Feldman is a "minimalist" does nothing to enhance my appreciation of his music, which, I dare to suggest, is at least as great as yours. [Fwiw, Feldman himself once said, "I certainly don't consider myself a minimalist at all." But I don't suppose that matters: you're gonna tie that can to his tail no matter what.]
Michael, I already observed that most composers - indeed, most creative artists of any sort - dislike labels. Partly because they fear what you fear, which is pigeonholing (not, I repeat, the same thing as labeling), andf partly because, having found their metier through private personal imperatives, it's kind of disconcerting to find other people whose own private personal imperatives have led them to the same place. It's a little like finding other people at the same obscure state park campground you've always secretly considered your own. But that doesn't make the labels any less useful and valuable. I am not "tying a can to his tail", and if you think I am, that shows you either do not in fact understand what I've said or are deliberately choosing to ignore it. To "tie a can" means to me to claim that this is the only, or the essential, thing to say about Feldman, or to demand that his music fit the predetermined category - that is, pigeonholing, which I repeat I'm not doing. Nowhere have I criticized Feldman for not being more like a canonical minimalist. If it sounds like I'm harping on this one point, it's only because I'm trying to make it clear. It's a minor point, really, and if I'd made it clear the first time, I'd have dropped it. To "be told that someone things Feldman is a minimalist" doesn't do anything to enhance my appreciation of him any more than yours, and if you think I said it did, that shows you either do not in fact understand what I've said or are deliberately choosing to ignore it. What I said enriches my listening experience is "to contemplate the similarities between Bruckner and the minimalists," or Feldman and the minimalists (or the other minimalists, or whatever), which is not the same thing. It is to listen to the music itself and notice the enriching similarities between one composer and another. If, as you imply here, you regard each composer as a completely separate unit from all other composers, with no close similarities or resemblances, you are indeed missing a tremendous amount of appreciation - of any composer. I am hardly the only person to have noticed the close similarity between Feldman and the canonical minimalists. Norman Lebrecht in his "Companion to 20th Century Music" writes that Feldman's music is remarkably similar to "early minimalism" (by which he means pre-1975 strict minimalism). And Grove 7 (the new New Grove) writes that Feldman's late style "embraced minimalist repetition", and also notes that he was influenced by New York abstract expressionist painters - the direct stylistic ancestors of the minimalist painters. Are you going to say that these respected reference sources are "tying a can to his tail"? If, contrary to the thrust of everything you've written so far, you would now like to draw a distinction between saying Feldman's music is minimalist and that it bears certain resemblances to minimalism, I could go along with that - but those statements are far too closely allied for the one to be dismissed as total nonsense while the other is agreed to. If that's what you mean, you would have done well to say so a lot earlier. But if you insist on total separation, I'm going to conclude that Lebrecht and the Grove writers know more about music than you do.
I'm not going to reject my opinion merely because it's mine, as Emerson says I shouldn't. Maybe I've read too much Emerson? ;-) Neither Lebrecht nor the author of the Grove 7 article has listened to enough Feldman. To say that Feldman's late style embraced minimalist repetition, for example, is to ignore the repetition that has characterized Feldman's music from the very beginning. Listen to some of his string quartet pieces from the 1950s, for example, in which motifs are repeated ad infinitum. It also uses the term "minimalist repetition" as if it were a distinct species of musical repetition, which it is not, or as if the minimalists invented repetition, which they did not. By that definition, Gustav Holst was a minimalist composer. The Feldman quote reads in full: "I never feel that my music is sparse or minimal; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself a minimalist at all." http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/txt/feldman_quote.html That sounds like an amiable way of saying, "I don't accept the term, but you can go ahead and use it if you think it applies to me." So, maybe we're both right. I just think the relation between the "minimalist"-sounding elements is in Feldman's music and in the minimalists themselves is analogous at best, and certainly not homologous. Birds and buttereflies both have wings. So?
The fat-person analogy in the Feldman quote seems to me to not only give one permission to call his music minimalist, it's as much to admit that he realizes it falls in that category, even though he doesn't think of it that way himself. (And why should he? Good creative artists rarely think of themselves as fitting in categories, no matter how well they do fit. That's what criticism and analysis are for.) "Sparse [and] minimal" (if not necessarily minimal_ist_) are certainly words that have come forcibly to my mind whenever I've heard anything by Feldman. If you don't find that so, it could be because you've heard too much Feldman: the more familiar in detail with an artist's work one is, the more aware one may be of subtleties and variations in the generalizations - but that doesn't make the generalizations any less valid as generalizations. Whatever your justification for disagreeing with them, I'm not going to take it on your word that Lebrecht and the Grove encyclopedia don't know what they're talking about, especially as what they say fits what my ears hear. You say that the relation between Feldman's music (or that aspect of it - at last we have an acknowledgment that there is such an aspect) and "the minimalists themselves" is "analogous at best, and certainly not homologous." The problem with that is that "the minimalists themselves" are no homogenous group either. Maybe that's the perceptual problem: if one considers "the minimalists" to be homogenous, of course one will resent the inclusion of a person outside of the original group. But the music of Glass and of Terry Riley (especially if you don't boil them down to their best-known mannerisms, and in particular don't assume that Riley is all like "In C") is as different as either is from Feldman. And once one includes the Eastern European mystics as minimalists, which I've been doing from the beginning of this discussion, the variety within "the minimalists" is even more dramatic - especially as, even allowing for their shared nationality, Glass, Riley and Feldman have a much more similar intellectual background than any of them does with the eastern Europeans like Gorecki or Pärt. For what it's worth, the single other composer Feldman most reminds me of is LaMonte Young. All music is repetitious in one way or another. Minimalism is more than repetition (though some people who dislike it will deny that), but it is marked by a particular way of handling repetition, a particular style of repetition, or, if you will, "a distinct species". I don't know what Holst works you have in mind as pseudo-minimalist: the oboe theme in Beni Mora, perhaps? But that's not at all minimalist repetition; and if Feldman's earlier string quartet pieces are equally non-minimalist repetition, that only reinforces Grove's point that it's Feldman's later works which are more minimalist.
(Bird wings and butterfly wings are not the same organ, is all I meant. Similar function, but very different morphology. Butterfly wings and wasp wings are homologous. Butterfly wings and bird wings are analogous. Whatever. Sorry I brought it up now, but, apropos, I ought to add that taxonomy is something I'm adept at. The real difference between us is that you're a lumper and I'm a splitter, as the taxonomists say.)
Well, I hear the simplicity and repetition in Feldman and most minimalists as working the same way. The simplicity and repetition in Holst and, say, a Baroque passacaglia work differently. Being adept at taxonomy as a science doesn't mean one knows one's ferns. I've studied taxonomy too. Evidently you know Feldman better than I do, but I suspect I know the canonical minimalists better than you do. I would be readier to accept your conclusion that I'm a lumper and you're a splitter, were it not for your earlier posts ridiculing the very notion of lumping.
That's what us splitters do. ;-)
Whereas we grammar-nitpickers insist that it should be "we splitters".
But then I couldn't've used the winking smiley!
Waiting for my daughter to emerge from swim practice the other night, I was listening to Morton Feldman's Coptic Light on the car CD player. When she got into the car, I offered to switch back to FM, but she said to let it play. "You'll change your mind." "What is it?" "Morton Feldman." "Different." Two minutes later, she said, "How long does it go on for?" "Half an hour." "Half an hour! It's not even music. If I was the percussionist, I'd have a drum stick in my right hand and Vogue in my left hand."
The new BBC Music magazine came with a CD of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto. I've heard it a few times in concert but I've never owned a recording of it and so have never devoted any time to repeated listening and "appreciation." Like most other listeners, I guess, I've always liked the so-called "Mizzi" tune parts with their swoony harmonies, and of course the ending where Berg reveals the old- fashioned romantic he was said to be at heart, but much of the rest of it is serialist and thus, to me, incomprehensible. If you listen to it a few times, though, the tone-row Berg based it on couldn't be clearer. The appeal of the piece, for me, still lies in the blessed relief afforded by the "easy" parts, such as the way the Bach chorale emerges from the tone row in the second movement. It's like having a headache, taking some Tylenol, and later realizing the headache is gone. Berg intended it as a consolatory piece for architect Walter Gropius and his wife Alma (Mahler's widow), whose daughter had died in her teens. It is incredibly touching when listened to in that light.
At Harmony House Classical on Woodward, I picked up a couple of new CDs: Way back in response #31 I mentioned an Albany Records re-release 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. The Piston 4th has been recarded a couple of times since then, but I'm not aware of any new recordings of the Harris 7th or the Schuman 6th until now. Koch has released a CD with both of those works on it, performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Hugh Keelan. The Harris symphony is very listenable but rather slight. The Schuman 6th is still a masterpiece, and I don't use that word often. Thus Koch and the New Zealanders once again trump the big American labels and orchestras in rescuing great American music from oblivion. (They started the Samuel Barber revival in the 1980s.) Speaking of Barber, the other CD has three Barber works -- the Second Symphony, the Cello Concerto, and the orchestral suite from the ballet Medea -- all with Samuel Barber himself conducting the New Symphony Orchestra. The recordings were made in 1950, and are absolutely horrible. I guess thanks should go to the Pearl label for digitally remastering these recordings, although they are valuable only as historic documents.
I wish more of those American nationalists school works of the 1930s- 50s would be re-recorded. I associate much of that music with crackly monophonic sound, and it's really startling to hear it in clear stereo. Most of what does exist in new recordings of second-tier music of this kind comes from the NZSO, who are to be blessed for this project. (I have their recording of Randall Thompson's 2nd and 3rd symphonies, as well as that Barber Second.) Pearl only does historical recordings, I think, and you can take it as a rule of thumb that the sound will be horrible, no matter what the age. (Other companies' historical recordings are often much better.)
I picked up a CD of a pianist named Ronnie Lynn Patterson playing two Morton Feldman pieces, "Palais de Mari" and "Piano." Feldman was a superb orchestrator and his orchestral and chamber music could be quite colorful. Here, his bare-bones style is stripped to, well, the bare bones. The music is pianissimo throughout and very slow and deliberate. Single notes and dissonant chords follow one another, singly or in pairs. The pieces are about 40 minutes long each. Feldman claimed that he made no effort to make his music interesting, and that in fact he tried to withhold his own personality from it as much as possible. The fact that he now has imitators, and that the word "Feldmanesque" has entered the vocabulary of the critics, shows that he didn't quite succeed. It is very hard not to love the composer of this music. While I was there, I bought some Debussy piano music I didn't have on CD yet: Images I and II, Estampes, Images oubliees, La plus que lente (valse), and L'Isle joyeuse, performed on a nice Naxos budget CD by Francois-Joel Thiollier. Sometimes after I listen to Feldman's music, the music of other composers can seem a little vulgar. It didn't happen this time, possibly because the two Feldman piano pieces are so thin as to be almost not there, but in any case definitely because nothing can make Debussy's exquisite piano music sound vulgar.
What do you think of Debussy's other music? B. declined to accompany me to a concert at which "La Mer" would be played, due to holding strong opinions about it which could vaguely be summarized as "it's vulgar".
I've never read anything to confirm this, but it has always seemed to me that you can trace the harmonic and melodic history of modern popular music back to Debussy. Maybe due to that, some of the sounds that were brand-new with him now sound old and corny and, yes, vulgar. As to La mer, who knows? Vulgarity is relative. I guess the sonorous, majestic "song of the sea" that the horns sing at the end of the first movement and again in the last movement could be accused of being vulgar, as could the waltz episode in the second movement. (I find the third movement a little tedious, which is not the same thing.) But the second movement is one of the most subtly beautiful things Debussy ever wrote. As to vulgarity, we should launch a defense of it. Some of the best music was vulgar when the ink was still wet. Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Copland. Stravinsky, among others, thought Beethoven's 9th was vulgar. Vulgarity -- such things as simple obvious melodies, galumphing rhythms, repetition in place of development, overly broad gestures, rampant heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, soap-box appeal to the masses, and the composer shoving his own personality forward -- is not, strangely enough, a valid measure of the value of a work of art.
Obviously. "Vulgar" just means common. Every note in music, by itself, is "common". It hardly helps to consider "simple" as necessarily "common". It is entirely a matter of context. By the way, #108 sounds like a quote - is it (besides of md....)?
It doesn't just mean common. As applied to music -- e.g., La mer, to the person who refused to attend the concert - it's definition 4 from Merriam-Webster: "a : lacking in cultivation, perception, or taste : COARSE b : morally crude, undeveloped, or unregenerate : GROSS c : ostentatious or excessive in expenditure or display : PRETENTIOUS." Definition 4c probably comes closest. 108 is just me.
"Common" has the the same definitions (among others). In both cases these are matters of personal judgement. I prefer to use the term "common", as it is not laden with the "uppity and elitist" insinuations we usually attach to "vulgar". Common, adj, 5. Commonplace; not excellent or distinguished in tone or quality; banal, coarse; vulgar; low. La mer is a fine piece of music, in my opinion, not common, much less vulgar. Si gustibus non disputandem est.
I'm sure Debussy rests easier now. ;-)
Debussy is dead and gone. I hardly think that any classical music that caused a near riot at its premier can be called either common or vulgar.
Why not? (Just asking -- I mean, I love La mer whether or not anyone thinks its vulgar. I didn't even bring the subject up. I'm just curious what relation you think "causing a riot" has to "not being vulgar." The two things don't seem related.)
Classical audiences don't riot at the common or vulgar, they go to sleep.
Shoot, they go to sleep even during the sublime.
Uh... Le sacre du printemps (spelling may be off) caused a riot at its first performance, specifically because it was 'vulgar'.
Speaking of vulgar: I picked up a CD with three pieces that meet all the requirements I listed above: simple obvious melodies, galumphing rhythms, repetition in place of development, overly broad gestures, rampant heart-on-sleeve sentimentality, soap-box appeal to the masses, and the composer shoving his own personality forward. Specifically, thee works for organ and orchestra: Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Organ, Strings and Tympani; Pierre Petit's Concertino for Organ, Strings and Percussion; and Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva, which is a 16-minute work for organ and full orchestra. (Well, I don't know if Pierre Petit is shoving his personality forward in his Concertino because it's the only music of his I've ever heard and I have no idea what his musical personality was like. But Barber and Poulenc are all over you like a couple of big dogs when you walk in the door.) The Poulenc piece appealed to me greatly when I was much younger but not so much anymore. It's a little too calculatedly melodramatic, too Phantom-of-the-Opera. The Petit piece is tuneful and listenable, but that's about it. Barber's Toccata Festiva is mostly a dark gnarly piece of music, with a few passages that the liner notes describe quite accurately as "ravishing." This piece is a textbook example of Barber's genius with cadences -- of sending a tune on its way and then bringing it back home in the most utterly satisfying manner imaginable. He is on a par with the greatest composers of all time in this one respect. The Toccata is in loose sonata-allegro form with a brief cadenza after the development section. This cadenza is the Toccata's Achilles heel. It's for pedals only, and hasn't a trace of Samuel Barber in it -- in fact, it might not even have been written by him. (My private theory is that Thomas Schippers wrote most of it for him.) But over-all this is one of the gems of Barber's middle period, along with the Piano Concerto and the opera Vanessa. This performance, by Dame Gillian Weir at the organ and the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Raymond Leppard, stands up well to the original recording by E. Power Biggs and Ormandy/Philadelphia. 16'20" -- a dollar a minute at Harmony House, well worth it.
I'd be tempted to say that's what you get with music for organ and orchestra. Murphy's law tells me that now someone will come out of the woodwork with a tasteful, refined and inobtrusive organ and orchestra piece, but something tells me that's not too likely.
I went to Harmony House Classical in Royal Oak to see what their going- out-of-business sale looks like. 25% off everything. People were buying *stacks* of CDs. I picked up the new release of John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music and the Abbado recording on DG of Pelleas et Melisande. I have Pelleas twice on LP, by Ernest Ansermet and by Pierre Boulez, but not on CD yet. I still like the Ansermet best. The new John Adams piece is [looks apologetic] kinda boring. Sorry. I mean, if I'd never heard any of his other music I might find this fascinating, but it's just the same old same old. I dunno, maybe I should lsten to it more. Adams is one composer I really want to like. The guy behind the counter said they're going to be open for a few more months, so I didn't buy a stack of CDs on the spot myself.
Did I mention how much I love Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande? I've been listening to my new Abbado CD and am enthralled by it all over again. Can you convert from an American to un Francais? I mean, not move there, just change my ethnic heritage? How about if I brush up my French and start shrugging a lot?
I had to be in Royal Oak yesterday so I stopped in on Harmony House Classical again. Everything is now 40% off, but there isn't a lot left in stock. I picked up three CDs: Wm. Schuman's Violin Concerto, New England Triptych, and Variations on "America"; Edward MacDowell's two orchestral suites and a Hamlet & Ophelia piece; and Jaarvi and the DSO performing Copland's 3rd and Harris's 3rd. I really like Jaarvi's way with American music. His Barber performances are excellent. On this CD, he's more crisp and less rhapsodic with the Harris 3rd than I'm used to hearing. I need to listen to it some more. The Copland 3rd is wonderful, though. Very powerful and monumental, as if Jaarvi is throwing himself into it. The Schuman Violin Concerto is new to me. It needs more listening than I have time to give it right now, alas, but I'll get there eventually. The MacDowell suites are teenage favorites of mine that still have a lot of charm in them, at least for me. The liner notes are a little disparaging, though. Chatting with one of the sales guys (who used to be an announcer on WQRS, which explains why his voice soinded so familiar), I learned that some investors are looking at Harmony House Classical, if not at the whole chain, so there is slight reason to hope that they'll keep their jobs there and that we'll keep our best retail shop of that kind in our area.
I certainly hope they find some way to continue! I was there last weekend and came away with almost a shoeboxfull of cds... way more than I could reasonably afford but I couldn't help it. That Jarvi recording is very enjoyable, and it did take me a few listens to accept the crispness of the Harris 3. One of the new cds I picked up, actually, was Bernstein doing Harris 3 with New York: needless to say, quite different from the Jarvi.
An old Bernstein recording of the Harris 3rd is on the flip side of Benstein's "Jeremiah" Symphony on an LP that I still have somewhere. It must date from around 1960, if not earlier. I have a more recent version of Bernstein conducting the Harris 3rd on CD, coupled with with Schuman's 3rd. I really never imagined there was another way of performing it until I heard that Jarvi/DSO CD. Jarvi/DSO did a CD with music by some African American composers I've never heard of, that Harmoney House had several copies of. Have you heard this one? Worth having at 40% off?
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
[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.]
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.
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.
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.
Good, more room for me. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
(In subsequent years I found that this technique did not always work. For instance, there is Richard Nanes.)
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.
Even that short-tempered German reviewer seemed to like Tabula Rasa. Whatever is in there, I guess I'm just not hearing it. Hovhaness wore thin for me when I realized what a small bag of tricks he had. Same thing with William Schuman.
A dismaying number of composers have small bags of tricks. I've even found Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven to be predictable at times. The answer is not to spend too much time listening to any one composer. Also, if you're expecting a composer to surprise you, what do you do when you listen to a work for the second time? My pleasure in relistening to a work is not solely dependent on noticing new things about it I'd previously missed. A work can have nothing new to say to me at all, and yet still be enjoyable. As for Hovhaness, his bag may have been small, but he carried different things in it at different times. More than many lesser composers, his work of different decades can be distinguished fairly easily on blind listenings. Perhaps a sense that he had little to say may have come from too much listening to works of the 1980s and 90s, by which time he had indeed rather run short on things to say. But his earlier music retains a freshness.
I seldom get that feeling with Mozart, and never with Bach or Beethoven. The one indisputably great composer I am sometimes surprised to find myself getting impatient with is Bartok. "Yeah, yeah, Bela, we know. Same-old same-old." Merely inhabiting the same "sound world" or writing in an instantly recognizable style isn't enough, though. Anyone might want to hear something other than Beethoven after listening to a couple of symphonies, but that's not at all the same thing. There has to be a sense of a failure of inspiration, of the composer repeating the same tropes and gestures -- William Schuman's scurrying prestissimo passages, "blue note" dissonance, kettledrum solos and massive brass chords, or Bartok's ebullient modal folk-dances or umpteenth little descending minor third figure -- that helped make some earlier work memorable, only without the same indispensible creative spark, and it has to be repeated in lots of compositions, not just a few potboilers. How can you listen to the opening of the Mount St. Helens symphony and not realize that you're listening to the opening of Mysterious Mountain, only without the "spark from heaven"?
With a lot of these earlier composers, I can not only "smell" the cadence coming a mile away, I know exactly how they're going to get there. Mozart in particular engaged in some dreadful note-spinning in some of his lesser works. Be careful what you call "potboilers," lest you wind up defining it as "those works with predictable characteristics" and whisk the problem away by tautology.
Okay, I'll be careful. ;-)
Grabbed a buncha Naxoses over the weekend. John Cage, Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. I've always liked Cage's prepared piano music. It's the classical counterpart of "novelty" music. Lots of fun, no deep thought required. I would say ignore the liner notes chatter about Zen, only "no deep thought required" *is* Zen. Arnold Bax, Symphony #6, "Into the Twilight" and "Summer Music." The 6th symphony is very dramatic, and the two tone poems are really lovely. Bax was a fine orchestrator, but I don't find his music awfully memorable. Sheila Silver, Piano Concerto (1996) and "Six preludes pour piano, d'apres poemes de Baudelaire" (1991). Silver, whom I'd never heard of, is an American composer born in 1946. The music on this disc is all very listenable. The Piano Concerto is a strange piece of music. Silver is apparently going for an eastern European "Jewish" sound in places, but it comes out sounding a little like Bartok, a little like Prokofiev, a little like Leonard Bernstein. There are also repeated figures that sound slightly minimalist. Over-all, I liked it very much. The six preludes are the stars of the CD, in my opinion. Highly recommended.
I don't find Bax very memorable either, and have never felt I really grasped his music. I couldn't tell you if I liked any of his symphonies better than the others, for instance. Thanks for the recommendation of Silver.
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