an attempt at a general "What are you currently digging re. classical music" thread

Liszt

Romantic sovereign of the piano. Creator of the religious piano piece. Chronicler of musical pilgrimages. Ceaseless practitioner of transcriptions and paraphrases. Radical precursor of the modern. Musical source of Franck and Scriabin, Debussy and Ravel, Messiaen and Ligeti.

Familiarity with Liszt’s piano works will make it evident that he was the piano’s supreme artist. What I have in mind is not his transcendental pianistic skill but the reach of his expressive power. He, and only he, as a “genius of expression” (Schumann), revealed the full horizon of what the piano was able to offer. Within this context, the pedal became a tool of paramount importance.

Liszt’s uncertain standing as a composer can be traced back to a number of reasons: the variable quality of his works (with few exceptions, his finest achievements can be found in his piano music); the stylistic panorama of his compositions, which shows the influence of German and French music, Italian opera, the Hungarian gypsy manner, and Gregorian chant; and finally the fact that Liszt’s music is dependent like no other on the quality of the performance. To use an aphorism by Friedrich Hebbel, music here “only becomes visible when the correct gaze is focused on the writing.”

Liszt’s outstanding piano works, among which I would only like to mention the B-Minor Sonata, Années de pélérinage, the Variations on “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” La Lugubre gondola, and the finest of the Etudes, are for me on a par with those of Chopin and Schumann. His B-Minor Sonata surpasses, in originality, boldness, and expressive range, anything that has been written in this genre since Beethoven and Schubert.

According to Lina Ramann, his first biographer, we should see Liszt above all as a lyrical tone poet, “rhetorician, rhapsodist, and mime.” She demands from the Liszt player “the grand style,” inwardness (Innerlichkeit), and passion.

In a work like Vallée d’Obermann, all these qualities are evident. The improvisatory arbitrariness often associated with Liszt is contradicted by accounts of his playing in later years. It seems to me of crucial importance that, over a period of twelve years, Liszt remained in close contact with the Weimar orchestra as its principal conductor. A work like the B-Minor Sonata needs to be perceived in this context. Leo Weiner’s remarkable orchestration of the sonata can provide more essential information for the performer than the urge to whip up a succession of feverish dreams. With their metronome markings, both the Liszt-Pädagogium and Siloti’s edition of Totentanz in the Eulenburg pocket scores point to the fact that much of Liszt’s music is nowadays played at overheated speeds. The last thing Liszt deserves is bravura for its own sake. Likewise, he should be shielded from anything that sounds perfumed, or what used to be called effeminate. Wilhelm Kempff’s 1950 recording of the First Legend (St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds) presents us with poetic Liszt playing of unsurpassed quality.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/alfred-brendel-a-pianists-a-to-v/?pagination=false

I love when Brendel writes about Liszt. And his Liszt albums are some of the best records he ever made. I wish he'd recorded the Transcendantes in his early vox/vanguard virtuoso phase.

In my ears' new inability to tolerate the timbre of the piano, which after 6 months I have to assume to be a permanent state of affairs, liszt and debussy are my most mourned losses. And I have now become a collector of orchestral or ensemble arrangements of both men's piano pieces as a result. I don't have Wiener's arrangement of the B Minor Sonata. Need to see if there's a cd...

aw didn't you say you could tolerate old mono recordings? i feel for you anyway

non-piano liszt is full of good things......the dante symphony is my favourite

could swear i never heard of the orchestral version of the sonata, which seems like quite an oversight

I soon discovered even mono piano still aggravated it. It's something about the decay pattern of the piano. As the note fades, my brain seems to want to fill in the fading overtone with tinnitus whine. That plus in the case of hi fi piano recordings the actual hammer strike which creates a whole stack of high information.

The old universal horror flick The Black Cat was scored with a variety of liszt arrangements including orchestral B Minor Sonata. I dunno whether that used the Weiner arrangement tho or the film composers own.

there is a recent recording with a german student orchestra, on the Cavi-musik label conducted by Nicolas Pasquet. I'm almost finished listening to it on Spotify. Quite good. The album starts with a solo piano performance of the sonata before you get the orchestral version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJRf6jmbMc

Lir of the half tongue was the father of the gods, and of the universe. When he gave the orders for creation, the gods who executed his commands understood but half of what he said, owing to his having only half a tongue; with the result that for everything that has been created there is an unexpressed and concealed counterpart, which is the other half of Lir's plan of creation.

no 1 responded to my aida revive a couple of months ago :(

think i'm gonna go for another classic this week, maybs "die zauberflaute"

Trying out my tinnitus' tolerance for mono piano recordings again today thanks to irrepressible enthusiasm brought on by that brendel essay. Using listentoyoutube to convert a bunch of old Louis Kentner Liszt 78s to MP3.

Oooooooh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ninHa6TqgqM#at=42

It is a Galina Ustvolskaya documentary and seeing them get together the Second Symphony while Galina sits in the birches is just great.
Please watch it, Ustvolskaya was and is my favourite of the Russians

On the radio I heard Verdi's string quartet, and I thought that was really good.

― Henry Frog (Frogman Henry), Thursday, 3 December 2009 21:39 (3 years ago)

Only came to know this recently myself, and must confess I was somewhat surprised that yes, it actually is.

Do we really not have a "Rolling Classical 2013" thread? Anyway, I heard Hilary Hahn playing a movement from Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Sounded very good, making me think I should start exploring her playing a little more. Anyone have the full recording? Other thoughts on Hahn (or the piece)?

I see that this is one of her earliest recordings, made when she was 20, and she was nominated for a Grammy for it. I'm not always that on top of recordings tbh.

Her disc of the Sibelius and Schoenberg violin concertos is totally killer. I have a couple other things by her but that was the first one to really light me up.

Whoa, did not know she played Schoenberg. Will get on it stat.

Even if it means interrupting my non-stop big band listening today.

Listened to mvt 1 on Youtube and OMG in love. Buying this album from iTunes atm. (First time I'm paying for Sibelius.)

any recommendations on arvo part? i'm hooked on fur alina right now - but i'm really curious about his choral stuff.

http://music.cbc.ca/#/genres/Classical/blogs/2013/8/Canadian-composition-Blurred-Lines-goes-accidentally-viral-thanks-to-Robin-Thicke

xp

i like Pärt's Berliner Messe a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCyqjHq2x1Y&hl=en-GB&gl=GB

Has anyone heard this disc?:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/journeys-mw0002512436

I heard the very tail end of the Schoenberg on the radio this morning and am quite intrigued.

Btw, that Hahn recording of the Schoenberg Violin Concert has been on heavy rotation in my apartment.

The Sibelius is a real ear opener too, which is no small feat after its 10,000 previous recordings.

I like Hahn's Bach myself.

I got to see the Emerson Quartet play the Rasumovskys a few nights ago in NYC... That was some high-octane, blisteringly paced stuff. I felt a bit bad for Philip Setzer a few times when his intonation got a little slippery, but other than that the playing was pretty air-tight. The final movement of the C major was so lightning-quick it was amazing--I'm not sure if it *should* be played that fast but it was cool to see that it could.

I've been on a real Henryk Szeryng kick lately; that guy was unbelievable.

I've been listening to it non-stop because I need to memorize it but man Kurt Weill's "Lost in the Stars" is fucking stellar

I'm happily coming around to "classical with vocals" too which has long been a stumbling block for me. (Sorry DJP.) The vocal parts of Mahler's symphonies (and of course Das Lied von der Erde), Schubert's Winterreise (and other various songs), the Herreweghe recordings of Bach's cantatas--all have been blowing me away lately.

I had a brief obsession with Hilary Hahn after seeing her play the Stravinsky Violin Concerto at an auditorium near my university. She was greeting people after the concert, and I had this image in my head that I was going to go up to her and invite her to hang out with me and my friends around campus and come to some stupid college party or something, but when I actually got up to her it was just "Uh, hi. You...were...really good." I think it turned out she had a boyfriend anyway.

Ha, well, I don't feel so bad about my occasional fantasies about being a young Martha Argerich's page-turner then...

lol

xpost

Xxp yeah her bf husband whatever is my coworker's friend.

Ws barefoot argerich but that goes without saying p much.

sund4r hahn did a recording of four ives sonatas a couple of years ago w/ valentina lisitsa i liked alot, it's on spotify.

which reminds me does anyone have any rolling or updating classical playlists or classical playlists in general i guess they can recommend. something like tim rutherford-johnson's radio rambler playlist. it can be modern comp or obv old recordings or whatever, any effective filter will work.

thought this was interesting - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/20/arts/music/petition-wants-met-gala-dedicated-to-gay-rights.html. stoked to see this btw, netrebko's tatiana is supposed to be fantastic.

any recommendations on arvo part? i'm hooked on fur alina right now - but i'm really curious about his choral stuff.

I think this disc is a rather good introduction to Pärt's choral work, it has most of his best pieces in that idiom. I haven't heard this particular recording, but I have other stuff by Polyphony and they're really good, so I can't imagine they'd screwed this one up.

Add this record on top of that, and I'd say you have a nice overall look to his vocal work.

I always forget there's the "Hilary Hahn is cute" factor. I genuinely love her technically flawless performances, every new recording of hers quickly becomes a favourite. I've listened to her un-recorded but Youtube'd Prokofiev 1 probably 20-30 times

Reading the "she plays like a robot" comments on violinist message boards is very frustrating

Fgti imma look up that Prokofiev 1. That's a favorite vc of mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2RbO3a3-B8

I've posted it before
It is revelatory

Ars Nova did a record of Arvo Pärt recently as well. I imagine that is really good as well.

I think I might have a thing for people who 'play like robots', probably because it's really hard for me to do.

I'll try to listen to that Prokofiev tonight (hopefully in MI). Will look for the Ives too.

Discovered that Parmegiani's La Création du Monde works surprisingly well in a car btw.

this lp

http://www.discogs.com/Bach-Kurt%C3%A1g-Busoni-Andreas-Grau-G%C3%B6tz-Schumacher-piano-duet-Piano-Duet/release/3281485

the kurtag transcriptions and the art of fugue are very familiar, the busoni is new to me

Have a listen to the serkin-goode recording of that busoni piece-- it was the first time I really loved that music.

that is a prestige piano duo huh, i like goode in beethoven and serkin in mozart

what are your favourite bruckner symphonies?

now returning to early cage and cowell

just went to see billy budd. it was f'ing cool. read a few reviews after and I was kind of surprised how more isn't made in the reviews of the way the powerful, cosmic forces and powerful human desires expressed on the ship all seem to be fashioned from the same roll and swell of the sea. It was all 'Vere sacrifices Budd for his country' and things like that, but that seems facile to say the least.

the melancholy air at the beginning gather force and strength with recollection, the vast sea gathering strength and body, gaining formal and material meaning in the shanties and work-ditties of the swabs, so that the ship's microcosm seems merely like a continuation of the same inhuman and elemental aspects of the sea.

Claggart seems to be a malignant and grotesque son of the the dark waters - the darkness is present in the music at the beginning, grim and brooding, and from that emotion or tone, all things can come, though good sounds as isolated as a bird's cry on the wind, or the weak but brave cheer of a sailors pipe. Claggart himself says he emerges from the chaos, gives the chaos order, and with his Master of Arms stick seems like a grotesque parody of the conductor - putting form upon the music. Yet the sea is *not* chaotic, it is darkly rhythmic.

the opera is a progression from darkness to darkness to darkness: the elderly isolation of Captain Vere at the beginning, out of which emerges life on the HMS Indomitable, the sleep of Budd from which he is woken to be tempted, the evil of Claggart - his genesis in darkness, and in the latter acts, the isolating mist that hangs around the ship, and in all the men's actions and thoughts. Captain Vere's attempt to shine a light through books, and learning, is snuffed and mocked by the forces that rowl around him. He is a glass, but not the glass he thinks he is - i.e. not of light, but of the greatest darkness: good men doing ill in the belief they are doing right.

in fact the only clarity comes with the moments of conflict - out of the mist emerges a French ship, and it's here that formal and material shaping given by human order is given fullest expression in the way all the elements of ship combine in action. How Britten embodies the structures of a ship's crew in the music was particularly forceful - the notion that the music is given structure by the order of the ship is also conversely presented by the notion that song (and music) gives order to the inchoate forces with which we are surrounded.

yet outside of action, in the becalming stillness of the mist those structures themselves become malign - the articles of war order to which men are chained when their desires tell them otherwise. At the end those forces that right at the beginning the sailors were seen to implicitly embody in their actions and song, for better or for worse, are heard in a different form, rising up in the crew's powerful and mutinous murmur against the death of a singer and a good man. Yet like all action in the opera, apart from the single fatal blow, this too subsides - like the swell of the ocean it rises but also falls, and the final sound is of a man's unaccompanied footsteps retreating into the final darkness.

it was all really impressive and awe-inspiring, and i'm left with a feeling i can't quite describe. perhaps it's the britten connection that reminds me of standing on the beach at Aldeburgh in the middle of winter, looking at the granite waves and dull sky, the salt smell and the gulls. there's also obv a deep strand of englishness, not good or bad englishness, but like the sea a sort of bleak pastoral, of being fucked up by our rigidity and rules, a bleak non-simplicity to our feelings as a consequence of a fucked-up entangling of shd and want, of not being able to act in an uncomplicated manner on desire, a resentlfulness of the shd. the null quality of the grey sky, not an existential void, but an even more negative thing of substance. the miserable beauty of being solitary in this amazing misty, sea-drenched, northern archipelago of europe.

love this image of forster, britten and eric crozier working on budd in aldeburgh:

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/3eac94f9-2d27-48ac-a036-e57eb670ef8c.img

Amazingly stated fizzles. I have seen billy budd on video but not in person. I have been lucky enough to see britten's midsummer nights dream and turn of the screw live though. His dramatic instincts are so uncanny. Fuck I wanna listen to budd right now.