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

scott: rtbf = Radio Télévision Belge Francophone

have become a big fan of the suk trio. and josef suk! the commposer that is. lucked into a trove of supraphon vinyl a couple of years back.

listening to robert erickson right now. night music/the idea of order at key west/pacific sirens. dismissed tons of academic-type CRI albums years ago cuz they weren't weird enough or didn't include vietnam-era tape hijinx or something (being punk rock or whatever) and then i go back and listen to one and i'm totally in love. and this actually does have cool tape stuff on Pacific Sirens. and weird vocalizing and all kinds of great sounds. he taught subotnick and oliveros when they were just wee little things and he definitely knew what was up.

anyway, this album has become a fave of mine. and i love the small room ambience of Night Music. don't know if any modern chillwavers have discovered Pacific Sirens but they should check it out.

xpost Suk's 'A Summer Tale' symphony tone poem thing rocks my world. The 'blind musicians' and 'phantoms' movements are so moving to me.

in case people have never heard it. set adrift on memory bliss:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuA2ghnrIY

Re catalogues of manageable sizes: The official work list of Fartein Valen (early Norwegian atonalist) clocks in at about 6 hours, according to a playlist published on Spotify (although a few works seem unrecorded). (The "official" criterion is important here; wikipedia says he also wrote about 25000 (!!) piano etudes, which have obviously not been recorded.)

Lili Boulanger has a tiny catalogue, much of it very beautiful. I've been meaning to recommend her music here. I own two great CDs on the Timpani label:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Melodies-BOULANGER/dp/B000Y1BR7U/

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Works-Choir-Orchestra-BOULANGER/dp/B00113EZVK/

The second in particular cuts straight to the heart.

oh yeah

jean cras too. his biography is a fun read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cras

i really dig this dutch guy. 20th century. didn't write a TON of stuff. i like everything i've heard. pretty sure everything he did could fit on 4 CDs or so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTHz_nA5-qA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC4CTyBwzp4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx7mLcWdJY

I have been savoring Jean Cras' Polypheme opera lately. He's really got the succulent stuff I go for.

Gonna check out his orchestral songs after Polypheme.

19th century composers tended to produce voluminously. For a compact body of work in high Romanticism I would nominate Berlioz, actually. The works themselves are large but there are only a few.

Alkan too, perhaps.

The works themselves are large but there are only a few.

*cough*wagner*cough* ;)

Thanks for Berg recoms, ttajpm!

Re: Brahms trios, say this recording?

http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/I/71ZDyilc3xL._AA1103_.jpg

Not sure! They may have done them more than once. The one I have is analog, a 2cd set which does include the Horn Trio.

All I could find in the library was the Borodin Trio's set on Chandos, so that will have to do for now!

can somebody who knows Feldman better than I do tell me whether I should get this? The stuff I have of his I love a lot, but it looks as though there's a lot to know about him

If you like the 90 min stuff (esp. Crippled Symmetry, there is an affinity between both works in my mind) and feel like you could listen to this for even hours then yes I would get Philip Guston.

Have the California EAR Unit rec, if that matters.

I have Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 (six hours) and have only listened to it once, but I really like having it.

SQ no. 2 is unlike Feldman's other 'late' music iirc, the last couple of hours are very different, more into repetition..

I haven't dared For Philip Guston yet. My Feldman faves fall into the 30 to 70 minute range, it seems.

My Feldman faves fall into the 30 to 70 minute range, it seems.

Definitely the case with me. I love the Piano & String Quartet (I have the '90s recording w/Kronos and Aki Takahashi), For John Cage (which splits between two CDs but is only about 82 minutes), and For Bunita Marcus (which I saw performed live once).

Definitely get this at any rate: http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=804552

Guston is probably my favourite Feldman piece at the moment. of course it's a listening commitment, but over the course of a quiet evening it inhabits the space and resolves itself into some of MF's most beautiful, transcendent music.

For me, a piece like that is aspirational in a way - I'd buy the CD/box set dreaming that one day I'd have the kind of uncluttered existence where I could devote five hours to a single piece of music.

"uncluttered", "lazy", it's all good :)

listening to a nice 1953 pressing of bruckner's great mass no.3. dig it. maybe christ-y is the way to go for me and old bruckner. and 60 year old records.

That's an interesting era, already recording to tape and releasing LPs but no stereo yet.

Some of the big names did their best work in that in between time. Thomas Beecham for example.

yeah i got no problem with mono. this is the vienna state philharmonia conducted by ferdinand grossman. which doesn't mean much to me. great recording though.

sounds like a pseudonym for a pickup orchestra. There were lots of them back then. The Vienna [something] [something]

i'd much rather hear a newer recording of bruckner, but the dynamic range makes home listening difficult w/out headphones

For Bruckner's sound world I prefer the height of analog: 60s or 70s. Like the recording of #6 by Horst Stein on Decca.

on the opposite end of the recording spectrum, yesterday i was listening to angel digital vinyl of muti and philadelphia doing scriabin symphony no.1. soooooo creamy. and dreamy. and kinda perfect. state of the art if you will. in 1986 anyway.

Creamy is the word for the Philadelphia, especially under Ormandy. Most recently I was getting drunk on their recording of Shostakovich #15. Haven't heard that many of the Muti/Philly era I must admit.

that's a mixed metaphor I guess. You don't get drunk on cream.

muti/philly was what hooked me on prokofiev's 3rd sym

One of the best Schubert piano performances I've ever heard is 5 bucks in Arkiv's January clearance sale:

http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=167461

So I haven't been paying close attention to the news for a month or so and it has come to my attention just now on another thread that Charles Rosen has died.

The Romantic Generation is one of the best books I've ever read, fiction or non-fiction, on any topic, and one of those rare books that really affected who I am at least w/r/t all my thoughts about art and artistic effort.

Gonna cue up Schumann's Davidsbundlertanze, one of many keystones I owe Rosen for.

RIP.

He cancelled a gig and lecture here last year. Great writer - he's all over the original Boulez Webern box, an obscure but noteworthy point I didn't see in any of the obituaries.

He was the first to record the Debussy Etudes, beating even Gieseking and Loriod to the punch. I really hope it finally gets released on CD as a tribute. It's supposed to me an amazing performance.

RIP.

Loving this piece on Carter

No central beat can be; heard: the rhythms therefore do not cross, but proceed independently.

Looks at this - what a semi-colon!

I meant to post this earlier today but got sidetracked by finding out about Rosen. It's a little Spotify playlist of the most recent things to slay me:

http://open.spotify.com/user/1213493496/playlist/62g39Ncy2VfBZkylN1tV61

1. Ernst Toch's vocal/chamber cycle The Chinese Flute. I love to wallow in modernist orientalism. I can't help it! I know it's wrong. This is so up my alley. If you love Das Lied von der Erde and Pierrot Lunaire you should give this a whirl. The recording available on Spotify is a historical mono one. Mine is the ravishing new digital recording on the cpo label.

2. Shostakovich 15th symphony, Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orch. Somehow the rich, creamy soulful Ormandy/Philly sound works incredibly well for the russian modernists. Their Prokofiev 5 is awesome and this recording of DSCH's last and most enigmatic symphony is even better. I don't know that much about Schnittke but it seems like DSCH 15 must have been a huge influence on him, with its impossible-to-fathom quotations and bitter, bitter tone of irony mixed with childish fantasy.

3. the music for chorus and orchestra of Maurice Ohana. Yet another 20th century francophone who gets me moondrunk on sheer instrumental color. A reissue series just came out of his orchestral and orchestral/vocal and chamber/vocal stuff. He's a little reminiscent of Messiaen but not derivatively so. The piece which got me super excited is a choral orchestral cycle called 'Office des Oracles' which is not on Spotify, but I found a similar piece.

4. Benjamin Frankel's fierce, beautiful serialism-tinged film score for the early Hammer Horror classic Curse of the Werewolf. I was reminded in various places of Schoenberg, Britten and Janacek. Take my word that those are three rare influences to encounter in film music. This is my first encounter with Frankel's music. It's a digital recording of a suite from the score which came out on Naxos.

5. Alfred Brendel's live broadcast performance of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. This was released in a special series a few years ago around when he retired. It's the fourth Brendel Diabelli to come out on CD. He says it's his best one. It certainly can go head to head with, and is very complementary to, his Philips studio version, which was already one of my very favorites of this work. I am a tireless defender of Brendel's Beethoven, and believe me there's a lot of hate out there for it on the interwebs. His Beethoven has been up and down, but when he's on he's incomparable IMO. Anyway, the 2CD album this comes from is on clearance at Arkiv right now for like 8 bucks!

6. Who the hell is Edith Canat de Chizy? She's a living composer, she's French, I stumbled across these pieces completely by chance, and here way with an orchestra floors me.

Dutilleux's piano music is great, I've discovered... Mean to listen to the orchestral works now in a much-recommended Chandos boxed set (Tortelier).

I have a new favorite cycle of Schumann symphonies, and it's Phillipe Herreweghe's Harmonia Mundi cycle. If owned it a few years, gave it a couple listens, but somehow this month on revisiting it, has unfolded itself to reveal sheer glory. The four deeply strange Schumann syms are pieces I've listened to exhaustively over the years; I've probably owned twenty different recordings of them. They are so full of sonic events, and so inscrutable in company with the rest of the 19th century heavies (as are his piano fragment cycles, but you can't engage the symphonies through the same prism as the piano cycles AT ALL. They are a different species of sphinx).

found a gem in one of my two dollar bins at the store:

hidden sparks - maryvonne le dize-richard (violin) and jean-claude henriot (piano) on New World Records from 1986. stuff by elliott carter, tod machover, john melby, and ralph shapey. don't know any of those dudes except for carter. though its possible i have something by melby on an old crystal records lp. (and the melby thing on here is awesome piece for violin and computer-synthesized tape)

anyway, this has been in the two dollar bin forever and its going home with me now.

A few bits from Elliott Carter (Double Concerto), following that article by Rosen.

Hans-Joachim Hespos - a composer who was most active in the 70s and 80s, paints savage landscapes (note I said paint not splashes)...akin to Finnissy or Barrett or Emsley, many years later.

Listening to a few pieces for solo oboe too: Ausgangspunkte by Roger Redgate, Holliger's Studie. Looking for more to compile. xp

currently digging this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrmb9iifnwg

Also a few works by Mark Osborn who died in his early 30s leaving about a dozen or so cracking compositions I can listen to an awful lot at times. He developed a sensibility like few others (he was a colleague of Czernowin's, who I talked about above) that is hard to describe right now.

Spahlinger - El Sonido Silencioso. Great choral piece from the mid-70s, post-Chilean coup.