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

LL I think u would dig the Partch CD titled 'Historic Speech-Music Recordings' as an intro to his world.

Welcome to the classical thread where no one but me and scott ever wanna talk about old fart pre-WWII stuff!

*crosses arms*

Gonna have to do some ear research on the Munrow/Tristano question. But I just scared up something rly interesting; it sounds like there is a Henze composition that Munrow fans need to hear (let me know if this Google Books link works or not):

http://books.google.com/books?id=uxB39t7O3FcC&pg=PA56&lpg=PA56&dq=david+munrow+lamento+di+tristano&source=bl&ots=9dG-FrHyWW&sig=zdr9M4-OoEvbNDb02DIbajU8Nlc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qiD4UJ-VGuqy0QHQp4GYCQ&ved=0CF4Q6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=david%20munrow%20lamento%20di%20tristano&f=false

AND CLOUDS

xpost

That album title is deliciously boring. I love it, will investigate.
I had already counted clouds among my allies ;)

also I am all for including early music in cm discussions. Especially with how much we talk about post-war stuff itt and how much the post-war avant garde was thinking about early music in their own work.

yeah it is a hella dry title but it includes works that quote hobo inscriptions from the railings of train stations and transcribed cries of san fran newsboys!

this is magical cd which includes a nice version of the partch piece:

http://www.allmusic.com/album/just-west-coast-mw0001407432

any bach experts here? i have a bach question on the sandy bull thread...

Thanks for asking, bc now I looked at that thread and I never knew abt Sandy Bull before now! If that album is on spotify I can prob ID the bach pc for you...

What? Trade you a Harry Partch for a Sandy Bull. He's great!
I'll be back when I have something more to report about what I am currently digging. Thank you thread!

Really enjoying Julius Eastman - Unjust Malaise (it's on Spotify). Great piece here on new music box:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/In-Search-of-Julius-Eastman/

― Crackle Box, Thursday, 17 January 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sad article, have a quite a few compositions of perfs from many composers that were transferred from tape to mp3s which should be getting a wider issue (not to mention a clearer recording in some cases), with good liner notes so as to perhaps encourage more enthusiasm and performance and understanding.

So much is tied up in older cassettes where you need to contact the people performing, or excellent performances that are tied up in publishing hell.

Welcome to the classical thread where no one but me and scott ever wanna talk about old fart pre-WWII stuff!

Getting organized here, give me a minute :-)

awesome dn there!

Was hoping someone would listen to the Newman I posted earlier and tell me what other old fart 19th century stuff it sounds like?

When I started posting here I thought we'd discuss classical music from other eras, hoping to make new links too.

you know you can always talk about whatever you want. everyone wins.

i feel really clueless about more recent stuff. so its always nice to hear about that. my problem is i don't really ever download/stream/etc. i listen to CDs and vinyl and CDs of recent music is hard to come by for me. though i do listen to stuff on youtube.

i was so excited when i found a bunch of schnittke CDs at the library book sale last summer! i never ever see them anywhere and that goes double for any vinyl of his stuff. listened to it for months.

So I am obsessed at the moment with Bach's organ chorale prelude BWV 659, and particularly with Busoni's solo-piano transcription of the same.

The recording a very elderly Horowitz made in his living room, for the documentary, "The Last Romantic" , I find almost unbearably moving.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PzGf-_zKuM

(This YT comment fits nicely with the poignancy of the music:

"..it was very beautiful, very beautiful..."
Horrowitz: " But I didn't compose it.... "
In this line he shows his sadness. His dream was to become a composer afterall. I bet he is composing in the life after ;)

Like many of the chorale preludes, this one consists of a freely imitative texture over which phrases of the chorale tune are presented (in this case with an unusual degree of liberty and elaboration). Here is the chorale tune itself, in a harmonization by Bach.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAiFO4S9G_g

For more information about this tune, including a transcription and English translation of Martin Luther's text, see: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Texts/Chorale016-Eng3.htm

My other favorite performances of Bach-Busoni BWV 659:

Perahia - more momentum
Paul Jacobs - evokes sound of organ

Here's a nice performance of Bach BWV 659 by organist Hans-Andre Stamm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6piOhwgopg

And if you still haven't had your fill of this music, check out the superb musician Stefan Hussong playing a transcription for accordian!

xyzzzz, I missed when you said the Newman was on Spotify. Listening to his First Sonata now. First mvmt is a dead ringer style-wise for late (last 7 or 8 Piano Sonatas) Schubert. Almost sounds like it could be a po-mo collage of bits from the late schubert!

2nd mvmt puts me in mind more of prokofiev's sonata style, especially his 2nd through 4th sonatas. Also Bartok's early set of Bagatelles.

3 mvmt - harder to pin down similarities. More brittle and strange, made of isolated gestures, than the first 2 mvmts. Oh gosh now the pianist is singing! I like the effect.

Newman's 4th sonata is bleary, wrong-note Bach, sounding plausibly Bach for a while but then repeatedly wandering outside the lines.

Will listen to the other 2 sonatas on this album tomorrow.

Paul - wonderful post. That Horowitz youtube stopped me on my tracks - will have to check the rest later.

Thx Jon, also.

Horowitz is such a weird pianist. People make out like Gould was an eccentric interpreter but Horowitz' style was just SO palpably bizarre, it's wild that he became the public name for 'greatest pianist on earth'. Even the sound of his instrument was weird. NB I actually LIKE him a lot in things like Kreisleriana and Scarlatti sonatas and Scriabin.

+1 on the latter two.

I don't know if I'm projecting but on the Meysles brothers films of him I get the vivid impression of a gay man culturally straitjacketed with a really dominating diva wife (Toscanini's daughter?) to boot. I can't escape the poignancy of this, to a certain extent anyway, when listening to the few records of his I have.

To my understanding, you are not projecting re: that situation.

That's consistent with what I've heard from people who knew him slightly. Not that they had juicy rumors of marital infidelity or anything like that. The trapped part as much as the gay part. It is an interesting meaning to map onto some of his performances.

And yes, an eccentric interpreter who achieved the highest level of mainstream appeal. His earlier recordings have a kind of nervous energy, his later ones seemingly placid but with a nervous undercurrent capable of exploding into the foreground. The violence of that final cadence in bwv 659! But I can't call him eccentric without adding that he is unfailingly sincere.

placid at times, it would be better to say

His performance of Liszt's Scherzo und Marsch (Sony) is... well, if it doesn't sell you on Liszt's 'demonic' side, nothing ever will.

i bought so many classical records this week. i don't know what i'm thinking...i don't sell that many classical records. can't resist i guess.

if you need selling on liszt then fuck you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEq_ixDC7fY&NR

To be clear, I am a Liszt partisan from way back. But vh's scherzo really shows you the demon in the demon.

Whose st Francis is that, nilmar?

hamelin

i think i have seen him play that

ive been using up my wh4+.cd tokens on old liszt cds, i think i have all of hamelin's recordings

also something called 'the composer pianists' in which our quebecois hero plays loads of silly music by people called sorabji, which i don't think i will listen to again

i was disappointed in sorabji

i read a biographical article about him years ago which was more interesting than any of his music i have heard

better read than heard from, agreed

I have a broadcast of Hamelin playing his own set of 12 etudes, I need to bust that out again. Was not in the mood on first audition.

yeah i think that could be quietly shelved

I wish Hamelin would record Liszt's penultimate version of the Transcendental Etudes. There's yet to be a credible rendition of those (Leslie Howard did them, Janice Weber did them, Ogdon did one or two, that's all there's been).

ha i was just thinking i should listen to those again

they aren't among my favourite liszt

the guardian reviewer speculated that hamelin hasn't recorded all that much because hyperion have the whole howard collection

jon what is your favourite alkan and how do you rate him in the grand victorian scheme of things?

http://ak.buy.com/PI/0/500/60097986.jpg

im increasingly convinced the 80s was the apogee of classical album cover design

The English pianist Ian Pace describes Sorabji's music as that of "a massive ego thoroughly unaware of its crushing banality."[190] The music critic Andrew Clements calls Sorabji "just another 20th-century English eccentric ... whose talent never matched [his] musical ambition."[191] The music journalist Max Harrison, in his review of Rapoport's book Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, heavily criticised Sorabji's compositions, piano playing, criticism and personal conduct and implied that "nobody cared except a few close friends".[192]

Alkan: I have only scratched the surface but he is definitely brilliant. I know the solo Concerto (in Hamelin's earlier recording) and I have the Hyperion discs of the Sonata and the Symphony waiting to be attended to.

That quote by Ian comes from this classic thread on Sorabji (first time I heard his name when I posted there).

R3 shut it down, before the cuts - no reason given that I know of at the time - but it could be er difficult to manage at times.

I have to say I always wanted to hear Opus Clavicembalisticum alongside Finnissy's History of Photography in Sound for an experiment.

that clements quote is quite apposite generallky i think -- 'eccentricity' as a curse of english culture, the repressively tolerated selfconscious 'weirdness' of prog or whatever vs disaffection for the sincerely strange and uncompromising

Clemets says this is "modelled on Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica". Since we've been talking about Busoni and Bach I'll give it a go.

This is really good piece on Sorabji by Max Harrison.

Withdrawing your music from performance for 40 years says it all.

For Fantasia Contrappuntistica, you want the two-piano version in the recording by Paul Jacobs and Richard Goode, which was finally issued on CD recently. I never saw the point of the Fantasia till i heard this recording. Like Liszt, Busoni seems to be very much at the mercy of his interpreters.

Will definitely check out the Jacobs/Goode Fantasia Contrappuntistica. The piece hasn't clicked for me the few times I've heard it. (Once? Twice?)

& a belated thanks for the display name props, took me a while to figure out what "dn" meant! (I know, a standard ILX abbreviation…)

We've been listening to the Brandenburg Concertos at work recently. Man, instead of giving the kids drugs for ADHD, they should have them listen to some Bach.