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

I just got back from seeing the Cecilia String Quartet and pianist Georgy Tchaidze at the university. The one contemporary work the quartet played, Another Little Piece of My Heart by Kelly-Marie Murphy, is really really great, despite the dumb title. You can watch one movement here: http://youtu.be/39Fla-lTbNw

They also did Franck's Piano Quintet, which was staggering. And Tchaidze played some Mendelssohn. I admit to taking a nap during Variations serieuses.:P

Variations sneuzes

Wonder what Canadian composers Cecilia will be recording - get onto it Sund4r :)

Yeah, that Franck piece rules.

Yun's Study for Flute is A+++

Liza Lim's Mother Tongue I'm undecided on this - great vocal lines and all but some of the brassy lines don't agree w/me, a bit one-dimensional at times. Will re-listen

how about this! i was just listening to john renbourn's lady and the unicorn and was like WHAT IS THIS SONG because it sounded so familiar
it was lamento di tristano played super duper fast!!

i never look at the song titles on this record but now i know
pleasant surprise, the end

i forgot about my ear-research project i was supposed to do on that ('why does LL like Munrow Lamento di Tristano more than other versions? What makes this Tristano diff than other Tristanos?')

it's ok, you have other things to do -- i'm patient! i think it has something to do with (1) spare instrumentation (2) drone and (3) pace, but beyond that i have no idea.

I've hunted a work for larger ensemble by Newman (The State Paintings with the anti-abstract), he has this...naivety about him, very English experimental school, i.e. post-Obscure records variety, yet what keeps you from dismissing it as solely is that is by how well learnt it is. Lives and revels in that paradox.

Elliott Carter re-discovery gathers pace - rocking away the duo for violin and piano from '75. The violin is incredibly gestural and violent, the piano is a almost ambient observer by comparison. Until it joins in the fun later, that is.

anyone recognize the artist of this painting?

http://static.qobuz.com/images/jaquettes/3760/3760127221029_600.jpg

It's a detail from Johann Friedrich Overbeck's "Maria und Elisabeth mit dem Jesus- und Johannesknaben".
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/romanticism/Friedrich-Overbeck.html

wow! i was expecting it to be some northern renaissance painter from the 15th/16th century. thanks :D

http://i.imgur.com/N6KXrOA.jpg

probably a fun cd (idk much ornstein apart from "suicide in an airplane"), but ugh that cover

Well people really did call them that tbf

that is solidly in the upper quartile of steffen scheiermacher covers judging by a cursory gis

Re: that "Oboe from Mars" compilation, don't miss Claus-Steffan Mahnkopf's Solitude-Nocturne!

― il caresse sa dingding (Paul in Santa Cruz), Monday, 14 January 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Love this! Def on the comp!

So wanna go to this tonight. *sigh*

http://open.spotify.com/track/7mc9iLnsOGsKyTHs6ICpNT

can anyone id that bach piece?

Happy birthday to Delius!

cool — i will listen to "paris" for the occasion

I always wanna reach for Song of the High Hills or Appalachia

Jon: as a big Sibelius fan, what do you think of Rozhdestvensky?

I have not heard any of Rozhdy's Sibelius cycle. I understand it's kind of a controversial one. Rozhdy is quite versatile in my experience - I have him in Prokofiev, Delius and Vaughan Williams and he's great in all three.

I'm really curious to hear his cycle, which is supposed to be very distinctive indeed - booking it out of the library tomorrow.

a stroll thru some of my classical bins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQpq4T-cGjM

That made me happy!

If i was there hangin' out right now I would bug you to throw on the Britten - Spring Symphony and then Boulez - Le Marteau! And WTF is the Nude Paper Sermon?!

"http://open.spotify.com/track/7mc9iLnsOGsKyTHs6ICpNT

can anyone id that bach piece?"

I'm having trouble tracking this down. There's a famous Bourree from the Lute Suite in e minor but that's not it. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a transcription/derivation.

Favorite Chopin Etudes? Perahia is my go-to for having the best combination of virtuosity and musicality. I am listening to the Lang Lang set on Spotify and it's surprisingly good for all the shit he gets from connoisseurs. On the positive - the guy can clearly play and it's cool to hear all the notes. However I don't want to hear EVERY note pounded out precisely at the expense of the melody. 25/6 and 25/11 are player-piano robotic in sections.

There has never been a particular one that worked all the way through the whole cycle for me. At various times I've favored Ashkenazy, abbey Simon, and Perahia. The BBC live excerpts by Richter are astonishing. Maybe too astonishing.

schubert d.958 and 959 (kempff)

D958 is my favorite Schubert sonata right now. Andsnes!!!

all three of the last sonatas are otherworldy

I consider D894 to be absolutely amazing too. Man, there's just nothing like late Schubert. I saw the trio D929 performed live last year and was almost indecently intense to experience in public.

"http://open.spotify.com/track/7mc9iLnsOGsKyTHs6ICpNT

can anyone id that bach piece?"

I'm having trouble tracking this down. There's a famous Bourree from the Lute Suite in e minor but that's not it. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a transcription/derivation.

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Yeah, this is the weird thing, I've got the lute suites book and my sight reading isn't quite what it used to be, but I'm quite sure it's not in there. It doesn't sound like it could be related either.

(If you can play the famous E minor one, play it triplets like a 6/8 feel and listen to what happens to the bass part, it does incredible things, I found a Buckethead video once where he seems to have discovered the same thing)

Just got back from seeing Penny Johnson playing Bach: French Suite #2, Prelude and Fugue in F# from WTC2, Contrapunctus 9 from Art of the Fugue, Partita #4 in D. Sounded great!

Favorite Chopin Etudes?

Pollini or Uchida imo

I saw Angela Hewitt play French Suites 5 & 6, Debussy's Pour le Piano, and Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin. She is not the most virtuosic pianist out there but her control and sensitivity are astonishing.

Warner Music Group announced they are buying the Parlophone Group - including EMI Classics and Virgin Classics. Good news IMO since Warner does not put sonic watermarks on their digital offerings.

got great CDs at the thrift store this morning:

havergal brian - symphony no. 1 "gothic" (marco polo) (slovak philharmonic. which is pretty gothic.)

sensemaya - the unknown silvestre revueltas (1899-1940) (dorian recordings)

schoenberg - verklarte nacht/kammersymphonien (DG) (orpheus chamber orchestra)

korngold - between two worlds (london)

janacek - concertino/violin sonata (london) (musiktage mondsee ensemble)

peter blanchette - style brise - the broken style (angelic alternative) (killer tunes - bach, handel, dowland, etc - for 11-string archguitar)

johann adolf hasse - salve regina (archiv)

Revueltas? Not unknown over here, that guy is super cool

its all stuff that had never been recorded until this cd.

Ooh, interesting. I just did a google search to learn about it. (The 2nd google result for "revueltas" is a recipe for pupusas on the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.)

It also means "scrambled" (re: eggs) iirc!

The janacek concertino is one of my favorite pieces of chamber music.

Anybody see the first part of The Sound and the Fury on BBC Four last night?

So it is becoming more and more indisputable that my ears cannot handle high fidelity stereo recordings of solo piano anymore. I.e. the repertoire which has been my listening bread and butter ever since classical music became a huge thing for me in 1995.

I should note that almost all of my listening opportunities are at my job and while walking/taking the subway, so I am a creature of headphones by necessity.

And I have had garden variety constant ringing of the ears for ages and ages, but in the last year or two it's become clear that solo piano recordings make my ringing a lot worse. To avoid it I have to lower the volume to the point where I can't hear hardly any of the tone color which makes it pointless to listen in the first place.

This may be a subconscious reason why my listening has veered so strongly toward orchestral music and chamber music in recent years. It's funny, I can handle a cello + piano chamber recording or a lieder recording.

You know what also works? Mono-era piano solo piano recordings. And to some extent, modern hi-fi recordings of historical instruments (fortepianos etc). I threw Yves Nat's, Wilhelm Kempff's and Schnabel's mono Beethoven cycles on my ipod and one could ask for much worse a situation than to get one's Beethoven from these fuckers.

Sorry to hear about your ringing-ears trouble, Jon. Solo-piano music is central to my own music listening, and giving up some or all of it would not be easy.

If you've still got chamber music and orchestra music, and modern recordings of historical keyboards, and historical recordings of modern pianos, then the good news is that you've got a world of stuff you can listen to without aggravating the ringing.

I don't see how the mono/stereo distinction itself would matter for ear-ringing, so I wonder if the advantage you're getting with mono-era recordings is a rolled-off frequency response. Have you tried messing with the EQ settings built into older iPods (http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26537), or with an equalizer app for newer iPods (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/equalizer-pro/id505170168?mt=8 -- NB I've never used this)?

Also, have you talked with your doctor about the whole ringing problem? I'm just thinking it could be worth learning about ways to ensure it doesn't get worse…

I think the difference is in the attack of piano notes - it's not mono v stereo per se obv, but that recordings of the 50s and before don't capture as much of that massive brick of high frequency information when the hammer strikes the string. It's definitely the note attack that gives me problems.

So that with a hi fi recording of a fortepiano, the instrument itself does not produce as much high frequency attack as a steinway. I almost wonder if I would also do well listening to recordings of modern Bosendorfer pianos which iirc have more of a 'ping' attack and less of a 'klang' attack.

Problem with using EQ is that the wonderful colors in the decay/long tail of the piano note seem to suffer too much.

I have had ringing forever and I don't usually notice it, and am almost never stressed out by it, so I hesitate to look into it as a health issue because 1) the ringing itself is notoriously untreatable and 2) so much of the ravages of tinnitus seems to come from the psychological stress of it, and I seem to naturally not focus on the ring; I would hate to learn to foreground it more in the course of paying attn to it as a health problem and then be unable to defocus on it, if that makes sense.

It does make sense and is probably a healthy way of thinking about the whole issue, as long as you're using common sense about things like loud headphone listening that could do you harm. Anyway not really meaning to lecture you about this.