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

I love those Structures *so much* and as a student went one step further and used Boulez' matrices to create MIDI clusters of varying densities to further get closer to serial perfection-- *checks hard drive*-- sadly long gone.

:(

Hello, just popped by to say that Boulez's Structures are his most austere and successful work and worth listening to and studying./

They aren't talked about as much as the sonatas are they? It is said iirc that Boulez relaxed a bit and all I'm thinking is why would you want to relax from this?!

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D3kM1khne_sg&start1=&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DFIo15gWMheA&start2=&authorName=FAV

^work in progress

I love it!! Yeah I can see why Boulez would want to relax, composing in that style is some heavy number crunching

After coming across an excellent overview of Kagel's works from the 80s and 90s I thought I'd devote to hunt some more down as I've had real problems with anything he's written after the mid-70s.

The Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano (85 - 92) is really tough, like his work based on Bach's life I am hearing a distorted quotation but because my understanding of what he is quoting doesn't work at the depth Kagel put into it large sections and their meanings may only become intelligible to people who are really in the know. But then what if I was to do the work? Someone is always shut out. I need to re-hear that one, see if I can get something else (or more) out of it.

"Rrrrrrr...." is p/good though. There is always that cathedral like association but the riffs come across as a circus act and their arrangement points to a computerized treatment at times.

I am absolutely delighted to note that a CD devoted to Kurtag's excruciatingly beautiful piano duo Bach transcriptions has been released. The performers are the Yin-Yang Piano Duo. It has 17 of the transcriptions interspersed with Bartok piano duo works. It's on Spotify, go wallow and prosper.

In other news, since I can now only listen to mono-era piano recordings if I want to avoid aggravating my tinnitus, I have been hunting high and low for mono era Schubert Sonata performances. This was pretty rare repertoire in that era. Especially when it comes to my favorite, the Sonata D 894. Does anyone itt happen to have an old Dante CD of Gieseking playing that sonata?

Since it's Good Friday, I've just heard Passio by Arvo Pärt. The ending gets me every time.

Do you know current favourite micropolyphonic composer Ezra Sims?

hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP6-sFdYsQs

I didn't but that sounds good. Thanks for the tip.

I got a haul of CRI records I'm gonna work through, pick the hits

Ives Plays Ives! Viola In My Life! All Harrison and Partch! Gay American Composers series!

Listening to:

Brian Ferneyhough - Transit. Real cracker from the 70s golden age of nu-complexity.
Chris Dench - enonce and afterimages. Two amazing pieces for ensemble, the former has these shiny solos that creep up from the murk. Feels like an exploration, a real adventure.

Going to:

Kagel and Ives at the Forge

Ferneyhough and Dillon and Bartok and Friends on the 27th (yay for amazing free gigs)

Reading:

The Jakob Ullmann cover story in the Wire (first issue I bought in at least a year). Nothing too relevatory, but love A Catalogue of Sounds - a mix of backstory of a composer in East Germany fighting to get his music heard at all (fighting allegations he was a collaborator post-Berlin wall), but what he is actually doing is totally in line w/ Wandelweiser types. A thing that goes unmentioned. There were questions of, you know, if you want to use bits of sounds to structure the noises you hear outside then the implication is that you won't need the music anymore surely?

And this crazy interview w/James Dillon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUJtc0lJMoo

saw the emersons play janacek's 2nd sq, lyric suite and verklärte nacht tonight — great program!

that does sound rather excellent

unfortunately i wasn't in the right frame of mind to enjoy it properly but it was definitely worthwhile

RIP Sir Colin Davis =(

indeed, one of the best interpreters of berlioz in recording history

oh wow. Huge presence, RIP indeed.

Classic for his old Philips traversals of Sibelius and Berlioz alone. I got to see him twice in all-Sibelius programs in the 00s and will always remember the power he conjured up.

carl nielsen

i remember listening to the helios overture on radio 3 during a period of insomnia in early 2008 and now i feel inclined to listen to it for the first time since then

are there any advocates here? thinking c0rey because he loves those nordic composers

jon, i suspect, given his proclivities

nielsen is fantastic. he probably gets short shrift bc his music is not as "difficult" as the more modernist of his contemporaries or as easy to enjoy as the more grandiose symphonists, but his music, esp the syms have the feeling of an extremely logical construction. his later music gets quite strange -- sparser, clipped, just within the bounds of tonality.

Symphonies 4 and 5 are as good as any music I know. The Aladdin suite has some amazing stuff in it, like the movement where he has multiple village bands playing at once (before he could have known what Ives was up to). The 6th symphony is deeply warped. Nielsen rocked.

So, no discussion of Caroline Shaw's "Passacaglia", which won the Pulitzer a few days ago?: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/04/15/177348405/caroline-shaw-30-wins-pulitzer-for-music

I'm listening to the Roomful of Teeth recording available for streaming via Naxos Music Library. It sounds excellent, much better than that Youtube. This is a very nice piece, rich in timbral and textural variation, concisely and attractively structured, and something that I can actually put on often.

Wow, just noticed she beat out Aaron Jay Kernis and Wadada Leo Smith!

I've got to admit, though, I never really know what the criteria are for things like this. This piece is, as I said, very pleasant and listenable and well-crafted, but it's not necessarily exceptionally innovative or hugely ambitious. I haven't listened to the runners-up.

you've pretty much described all american contemporary classical music that gets any kind of acclaim

Really digging

Trying to find the rest now - that track is amazing.

Liking this album by Nadia Sirota a lot. American viola player overdubbing herself, covering Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzolli, and others...

This week I'm finally getting a breakthrough into the Baroque, courtesy of avant-garde oboist Heinz Holliger: his set of Zelenka's Tri Sonatas on ECM ae amazing. Its all witty with plenty of dances and extravagancies, without being in any overbearing. Not sure how he manages this, and I won't start to ask questions now.

Trio Sonatas

My trouble with classical is that it's not only the individual works, it's the player(s)/orchestra and the conductor that have such a huge bearing. Take the example of something like Beethoven's 9th; that piece may have hundreds of iterations available with an equally wide palette of flavors -- so, how can one sift through it all to find those few examples that really do it for you?

I have a small collection of Columbia Masterworks and Angel imprints that i enjoy, and have so far trusted that those guys back in the 50s and 60s did the necessary homework to make sure these pieces were given their due due justice, yet, i have no idea. I'm still on the lookout for guidance in this realm as i don't have the time or the money to explore the field with an equal amount of zeal that i've tapped to explore, roughly, all other musical forms.

Example. I may have heard 50 different iterations of Toccata and Fugue, but not a single one so resonates as a version i found from a "local" early 60s version played by some no-name geezer in his hometown church.

Really reaching a breakthrough on Baroque music. If I look at things from a contemp music lense everything becomes clear. Like it could be anything, so now I'm looking at the discog of Musica Antiqua koln and really feeling the Leclair Chamber Music recording.

But of course the key is 'Koln' => the city of Stockhausen and Kagel.

So last Thrus I went to Camden's Forge venue, watched Mark Knoop and EXAUDI's Juliet Fraser perform songs by Ives and Kagel, Shlomowitz and Laurence Crane. Just loved the combination of Ives' awkward romanticisms and Kagel's uninhibited joy in clowning around. A combination that simply worked and a good link between the early and later years of the 20th century. Juliet had not only to sing but act (with both body and voice), speak, and later on w/Shlomowitz, to read straight and fast.

Crane's piece was the one oddity: he started out in the 80s and I'm getting the sense there was a vogue then for writing playful pieces (this one has the winning countries of the Tour de France) as lyrics; pieces that rode against complexity perhaps. But the lyrics were sorta nothingy, an I prefer Kraftwerk's music.

Saw Mark Knoop and Ian Pace playing w/two percussionists (Nicholas Reed and Tenley Martin) at Goldsmiths last night, putting on an exciting programme, although I'm not sure the Nebulae in my mind has cleared yet to see what James Dillon was up to. I think its the (from the programme note) "nebulous character" that acted as a bit of a crutch, you couldn't see the "simple expansion and contraction" of the material at times, whereas in Ferneyhough's Sonata clarity was achieved, the two pianists really doing a great job in making sure the "cells" did their work on the audience. All those precise physicalities at ends of sections...the job of any performer is to make these structures clear and they do so. Shlomowitz Hi-Hat and me was a brilliant, witty performance piece, and all credit for programming this in as it wasn't as physical an experience, it reminded me of Hugh Metcalfe doing percussion and poetry at the Klinker over the years. Zaldua's Brumaires (apart from the Bartok the only other work in the programme to make use of the full line-up) was the weaker piece in the whole programme. I'm not sure we needed as many starts and stops, too many metallic explosions w/out seeing the joins: you could perhaps see this was a 'progression' on Ferneyhough and Dillon (and Bartok!) but I'm not sure how exactly this is meant to operate as commentary on Marx's text, in the end leaves an impression of a piece that is anxious to be seen as 'progression' whereas Shlomowitz there was no commentary (no programme note on it apart from who it was written for), he's really trying to work at something else (as was the case with the songs of his that were played at the Forge), and all the better for it, without lapsing into gimmickry. Possibly unfair to compare both but I do so as they wrote the younger pieces on the programme.

Hey classical heads, I have a bit of a question to you. I was listening to Mendelssohn's Liebe ohne Worte, and noticed that the tune titled Frühlingsliede ("Spring Song") sounded very familiar. I'm sure it's been used a lot in TV and movies, but Wikipedia doesn't list any examples. IMDb says it's in a bunch of Warner Brothers cartoons, but I'm sure there other examples as well. Can you recall any?

Sorry for the typos, it's "Liede ohne Worte", and "Frühlingslied".

that is such an excellent question because it has been used so much that it's impossible to think of even one example, it feels like. like it's "morning scene" default music, but is there a specific place it actually got that rep? hmm

Yeah, I guess it's so widely used I've just picked it up without consciously acknowledging where I heard it. It's interesting though, with most "stock classical tunes used in movies/TV", I can name at least one example of their usage, like "Morning Mood" in The Simpsons, "Ride of the Valkyries" in Apocalypse Now, "Carmina Burana" in Jackass The Movie, etc, but with this one I can't think of a single one.

yeah i'd guess that originated w/ carl stalling, i'm not even sure i've seen it anywhere outside of warner bros cartoons (and if i did they were definitely referencing warner bros cartoons) but i can imagine once they'd done that gag it was a useful well to go back to. obligatory - http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/looney-tunes-classics/n10049/

Can't watch that video in Finland, what's it about?

Pretty sure I've heard the Mendelssohn as "morning" music in a Buster Keaton short (The Scarecrow?) Music in silent films is highly variable, and often just a bunch of classical things performed solo and strung together haphazardly, which is perhaps why IMDB wouldn't list it for something like that at least.

Enjoying

http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/imgs/s300x300/4791180.jpg

RIP Janos Starker. Probably not enough interest on ILM to start an entire thread, but I am currently digging the hell out of this:

http://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS-3WsEMvX4usO_iqfc149ba4wC2sz5pn3UzuZ1_inqIX74qpX_Iw

i take it all back about band of susans. Love Agenda is killing me at the moment. my apologies.

RIP Janos Starker. Probably not enough interest on ILM to start an entire thread, but I am currently digging the hell out of this:

i take it all back about band of susans. Love Agenda is killing me at the moment. my apologies.

― scott seward, Wednesday, 1 May 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Apols accepted :)