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

I guess lots of classical stuff is like this, but digitally recorded versions intended for CD usually sound weak compared to a recording played on creepy-sounding old vinyl.

anatol_merklich, which recording are you listening to?

All four Schoenberg string quartets are great but #2 and #3 are my favourites. I listened to #1 and #2 (Schoenberg String Quartet recording) at work tonight. 2 is heart-stopping for me.

Going to go to sleep to Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (Cedric Pescia).

Now I'm remembering how much better the Fred Sherry SQ's recording of Schoenberg's 3rd is than SSQ's.

(Pescia's recording didn't really do it for me, not last night, at least.)

anatol_merklich, which recording are you listening to?

Let's see... it's the New Vienna String Quartet with Evelyn Lear in #2, on Philips.

--
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lol at usual email signature creeping in there

I actually forgot that I have the LaSalle Quartet's DG recording of it on vinyl. I'll try to listen to that tonight.

Yeah, SQ1 really comes to life in that version imo. I completely get where you're coming from when I listen to it. I've been thinking that performances make a huge difference for me when it comes to Schoenberg. I'm not entirely sure yet why it is that any professional-calibre performance of e.g. a good Mozart piece will sound fine to me but a great performance of Schoenberg will sound like the best thing ever while a different performance might not connect.

I've been digging John Tavener's The Protecting Veil (the original recording) a lot, I wonder if you recommend other pieces like this, modern stuff that's droney but pretty, and not atonal (don't really know how else to describe it). I know Pärt has some compositions that are kinda similar, but I'm looking for something less austere. The other Tavener stuff I've listened to is his choral music, I like that too, but it doesn't have the same droney quality. Are the some other non-choral pieces by Tavener that would sound the same? Or by other composers?

Happy Canada Day:

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

(Er, it's still July 1 in four provinces.)

Less Grisey more Vivier in London venues please! :)

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