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

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

Fgti imma look up that Prokofiev 1. That's a favorite vc of mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2RbO3a3-B8

I've posted it before
It is revelatory

Ars Nova did a record of Arvo Pärt recently as well. I imagine that is really good as well.

I think I might have a thing for people who 'play like robots', probably because it's really hard for me to do.

I'll try to listen to that Prokofiev tonight (hopefully in MI). Will look for the Ives too.

Discovered that Parmegiani's La Création du Monde works surprisingly well in a car btw.

this lp

http://www.discogs.com/Bach-Kurt%C3%A1g-Busoni-Andreas-Grau-G%C3%B6tz-Schumacher-piano-duet-Piano-Duet/release/3281485

the kurtag transcriptions and the art of fugue are very familiar, the busoni is new to me

Have a listen to the serkin-goode recording of that busoni piece-- it was the first time I really loved that music.

that is a prestige piano duo huh, i like goode in beethoven and serkin in mozart

what are your favourite bruckner symphonies?

now returning to early cage and cowell

just went to see billy budd. it was f'ing cool. read a few reviews after and I was kind of surprised how more isn't made in the reviews of the way the powerful, cosmic forces and powerful human desires expressed on the ship all seem to be fashioned from the same roll and swell of the sea. It was all 'Vere sacrifices Budd for his country' and things like that, but that seems facile to say the least.

the melancholy air at the beginning gather force and strength with recollection, the vast sea gathering strength and body, gaining formal and material meaning in the shanties and work-ditties of the swabs, so that the ship's microcosm seems merely like a continuation of the same inhuman and elemental aspects of the sea.

Claggart seems to be a malignant and grotesque son of the the dark waters - the darkness is present in the music at the beginning, grim and brooding, and from that emotion or tone, all things can come, though good sounds as isolated as a bird's cry on the wind, or the weak but brave cheer of a sailors pipe. Claggart himself says he emerges from the chaos, gives the chaos order, and with his Master of Arms stick seems like a grotesque parody of the conductor - putting form upon the music. Yet the sea is *not* chaotic, it is darkly rhythmic.

the opera is a progression from darkness to darkness to darkness: the elderly isolation of Captain Vere at the beginning, out of which emerges life on the HMS Indomitable, the sleep of Budd from which he is woken to be tempted, the evil of Claggart - his genesis in darkness, and in the latter acts, the isolating mist that hangs around the ship, and in all the men's actions and thoughts. Captain Vere's attempt to shine a light through books, and learning, is snuffed and mocked by the forces that rowl around him. He is a glass, but not the glass he thinks he is - i.e. not of light, but of the greatest darkness: good men doing ill in the belief they are doing right.

in fact the only clarity comes with the moments of conflict - out of the mist emerges a French ship, and it's here that formal and material shaping given by human order is given fullest expression in the way all the elements of ship combine in action. How Britten embodies the structures of a ship's crew in the music was particularly forceful - the notion that the music is given structure by the order of the ship is also conversely presented by the notion that song (and music) gives order to the inchoate forces with which we are surrounded.

yet outside of action, in the becalming stillness of the mist those structures themselves become malign - the articles of war order to which men are chained when their desires tell them otherwise. At the end those forces that right at the beginning the sailors were seen to implicitly embody in their actions and song, for better or for worse, are heard in a different form, rising up in the crew's powerful and mutinous murmur against the death of a singer and a good man. Yet like all action in the opera, apart from the single fatal blow, this too subsides - like the swell of the ocean it rises but also falls, and the final sound is of a man's unaccompanied footsteps retreating into the final darkness.

it was all really impressive and awe-inspiring, and i'm left with a feeling i can't quite describe. perhaps it's the britten connection that reminds me of standing on the beach at Aldeburgh in the middle of winter, looking at the granite waves and dull sky, the salt smell and the gulls. there's also obv a deep strand of englishness, not good or bad englishness, but like the sea a sort of bleak pastoral, of being fucked up by our rigidity and rules, a bleak non-simplicity to our feelings as a consequence of a fucked-up entangling of shd and want, of not being able to act in an uncomplicated manner on desire, a resentlfulness of the shd. the null quality of the grey sky, not an existential void, but an even more negative thing of substance. the miserable beauty of being solitary in this amazing misty, sea-drenched, northern archipelago of europe.

love this image of forster, britten and eric crozier working on budd in aldeburgh:

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/3eac94f9-2d27-48ac-a036-e57eb670ef8c.img

Amazingly stated fizzles. I have seen billy budd on video but not in person. I have been lucky enough to see britten's midsummer nights dream and turn of the screw live though. His dramatic instincts are so uncanny. Fuck I wanna listen to budd right now.

likewise, but i've only got a video of Peter Grimes so that'll have to do

So, no discussion of Caroline Shaw's "Passacaglia", which won the Pulitzer a few days ago?

listening to this now, really into it. love the way some of the vocals intentionally wobble out of tune like synths.

I didn't realize Gustav Leonhardt had died until a few days ago :( My father's harpsichordist of choice. Great conductor, too

Cantata 45: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSpFxaskUSM

Yes I think he died a few afetr announcing his retirement from perf due to illness.

Very tasty series of concerts at City Uni:

Here's the programme of the 2013/14 concert series at City University:

Tues Nov 5th, 6.30pm: launch event for Ian Pace's release of the 5-CD set of Michael Finnissy's 'The History of Photography in Sound'

Tues Nov 12th, 7pm: Pamela Z (voice/electronics) and Lauren Hayes (electronics)

Tues Nov 19th, 7pm: Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Ian Pace (piano), featuring music by Berio, Cerha, Schoenberg, Janacek, Ravel

Thurs Jan 30th, 5.30pm: Bernhard Lang guest lecture

Tues Feb 18th, 5pm: Richard Barrett pre-concert talk

Tues Feb 18th, 7pm: Richard Craig (flute) and Lore Lixenberg (voice), featuring world premieres by Richard Barrett, John Croft, Kristian Ireland, plus music by Brian Ferneyhough

Tues Mar 25th, 7pm: Stephane Ginsburgh (piano), featuring music by Guy Barash, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Stefan Prins, Sabrina Schroeder, Newton Armstrong

Tues Apr 8th, 7pm: James Saunders feature concert presented by Plus-Minus Ensemble

And yes, that's right!

http://i.imgur.com/x9De6hn.jpg

Been listening a lot to Faure's songs lately. I've been into his piano and chamber music for a while, but have been falling in love with the songs over the past few weeks, thanks to the four-disc complete recording by Elly Ameling and Gerard Souzay. I feel like Faure has always gotten short shrift, partly because he didn't write a lot of long-form works, and only a few orchestral pieces (mostly short ones), but also partly because of his weird, opaque melodic language. Especially his mid and late-period pieces have these long, evolving unpredictable melodies that modulate constantly but always have their own internal logic. Apparently the word among pianists is this quality makes his music second only to Bach's in its difficulty to memorize.
Anyway, his best songs totally transcend this quality, particularly as sung by Ameling, who has a really warm, unaffected voice. Souzay is a little spottier, apparently this album was recorded toward the end of his career. Check out the song below, or if you're on Spotify the whole set is there, including Le Secret, my favorite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ4Z2sBeWeQ

Heard a selection of Gesualdo's late madrigals yesterday - live, for the first time (though I have been listening I the William Christie and Alan Curtis recordings for years). All from book vi.

Hearing the voices intersect in the air, as it were, was pretty spectacular.

Saw this played live a couple of years ago, now on CD:

http://conviviumrecords.co.uk/c/releases/james-erber-the-traces-cycle-matteo-cesari-flutepiccolo/

Post-Christian Survival Kit (2005) unspecified instruments or instrumental components, unspecified percussion, physical actions which inadvertently produce a sound c. 10'

The complete History of Photography is being played next year:

http://ianpace.com/?event=history-of-photography-in-sound-complete

nx wk: http://cafeoto.co.uk/john-tilbury-plays-samuel-beckett-dave-smith.shtm

Looks like quite a lot of the Harmonia Mundi catalogue has been added to Spotify US sometime in the past couple weeks. There are still a few albums with 10-minute-plus tracks missing, but many more have their long tracks included. Been on a Schubert kick lately, so spent the evening listening to the Arcanto Quartet version of the String Quintet and the Mark Padmore/Paul Lewis Winterreise. Both beautiful, and beautifully recorded. Any recs from the recently added?

Loving Koroliov's The Art of the Fugue at the minute.

The Art of Fugue (or The Art of the Fugue, original German: Die Kunst der Fuge), BWV 1080

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjrR9hPM6OE

^ weird meditation on death and nothingness that the recent bbc elgar documentary introduced me to

What is that? ... Nothing.
A wild thing hurt in the night,
And it cries
In its dread,
Till it lies
Dead at the foot of the tree;
All that can be is said.
What is it? ... Nothing.

that is excellent

did elgar write anything else in that vein

having been digging around but haven't found anything else quite as out there as that. that one is the last song in his 'four part songs' from 1907

will always be a fan of 'where corals lie' though, janet baker version of that is just the dreamiest thing

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/02/277009922/first-listen-augustin-hadelich-sibelius-ad-s-violin-concertos

The Adès piece is lovely! Thanks for the link.

Pretty tempted by this 33-disc complete operas of Strauss at Arkiv.

currently digging Vivaldi, Beethoven, Messiaen and whatever-I-can-find in the dollar bins. Virtually all this shit's basically new to me.

Been really into comparing the Szell, Abbado, Furtwangler and Karajan recordings of various Beethoven symphonies, made easy by Spotify. Also been into revisiting the Reiner recording of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (an all-time favorite). Also the Hillary Hahn recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, which is super-impressive and unusually unromantic for a very romantic work.

i looked at that same strauss box aero, but figured i personally would be better off just getting decent copies of salome and elektra for now. it is very handsome tho.

mvb that was my strategy too and now i have been totally sucked in... enjoy!

xpost

Have that same Reiner recording on my phone, and I love it.

Lots of Ligeti, specifically his string quartets, piano music and various orchestral pieces. He wrote so much quiet music! Today, I went to look his complete works list, and was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) how his style changed pretty much immediately after hanging with Stockhausen and crew in Darmstadt. I read he considers most of his stuff pre-Cologne and Darmstadt as "juvenile" (though I like a fair amount).

Also, still listening to a lot of Sibelius' Tapiola and The Tempest. I went back to the 7th symphony, but it reminded me too much of what (I already thought) I didn't like about his music, as far as just being too blandly symphonic, and simplistic. Still, there's something about this guy that's interesting, like the notion I must be missing something. I guess I'll keep hunting and gathering bits.

As I write this, the 3rd mvt of Schumann's string quartet in A comes up on shuffle. Slow, fluid, a bit drippy, but compared to what would come later in the century, practically stately. Also, the chord sequence starting around 1:40-2:00 reminds me why I love him so much. I read he suffered from depression, and like Sibelius, I hear moments like this as spots where he's distracted, looking inside (or out a window into the rain), and hanging on a chord or progression a bit longer than is necessary. He makes a very meditative, melancholy music, and seems timeless to my ears.

latest thing i've been really enjoying are various recordings of guitar compositions by manuel maria ponce, henze, brouwer, cornelius cardew and some others - julian bream's '20th century guitar' got me started down that path. one really nice one i just picked up for cheap that i'd never heard before is nikita koshkin's 'the prince's toys' played by some guy called vladimir mikulka, which has got a fair amount of banging and harmonics and stuff on it and kind of reminds me of a cross between bream and steffen basho junghans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2qDpUqkjJo

^ this is good fun

So much Sibelius the last couple of months. Not news, he's still my favorite of them all. His Sixth is the apex for me these days; Dominique I'm taken aback by your divergent reactions to the 7th and Tapiola. They are v much twins IMO. Wish I could go to Finland for the 150th bday festivities next year.

this is very old, but i enjoyed watching this stravinsky documentary today, no modern bullshit just all excellent archival footage:

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

igor cracking up when someone reads aloud shostakovich's criticism of him for being too avant garde is so wonderful

well Jon don't be! I need to listen more.

That Strauss box is a good buy. Also, the beloved old EMI box of Strauss' non-operatic work (rudolf kempe/Dresden staatskapelle) has been newly remastered for the first time since the early 90s and reissued cheaply under Warner's aegis. Supposed to sound great. I guess the new remastering was done a few years ago for Japan CM boffins market and now gets general release. So weird to have warner logos on classic EMI stuff tho.

My stravinsky of the month is Persephone, as already noted in the waiting for spring thread. About the only recording I don't have is the Stravinsky-craft one. (Is that in the 22 cd budget box?)