Rolling Classical 2017

My choir is currently singing Ildebrando Pizzettis Requiem from 1923, I think. Lovely music, most of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_GW9O7Qhr0

Also Max Reger. Whom I like less and less, honestly.

Du Yun wins the pulitzer, over Ashley Fure and Kate Soper. And I'm wondering if this is the first time all three nominees were women. For, like, any music prize in the world ever...

A lot of the current composers I enjoy the most are women. I'd include Soper in that number but I don't know the nominated piece. I'll listen to all three of these. Thanks.

ILM's 2017 Rolling Classical Thread Spotify Playlist

So glad you're doing this, ulysses. And extra glad you didn't put a choral composition by Reger on there, because I hate them at this point :)

Do we have a thread to discuss women composers?

Not afaik. I think most of the classical music discussion on ILM happens on this thread (except for the Boomkat-classical thing)?

Oh, "Only the Words Themselves Mean What They Say" has become a movement of the Soper work that was nominated? I really love that piece (now a movement)!

https://soundcloud.com/michael-pisaro/lucretius-alap

Lucretius Alap, Michael Pisaro, 2009-12

String Quartet:
Lorenz Gamma, violin 1
Min Lee, violin 2
Mark Menzies, viola
Mona Tian, cello

Been feeling this..

https://soundcloud.com/leheron_idletones/1-01-half-sleep-beings

also, the first track of the Michael Pisaro/Reinier van Houdt 3XCD, the earth and the sky

I look forward to hearing Du Yun, Ashley Fure and Kate Soper's music.

In the meantime, I've been relistening to Helena Tulve's first release, Sula, and the title composition, a tone painting of a glacier's gradual thaw, is as overwhelming as ever:

https://soundcloud.com/helena_tulve/helena-tulve-sula-thaw

Ulysses, I get it could easily be a hassle, but would it be possible to request a movement for the spotify list? The Agnus Dei of the Pizzetti Requiem is lovely, and only takes two minutes :)

I also ask, because a new cd with my choir singing translated Danish songs will be out in a few weeks, and I know what my favorite tidbits are :) Langgaard, Holten, Gudmundsen-Holmgreen (RIP). Good stuff!

np, added.

it's lovely!

I know, right! It's just hard to get that chord around 1:00 perfect. Out of three tries we got it absolutely perfect once! Oh well, still one try left.

Speaking of Helena Tulve, Simon Cummings's retelling of this year's Estonian Music Days really makes me wish I'd been there:

http://5against4.com/2017/04/12/estonian-music-days-2017-part-2/

^^^ 5 against 4 blog is a GREAT resource for downloads of new music broadcasts

I've been exploring black metal and its precipitates and it brought me back to the 'classical' work that helped me overcome my longstanding aversion to 'cookie monster' vocals, Raphaël Cendo's Introduction aux ténèbres. Here's part I—

https://soundcloud.com/rapha-l-cendo/introduction-aux-tenebres2009-chant1-pour-baryton-contrebasse-solo-ensemble-et-electronique

This is cool. When I was in undergrad, my friend and I sometimes talked about how sometimes the vocals on Makrokosmos Vol 2 were a bit metal.

TORA TORA TORA

I strongly recommend hearing the whole thing for full effect (it's on Donaueschinger Musiktage 2009, Vol. 2). Cendo's music in general is worth seeking out, especially if you're interested in his 'overdrive' principle.

For those who know French, he explains it quite well here: http://brahms.ircam.fr/documents/document/21512/

So I've been trying to catch up with the Pulitzer nominees and I must say I wish Ashley Fure had received the prize over Du Yun, perhaps because Fure studied under Chaya Czernowin, whose music I've long admired. I'm a sucker for polystylism when it's done right, but the Du works I listened to via Soundcloud often failed to its avoid its classic pitfalls: a superficial incongruity and a sense of 'so whatness' that Schnittke almost never fell prey to. Still, I am curious to hear what comes next.

Have you heard the entire Soper work?

Not yet, actually, in part due to this description:

'Ipsa Dixit is an evening-length work of theatrical chamber music by American composer Kate Soper. Exploring the intersection of music, language, and meaning, the piece blends elements of monodrama, Greek theater, and screwball comedy to skewer the treachery of language and the questionable authenticity of artistic expression. Each of the piece’s six movements draw on texts by thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Freud, Wittgenstein, Jenny Holtzer, and Lydia Davis, delivering ideas from the linguistic disciplines of poetics, rhetoric, and metaphysics through extended vocal techniques and blistering ensemble virtuosity.'

I enjoy all of these things separately to varying degrees, but not so much when they're set to music. And I'm frankly tired of the whole 'critique of authenticity' shtick, it's preaching to the choir.

It sounds quite a bit like Caroline Shaw's Partita. Which I love! Anywhere to listen to it / excerpts from it?

Here's the first movement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zTqwkD28NA

Yeah, that's a bit... overcooked.

It's not like Partita, from what I know it. This movement was around as a standalone work for a couple of years, and I rate it pretty highly:
https://vimeo.com/55881666

"know of it"

I don't care that much about most of the things described in that blurb but I like what she does with the voice.

bbc proms: i will be going to simon rattle's gurrelieder, the monterverdi vespers, shostakovich's 11th symphony. Otherwise i do find the pickings slim this year. Last year was loads of boulez and other interesting stuff.

Musorgsky's Khovanshchina as well.

I haven't found either Ashley Fure's Bound to the Bow or Du Yun's Angel's Bone, but here are two other instances of their respective styles, if you're curious:

https://soundcloud.com/duyun/quatrain-slow-portraits-iii

https://soundcloud.com/ashley_fure/ashley-fure-something-to-hunt

I don't care that much about most of the things described in that blurb but I like what she does with the voice.

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Wednesday, May 10, 2017 11:29 AM (thirty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seconded. I'd love to hear her sing Claude Vivier's Lonely Child.

The score and recording of Bound to the Bow are here: http://www.ashleyfure.com/new-page-5/

Thanks, much appreciated. Google is less omnipotent than I thought.

ipsa dixit lost me when it started with someone asking, with impeccable diction, "what is art?"

Lonely Child is one of my favourite pieces every btw!

ever

Same here!

I'm thoroughly enjoying Bound to the Bow, btw. It further consolidates my preference for Fure over Du and Soper. Hopefully a CD of her music is in the works.

The Caroline Shaw Partita is something I just got into recently. I know a guy who's the cellist in an up and coming young quartet and they did an all-Shaw concert (which I only found out about talking to him later on)... he told me the partita is currently his favorite piece of music in the world so I bought it on emusic. I'm still coming to grips with it tbrr.

Today's listening highlights were Humphrey Searle's dodecaphonic rager Labyrinth and a wonderful new orchestral arrangement of Liszt's choral obscurity Les Quatre Elements (the original being for choir and piano; Liszt later overhauled it into the warhorse tone poem Les Preludes)

Now I remember where I know Du Yun from -- I heard her piece Kraken. It was okay but kind of a bag of tricks... have not felt the urge to hear again.

I was listening to Shaw's Partita all the time for a while tbh. Getting ready in the morning, exercising, etc.

Partita is pure joy. I think there are some similarity with Soper, which I can't really explain, but her reading about Poetics reminds me of the 'the detail of the pattern is movement' part of Allemande. Spoken word, 'innovative' - mostly rediscovered old - singing techniques. It's almost primordial, reducing choral music to it's essence - sounds of voices - and rebuilding on top of that. It's like the choral version of Merce Cunningham, which probably just means it's inspired by Meredith Monk, I don't know? But Partita knows that if you rebuild choral music from scratch, it would only take a short while until you're joyously shouting 'ah-ah-AH-ah' at the top of your lung.

On a non-Pulitzer note, I finally bought this Stefan Östersjö album of modern(ist) guitar music with an iTunes gift card after streaming it on Spotify for a while and am very impressed and satisfied. (A lot of it seems to have been recorded 20 years ago.) Murail's Tellur is the biggest draw for me; I've been wanting a good recording of it for a long time. Such a remarkable piece. But it's great to have good recordings of Carter's Changes, Dillon's Shrouded Mirrors, and Donatoni's Algo 1 and Algo 2 in one place. I didn't know Kent Olofsson's work before I got into these recordings but his Treccia and Garden of Earthly Delights (for guitar, ensemble, and tape) are really cool too. I'll be digesting this for a while.

The Caroline Shaw Partita is something I just got into recently.

An interesting article from VAN about Deutsche Grammophon.

Sums it up pretty well, though DG hasn't completely lost its touch: this year, they also put out Barenboim's Hommage à Boulez, Rachmaninov's trios with Gidon Kremer, Blechacz's Bach and Chopin's late works by Pollini. Still, the decline is palpable.

There was supposed to be a free premiere performance of John Luther Adams new Ten Thousand Birds in Morningside Park (NYC) today but they've cancelled it doe to the weather forecast >:[

On the other hand, there's still an afternoon performance of Become Ocean scheduled for Thursday...

Thanks, ulysses! I was planning to listen to a bunch of those. Esp curious about the Higdon piece. Listening to Hannigan's take on the Berio vocal sequenza now.

Her Lulu Suite is equally exquisite. What an incredible musician.

I'll listen to that. There's this famous one, too, of course.

Ugh: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/arts/music/james-levine-sexual-misconduct-met-opera.html

Ugh x2

Rumors have been around forever, knew it was him as soon as I saw the link that was posted in the Weinstein thread.

For awhile a year or two ago, there were a lot of predators being unveiled around the classical and early music world in the UK, most of it was written about on ian pace’s blog. Philip Pickett comes to mind

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/06/sound-of-mega-orgasms-female-composers-london-contemporary-music-festival-new-intimacy

a work by Kajsa Magnarsson “for strap-on and electric guitar”

After watching, I think I preferred Anvil's take on this concept.

“Modernism was about removing the body from art,” says festival director Igor Toronyi-Lalic. “About removing personal identity and prioritising science, abstraction and objectivity.

Also, this is emphatically not what the Second Viennese School did imo.

Yeah that statement does not ring true for me at all

Favorite records of 2017 I should consider checking out before doing my ILM EOY list? Potentials for me are Canticles of the Wind by John Luther Adams, Last Leaf by the Danish String Quartet and Crazy Girl Crazy by Barbara Hannigan.

Ten personal favourites, in no particular order:

Arturo Fuentes - Broken Mirrors; Liquid Crystals; Ice Reflection; Glass Distortion
György Kurtág - Complete Works for Ensemble and Choir
Tõnu Kõrvits - Moorland Elegies
Bent Sørensen - Mignon
Pascal Dusapin - Quatuor VI « Hinterland »; Quatuor VI « OpenTime »
Alberto Posadas - Sombras
Michael Jarrell - …mais les images restent…
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Kaspars Putniņš - Schnittke: 'Psalms of Repentance'; Pärt: 'Magnificat' & 'Nunc dimittis'
Quatuor Psophos - Constellations
Chaya Czernowin - Hidden

Shit I need that Kurtag. I keep forgetting.

Noticed the Jarrell on eMusic yesterday. Thinking about it. His orchestration of a few of the Debussy Etudes was brilliant.

Not saying it's aoty but I got this recently and am getting a lot out of it, as more Canadian solo guitar stuff goes (gnarlier than most of the Victoria disc):
http://www.johngordonarmstrong.com/my-new-cd/

really enjoying that Last Leaf album, thanks for that!

For those compiling your year-end lists, this playlist includes all the available tracks on this thread, organized roughly chronologically in order of mention:

ILM's 2017 Rolling Classical Thread Spotify Playlist

it's worth noting that this thread (along with electronic and jazz) is where the spotify catalog gets a bit punchy.

The Danish Quartet (Mk 4) is great, yeah. Also notable is their Carl Nielsen sq cycle (for Dacapo).

Will check that out, thanks!

After James Levine, Charles Dutoit:

http://www.ledevoir.com/culture/musique/515974/allegations-d-inconduite-sexuelle-contre-le-chef-d-orchestre-charles-dutoit

(Link is in French.)

Wow, damn.

I've had "Tjønneblomen" off that Last Leaf album on repeat for like a half hour; what a lovely song