Rolling Classical 2017

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...

Huh. I would not have guessed this guy was the drummer for Dawn of Midi.

https://qasimnaqvi.bandcamp.com/album/fjoloy

Wow, some interesting and sometimes arresting stuff there, yeah, thanks. I'll probably buy it. I'd like to know more about what exactly he was doing in terms of the intonation. Dawn of MIDI is a jazz fusion thing?

The "Gloppedalsura"s are standing out for me.

dawn of midi came across to me as post-rock, but i guess there's room for disagreement about what exactly they are. some people say "dance music", they showed up on a mojo "dream pop" compilation.

While doing a little research on the technique of singing while playing woodwinds, I came across this piece, where the clarinettist does this on every note. Interesting and enjoyable piece. Roche's blog can be pretty interesting as well: https://heatherroche.net/

ooh thanks!

Crumb uses this in his chamber works for flute also

not gonna mention tull though

Ha, I think you just did. I like both of those examples, for sure, and Kirk; I just found this piece notable in terms of how in-depth it goes with that technique. And also find it expressive and appealing. (I just finished writing something that uses the technique but kept it much simpler than this.)

that's neat

Just picked up tickets for Angela Hewitt at the National Arts Centre. I've never seen her before! She's not playing anything from Well-Tempered Clavier but we're thinking of yelling out a request: "Fugue in C minor!"

I'm in the choir for a version of La Boheme this august. Second act is kinda some amazing proto-Ives stuff. I remember seeing the opera years ago, and liking it a lot, but delving deeper into it, it's really quite incredible.

thanks for mentioning it. been meaning to listen more closely to puccini for quite awhile. Playing the famous Decca boheme recording now.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/5193lUu%2BU%2BL._SR600%2C315_PIWhiteStrip%2CBottomLeft%2C0%2C35_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CKD585

The samples on here from the latest Kuniko Kato album Bach: Solo Works For Marimba sound beautiful. I loved her previous Reich + Arvo Part recordings.

These classical labels do take the piss though. £18 for a flac download, £12 for mp3 - gtf !

Hyperion are about 10 usd through the iTunes Store

I'd almost be tempted at that price, Jon. But my massive aversion to Apple + iTunes and having their horrible software on my pc is too strong.

There's another UK website based one with similar pricing from which I've bought Chandos before... name escaping me atm...

Check presto classical, I've bought reasonably priced downloads from them before

Lots of Birtwistle this week, mostly downloaded recordings from this year's and prior years' Proms. His stuff is finally starting to break for me.

I remember liking Panic a lot.

calzino got me on a marimba kick. this is the last track of a really good recent cello record by michael samis (not in this version, obviously).

https://vimeo.com/82713733

Angela Hewitt was magic! Such a good concert experience. It was the first time I brought scores to a concert and followed along while listening and watching, which I found very helpful. I think she is my favourite Bach interpreter: she brings out and connects the lines so clearly and sensitively imo.

John Luther Adams has made a grand choral work. Right up my ally. Canticles of the Holy Wind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JeFaMpucVg

I brought scores to a concert and followed along while listening

I was talking to a friend last night, who thought it was lolsome that I did this the week after seeing Migos at Bluesfest. Maybe this is why I need ilx.

xp I've listened to most of Canticles and liked it very much so far. On the to-buy list.

Yeah I'm buying Canticles this week when my emusic credits refresh.

There's a concert in NYC next month with a new work by Anna Thorvaldsdottir plus a Pauline oliveros piece; I'm totally going

Also a staging of hans zender's explosion of Winterreise with Ian Bostridge. Going.

I want to sing this, or something like this. Just to figure out how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9mY5tvd-lM

Going to see Penderecki String Quartet tonight. I went to all three of these new music concerts on Monday, which were mostly very good. The Chan Ka Nin string quartet was probably my favourite piece of them all, integrating Chinese folk-derived melodies with the gamut of contemporary string techniques. I will definitely be listening to more Brian Current. The Palej songs were lovely, too!

The string quartet concert was wonderful. I'd never seen P's 3rd live before and it was startlingly intense and powerful. The Murphy is a new piece that was commissioned for the quartet's 30th anniversary. I always enjoy her work and suspect that if she lived in NYC or Boston and knew the right people, she'd be a lot more famous. (Her aesthetic makes me think of something like a contemporary take on Bartok, with much more use of extended techniques/timbral exploration, with a lot of rhythmic energy.) It was also really nice to see the Mozart! A breath of fresh air in a week of new music.

I picked up this CD, which seems v good so far.

Anyone who has seen Andrew Norman's Play live? The piece won the Grawemeyer award this year, and it sounds fun on spotify, like the symphonic orchestral version of a lot of the stuff we've been talking about with Caroline Shaw and Kate Soper, and apparently it's amazing to see the way the musicians are playing it.

BBC Proms, going to three this week: Schubert 8 + Mahler 10 this Saturday.

My newest recent discoveries are Gesualdo's madrigals and Tenebrae, and Shostakovich's preludfes and fugues played by Tatiana Nikoleyevana.

Shostakovich's preludfes and fugues played by Tatiana Nikoleyevana

I love this set! Essential 20th century piano music imo.

Still catching up with downloaded recordings from this years proms. Dug the Julian Anderson premiere bookended by two neglected and excellent Liszt poems (cond. Volkov)

Anyone into Maurice Ohana? I've been checking out his 10-string guitar music recently, since I'm working on a piece for that instrument. Some very good stuff, with a lot of space and drama to it. "Cadran lunaire" is lovely. Evan, this might appeal to you.

I'm listening to Graham Anthony Devine's recording on Naxos.

I don't know anything about Julian Anderson btw. I should look into that.

This isn't the most novel observation but it's something I've been reminded of and thinking about a lot recently, after seeing Hewitt and the Chamberfest concerts: the audience for classical music, at least in the US and Canada, seems to be so overwhelmingly, well, old. I might estimate the median age to be over 60, even at new music events. (This doesn't really apply to electroacoustic or improv ime, but does seem to be the case for notated acoustic music.) I don't exactly know if it's because there was more of a mainstream classical audience before the poptimism of the 60s and 70s or because there's something about the music that appeals more to people as they age, but the former seems far more likely, which is more concerning, since it would suggest that there will be almost no audience in a couple of decades (unless young people decide to take it up in rebellion against their decadent parents). In a real way, the Western art music tradition is arguably a foreign cultural tradition in the US and Canada so I suspect that things might be different in e.g. Germany or Italy?

I feel like the Proms with its significant focus on big new works that are frequently pretty damn challenging could never ever exist here. Idk I think the situation outside North America is just not as dire. But that's not first hand knowledge on my part.

I LOVE Ohana. He was on my ilx ballot! He has a great guitar concerto btw, Trois Graphiques, which was recorded by Narciso Yepes and the LSO in the LP era. Any of Ohana's stuff mixing voices and instrumentation (e.g. Office des Oracles) is fantastic.

Definitely my favorite of the composers I've stumbled onto in the last five years. I'm hoping to find some literature on him.

Premiere of La Boheme yesterday, that's one of the funniest things I've ever done. That second act is absolutely great, that is one of the greatest things ever, kinda. Apparently, it's famous amongst real opera choir singers as one of the most difficult things in the repertoire, because it's so illogical, which is fascinating to me. Absolutely fascinating, the way the mass of the people is interwoven with the soloists.

I might be slightly drunk still... You know what's awesome? Going to a bar with a piano with an opera crew and having Rodolpho sing Nessun Dorma.

Reposting from experimental thread:

This is pretty cool: https://neuguitars.com/2017/08/14/video-dai-fujikura-sparking-orbit-for-electric-guitar-and-electronics-on-neuguitars-blog/

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, 14 August 2017 12:57 (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(A piece for electric guitar and electronic signal processing, with some actually lyrical and beautiful moments)

― No purposes. Sounds. (Sund4r), Monday, 14 August 2017 13:14 (0 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Booklet here: https://www.kairos-music.com/sites/default/files/downloads/0013302KAI.pdf

I'll look into the Ohana pieces you mention, Jon.

I'm on a huge Schoenberg kick these days, in part because I'm reading Adorno but it just feels right for the times somehow.

This seems like a good place to start for data on the aging audience btw: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2011/03/age_of_the_audience.html
The NEA studies can be Googled fairly easily.

I was at the Schoenberg Gurrelieder conducted by Simon Rattle last night, and yeah, it was spectacular. Great structuring, but masses of detail too. If you can listen on BBC iplayer, check it out!

Good to hear you're keeping up with the proms, Jon. I agree, the commisioned pieces are a treat.