Rolling Classical 2018

I don’t have him in any solo recordings but in several chamber music recordings with Isabelle Faust et al where he is excellent

On an unrelated note, fans of Saariaho's pre-2000 output should check out this performance of Helena Tulve's Extinction des choses vues:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keNVBPOyFx4

melnikov's shostakovich preludes/fugues recording is great!

Will look into all of this. Tulve sounds really good so far. The best thing I've been listening to recently is probably Kate Soper's Nadja for soprano and string quartet from a year ago. It gets pretty intense and satisfying. Some great noisy string bits: https://soundcloud.com/ateoper/sets/nadja

John Gordon Armstrong's Space Within for Julian Bertino on 10-string guitar (both guys I know tbf): http://www.johngordonarmstrong.com/the-space-within/

Nicholas Omiccioli's Field Well for chamber winds is a fairly open composition, I gather, with a lot of extended techniques. Works in a loose sound mass sort of way: https://soundcloud.com/nicholas-omiccioli/the-field-well-2017-for-chamber-winds

Thanks, Sund4r, I'll check them out in a bit.

Of the three, my preference goes to Omiccioli. I like that he filed the piece under 'ambient' on Soundcloud - it's a type of crossover I'm invariably happy to hear. I enjoyed Armstrong's piece as well, and would love to hear a higher quality recording of it (was this sub-128 kbps?). Soper elicited mixed feelings: I'm mostly on board with her string writing (she should write a purely instrumental string quartet) but the vocal lines sounded kind of awkward to my ears, a little too hesitant for comfort (nor did that appear to be the desired effect). The Breton setting struck me as marginally more successful on that front, though for admittedly personal reasons the irruption of speaking voices reciting parts of the English translation of Nadja in a casual North American accent didn't move me or even strike me as particularly thought-provoking, for that matter. Interesting stuff nonetheless.

would love to hear a higher quality recording of it

Yeah, it's definitely not a top-notch recording, just a document of that performance. I think it's very possible that there may be better-quality recordings to come.

Yep, the Tulve piece is pretty much what I've been looking for. It must be magnificent in the concert hall! What's that one dude blowing into? Some sort of rubber tubing??

Btw, Armstrong's Music for Solo Guitar, from last year, is very good. I've been listening to it all the time.

RIP Klaus K. Hübler: https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2018/03/05/rip-klaus-k-hubler/

Listening to Donnacha Dennehy for St. Patrick's Day: https://bedroomcommunity.bandcamp.com/album/tessellatum

Thanks for the link. I’m familiar with the name but have yet to hear his music.

FINALLY tracked down the Rostropovich/Ozawa/Boston recording of the 2nd Shostakovich cello concerto. Was not disappointed in the slightest. Fuckin' A. Is there anything better in all of music than the last minute of the finale?

Other pieces obsessing over last coupla weeks:

Schumann Dichterliebe (i've been a fiend for his solo piano corpus for over twenty years and only now do i finally realize how great the song sets that come right after the solo piano phase really are!)

Berlioz Faust (now I know why I never clicked with this piece: the Colin Davis/Philips version is fucking boring, that's why. Hello Paul Paray live bootleg and JE Gardiner proms 2017 broadcast)

Ohana - just keeps getting better the more I hear of him. Definitely one of my top 10 20th c composers by now.

Shostakovich Symphony 10 - Svetlanov mid 1960s on Melodiya. Monstrously overwhelming version. Fantastic sound for russia at that time.

Ohana hasn't quite clicked for me yet, but I'm sure it'll happen someday. I need to give those Erato recordings another shot.

I didn’t know about those until quite recently. I had been working my way through the series on the Timpani label (which I think originally came out on a different label). I’d say my favorite piece atm is Office des Oracles.

If memory serves, the Timpani series also features some of his very last works, so it's probably a better way to get acquainted with his different periods than the Erato recordings. Both leave out his etudes for piano, which are characteristically unusual in that the final two include a part for percussion. I have a version with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (one of my favourite Debussyans) lying somewhere and should dig it up. There's also his string quartets, which I haven't explored at all. The Quatuor Psophos, whose Debussy/Ravel/Dutilleux disk impressed me last year, recorded the Ohana set back in 2004 and I'm sure they make for fine guides throughout.

Too bad I'm still furiously struggling to catch up with the (mostly non-classical) stuff I missed out on last year… I'll get there eventually.

I have the Etudes by Symeonidas (sp) - would like to hear bavouzet. I had better buy it from iTunes before you can’t buy things from iTunes anymore.

With all the harp talk going on now, I thought I'd note that I've really been enjoying this new quasi-minimalist harp quartet by John Gordon Armstrong. It's on the accessible, energetic end but I don't think it's fluffy at all, really:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51pfUV28nBg

Some highlights from the MusCan contemporary music concert on Thursday night:
Edgar Sulski - Polaris-Nocturne:
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That was a test. Sulski's Polaris-Nocturne:

https://m.facebook.com/video_redirect/?src=https%3A%2F%2Fscontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net%2Fv%2Ft42.1790-29%2F10000000_919055688268021_5428053430453141504_n.mp4%3F_nc_cat%3D0%26efg%3DeyJ2ZW5jb2RlX3RhZyI6InNkIn0%253D%26oh%3D846606cd3450e97530c5b76a4949a166%26oe%3D5B09B18B&source=misc&id=1839983359393468&refid=52&__tn__=FH-R

Illkim Tongur - Old Shaman:

https://www.facebook.com/MusCanSoc/videos/1840024262722711/

Gabriel Dharmoo - the fog in our poise:

https://www.facebook.com/MusCanSoc/videos/1840043936054077/

Fantastic new Nick Omiccioli piece called "The Haunted Sea" for amplified soprano and string quartet. Nice evocation of wind and water sounds with extended vocal and string timbres: https://soundcloud.com/nicholas-omiccioli/haunted-seas-2018-for-amplified-soprano-string-quartet

"Haunted Seas", sorry

Thanks for these, Sund4r. I've too little time to properly listen to them at the moment but they haven't gone unnoticed!

Luis Aracama's take on Mompou's Música callada is sounding quite perfect at the moment. I'm liking it even more than Herbert Henck's, partly because it hasn't been filtered through Manfred Eicher's proverbial reverb (which I usually love btw).

I’ve never heard any performance but henck’s, and it’s been many years

I should revisit

Finally got around to those pieces Sund4r posted upthread. As expected, I really liked Omiccioli's Haunted Seas – based on this and Field Well, I'd love to hear a monograph of his work. Armstrong's Burst! was pleasant, but I doubt I'll return to it any time soon. I didn't much care for any of the MusCan pieces, unfortunately, except perhaps, and only in parts, for the Suski and Dharmoo.

RIP Gennady Rozhdestvensky: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jun/17/gennady-rozhdestvensky-obituary

His recording of Gubaidulina's sole Symphony is still one of my favourite things ever.

Insanely wide repertoire.

There’s a download release via iTunes emusic etc from melodiya, in their newer remasters program, of rozhdy leading all the Prokofiev ballets. Wonderful performances of course, and though Romeo and Cinderella are earlier recordings in rough sound quality, all the obscurer ballets now sound just gorgeous compared to older melodiya versions - this digital box set is cheap and invaluable.

Heh: http://5against4.com/2018/07/19/proms-2018-caroline-shaw-second-essay-echo-third-essay-ruby-world-premieres/

Saw that on the news group yesterday definitely gonna download it

I have some classical thoughts from my last couple weeks listening but I’m too frayed to type them rn

I wanted to love the pieces because the reviewer came off as a dick but they feel pretty underwritten and forgettable tbh. "Valencia" from last year's Jasper String Quartet album was better. I sometimes wonder if she's actually fairly limited as a composer and just managed to hit the jackpot when she wrote Partita for Eight Voices.

This year's Chamberfest looks a little less exciting than usual but I'm very excited about two concerts: Angela Hewitt playing all of WTC, Bk 1, and a performance of Le marteau sans maitre, neither of which I have seen performed live in their entirety before.

LMsM seems like it would be super fun to see live
Speaking of festivals, Barbara Hannigan is curating next year’s Ojai festival. She’s going to sing Grisey’s Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold (which I just heard for the first time last week and are INCREDIBLE) and Schoenberg’s Op. 10 quartet plus other stuff
I gotta go I think

Sund4r siren!!!

During the 2019 Festival, Barbara Hannigan will conduct works by Aaron Copland, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Claude Vivier.

Sounds v cool but this is in California?

yup

Speaking of Vivier, there's a p decent recording of his "Pour guitare" by Steve Cowan, one of the dudes I'm writing for rn, on this album he made of contemporary Canadian guitar music: http://www.fredsrecords.com/site/shop/steve-cowan-pour-guitare/ . Some of the other pieces are p nice too, esp Jason Nobles's "Shadow Prism", which is mostly in harmonics in an alternate tuning. All the pieces are available on Youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSOLEA26J9mTG40WVXb38vw/videos .

Hewitt's performance of WTC1 was really magical. Followed the whole thing with the scores. The hometown audience sang "Happy Birthday" to her beforehand! Some good stuff at the New Music Now concerts too. Only four movements from Le marteau were performed but they were excellent. The musicians really connected and brought out the delicate timbres and angular rhythms. First time it's been played in Canada since 1991 apparently! The new Scott Good piece also v good.

Wish I could have been in town for Hewitt.
Is there anything coming up in Ottawa that you're looking at attending? I was just looking at the September Beethoven concerts at the NAC, trying to decide what I want to see.

I wound up getting tickets to the last four nights, symphonies 4 to 9. Very excited. I've never been to a symphony.

Who’s conducting?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Shelley

Know him?

Hey jmm, I haven't looked at the NAC listings yet. I'd def be interested in some of the Beethoven symphonies but I'm mot sure what September will be like yet. Hopefully, I'll be working a lot of evenings.

Never heard of Alexander Shelley but I'm excited for you, jmm! Going to see/hear a symphony always feel like an event, and Beethoven never gets old in my book.

Otm

A review of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989, by Alex Ross:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/the-sounds-of-music-in-the-twenty-first-century

Ross to Rutherford-Johnson: 'but AMERICAAA' (already a leitmotiv in The Rest Is Noise). Your pop culture took over the world long ago, give it a rest now.

Where do I begin…

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/22/arts/music/atonal-music-deutsche-bahn-drugs-trains.html

The plan was dropped, at least in part because of this atonal protest concert that drew 500: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/aug/31/art-shouldnt-be-weaponised-the-atonal-concert-championing-berlins-homeless

My FB comment when the plan was first announced, anticipating a prospective outcome: "The experiment was not entirely successful, with local drug users describing Kontakte as 'extra trippy' and Le Marteau as 'intense on mescaline'."