Rolling Classical 2018

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:

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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'."

Listening to Hahn's disc of Mendelssohn's and Shostakovich's violin concerti over and over in the van these days.

I wasn't overly keen on Linda Catlin Smith's previous releases, but Wanderer is definitely doing it for me. Bits of it remind me of Mark Hollis's S/T shorn of the man's voice. I should give Dirt Road and Drifter another go, I probably wasn't paying enough attention.

My crush Víkingur Ólafsson has a Bach piano solo album out. Turns out Bach is great!

I saw a wonderful performance of Beethoven's Ninth this weekend. The festival was great, though I'm sad to have missed all of the string quartets.

Missed it all.:( I'll probably start going to more concerts again when I get more work hours.

Kukuruz Quartet: Julius Eastman - Piano Interpretations

^^^

this is blowing me away rn, awesome.

I've often wondered why some performers approach fin de siècle French chamber music in a deliberately cloying, saccharine way, minimising its modernity as much as possible (actually, I think I know why). Debussy and Ravel generally survive such opulence, but I can't say the same about Fauré, especially his later, more harmonically prickly pieces. Few things are as refreshing, then, as hearing Pierre Fouchenneret, Raphaël Merlin and Simon Zaoui's takes on Fauré's works for strings and piano (quartets and quintets notwithstanding). They remind us that, despite appearances to the contrary, this isn't Parisian salon music, except, perhaps, as painted by the Nabis (Pierre Vuillard, Edouard Bonnard, Maurice Denis). I haven't listened to many new classical releases this year, but I'm absolutely loving this one (titled Horizons), which also features a pitch-perfect performance, by David Lefort, of the brief song cycle L'Horizon chimérique.

I've also been listening to Mihai Ritivoiu's first recorded recital, showcasing works for piano by Enescu (who was Fauré's pupil), Franck and Liszt. The album's title is Transcendence, and I daresay he gets there without resorting to tired tricks such as slowing the tempo down to a crawl. Enescu's first sonata is the highlight as far as I'm concerned, and I hope Ritivoiu will record the rest of his output for solo piano, as well.

Speaking of Romanian composers, NEOS just put out an Hommage à Horațiu Rădulescu, gathering all of his works for piano (including the concerto) in performances by Ortwin Stürmer, to whom Rădulescu dedicated several scores, including the 'Lao Tzu' sonatas, which contain metaphysically bumbling titles such as 'settle your dust, this is the primal identity' or 'like a well… older than God'. Most of this material was already available elsewhere, but it's nice to have the sixth sonata on disc, as well as a few odds and ends, all of which are quite fascinating due to the collision between the piano's limited microtonal range (at least when played conventionally) and Rădulescu's spectralist aspirations, which tend to imply the use of string instruments. Somewhat surprisingly, the concerto reins in the strings somewhat so as to remain in 'tune' with the piano. It's definitely one of his most conventional efforts – a tribute to Brahms, as it were. As a side note, I really hope Mode will be able to continue its piano sonatas and string quartets cycle with Stephen Clarke and the JACK Quartet. That first disc was incredible.

I haven't listened to much living contemporary music, however, aside from the aforementioned Wanderer by Linda Catlin Smith and Bent Sørensen's meltingly beautiful Pantomime; Rosenbad, the second and third parts of his Schumann-esque Papillons trilogy (the first instalment, Mignon, came out in 2016). There is still time to catch up, I suppose, and I'll no doubt switch back to an almost exclusively classical diet once I get bored with the rest anyway (I go through cycles).