Rolling Classical 2019

https://johnlutheradams.bandcamp.com/album/become-desert

this is beautiful.

Indeed it is. More oceanic (again) than desert-like but I'm not keeping a tally.

yep, attacking the proms as conspicuous commercialism or whatever stupid term they used in that garbage piece was spectacularly missing the point - seeing as it is probably the only major event in London doing six quid tickets!

Also many of the seats cost less than a tenner. Ive booked 5 concerts and 2 of those are under ten, in the circle

This is rather… unexpected given HWH's politics:

The opening of Hans Werner Henze's 'Allegra e Boris', the violin & viola duet he wrote for Boris Johnson's marriage to Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1987 pic.twitter.com/4ETeBgCGuY

— Tom Coult (@tomcoult) July 21, 2019

Odd. There has to be some context for that?

Ana Sokolović was a name familiar to me for geographical reasons but I'd never been tempted to check out her music because program notes tend to emphasize its purported 'humour', which is not a quality I seek outside of, well, film and day-to-day life. So I've only just gotten around to her latest disc for ATMA, Sirènes, which features a smattering of vocal works (one for a cappella choir and two short song cycles), as well as a violin concerto, none of which I found very funny (to my great relief).

As it turns out, her penchant for humour is sporadical and of the mildly surrealist, late Ligeti-esque variety, i.e. tempered by darker hues and a feel for the mysterious macabre. Her writing for voices clearly leans on Claude Vivier's, and parts of Evta (for violin and orchestra) hearken back to Gubaidulina's string concertos, so she stylistically brings together no less than three of my absolute favourite composers, on top of her own personal touches, which highlight her Serbian heritage. Although I catch myself wishing she'd make more of this (lesser known) cultural baggage, her polystylism is of a highly competent and seamless sort, far removed from, say, Osvaldo Golijov's. There's a sense of poetry (a meaningless, meaningless word, I know) throughout, and it stems from the music itself, beyond her settings of Francisco Tanzer and others.

Anyhow, I'm glad to have finally gotten acquainted with her work.

Someone else I never looked into. You do make it sound good.

I don't want to oversell it as I'm not wholly bowled over (structurally, she does meander a little too much at times), but if you're a fan of her touchstones, I'd say it's worth your while.

I'll have to check out her other discs – there are way more of them than I expected.

RIP Anner Bylsma (1934-2019).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD4CnTbjkSA

Microtonalist Ben Johnston as well

RIP

I'm not as familiar with his work. I'll have to remedy that.

I just saw Quatuor Danel play Shostakovich 8; first time I've seen it live. Goosebumps p much the whole time. Weinberg after intermission.

I have their Shostakovich cycle - they’re great.

Recently enjoyed Boris Giltburg’s solo piano transcription of that piece

Yeah, I'll look for that set (their intégral of Shostakovich, as the host of tonight's concert described it in good Ottawan franglais). I thought it was supposed to be available for sale here but I couldn't find it so bought a glass of rosé instead.

Could be the rosé talking but I really liked Weinberg 6, which I'd tbh never heard before.

Jelly, Sund4r!

The Danels studied under the Borodins (and Fyodor Druzhinin) and it really shows. Theirs is by a significant margin my favourite post-Soviet Shostakovich SQ cycle. All of their recordings are good tbh – I think the only one I was disappointed with was their Debussy, which was a little too wiry.

And yeah, Weinberg's music is a treasure trove. I need to dig into it further. Speaking of which, there have been two important releases devoted to him this year, which I've yet to hear: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 21 (he was quite prolific) with the KREMERata Baltica, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Lithuanian conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, and his 24 Preludes for solo cello arranged for violin (and played) by the indefatigable Gidon Kremer.

http://www.anothertimbre.com/beissel.html

Klaus Lang & Golden Fur - ‘Beissel’

this an incredible recording imo done in a church and based the work of Johann Conrad Beissel, the 18th century religious leader who travelled to America to found a utopian religious community.
"who developed his own compositional system which he said was given to him by angels, and which has been described as a very early pre-cursor of serialism."

Sounds cool, I'll check it out.

Sad to have missed the Shostakovich. I'm enjoying revisiting the Ravel Sonatine from the other night.

this may be old hat to y'all but i thought it was fascinating
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/21/opinion/editorials/errol-morris-lobster-sviatoslav-richter.html

I'm enjoying revisiting the Ravel Sonatine from the other night.

I should revisit some of the pieces from the Janina Fialkowska concert as well.

Not quite done catching up with my 2019 classical list, but… for those (and they are no doubt few) who dream of a nearly depoliticized, covertly Lutheranized Luigi Nono and Helmut Lachenmann, with an aural palette reminiscent of Cy Twombly's frescoes, Mark Andre's latest Wergo disc, hij is worth your while.

Also really enjoying the Riot Ensemble's Speak, Be Silent, an album that got funded through Kickstarter (!!!), featuring works by five contemporary women composers, almost all of whom I count among my favourites:

https://www.nmcrec.co.uk/huddersfield-contemporary-records/speak-be-silent

(May be of special interest to calz for regional reasons.)

hey i'm an internationalist, pal! but am always very glad when the Huddersfield Music Festival and related releases help raise my appreciation of some more fine music and will have a listen. Much preferable than the region just being just known for grim old satanic textile mills, 70's Smash advert and patrick fucking stewart!

Can't argue with that, calz.

Last one… a cello-based 'rencontre' between Robert Schumann and Tristan Murail. It sets Schumann's more-or-less canonical Fünf Stücke im Volkston and the Fantasiestücke alongside two works for solo cello and one duet for flute and cello (Une lettre de Vincent, i.e. Van Gogh) by Murail. The 'encounter' itself consists of Murail 'rereading' (his term) Schumann's Kinderszenen by freely rearranging them for flute, cello and piano. It all comes together beautifully.

Here's a YT teaser (I'm still astounded that this has become a thing in recent years… pourquoi pas?):

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

Xposts I’m a richter fan but I’ve run out of free NYT articles for the month :(

You may find this useful.

Not a connoisseur by any means and I usually just drop by here for the recs, this is rather a big coincidence. Just yesterday I was listening to Marie Ythier's 'Une Recontre' (found via this label*). It's so beautiful.

*Coincidentally, a Barnsley label!

Will def check out 'Speak, Be Silent', ta!

Well

I was just introduced to Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg-- I'm staying with a violinist who was trained by her-- and I've always hated the Tchaikovsky concerto with a passion until I heard Nadja do it like this, it's like pure comedy, she makes it sound like a Looney Tunes soundtrack and I'm so so into it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRuH3G-N0I

Not a big fan of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto either (or most of his works, really), although I've managed to extract a modicum of enjoyment from it thanks to Vadim Repin's sprightlier-and-gruffer-than-usual performance with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra. I'll look into Salerno-Sonnenberg's version.

Do you like Sibelius's violin concerto, fgti? To me it sounds like what the Tchaikovsky should have been all along.

Tchaikovsky I love without qualm:
Symphony 1!!!
Symphony 4 if performed fire-spittingly enough
All three Shakespeare tone poems (Romeo, tempest, hamlet)
Sleeping beauty esp if conducted by monteux

I just saw this concert by the Rolston String Quartet at Chamberfest. It was great: I've been a fan of Schafer's 2nd string quartet (with rhythms based on the times intervals between crests of ocean waves on both coasts) since I was given the LP as an undergrad. It was really powerful to see live. Actually got a standing ovation from part of the decent-sized audience. I didn't actually know Beethoven's 7th quartet before but it was really satisfying as well, and nice to close off with some tonal music.

Planning to see Continuum play contemporary pieces combining acoustic and electronic sound tonight: https://www.chamberfest.com/concerts/2019-0804-06/
and three new music concerts tomorrow:
https://www.chamberfest.com/concerts/2019-0805-02/
https://www.chamberfest.com/concerts/2019-0805-03/
https://www.chamberfest.com/concerts/2019-0805-06/

I’m gonna look for an LP rip of that schaefer quartet!

Beethoven #7 is the first “razumovsky” quartet right?

Yes.

This is the LP I have with the Schafer: https://www.discogs.com/Orford-String-Quartet-New-Music-Series-15/release/9356575
There were a bunch of old LPs and cassettes of modern Canadian music lying around in the computer music studio (99 or 00). The prof saw me looking at them with interest and said I could have them. At the time, I was incredulous that people would just give away all this great music. It was also how I got this Viver LP: https://www.discogs.com/fr/Claude-Vivier-Shiraz-Pulau-Dewata-Lonely-Child/release/2390406

R Murray Schafer!
I thought you meant Pierre Schaefer haha
I know next to nothing about either of them, so my interest level is unaffected

Oh ha, did Pierre Schaefer write string quartets??

I picked up the Quatuor Molinari's recording of Schafer's quartets 1-7 back in the early 2000s and never got much out of it. I suspect I was too immature at the time to really tune into his conception of music, which seemed at odds with mine (drama! despair! catharsis!). It's time I revisited them all.

Idk if I do exactly tune into his conception of music as such but I do love this piece. "Requiems for the Party Girl" is cool too.

So, Emmanuel Nunes. I've never quite understood his music, which strikes me as generically forbidding European structuralism, very much unlike that of Claude Vivier, who also studied under Stockhausen but whose every piece exudes invention (to say nothing of fellow pupils such as Grisey, Lachenmann, Rădulescu or Rihm). Still, new Wergo releases are almost always worthwhile, so I decided to give Minnesang (for a capella choir, from 1976) and Musivus (for orchestra, from 2001) a chance. I'm not sure I've cracked the latter, whose mostly impenetrable process-oriented writing is technically flawless but no less trying for it – perhaps because it seeks to impel an experience of spatial disorientation, Gruppen-style – but the former piece, inspired as it is by German medieval troubadours and Stockhausen's proto-New Age Stimmung, is unusually gorgeous, and does in fact bring to mind a less idiosyncratic Vivier, or even Per Nørgård's experiments with the 'infinity series' around the time of his ecstatic Third Symphony, which happens to be more or less contemporaneous (1972-1975) with Minnesang.

been listening to this recently after not being familiar with the pieces. Surprisingly dark at times -- approaching Shostakovich territory.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91J8SY-dIDL._SL1500_.jpg

I really love prokofiev's violin concertos 1 + 2 as well, don't know why i've never round to this one yet.

not really modern, but was listening to a performance of Biber's Rosemary sonatas on R3 earlier from Edinburgh and losing myself in it.

Biber's Rosemary sonatas

Never really thought of him as a cook, but it all makes sense now.

lol can't even blame auto-correct there, am in front of a decent qwerty rn!

i've been listening to Saint-Saëns' Piano Concertos No 3-5 as performed by Alexandre Kantorow w/the Tapiola Sinfonietta. Moments of great beauty and virtuoso playing -- i had heard a piece from it played on the local classical station and immediately had to pull over and SHAZAM it.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81ypYWmQIRL._SS500_.jpg

I also got to see Joshua Bell do the Dvorak concerto at Tanglewood and it just kinda confirmed my feeling that he doesn't really stack up with the other greats of today.

I got to be a fan of saint-saens 5th pno cto recently due to good old public radio. I have no problem with warhorses long as they kick.

Hyperion has released a cd of some neglected piece of mystical exotica by him - can’t remember the piece’s title now but heard that also on MPR and it’s on my to get list

Some good stuff at the New Music Now marathon yesterday: premiere of a new song cycle by Kelly-Marie Murphy, with text drawn from Ethel Rosenberg's letters. I always find her work satisfyingly well-structured. This one packs an emotional punch. Emili Losier seems like a really strong singer: she had to bring out a pretty wide dynamic range with some sustained vibrato pitches in a very high register. I also really enjoyed James Rolfe's raW, another Ottawa composer but one I was unfamiliar with. Reminded me a bit of Andriessen. I picked up this CD: http://www.jamesrolfe.ca/discography/raw-chamber-music-by-james-rolfe/ . Some creative new works from young composers in the first set. Mathilde Cote's piece was probably the standout for me there.

Thanks, I'll look into them. My knowledge of Canadian contemporary music is wanting, alas.