Rolling Classical 2019

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.

Btw Sund4r (and others), this disc of Estonian works for (electric) guitar(s) and choir is pretty cool:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2019/May/Estonian_incantations_v1_TOCN0002.htm

Listening to it on Naxos Online now, thanks.

Coming to value Pletnev (as pianist) more and more lately. I’m not sure if he just 100% conducts now but he is absolutely top echelon among modern practitioners imo, right up there with kocsis, moravec, argerich, anyone.

I overdosed on the Russian piano school a while back and haven't revisited it since, but your points of comparison make him seem appealing, to say the least. Which of his recitals have you been listening to?

Live stuff - the Carnegie hall 2cd and an unofficial Wigmore Hall that was doing the file sharing rounds a few years back (Debussy preludes book 1 plus Brahms Handel variations). Also his spectacular studio discs of CPE Bach and Scarlatti.

Added them to my list, thanks.

Btw Sund4r (and others), this disc of Estonian works for (electric) guitar(s) and choir is pretty cool:

This album is beautiful.

Yep. And it's a genuinely unusual mix – I can't think of any other such pieces.

Ha, I actually did play digitally processed electric guitar with the University of Regina choir one time, on a Gregorian chant; it was the conductor's idea. It was fun.

It's on Youtube, though it might not really be a competitor to Estonian Incantations.

many xp

The Sibelius Violin Concerto is unbearably difficult and extremely lovely, yes

I get parts of "Requiem For A Party Girl" in my head like once a week, he said, leaning forward and expaAAAAAaanding his head as he did so

Unfortunately the Tchaik performance I posted (Nadja S-S) was not the version I was thinking of. Me and my friend (violinist Eoin Andersen) were snorting up a lot of Nadja and then he played me this magical version of Tchaik and it wasn't Nadja, I'm still waiting to hear back from him about who it actually was, it was crazy, it sounded like Looney Tunes and it redeemed (for me) a work I've never previously enjoyed

I get parts of "Requiem For A Party Girl" in my head like once a week, he said, leaning forward and expaAAAAAaanding his head as he did so

Actually, this is a good one if you're looking for drama/despair/catharsis.

OK, here's the comedy rendition

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbdy5Ldeo70&app=desktop

I am suddenly the biggest fan of this concerto

Link doesn't work on my end. :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbdy5Ldeo70

Really guys

Listen to this

Ahhh, yes! I actually have heard this version and it's fucking awesome. I love all musicians involved.

I KNEW it was going to be kopatchinskaja after that last post of yours!

IT'S CRAZY

Slowly but surely catching up with my 2019 list before making my way back to everyone's suggestions upthread… Today I've got:

1. Wilhelmina Smith, works for solo cello by Kaija Saariaho and Esa-Pekka Salonen. I still consider myself a Saariaho fan despite how underwhelming most of her postmillennial output has been. With the exception of Dreaming Chaconne (paraphrasing Giuseppe Colombi's baroque Chiacona, also included here), Smith draws on Saariaho's overtly spectral mid-period (Petals, Sept Papillons, Spins and Spells), which makes for ever-fascinating listening. Salonen, on the other hand, whom I generally appreciate as a conductor, has never impressed me as a composer and none of the pieces on display here strike me as memorable in any way, shape or form: structurally they're easier to keep up with than those of Saariaho, but their neo-classical clarity only serves to underscore how utterly bland and middle-of-the-road the writing is. Nor does setting them beside Saariaho's do Salonen any favours. Ultimately, while Smith is a persuasive musician, I see no reason to pick up this disc over Alexis Descharmes's complete recital or, better yet, Anssi Karttunen's performances, disseminated across several Saariaho monographs.

2. Filigree, chamber music by Hannah Lash, with the composer herself (a harpist) and the JACK Quartet. I got wind of this one because the latter are ever-reliable guides when it comes to contemporary classical. I should probably spend more time with it before dishing out an amateur verdict, but overall I found these pieces quite intriguing. The controlled awkwardness of Frayed, for string quartet, brings to mind John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts, whereas the Suite (Remembered and Imagined), also for string quartet, is a somewhat eccentric pastiche of polystylism (a pastiche of pastiche?) that variously evokes baroque music, Ligeti, Berg, Shostakovich, Julian Anderson (with whom she studied), and (of course) a pinch of Schnittke, minus the hopeless chaos. Then we have a final work for the JACK Quartet, Pulse-Space, a disquieting, expressionist take on minimalism that brings the disc's emotional heft out into the open. Lastly, Filigree in Textile, a quintet for harp and string quartet, borrows its melodic contours from medieval music. Tapestry metaphorically informs her writing throughout, reminding one of Morton Feldman, but Lash's impulses remain rooted – broadly speaking – in Romanticism: even when the work is at its most gnomic (the second movement, played pizzicato), a yarn is being spun into narrative rather than into an endlessly self-proliferating non-human object that appears to be subject to its own enigmatic laws. Anyhow, I very much enjoyed this and would love to hear more stuff by her.

3. Influences, a highly personal piano recital by the discreet and undersung Tamara Stefanovich (who is married to Pierre-Laurent Aimard, incidentally), featuring works by Bach, Ives, Bartók and Messiaen. As much as I admire Aimard's playing, which is unimpeachably idiomatic in Messiaen and Ligeti (among others), Stefanovich exhibits just as much precision and transparency without giving the impression that she's on the outside looking in. Her playing is a paradox (just the way I like it): ardent and dispassionate, mystical and analytical, Stoic and Epicurean, etc. This works especially well in Ives's First Sonata, which I'd never quite gotten before hearing her perform it, but Bartók's Eight Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs, Messiaen's Cantéyodjayâ and Bach's Aria variata alla maniera italiana also benefit from her impossible sense of synthesis. She makes the strongest possible case for these lesser-known works by well-known composers.

I really like Lash's Sonata for Harp, released on Bandcamp in 2016. I think we talked about it a bit at the time in the context of 'neo-Romanticism'. Just a well-crafted composition written solidly in a traditional form using a modern but tonal harmonic language and some asymmetrical metres, without any of the bombast that usually comes with 'neo-Romanticism'; she played it sensitively and the recording sounded beautiful. I'll definitely look out for this collaboration with JACK. Sounds like she might be pushing the envelope a little more with some of this stuff.