Rolling Classical 2020

Yow

Thanks for the heads up – I'll listen to anything released by the JACK Quartet.

Is anyone familiar with Hermann Abert's enormous book on Mozart? https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300072235/wa-mozart

I'm wondering if I should give it a shot (not that I need be starting more large books right now.)

(Not sure if this belongs on this thread but) I really enjoyed Robert Haigh's newest on Unseen Worlds, called Black Sarabande. Anyone else? Minimal piano-led pieces.

https://unseenworlds.bandcamp.com/album/black-sarabande

Yeah, I kinda love it? Much better than I expected, though I can't really explain why

it's the first thing this year that i've felt compelled to listen to repeatedly

will test drive!

Nikolai Lugansky's take on César Franck's piano works is predictably excellent, although no transcription of the Prélude, Fugue et Variation could ever match the organ original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM4WWd6OWPg

Fitting music for this semblance of the end times…

Come to think of it, the piano & harmonium duo version is even better (the variation at 6:04 just slays me):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFj_oA4-pTM

(The Chamayou/Latry recording easily tops this one btw.)

Always nice to see Han Reiziger (the presenter, rip) pop up. A lovely rendition indeed.

since everything has to tie in to COVID-19 right now, Brett Dean (australian composer and violist, I've always meant to listen to him since I adore the viola) has been diagnosed. First person from the CM world that i've seen news of.

Fuck, I hope he'll be alright. And I can't wait for this to be over.

there will certainly be more as CM is so very travel-heavy :(

That blows. Hope he gets better soon.

someone posted about Víkingur Ólafsson -- he has a new one out this year, Debussy / Rameau

How COVID-19 is going to fuck over opera singers

Just got the Cenk Ergün/JACK Quartet disc mentioned above in yesterday's mail; looking forward to checking it out.

Reviewing the new Darragh Morgan/John Tilbury recording of For John Cage for The Wire.

And as promised, here are links to my interview with violinist Isabelle Faust:

Osiris: http://bit.ly/2IJZvHc
Apple: https://apple.co/3cXWMHR
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2xvnbww

was gonna see the local symphony orchestra do berio's sinfonia but that was obviously cancelled. flip side is that the portland baroque orchestra, who of course also aren't going to be able to put on a public concert, has just decided to livestream their concert instead. i'm down with that!

Along the same lines as the blog post unperson linked to upthread:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/coronavirus-concerts-the-music-world-contends-with-the-pandemic

berliner philharmoniker making their digital archive free for a bit: https://www.digitalconcerthall.com/en/home

the st. paul chamber orchestra’s free concert library:

https://content.thespco.org/music/concert-library/

:(
https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/coronavirus/selling-cello-support-family-musicians-impact/

:(

RIP: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/29/composer-krzysztof-penderecki-dies-aged-86

RIP.

I still struggle with his post-1970s output, even as I am sympathetic to the aesthetic conversion he underwent – it just seems as though he never figured out where to go with it. His iconoclastic early material, however, is bound to remain.

I listened to the Naxos recording of the St Luke Passion this morning. Not only is my understanding of his work colored by hearing "Threnody For the Victims of Hiroshima," but it's colored by only really hearing the first minute or two of the piece, and thinking the guy had made a career out of microtonal sludge and writing him off. St Luke Passion was amazing, and I'll have to make time to hear his other music.

He only really composed in that avant-garde 'sludge' style (which I think was brilliant) in the 60s. String Quartet no. 3 ("Leaves from an Unwritten Diary"), from 2008, was the first one I pulled out this morning. It's one I could listen to over and over, maybe closer to a Bartok-influenced style? Very expressive without being drippy Romanticism; still tonal and melodic but with a lot of dissonant chromaticism and folk references. It was great to see the Penderecki Quartet perform it a few years ago.

Excellent, evenhanded obituary by Keith Potter:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/29/krzysztof-penderecki-obituary

Hm, that's kind of brutal, as obituaries go. I'm not sure i know the St Luke's Passion tbh.

Yet those early works, which at the time struck so many as so arresting in their dramatic challenge to convention, now seem – for some listeners at least – shallow, simplistic, or even opportunistic.

hmm

Yeah, that was O_O. "Some people say"...

Tbf the sentence that follows is just as tart. He seems to be writing from the point of view of über-modernists and musical populists both.

ppl who enjoy the comfort of their own enervating self-consciously cold judgement do seem esp drawn to classical music

the comfort of their own enervating self-consciously cold judgement

This seems fairer, since I have no idea what Potter's own position is after reading that obituary.

Well, as he notes, an über-modernist could hate both early and late Penderecki for the reasons he gives. After reading his Gorecki obit, though, I'm not sure that is actually where he comes from himself.

A scholar of American minimalism? That could work: https://www.gold.ac.uk/music/staff/potter/

Ahahaha, it all makes sense now.

Anyway, what are everyone's favourite Penderecki recordings? As noted, I favour the Penderecki Quartet's SQ3. I have the Wit/Polish NSRO disc with Symphony 3 and Threnody but I feel like I've heard some more intense Threnodies. Good recordings of St Luke's Passion?

Penderecki's own 60s recordings are where it's at. For the St. Luke Passion, I've only heard his 1989 take, which is as good as you'd expect. Of his works in a self-consciously tonal idiom, I vaguely enjoy his Violin Concertos (No. 1 with Isaac Stern & No. 2 with Anne-Sophie Mutter).

I really liked Utrenja, a huge piece recorded in Wit’s series on Naxos

Don't know that one. I'll have to binge on his complete works one of these days.

Listened to that St. Luke's Passion today but it ended up being broken up and sometimes distracted so I definitely will come back to it. A lot of really striking and intense moments, though.

Listening to this disc now, which I bought as an undergraduate: https://www.discogs.com/fr/Krzysztof-Penderecki-Musica-Da-Camera/release/1805311
First string quartet still so striking.

I absent-mindedly heard said disc once, more than 15 years ago. Time to make up for that, especially now that the 1960s poll is on its way.

Another obituary worth reading, courtesy of Tim Rutherford-Johnson:

https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/krzysztof-penderecki-1933-2020/

some of the most emo music in the classical canon - that's more like it!

National Arts Centre Orchestra musicians doing solo lunch break Youtube performances from home every day: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL90GqA5xhozq9vZwEpm-7VB5o-DxYHuBN

Something about the phenomenon of NACO players doing solo livestreams from their living rooms really impressed on me what a world-historical crisis we are living through.

Listening currently to Thomas Adès' piano concerto, premiered at the BSO last year but released this year. They played it on the radio last night but I slept right through it. It's really something! I picked up a couple older Adès CDs and I wasn't totally impressed with them, but this has this amazing sense of motion going on, like "Giant Steps" arranged for two orchestras and they both started in different places in the changes.

Adès is as good as they say, imo. I adore his violin concerto so so so much... the first movement's harmonic material is, effectively, a Shepard tone (though I don't know if he's acknowledged it? Google turns up nothing but it is exactly what he did)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTth0fp13aU