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Post by jk on Jun 24, 2021 9:03:59 GMT
He probably won't see this, but this is for barnsy at EH. Actually, the version I have on LP of Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration ( Tod und Verklärung), Op. 24 is conducted by Karajan (no problem with his past; those were tricky times). I was looking for it on YouTube and bumped into this live version from 1970 by the Orchestra Sinfonica di Torino della Rai under one of my favourite conductors, the imperturbable Sergiu Celibidache, who (in someone else's wonderful phrase) discovered his inner snail late in life. In this age of helter-skelter versions of everything, his tempi are a breath of fresh air! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergiu_CelibidacheBy way of an afterthought: if no one feels inclined to respond to your post within a couple of days, I'll do the honours. The non-BB music section doesn't deserve to fade away, for whatever reason...
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Post by jk on Jun 26, 2021 20:44:55 GMT
This morning my preferred Dutch religious music programme played Rise Up, My Love (2002) by the English composer Howard Skempton, who is full of surprises judging by his wiki page. In the 1960s, I had a brush with British experimental music, a scene in which he was deeply involved. I must look out more of his stuff. These are Ars Nova Copenhagen directed by Paul Hillier: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Skempton
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Post by jk on Jul 2, 2021 8:07:09 GMT
There is something intriguingly modern about this third movement of Edvard Grieg's Symphonic Dances, written at the tail end of the 19th century. The harmonies are suggestive of Stravinsky, or Prokofiev: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Grieg
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Post by jk on Aug 13, 2021 18:52:51 GMT
A good friend of mine was lucky enough to see this gentleman in action a short while back in a world-class trombone quartet. Here Mark Fisher shows his prowess on the euphonium (in James Stephenson's Fanfare for an Angel)… ...as well as the trombone (in Franz Biebl's Ave Maria): www.chicagolyricoperaorchestra.com/mark-fisher
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Post by jk on Aug 14, 2021 21:42:43 GMT
Some years back when holidaying in the UK we walked the * Cotswolds Way National Trail* northward from Bath to Chipping Camden. What a fantastic if (healthily) exhausting experience! One of the many picturesque villages we passed though had some stalls set up. Among the stuff on sale were some classical CDs. We bought three, I believe -- one was of music by Vaughan Williams and one of the others was of orchestral music from the Baltic. Little did we know we would be visiting all three Baltic States a few years later. One of those orchestral works was the Estonian-born Eduard Tubin's Symphony No. 3, of which this is the opening movement: www.tubinsociety.com/?page_id=707&lang=en
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Post by jk on Nov 8, 2021 18:45:05 GMT
This morning I heard an excerpt from the performance linked below. I'd say it was the first time music had ever made me feel scared. These notes are adapted from texts on YouTube and at the website linked below: AKQA and Jung von Matt, in partnership with composer Hugh Crosthwaite and Monash University's Climate Change Communication Research Hub used climate data to recompose Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. One of the best loved classical pieces, Vivaldi wrote it three centuries ago as an endlessly inventive depiction of each season, influenced by the rhythms of the year. Portraying a future (2050) where the world has failed to deliver on combatting global warming, The [uncertain] Four Seasons seeks to put pressure on world leaders to act decisively at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. The [uncertain] Four Seasons is a global project that recomposed Vivaldi's The Four Seasons using local climate data for every orchestra in the world. The new compositions (a dozen local variations can be heard on YouTube) were to be a call for global leaders to commit to the Leaders Pledge for Nature ahead of the conference in November 2021. Building upon the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra's 2019 performance in Hamburg, which fused Vivaldi's music with historical weather data, the first variation of The [uncertain] Four Seasons was performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at the 2021 Sydney Festival on January 12th. The [uncertain] Four Seasons is the output of a musical design system that combines music theory with computer modelling to algorithmically generate countless local variations of Vivaldi's original 1725 composition. The algorithm alters the musical score to account for predicted changes in rainfall, biodiversity, sea-level rise, and extreme weather events as laid out in the IPCC's reports. Here are the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra performing the "Amsterdam Variation": the-uncertain-four-seasons.info
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Post by jk on Dec 28, 2021 11:33:52 GMT
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Post by jk on Jan 9, 2022 20:41:42 GMT
It's that day again -- I'm reposting this from last year... January 9th 1905 is the fateful day in Russian history when soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired upon unarmed demonstrators marching on the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, killing several hundred of them. Shostakovich commemorates it in the second movement of his Eleventh Symphony (1957), although it is more likely a veiled reference to the then recent crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops. This is the complete symphony performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Shostakovich's favourite conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. This must be the recording made in 1959, on 2 November it would seem (not 1967, as stated by the uploader). Important note: Play at a reasonable volume -- much of the first movement is very quiet and, more importantly, you may otherwise miss the deathly hush (here at 30:04) in the second movement. I. The Palace Square II. The 9th of January (starts 15:33) III. Eternal Memory (starts 34:01) IV. Tocsin (Alarm) (starts 45:48) I need scarcely add that the visit I paid in late 2019 to St Petersburg, where Shostakovich himself lived for many years, has only intensified my experience of the Eleventh, particularly in this version. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._11_(Shostakovich)
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Post by jk on Mar 4, 2022 21:50:33 GMT
Troparion to the Blessed Virgin was written (in 2020?) by the Ukrainian composer Hanna Havrylets, who died five days ago aged 63, cause of death unknown. This heart-breaking rendition was recorded during lockdown in 2020 by fellow Ukranians Molodizhnyi kamernyi khor (Youth chamber choir, soloist Antonina Yurash) conducted by the choir's director Oksana Sukhetska. It is as relevant today as it was then, if not more so in these tragic times:
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Post by Kapitan on Mar 4, 2022 22:04:45 GMT
Beautiful piece, thanks for sharing that.
I also learned a new word today: troparion, "short hymn or stanza sung in Greek Orthodox religious services. The word probably derives from a diminutive of the Greek tropos (“something repeated,” “manner,” “fashion”), with a possible analogy to the Italian ritornello (“refrain”; diminutive of ritorno, “return”)."
I'm so unfamiliar with Orthodoxy in general, it's all Greek to me... (Thank you, I'll show myself out.)
Gorgeous, haunting music though. And while I know we've mostly moved on to the current crises, I have to note that the idea of singing in a choir as an individual through a computer is so depressing. Better than not singing at all, but it must have been so unchoirlike an experience for those in that situation. (Much less recording that way.) I know we do it with popular music, but choirs?
(One of my brothers is a high school band director, and so had to do similar things with his students. That would also be awful.)
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Post by jk on May 27, 2022 12:20:40 GMT
I remember my father telling me that E.J. Moeran (1894–1950) worked the points on a remote railway line with something like one train a day, which gave him all the time in the world to compose. Regrettably I can't find anything to that effect online, even in a * thesis* devoted to Moeran and his music (the memory playing tricks again?), but it does seem he was obsessed with trains and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of train timetables! To get to the point, a couple of days ago I heard a unique Dutch radio broadcast of "Whythorne's Shadow", the lesser-known of his Two Pieces for Small Orchestra (1931). Its companion piece, "Lonely Waters", does get played from time to time, as does his Symphony, my favourite work of his (in this rendition). These are the two pieces in question, played here, as in that lone Dutch radio airing, by the Ulster Orchestra conducted by Vernon Handley ("Whythorne's Shadow" begins at 9:20): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_John_Moeran
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Post by jk on Jun 9, 2022 21:20:24 GMT
My first brush with the name Salieri was in the early 1960s. Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Mozart and Salieri was listed among many works at the back of orchestral scores I used to borrow from the local library. Thirty years later, I made more substantial contact with il maestro when I found myself playing the piano accompaniment in an amateur performance of his Requiem in C Minor (1804). And today, a further thirty years on, I heard -- in the version linked below -- his overture to Axur, re d'Ormus (1787 [?], premiered January 1788), one of the forty-plus operas he wrote in either Italian, French or German. Unlike the cruel if entertaining picture painted of him in the film Amadeus, Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) was a key figure in European musical life, as an influential composer and teacher, for a full four decades. And no, he didn't poison Mozart, hahaha -- chances are they enjoyed a deep mutual respect. [To get to the elusive wiki page, google "Axur, king of Ormus"]
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Post by jk on Jul 22, 2022 21:22:52 GMT
How about this for a much-needed breath of fresh air? "Another side to my musical personality, I perform one movement of Johann Hummel's Sonata for Mandolin and piano, accompanied by my mother, the great Linda Hoisington." One commenter speaks of "such immense talent". They aren't kidding! Hummel's sonata (Op. 37a) was written in Vienna in 1810 or thereabouts. Let's hope there are more works for this combination waiting to be unearthed... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Nepomuk_Hummel
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Post by jk on Nov 4, 2022 14:47:28 GMT
I bought this next recording for peanuts back in the mid-1960s. Every Saturday prior to 1967, I travelled to the local town to buy a "classical" LP. Sometimes, when I couldn't find anything I really wanted, I'd buy the next best thing. Ironically, this often elicited some real gems. One was René Leibowitz's 1955 recording of Fauré's Requiem, a work in which I had previously shown no interest at all. But I was riveted from the first listen. And all of a sudden there it was on YouTube, uploaded last year (with grateful thanks to asia&curiosa). It is performed by Nadine Sautereau (soprano), Bernard Demigny (baritone) and Choeurs et Orchestre Philharmonique de Paris, conducted by René Leibowitz: This is the cover of my LP (which I still have): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Leibowitz
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Post by Kapitan on Nov 4, 2022 14:51:29 GMT
I first heard Faure's Requiem in the mid-90s sometime, when I was on a bit of a binge collecting requiems. (Totally normal pastime, no?) It was, and has remained, one of my favorites. I'll be sure to give this version a listen!
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