Classical Listening

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Utterly hilarious ...

I'm failing to see the joke in Emil's vid. Not because it's supposedly making fun of my vid . . . I'm just not finding the correlation.

[Emil Miller]

Utterly hilarious ...



Thank you for posting the link; I have listened to the Pictures twice in live concert, but the addition of the choir was very powerful.

I'm glad you find it hilarious but I don't think the Pentagon are very amused. If the UK had paid a little more attention to what was happening in Germany during the pre-war period, it might not have had to face many of the problems that emerged when they eventually declared war on Germany.

http://youtu.be/Hkt7Nw0PE2E


As for the Mussorgsky, the opening with the bell at fff is brilliant, and the deep sound at 1,56 just before the choir comes in is masterly. The accentuation of bells throughout underlines the Russian nature of the work. The use of the organ at 6.01 and 6.08 adds to the notion of holy Russia and I'm surprised that Leopold Stokowski didn't think of these changes first.

[cl154576]

I'm failing to see the joke in Emil's vid. Not because it's supposedly making fun of my vid . . . I'm just not finding the correlation.

I'm glad you find it hilarious but I don't think the Pentagon are very amused. If the UK had paid a little more attention to what was happening in Germany during the pre-war period, it might not have had to face many of the problems that emerged when they eventually declared war on Germany.

I meant the speech, not the army.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm confused.

[Emil Miller]

I meant the speech, not the army.

Perhaps you should have made that clear, seeing as how most members don't speak Mandarin Chinese.

[cl154576]

Perhaps you should have made that clear, seeing as how most members don't speak Mandarin Chinese.

Sorry. I forget where I am sometimes ... I can translate later if I finish my work, but it's mostly the tone.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

To maybe bring this back on track, a little.

This is still one of my all time fave vids on YT:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGA6bpscj8

[stlukesguild]

Last year the best purchase I made was of the box set of J.S. Bach's Sacred Materpieces/Cantatas performed by John Eliot Gardiner with the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir:



This box set was produced rather cheaply. The box (as can be seen from the picture) is rather poorly constructed from lightweight cardboard and the discs contained in paper sleeves... as with old LPs. The accompanying booklet is minimal (at best) with little information beyond the identification of each track on the discs and a link to an online site where one might download the texts. On the other hand, for little more than $30 US you get 22 discs of the finest recordings of Bach's St. Matthew and St. John Passions, the Mass in B-minor, the Magnificat, the Christmas Oratorio, and 11 discs of the many of Bach's finest cantatas. I should also note that when I say 22 discs of the "finest" recordings... I am not exaggerating. Gardiner's recordings of any of these individual works are commonly considered to be the standard against which all others are measured... and purchased separately, the St. Matthew Passion alone can run nearly as much as this entire set.

This year, once again it has been a box set that has been perhaps my greatest purchase of the year. Sony re-released the first 15 discs of classic recordings by the Huelgas Ensemble, the Belgian-based choral group of around 20 unaccompanied singers, specialising in Early Music (Middle Ages to Renaissance), many written by obscure or little-known composers such as Agricola, Riquafort and Ciprio de Rore.





Once again the set runs around $30-$35 US for the 15 disc boxed set... but in this instance Sony has pulled out all the stops in packaging. The box itself is beautiful... great graphics and produced of heavy stock cardboard with a second heavy cardboard liner that can be removed to allow for ease of access (in case you plan on playing all the discs one after the other). Each individual disc is housed in a lighter-weight cardboard case designed to allow easy removal of the disc by simply squeezing. The set is capped of by a 200+ page booklet which includes the texts of the works in the original Latin (in most instances) as well as in French, German, and English translation. The only possible complaints is that the original cover art is lost (although this wasn't always the finest)... reduced to an image the size of a postage stamp reproduced on the back of each individual disc liner. Neither are the original liner notes reproduced... although one might surely look up the individual composers on the internet. For example, I'm currently listening to the 15th century Franco-Flemish composer, Alexander Agricola, and I find there is plenty about him available on the net.

Once again, as in the Bach box set, any shortcomings... even less in this instance... are more than compensated for by the quality of performance and wealth of music at a bargain price. This set is ideal for anyone wishing to delve deeper into the realm of "Early Music".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naap4CWanv0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk_pPTiyUDs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL40Zxi1IFo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGUjyFqQ1aI

http://brandnewmoods.blogspot.com/20...-ensemble.html

[stlukesguild]

Where I have always struggled with Schoenberg and found him too "lumpen" and leaden... like Brahms at his worst without the tonality... this is not so of Berg. And once again I find I immediately warm to Berg's work. I already have another version of the Lyric Suite, but I find this one "special" on several accounts. Surely the Kronos Quartet plays this music in a manner at once deft... sensuous... fluid... and lyrical.

The work was famously an expression of Berg's tragic love for Hanna Fuchs-Robbetin. Berg had already been married some 14 years, but he was overwhelmed with a grande passion for Hanna, the sister of the Austrian novelist Franz Werfel, the wife of a Prague industrialist and mother of two. Divorce for either was unthinkable and only rarely, through missives sent via trusted confidants count the two communicate or arrange the rare clandestine meetings. The affair was impossible and heart-breaking for both. Hanna broke down in tears at seeing Berg at an opera house. Berg drunkenly wandered the streets for hours and ending standing beneath his beloved's window in a silent parody of the ritual of courtly love.. The two resigned themselves to a silent suffering of this love that could not be.

Berg's Lyric Suite was laden with symbolic expressions of this love which were only later (1977) deciphered by the musical scholar George Perle who had access to the original annotated copy of the score sent by Berg to Hanna. With this, Perle discovered that the suite originally concluded with a setting for quartet and soprano of Baudelaire's poem, De profundis clamavi in the German translation by the German Symbolist, Stephan George. This concept of transcending the inarticulate expression of the instrumental with song was of course born of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in which the bass soloist suddenly silences the orchestra to announce the song of brotherhood. Berg's mentor, Schoenberg, adapted the idea to his string quartet, the final movements of which adapt Stephan George's poems, Litany and Transport.
Berg must have suspected that the performance of the suite with the original intended vocal finale would have resulted in a too obvious comparison with Schoenberg... but also... considering the lyrics of the chosen text by Baudelaire:

To you, you sole dear one, my cry rises
Out of the deepest abyss in which my heart has fallen.
There the landscape is dead, the air like lead
And in the dark, curse and terror well up...

I envy the lot of the most common animal
Which can plunge into the dizziness of a senseless sleep...
So slowly does the spindle of time unwind.

it would have led to unwanted speculation among the scandal-mongering Viennese, and so once again Berg resigned himself to silence, and the melody composed for Baudelaire's words was dispersed among the instruments of the quartet. This melody was reconstructed by Perle. By placing this melody once again before the quartet, the shattering finale draws clearer thematic connections to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, itself a masterpiece of love and suffering in silence. In Berg's setting the voice ends before the quartet, conveying, perhaps, that there are no longer any words fitting to such suffering. Each instrument of the quartet then equally dies away... losing its voice in silence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GOu6GxZVW0

[Emil Miller]

Gorgeous women and great music go together.


http://youtu.be/_-xwx-Z3ijc

[stlukesguild]

Indeed!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQR0LQskL4E

[Vonny]

Yes, really gorgeous women and music there Emil, Luke. Watching Yu-Na, I found it interesting the role of her coach in her life who has taught her all that he knows and she is capable of magic.

[Emil Miller]

Yes, really gorgeous women and music there Emil, Luke. Watching Yu-Na, I found it interesting the role of her coach in her life who has taught her all that he knows and she is capable of magic.

It's unfortunate that she and her coach have since broken up. I don't know anything about skating but, checking her out on Google, there was an acrimonious parting of the ways for reasons that are not at all clear.
She has made a fabulous amount of money since becoming an olympic and also world champion in womens' skating but she owes it all to her Canadian coach who was himself a former champion skater. The professional life of a skater is very short but at least we have the video footage of her performances in which she is simply ethereal. I posted this some time ago in another thread but here she is again winning the 2010 olympic championship. Beauty personified.


http://youtu.be/yc35PYNEQMk

[Vonny]

It's unfortunate that she and her coach have since broken up. I don't know anything about skating but, checking her out on Google, there was an acrimonious parting of the ways for reasons that are not at all clear.
She has made a fabulous amount of money since becoming an olympic and also world champion in womens' skating but she owes it all to her Canadian coach who was himself a former champion skater. The professional life of a skater is very short but at least we have the video footage of her performances in which she is simply ethereal. I posted this some time ago in another thread but here she is again winning the 2010 olympic championship. Beauty personified.


http://youtu.be/yc35PYNEQMk

Thanks for this Emil. I hadn't seen her before. I'm sure she had natural talent and practiced very hard, but it's true she would have gotten no where on her own.

The commentaries on the videos are very interesting. She is a mixture of shyness and competitiveness, (which can make food for vultures.) Her coach protected her, they say. Protecting a girl is not something society respects because it keeps girls from "growing." But it seems Yu-Na developed her full potential and her unique self. I don't know what the coach protected her from, but maybe from other girls that he didn't want her to emulate, maybe from criticism, or from believing that being different equaled inadequate and unacceptable.

I understand about people seeking the best education, but I still wonder why she left her coach. It happened after she had fully succeeded, not before, which makes me think she did drop him. How disillusioning. How sad for him.

[stlukesguild]

My personal preference has long been for music of the German/Austrian tradition (Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, Schumann, Strauss, Mahler, etc...) followed by the Italians and the French. I have not necessarily disliked the Russians... but rather they have simply not been my favorite... at least not since I was a teenager and the gushing emotions spoke to me.

Recently, I have begun to rediscover a lot of Russian music. Russian operas are intriguing in their predominant use of bass and baritone singers... although the general scarcity of lead female characters is less than endearing. The French long embraced the ballet... dance... even in their operas, and 19th century Russia's love of all things French resulted in a great tradition of Russian ballet which continued into the 20th century. I've been exploring any number of the classic Russian ballets:

Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet is quite fabulous... at once drop-dead gorgeous... and yet laden with enough of a tinge of the dark and sinister... the dissonant... to not make it seem but a pastiche in the 20th century:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB0PV...eature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB3sd2BAxys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrJQiGCdTFk

Looking through videos of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, I came across the performance of the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe of China who are every bit as brilliant athletes as anyone I've seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gLDG...eature=related