What were you listening to? (CLOSED)

[Wanderer]

Good morning, everyone! 

[Que]

A very good morning!



Listening to the 1st disc of this 3CD-set.

Sounds wonderful.

Q

[mozartsneighbor]

Souzay French Airs -- Faure, Chausson

[Subotnick]

I'm listening to a selection of works by Peter Maxwell Davies, all bar one acquired from the excellent Avant Garde Project, a site which I need to pay a long overdue visit.

Dark Angels
Psalm 124
House Of Winter
Miss Donnithrone's Maggot
Eight Songs For A Mad King

TTFN.
Me.

[Que]

Previous impressions are once again confirmed: very interesting music - which is getting more delightful now I've progressed to the really mature sonatas nos. 10-12 on disc 3, and really excellent performances - beautifully recorded. Bulgarian Sylvia Georgieva, musically educated in Prague, plays two double manual harpsichords: one after Johannes Ruckers (1624) and one after Michael Mietke (ca. 1710)


This is a 4CD set of the complete harpsichord sonatas.
           Click picture for samples at jpc

Q

[Que]

Listening to this disc:                                                   From the 15-CD Leonhardt set:

       

The cardboard slipcase of each disc has the cover of the original issue - very convenient!

Interesting, solid, scholary Bach organ playing BTW. And this organ is naturally a marvel!

Q

[johnQpublic]

LPs

Purcell - Overtue to "The Gordian Knot Untied" (Kehr/Nonesuch)
Clarke - Almand, Round O & Jigg (Tilney/Argo)
Handel - Water Music Suite #3 (Menuhin/Angel)
Telemann - Fantasies #7-9 (Rampal/Odyssey)
Gabrielli - 4 Canzoni (Philly, Cleveland & Chicago Brass/Columbia)

[Bogey]

I'm back on a normal schedule Que!   This week's cantata:

Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata #65 "Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen" BWV 65
La Petite Bande / Sigiswald Kuijken
Elisabeth Herman, soprano
Petra Noskaiova, alto
Jan Kobow, tenor
Jan Van der Crabben, baritone
Accent 25304 

I found this performance very enjoyable.  Enough so to add to my wish-list.

[Que]

I'm back on normal schedule Que!   This week's cantata:

Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata #65 "Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen" BWV 65
La Petite Bande / Sigiswald Kuijken
Elisabeth Herman, soprano
Petra Noskaiova, alto
Jan Kobow, tenor
Jan Van der Crabben, baritone
Accent 25304 

I found this performance very enjoyable.  Enough so to add to my wish-list.

Niiiiiice! I happen to rather like that new Kuijken series as well.

Q

[not edward]

What do you think of what Dutoit does with Honegger.  I think he's 'big' enough but not 'wide' enough and could do with a little more expression.

If I can toss in my own opinion, I think the Dutoit set is very disappointing given the comments I've heard from those who've heard Dutoit live. The performances are well-executed but seem to me to be more of a run-through than a well-thought-out interpretation: I just find nothing interesting about them. Now that I've got the complete CzPO/Baudo set, the Dutoit one will likely head to the trade pile.

For the 3rd specifically, I can't look past BP/Karajan, though Baudo and Mravinsky offer plenty as well. (In fact, I think I might put the Mravinsky on right now.)

Incidentally, has anyone heard Honegger's own recording of the Liturgique?

[Christo]

Again. But this time not for the two Havergal Brian Symphonies - their merits are beyond debate, I would say - but for the filler-up: Arnold Cooke (1906-2005), Symphony No. 3 (1967).

A joy to hear it again, after all these years (I knew the LP version around 1979, but didn't hear it since then). Much more than I was aware of in those days, Cooke does stand in a specific type of "English" musical tradition. That's too say: the not-so-English brand of Neoclassicism to be found with Lennox Berkeley and Alan Rawsthorne too, and sometimes also with Eugene Goossens - the three composers that Cooke resembles most, especially Berkeley. In the end, even if they don't belong to a "national" school, neither of them can be anything but British, Cooke included. Lovely symphony, fine craftmanship. Would love to hear all six of his symphonies, but only the First is also on record.

                 

[Haffner]

Wagner Lohengrin (Keilberth)

An old recording with some excellent performances, both from the musicians as well as the vocalists. Steber is very interesting, she's a singer I'm not particularly familiar with. Glad that I am now.

[Bogey]

Yo Ange!

Wife and I out on the porch sipping more coffee while getting some paper work done, so:

Bach 4 Orchestral Suites
Harnoncourt/Concentus Musicus Wien
Teldec

[Haffner]

Yo Ange!

Wife and I out on the porch sipping more coffee while getting some paper work done, so:

Bach 4 Orchestral Suites
Harnoncourt/Concentus Musicus Wien
Teldec

Yo YO yo yo-OO-oh!

You are JAHM-ming, my good maing!

[Lethevich]

Unfortunately I find this recording of Styx literaly unlistenable for the most part. The volume required to hear the quiet sections makes the loud sections... too loud. The relatively uninspired music (versus the symphonies) do not make it worth the effort. I am not interested in some post-modern smoke and mirrors listening experience in which I hear almost nothing punctuated by some orchestral blasts and a randomly added choir. The Gubaidulina is more interesting, although I am not familiar enough with the composer to judge the merits of the performance. The two styles do superficially compliment each other quite well, but Styx is garish wheras the other work is enigmatic.

Edit: Fortunately I didn't pay for it - a poster child for try before buying

[lukeottevanger]

Unfortunately I find this recording of Styx literaly unlistenable for the most part. The volume required to hear the quiet sections makes the loud sections... too loud. The relatively uninspired music (versus the symphonies) do not make it worth the effort. I am not interested in some post-modern smoke and mirrors listening experience in which I hear almost nothing punctuated by some orchestral blasts and a randomly added choir. The Gubaidulina is more interesting, although I am not familiar enough with the composer to judge the merits of the performance. The two styles do superficially compliment each other quite well, but Styx is garish wheras the other work is enigmatic.

Edit: Fortunately I didn't pay for it - a poster child for try before buying

Agree completely - Styx is a ridiculous piece, I think, and a horrifying contrast to the wonderful music Kancheli was writing a couple of decades before. OTOH one has to try to imagine the situation Kancheli must have found himself in - he'd discovered this style that worked wonderfully, in its own way. Presumably he could have gone on repeating it, but that would be creatively dead - he had to move on, but how do you move on from something as finely achieved as the style of the symphonies?

I feel the same about Part, only more so, because his early tintinabulation style was unique and literally perfect - it's so sad to see him writing pieces like Lamentate (for instance). A beautiful piece in its own right, it's nevertheless (IMO) a desertion of the wonderful, pure and self-sufficient high ground his music achieved in those first few years post-1976. If he'd stopped at the Passio and the Stabat Mater, he'd have left things on the most exalted plane, a totally unified, spiritually integrated, technically infallible style. But of course he couldn't stop composing, and of course he couldn't stand still however perfect the pitch he'd reached - and so ever-so-gradually since then Part's music has undergone an injection of romantic dramatism and modulatory chromaticism that seem to me at odds with the aesthetic of the tintinabulation technique he still employs. In a work like Miserere things still work - in fact, that's one of my favourite Part pieces. But after that there's little that has much appeal for me.

Maybe one day I'll catch up with him, and with Kancheli, realise that they were treading a sure, certain and logical path which I was too blind to see. I genuinely hope so, because currently I feel rather sad when I listen to both composers.

[Mark]

While I've not heard Kancheli's symphonies, I feel I have to take issue with the charges against 'Styx'.

I have the recording that Lethe references. I also have the easily superior recording on the Onyx label, with Maxim Rysanov in charge of the viola part. And let me tell you, there is a MASSIVE gulf of difference between the way these two recordings hit me as a listener. Had I heard the Bashmet recording first, I'd have walked away from the work thinking it interesting but nothing outstanding. But I heard the Rysanov first, and it blew my fucking head off! It still does.

One big difference is the recording venue. The Onyx recording is in the Dome Cathedral at Riga in Latvia. The acoustic is breathtaking, and the dynamics of this recording leave for dead those in the DG outing. Certainly, Bashmet and Gergiev are more subtle and delicately coloured in their performance, but the team behind Rysanov bring the domed roof down, and the effect is nothing short of stunning. Like being injected with an oil tanker's worth of adrenaline in about 20 seconds flat!

Whether 'Styx' can be considered as artistically valuable as Kancheli's earlier work I wouldn't know. But I will say that if you're judging it on the Bashmet performance, then you're doing your ears a huge disservice.

[Kullervo]

Schoenberg - String Quartets 3 and 4 (New Vienna String Quartet)

[Lethevich]

While I've not heard Kancheli's symphonies, I feel I have to take issue with the charges against 'Styx'.

I have the recording that Lethe references. I also have the easily superior recording on the Onyx label, with Maxim Rysanov in charge of the viola part. And let me tell you, there is a MASSIVE gulf of difference between the way these two recordings hit me as a listener. Had I heard the Bashmet recording first, I'd have walked away from the work thinking it interesting but nothing outstanding. But I heard the Rysanov first, and it blew my fucking head off! It still does.

One big difference is the recording venue. The Onyx recording is in the Dome Cathedral at Riga in Latvia. The acoustic is breathtaking, and the dynamics of this recording leave for dead those in the DG outing. Certainly, Bashmet and Gergiev are more subtle and delicately coloured in their performance, but the team behind Rysanov bring the domed roof down, and the effect is nothing short of stunning. Like being injected with an oil tanker's worth of adrenaline in about 20 seconds flat!

Whether 'Styx' can be considered as artistically valuable as Kancheli's earlier work I wouldn't know. But I will say that if you're judging it on the Bashmet performance, then you're doing your ears a huge disservice.

Eek, that sounds exciting Danke for the rec

BTW Luke, I also have a problem with recent Pärt, although in general I still find it valuble (if not crucial) due to so few living composers writing choral music on that level. As for the newer instrumental music - I simply pass...

[lukeottevanger]

@ Mark - Well, I'll have to try to hear that one, then. But (speaking for myself only) what I dislike about Styx would not be improved upon by a better recording - Kancheli does kitsch things here that just rub me up the wrong way. Of course, some would say the same of certain moments in his symphonies, but there the kitsch moments are charming, vulnerable and fleeting. They are also stylistically of a piece. Styx is too coarse and its material to diffuse for my tastes.

But if you liked Styx, I'm very pleased to hear it - I wanted to, very much. I hope you explore backwards into Kancheli's oeuvre - there are a number of extremely fine, potent pieces there. The previous viola-and-orchestra piece, Vom Winde beweint, is a much better-integrated piece, I think (I took part in its UK premiere, but I knew it from the ECM recording before that; having gone through a couple of other versions, I've firmly settled on Bashmet's). Even this one is not seen by everyone here as the equal of the symphonies, but for my money it's one of his best and most direct pieces. Give it a go!