The Classical Chat Thread

[EigenUser]

Hmm. I sense a hint there somewhere. 

Do give the Rott a listen ...

I'll keep it on my radar.

The night before last I saw Boulez conduct his "Notations" for orchestra on the Berlin DCH. What great music! It got such a warm applause/reception at the end, right after the loud and exciting raucous ending. Even my dad, who is often wary about post-Bartok music, said "That's pretty good!"

[EigenUser]

Sadly, today was the last day that Dale Music in Silver Spring, MD was open. I must have got over $500 worth of scores for $35 (no, I didn't forget a '0' -- I mean $35). The Haydn "The Seasons" alone is $170 for the two volumes.

-Haydn Symphonies 2, 9, and 10 (score and set of parts)
-Bruckner "Mass in E Minor" ($1 -- why not? -- she ended up giving it to me because it was falling apart)
-Ravel "Valses Nobles et Sentimentals" for piano solo
-Haydn "The Seasons" (both volumes)
-Dvorak "Slavonic Dances"
-Schumann "Concertpiece for Four Horns and Piano" (a transcription of the orchestral one)
-Bartok "Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs" for piano solo
-Milhaud "Suite in G" for orchestra
-Schubert "Symphony No. 4"
-Bach orchestral suites 1+4
-Bruckner "Mass No. 3"
-Bruckner "Symphony No. 6"
-Varese "Integrales" (should go well with Boulez's "Derive", plus a constant )

The place has been there for 64 years! There were local news reporters there interviewing people. I guess that isn't posted yet, but I found this video. The lady interviewed at 1:25 is the one who gave me great deals. I will miss going there. Not many places like this exist anymore. There are a few sheet music stores, but I have never seen such a large conductor's score section. Maybe the Julliard Store comes close, but all of that stuff was new (not many "hard to find" things).
http://www.youtube.com/v/VnAejAM1Mz4



I didn't realize how many Haydn symphony parts I was collecting until I stacked them up together:

[jochanaan]

Aye.

There is a difference of opinion, though.  To you, the opera is dreck.  To another, it is a turd.

Do I hear a "Merde"?

[jochanaan]

I'm proud of myself! I watched all of Mahler's 7th in one sitting on the Berlin DCH. And I liked it! I could have sworn that I had listened to all of the movements, but now I'm thinking that I didn't. I love the Arabian sounding melody in the "Nachtmusic I" and I really loved the finale.

Good for you!  I heard that one live in Denver some years ago with Marin Alsop leading the Colorado Symphony in a flawless performance.

[jochanaan]

...-Bruckner "Mass in E Minor" ($1 -- why not? -- she ended up giving it to me because it was falling apart)...

You lucky son of a...!!! I've been trying to get a glance at that one for years!  It really is some of the most beautiful music ever; that opening makes me shiver every time!

[Jaakko Keskinen]

You're free to add new discussions in this thread, yes?

What are the worst character names ever in opera? My choice is clear: Ping, Pang and Pong from Turandot. How could Puccini, who was very strict about quality of his libretti (even if results were not perfect, Tosca's libretto being referred to as "a shabby little shocker") let something like this happen? I think even back in 1920s those names (together) would have been considered a failure. I am not calling a race card because there certainly were far worse names or nicknames for chinese back in the day. And no offense to anyone actually named Ping etc. it's just that together those three names... just why? Table tennis, anyone? Not very innovative, to say the least.

And yes, I know Alberich is a very bad name

[kishnevi]

I thought the P. trio names were taken from the source material?  At any rate they suggest the commedia dell'arte origins of the characters.

Not necessarily worst, but certainly confused, are the names on the dramatis personae in I Puritani.  Story in England, so one expects English names either in English spelling or Italian transcription,  but not a mixture of both (Gualtier Walton?),  although checking on Wikipedia that may be the fault of the track listings of my recordings, not an error of Pepoli, the librettist.

[Cato]

The Wall Street Journal has a 3-page (!!!) "Portrait of a Prodigy" today (July 18th) about Matthew Aucoin, the youngest (24) assistant conductor in the history of the Metropolitan Opera:

Mr. Aucoin recently made his conducting debuts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Rome Opera's orchestra and the Juilliard Opera. He is the youngest member of the Met's team of assistant conductors and has conducted rehearsals for luminaries such as the Chicago Symphony's Riccardo Muti and the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Gustavo Dudamel. In those sessions, he meets with the maestros to discuss complex sections of the music and later debriefs them about the practice. His orchestral and chamber compositions are performed in the U.S. and Europe. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., made him its first composer-in-residence...

....he was diving back into classical music, which he felt was his artistic home. After a series of composing feats at Harvard, including creating a string-orchestra piece in three days, word about his talents began to spread. "There was a buzz on the campus here that he was the next Leonard Bernstein," says Diane Paulus, the Tony award-winning director who teaches at the university.

In the spring of his senior year, he debuted "Hart Crane." Ms. Paulus, who had been in the audience, approached him some time later about writing a Civil War opera for the American Repertory Theater, where she is artistic director. Within a few months, he gave her song studies for an opera with Walt Whitman in a Civil War hospital turned into Purgatory. He got the job.

Not long ago, Ms. Paulus watched as he performed the entire score for her, flying through scribbled notes on composition paper at the piano and scrolling through music written so recently on his laptop he hadn't yet printed it. "It was the classic mad composer," she says.

"Hart Crane" also caught the attention of Ms. (Renee) Fleming, whose daughter, a student at Harvard at the time, performed in the piece. Ms. Fleming eventually introduced Mr. Aucoin to Anthony Freud, general director of the Lyric Opera, which commissioned him to write a children's opera to be performed at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago next year. Mr. Aucoin says he is writing a story set in a dystopian future where a monkey hands two children a piece of real fruit, forbidden in their synthetic world.

The link below offers excerpts of some of his compositions.

See:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/is-matthew-aucoin-the-next-leonard-bernstein-1405626210?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304668604580029493659456952.html

[Karl Henning]

The Peabody-Essex Museum is close to home, indeed!

[kishnevi]

The Peabody-Essex Museum is close to home, indeed!

Indeed.  Although it never occurred to me that it would have a composer in residence.  I thought its collections went in completely different directions.

[Karl Henning]

Indeed.  Although it never occurred to me that it would have a composer in residence.

Nor to me.  It is a position which would never have been created for a composer like me.  (Connections, connections, and connections.)

[kishnevi]

Thread duty insofar as this thread had one
Brit critics seem to have snarled up over soprano size again.  http://standpointmag.co.uk/music-july-august-14-heavy-fall-from-grace-norman-lebrecht-tara-erraught

[jochanaan]

Thread duty insofar as this thread had one
Brit critics seem to have snarled up over soprano size again.  http://standpointmag.co.uk/music-july-august-14-heavy-fall-from-grace-norman-lebrecht-tara-erraught

Well, they have the right to their opinion--just as we have the right to decry it.  And most of our criticisms of the critics are much less sharp than, say, Sir Tommy Beecham's "If there is a chair for critics, it had better be an electric chair."

Still: "Frumpy"?  The Octavian in the photo looks absolutely appropriately boyish.  Of course I can't comment on her singing or acting skills--which, in the end, are all that matter in an opera performance.

[TheGSMoeller]

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/arts/music/met-opera-prepares-to-lock-out-workers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=2&referrer=

[Brian]

Nice long interview with Riccardo Chailly.

MC: Not like Valery Gergiev jetting all over the world giving an astonishing number of concerts and operas?
RC: No, no, no. That type of life is not for me. I'm completely opposite to that....now I am taking over at La Scala, Milan which in combination here with the Gewandhaus means that I have filled a complete season.

also:

"My father was hoping that I would [become a musician]. But when he knew that I wanted to be a conductor he was completely against it. because (he said) at his age he had seen too many flops in the music world; especially sons of musicians. You see my father was a celebrated composer in Italy in the fifties, sixties and seventies. So he assumed that I would be one of those flops [Laughing] in the best tradition of musical families. He was very much against me becoming a conductor. So I had to prove with all my guts and all my energy that I wouldn't be so bad. Then when he was almost persuaded that I should continue my conducting studies he became my first teacher of composition for one year which was a nightmare for me owing to the father/teacher relationship. But thanks to this almost traumatic period I then went to the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi, in Milan on my fourth year of composition because my father had made me do three years in one. [Laughing] He taught me that a conductor should know how to compose to be able to interpret someone else's compositions."

and most interestingly:

MC:Do you need less rehearsal time with the finest orchestras?
RC: Well that depends on the country. The fastest orchestras in the world are the British followed by the European orchestras, such as in Germany, the French, the Italians and the Spanish orchestras they are good orchestras but are not as trained for such fast first sight reading. The London orchestras are amongst the fastest in the world; they are unbelievable at this.

[Karl Henning]

Just a stray Sunday-morning thought . . . I don't suppose Lenny would ever appear in the Composers you don't get thread.  The man was human and a communicator.

[Ken B]

Just a stray Sunday-morning thought . . . I don't suppose Lenny would ever appear in the Composers you don't get thread.  The man was human and a communicator.

Well, on the other hand I don't get how one could write Mass and not die of shame. So there's that.

[Karl Henning]

Well, on the other hand I don't get how one could write Mass and not die of shame. So there's that.

I could not well refute you....

[Brian]

BIS CEO Robert von Bahr's daily write-ups on eClassical.com are absolutely mandatory reading.

"The percussionist simply didn't turn up, and we had to have some drumbeat in one of the pieces, and there wasn't anything at all to use in the church, not even a waste paper basket. Sooo, we built up a scaffold of one chair on top of 3 others on top of a table, and I had to start the tape recorder, then climb up this rickety thing, stand on top of the one chair to get near enough to the microphones, beating my breast like a gorilla while keeping the balance. For some reason (I think more or less sadistic ones), Solveig made sure to make a lot of takes on this one song, and I ended up with a totally black and blue bruised chest afterwards. Talk about dedication as a recording producer."

If you want to hear him beating his chest, it's track 27 and you can listen to the whole thing via the sample.

[Karl Henning]

"I want to beat my breast like a ape-man!"

http://www.youtube.com/v/pj-UqKjOwwo