Pieces that have blown you away recently

Started by arpeggio, September 09, 2016, 02:36:58 PM

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Daverz

Quote from: Daverz on September 09, 2017, 04:55:51 PM
Violin Sonata No. 1 is a good follow up.  Shaham & Erez are very good.

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And to make it a triptych from this same emotional landscape (with the Piano Quintet No. 1), add the String Quartet No. 2:

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Excellent performance and recording from the Pro Arte Quartet and Laurel Records.


DaveF

Until I bought a few of the Quatuor Diotima's discs in the recent Qobuz sale, I don't think I'd ever heard the "other" two movements of Barber's string quartet.  What an exquisite piece the first movement is.  All it lacks is a big scherzo and fugal finale to balance the whole structure.
"All the world is birthday cake" - George Harrison

vandermolen

Martinu's 4th Piano Concerto 'Incantations'.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

pjme

#323
Quote from: vandermolen on September 19, 2017, 10:52:19 PM
Martinu's 4th Piano Concerto 'Incantations'.

I discovered that wonderful score through this LP:



The Fantasia concertante ( concerto nr 5) is another favorite. The DGG LP/Cd (Margrit Weber / Kubelik) is a gem.



Yesterday I was blown away by James McMillan's viola concerto!

P.

vandermolen

Quote from: pjme on September 19, 2017, 11:44:09 PM
I discovered that wonderful score through this LP:



The Fantasia concertante ( concerto nr 5) is another favorite. The DGG LP/Cd (Margrit Weber / Kubelik) is a gem.



Yesterday I was blown away by James McMillan's viola concerto!

P.
Thanks for responding. Macmillan is one of those composers I need to investigate. The Head of Music at the school where I work was enthusing about his music (Symphony 4 in particular I think) when I was chatting to him over lunch last week.
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

pjme

Hi Vandermolen,

(this was earlier in the" What are you listening to" section):

A couple of minutes ago on BBC 3 : James Mc Millan's viola concerto. Second time only (earlier this year it was performed & broadcast in the Netherlands). Loved it even better this time - the viola hisses as a angry cat , chirps as anxious birds ... sings like an angel!

From the Guardian:https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jan/19/manon-james-macmillan-viola-lawrence-power-review

....
Lasting nearly 40 minutes, this inventive, three-movement piece exploits fully the lyrical qualities of the instrument, launching with a rhapsodic solo ascent and finding bold colours via some hushed string harmonics, dissonances and glissandi. Bright sounds of harp, xylophone, vibraphone and tubular bells offset some more mellow string sounds, including those from the soloist's 400-year-old instrument.

At the start, after what sounds like a backward cadence (as if singing Amen in reverse), the viola floats over a murky, indistinct orchestral layer with almost imperceptible cross-rhythms, until interrupted by a sparky oboe and cor anglais. The second movement blasts to life with a vast, noisy clatter of percussion and full orchestra, out of which the songful viola emerges.

The work, a major contribution to the repertory, is full of musical debate, not least between the solo viola and the four front-desk players of the viola and cello section, but has little in the way of show-off virtuosity for its own sake. In an unexpected gesture, the soloist finishes fractionally ahead of everyone else after some spectacular, rapid string crossing, leaving his comrades to play two final chords. Counter to its ponderous image, the viola triumphantly proves its fleet-footed ability to gallop home first. James MacMillan has said he loved writing for the instrument and its player. Lawrence Power, in turn, looked as if he adored playing it. The cheers suggested everyone was of the same mind.

Or:

But violist Lawrence Power's extraordinary championship of the gift James MacMillan has given him might well prove to be the solo performance of the year – and it's only January. MacMillan is such a natural communicator and from the two simple chords ushering in Power's rhapsodic opening solo the compulsion to go where he led was a given. For a Scottish Catholic the tone of this solo – indeed much of the solo part – was (as the serendipity of the pairing would have it) hauntingly Hebraic, almost as if Bloch's Shelomo now had a son and heir. But it was MacMillan's fantastic ear for orchestral sound that turned his largish orchestra into an environment in which his soloist could hold court and shine and always be heard. Pitting the gruffly assertive and astonishingly virtuosic pyrotechnics of the solo part against equally virtuosic tuned percussion was one way – chesty ardour offset by sparkling iridescence above. Another was through the soloist's affecting alliance with pairs of violas and cellos or solo strings. Or simply by counterpointing the fast moving solo part with slow moving and highly characteristic plainchant in the wind.

MacMillan's innate theatricality (he and Mahler both) made for a gripping slow movement where indomitable brass chords and the roar of tam-tam cleared the floor for the soloist's rapt song. This most songful, hymn-like, writing incorporating the scoops and swoops and catches of an emotive vocalise eventually arrived at an unforgettable "evaporation" of the song in shortening phrases so high and so barely voiced as to sound like they were no longer emanating from the instrument at all.

From:http://www.edwardseckerson.biz/reviews/london-philharmonic-orchestra-power-jurowski-royal-festival-hall-review/

Afaik, no recording yet.

Peter

kyjo

Quote from: vandermolen on September 20, 2017, 06:41:54 AM
Thanks for responding. Macmillan is one of those composers I need to investigate. The Head of Music at the school where I work was enthusing about his music (Symphony 4 in particular I think) when I was chatting to him over lunch last week.

MacMillan's Symphony no. 4 is a powerful work well worth investigating. Throughout the piece there is a contrast between violent, dissonant passages and passages of transcendent beauty. I find the extended cello soli about three-quarters of the way in particularly moving. I think you'd enjoy it, Jeffrey :)
"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" - Sergei Rachmaninoff

Cato

From 1957, before Riley's In C, before Glass and Adams:

Proto-Minimalism  ???  from Miloslav Kabelac (or...?):

https://www.youtube.com/v/UgeYpx-azF0

It takes a while for it to take off, but it takes off!
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

North Star

#328
Quote from: Cato on September 21, 2017, 10:37:35 AM
From 1957, before Riley's In C, before Glass and Adams:

Proto-Minimalism  ???  from Miloslav Kabelac (or...?):

https://www.youtube.com/v/UgeYpx-azF0

It takes a while for it to take off, but it takes off!

You're welcome, Cato8)

I've rather enjoyed all the symphonies (seven out of eight) I've heard so far, too.
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

Cato

Quote from: North Star on September 21, 2017, 10:53:40 AM
You're welcome, Cato8)

I've rather enjoyed all the symphonies (seven out of eight) I've heard so far, too.

Yes, many thanks to alert member North Star for spreading the Musical Gospel According to Kabelac:D

YouTube does not offer all the symphonies, or at least I have not yet found them all!
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

North Star

Quote from: Cato on September 21, 2017, 01:22:08 PM
Yes, many thanks to alert member North Star for spreading the Musical Gospel According to Kabelac:D

YouTube does not offer all the symphonies, or at least I have not yet found them all!
There's the Supraphon set (without texts   >:() for the symphonies.  8)
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

Monsieur Croche

#331
Quote from: Cato on September 21, 2017, 10:37:35 AM
From 1957, before Riley's In C, before Glass and Adams:

Proto-Minimalism  ???  from Miloslav Kabelac (or...?):

https://www.youtube.com/v/UgeYpx-azF0

It takes a while for it to take off, but it takes off!

I'm glad you put it thus, Proto-Minimalism  ??? , because I don't hear a scrap of anything relating to what is called minimalism in the Kabelac.  Sure, the musical materials are a bit 'spare,' but what I heard sounds and plays out and through as a rather romantic piece in its musical ideas and gestures, but I heard nothing remotely minimalist, in procedures or aesthetic, if you will, anywhere.

Elliott Carter's Eight Etudes and a Fantasy for woodwind quartet predates (1950) this piece and Riley's very seminal In C   Though the Etudes are very brief, some are more directly in line with that arena of procedure(s) we later came to know as minimalism, (especially those that deal are studies on one interval, lol) at least those early stages of it ala Riley's In C, early Reich, Adams and Glass pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/v/WqF96XKh64Q
~ I'm all for personal expression; it just has to express something to me. ~

Ken B

Quote from: Cato on September 21, 2017, 10:37:35 AM
From 1957, before Riley's In C, before Glass and Adams:

Proto-Minimalism  ???  from Miloslav Kabelac (or...?):

https://www.youtube.com/v/UgeYpx-azF0

It takes a while for it to take off, but it takes off!

That's a corker, Cato.

Mirror Image

I'm always blown away by Shostakovich's Symphony No. 11, "The Year 1905".

Maestro267

OHHHH YES MY SON!!! That GLORIOUS and EMPHATIC F major fortissimo that ends Strauss' Symphonia Domestica! WOOOAHHH!!!

arpeggio

Quote from: Maestro267 on September 23, 2017, 09:36:48 AM
OHHHH YES MY SON!!! That GLORIOUS and EMPHATIC F major fortissimo that ends Strauss' Symphonia Domestica! WOOOAHHH!!!

Have you just discovered this work?

Cato

Quote from: Monsieur Croche on September 21, 2017, 01:56:51 PM

I'm glad you put it thus, Proto-Minimalism  ??? , because I don't hear a scrap of anything relating to what is called minimalism in the Kabelac.  Sure, the musical materials are a bit 'spare,' but what I heard sounds and plays out and through as a rather romantic piece in its musical ideas and gestures, but I heard nothing remotely minimalist, in procedures or aesthetic, if you will, anywhere.


I did!  0:)  e.g. The subtle - and slow - use of small variations building and building until suddenly one realizes that one has entered new territory different from just a few minutes earlier!  Is there an almost static, or even manic, repetitiveness, such as one finds in Koyaanisqatsi?  No.  If you hear a basically Romantic piece, no problem!  8)

Quote from: Ken B on September 21, 2017, 02:11:12 PM
That's a corker, Cato.


Agreed!   0:)
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Maestro267

Quote from: arpeggio on September 23, 2017, 11:45:25 AM
Have you just discovered this work?

No, but it always blows me away. That epilogue is just glorious marshalling of a huge orchestral juggernaut! Brilliantly bombastic and over-the-top!

Mirror Image

#338
K.A. Hartmann's Symphony No. 6 has really hit me quite hard recently I must say. One of the most underrated symphonists of the 20th Century IMHO.

Cato

Quote from: Mirror Image on September 24, 2017, 08:10:05 AM
K.A. Hartmann's Symphony No. 6 has really hit me quite hard recently I must say. One of the most underrated symphonists of the 20th Century IMHO.

We welcome all to the World of the great Karl Amadeus Hartmann!   :D    If you do not know all the symphonies yet, get ready to have your soul battered and fried!   0:)
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)