What are you listening 2 now?

[amw]

What are we to say about Feldman, it's so beautiful, so brilliant, and yet so unlistenable, I can't get past half an hour.

When you were studying this stuff what did the music people think - is there any long range structure in there or is it just a chain of random, or rather "intuitive" musical events? I guess if it's the latter, there's not much point in listening for more than half an hour.

I've never had a professor bring up Feldman at all except sometimes to be dismissive. As far as I know he aimed for open-ended generative forms, supposedly citing Sibelius as an influence, and did plan out his works to some extent before writing them, but the writing process itself was intuitive (in the later works) rather than generative (as it was in the earlier works). Otherwise he's not really someone I know a ton about, apart from listening to the music.

[Wanderer]

Now I'm on vacation and separated from my CD collection, I find that Spotify is a great way to discover new recordings. 

Isn't it? 
It proved very useful during my 2-month summer sojourn in the Peloponnese, the only major drawback for me being that they don't have a contract with Hyperion.

Alkan has been a recent revelation of mine as well. I've always loved his violin and cello sonatas, but didn't explore his solo piano music until a few months ago and was blown away. It's monstrously virtuosic music, but is never virtuosic for its own sake - there's always plenty of masterly musical invention going on. In short, it's some of the most thrilling solo piano music I've ever heard!

I'm glad to hear it. Better late than never!

Alkan
Symphony for solo piano, Op. 39 Nos. 4-7
Jack Gibbons

A perennial favourite. The whole op.39 by Gibbons is great. Hope you enjoyed it!

Two winner discs!!

Indeed! They're both great favourites. The Segerstam disc is actually the first Langgaard recording I bought back in the day and it's been a favourite ever since. 

[Traverso]

Bach

Cd 22

[Madiel]

Shostakovich, Symphony No.3



I find it vaguely interesting that this was written in a period when Shostakovich seemed to have been very focused on stage and screen music. I don't know if that means anything specifically for this piece, but this isn't the first time that I've thought of early Shostakovich as being from the world of early cinema.

Given this work's complete and conscious failure to have anything like symphonic development, listening to it as if it's the score to a film turns out to be a good strategy for getting a lot out of it.

[Traverso]

Telemann

CD 2

Reinhard Goebel
Musicians nowadays study baroque violin at the age of eighteen. Without ever having done a Brahms, Beethoven or Stravinsky. The technical level has thundered down. "

[Tsaraslondon]

Disc 2 from this excellent set. These are mono recordings, made in 1952 (Finlandia and Symphony no 5) and 1953 (Symphony no 4).

I wouldn't necessarily prefer this 4th to his 1965 DG recording with the BPO, or the 5th to either the 1965 BPO DG recording or the 1960 stereo Philharmonia 5th also included in this set. The Finlandia is very exciting, though the recording is, as you might expect, a little constricted.

All these recordings do serve to remind us of how Karajan championed Sibelius from quite early on.

[Florestan]

A CD I bought after hearing this group perform in one of the beautiful baroque churches in Venice. A nice memory of a special event.

I too have heard them live in Venice and it was indeed something special. They are all excellent but cellist Davide Amadio is something else. He plays everything, including run-of-the-mill accompaniments, with such a conviction and dedication, and such theatrical bodily and facial gestures as if his life depended on it. An amazing show, really. Next time I'll be in Venice they're on top of my to-do list.

[Madiel]

Shostakovich, Six Romances on Texts by Japanese Poets, op.21



The first 3 songs written in 1928. The next 3 written in 1931-2. This apparently explains why I find the first songs extremely heavy going, and the later ones somewhat more tolerable.

The orchestral version is a recent purchase. I had hoped that the orchestra would enhance the songs (much the same way as it enhanced the Krylov Fables, op.4), but... no. I'm not a huge fan in either format. The songs manage to be both not that interesting (because there's not enough variation in the music) and, especially with the first two, rather shrill. Which is quite a combination.

Dedicated to Shostakovich's first wife, who he married shortly after the work was completed. I hope she liked it.

[Florestan]

Alkan has been a recent revelation of mine as well. I've always loved his violin and cello sonatas, but didn't explore his solo piano music until a few months ago and was blown away. It's monstrously virtuosic music, but is never virtuosic for its own sake - there's always plenty of masterly musical invention going on. In short, it's some of the most thrilling solo piano music I've ever heard!

Yup!

[Tsaraslondon]

I too have heard them live in Venice and it was indeed something special. They are all excellent but cellist Davide Amadio is something else. He plays everything, including run-of-the-mill accompaniments, with such a conviction and dedication, and such theatrical bodily and facial gestures as if his life depended on it. An amazing show, really. Next time I'll be in Venice they're on top of my to-do list.

I was there in a cold, wet November. The flooding was so bad when the tide was in that you needed wellington boots to wade around the centre. Still there is something rather romantic about Venice in the winter.

[Traverso]

Prokofiev

Violin Concertos

[Florestan]

I was there in a cold, wet November. The flooding was so bad when the tide was in that you needed wellington boots to wade around the centre. Still there is something rather romantic about Venice in the winter.

I visited Venice thrice: the last visit was on my honeymoon, 10 years ago. I swear to you that each time I felt like coming home; if it were true that we live more than one life, then at least one of the previous ones must have been lived in Venice. 

[Roasted Swan]

Rhetorical statement of the day......  Is there a more life-affirming piece of music than the Mendelssohn Octet?  And is there a more glorious performance than the old Supraphon recording from the combined Janacek & Smetana Quartets?  A desert island candidate for sure......

[Florestan]

Rhetorical statement of the day......  Is there a more life-affirming piece of music than the Mendelssohn Octet? 

Rhetorical answer of the day... yes, there is.

[Traverso]

Charpentier & Lully

CD 6

[Maestro267]

Takemitsu: From me flows what you call Time
Nexus (percussion ensemble)/Pacific SO/St. Clair

[Karl Henning]

Alkan
Concerto for solo piano, Op. 39 Nos. 8-10
Jack Gibbons

[ritter]

Some vocal Berlioz aujourd'hui:

CD 7 of the Erato "Complete Works" set, including La mort d'Orphée (with Rolando Villazón), Cléopâtre (with the wonderful Véronique Gens), Huit scènes de Faust, and the hitherto unkonwn to me Le ballet des ombres and Sardanapale.

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[Karl Henning]

A perennial favourite. The whole op.39 by Gibbons is great. Hope you enjoyed it!

Cheers!

[ChopinBroccoli]

Klemperer slowed down considerably in old age, even more so in the recording studio. Recordings and concerts from the fifties show he could be quite the speed merchant, to the point where things tumble down almost uncontrollably at times.

The problem is when he did speed up, he didn't maintain ensemble discipline, got sloppy