What are you listening 2 now?

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Henri Rabaud. Mârouf, savetier du Caire.

[brewski]

Shostakovich: Two Pieces for String Octet (musicians at Festival Mozaic, recorded July 2024 in San Luis Obispo, CA). A very fine version, perhaps less raucous than some, but beautifully played.

[prémont]

Could you share what drew you to Liuwe Tamminga in particular?

Like so many other Dutch organists, he expresses the ideal balance between musicological and interpretative considerations. Add to this the great spiritual concentration of his playing.

[Linz]

Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 8 in C Minor, 1894 Original Version. Ed. Leopold Nowak
Pro Musica Orcchestra Vienna, Jascha Horenstien

[Mister Sharpe]

I have this on CD, too, but greatly favor the LP, purchased in the winter of 1971.  Selected concertos of Boismortier and Corrette.  Enjoyed them so much back then they actually incited the purchase of a flute and some lessons, which did not go so very well! Still, only pleasant associations withal.

[Linz]

Joseph Haydn Symphonies, Volume III
Symphony No. 6 in D major
Symphony No. 7 in C major
Symphony No. 8 in G major
The Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood

[André]

Andréa Tyniec is wholly dedicated to Ysaÿe's world of fantasy and murderously difficult exploratory violinistic gestures. While she does conquer their difficulties, there are instances where this seems to have been done at the expense of probing the music's  many layers. Her tone is well-centered and her instrument sounds both sweet and commanding under her deft fingers.

One tiny detail: 4 of the sonatas end with swirling ascending scales before plunging into a curt chord about an octave below. The effect is very much like watching a gymnast hurtle through a difficult tumbling pass and nail a wobless landing with outstretched arms. It should be felt like a punch in the gut. It's THE place to make a violinistic flourish - a final statement to end the work. Tyniec is insufficiently assertive every time. That final chord is almost apologetic. Fine fiddling, but a work in progress, I think.

I recently listened to another canadian artist, Karl Stobbé, playing these sonatas with even better control of his instrument while displaying deep feeling and unusual intuition fo the internal direction each of these works undergoes.

For those unfamiliar with Ysaÿe's sonatas, they are widely - and wildly - different from one another. Almost maddeningly so. The composer wrote them down in just a few hours toward the end of his life. Throughout his career he distilled his experience and forward-looking musical thoughts in works he wrote for his instrument - solo, with piano or orchestra. Less than 30 opuses in toto. The sonatas are his opus 27. Each is dedicated to a famous artist of his day: Kreisler, Thibaud, Enesco etc. In turn, many composers dedicated some of their most famous works to him: Debussy (the string quartet), Franck, Lekeu, Jongen, Magnard, Saint-Saens etc (violin sonatas). Over 50 recordings of the 6 sonatas have been made, most of them in the last 20 years.

[AnotherSpin]

[Que]

16th & 17th c. Portuguese music for the Holy Week from the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Coimbra.

https://artwayonlinestore.com/Ad-Tenebras-Capella-Sanctae-Crucis-CD-p613817036

[prémont]

As to Tamminga:

Try the organ works by Fiorenzo Maschera

and the one called Il Ballo di Mantova

[AnotherSpin]

As to Tamminga:

Try the organ works by Fiorenzo Maschera

and the one called Il Ballo di Mantova

I will, thank you. Found two albums in Qobuz already.

[hopefullytrusting]

Shostakovich's two last song cycles:

[AnotherSpin]

Thank you for the recommendation, @prémont. A very fine performance. One point piqued my curiosity: the album begins and ends with a melody that, if I'm not mistaken, forms the basis of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. Presumably, the anthem is based on an old Jewish melody, and if so, how likely is it that this melody might have been performed in a 17th-century Christian church?

[JBS]

Thank you for the recommendation, @prémont. A very fine performance. One point piqued my curiosity: the album begins and ends with a melody that, if I'm not mistaken, forms the basis of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah. Presumably, the anthem is based on an old Jewish melody, and if so, how likely is it that this melody might have been performed in a 17th-century Christian church?

Your ears were correct. According to Wikipedia:
The melody for "Hatikvah" is based from "La Mantovana", a 16th-century Italian song, composed by Giuseppe Cenci (Giuseppino del Biado) ca. 1600 with the text "Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi da questo cielo". Its earliest known appearance in print was in the del Biado's collection of madrigals. It was later known in early 17th-century Italy as Ballo di Mantova. This melody gained wide currency in Renaissance Europe, under various titles, such as the Pod Krakowem (in Polish), Cucuruz cu frunza-n sus [Maize with up-standing leaves] (in Romanian)[10] and the Kateryna Kucheryava (in Ukrainian).[11] It also served as a basis for a number of folk songs throughout Central Europe, for example the popular Slovenian children song Čuk se je oženil [The little owl got married] (in Slovenian).[12] The best-known use of the melody prior to it becoming the Zionist anthem was by Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in his set of six symphonic poems celebrating Bohemia, Má vlast (My Homeland), namely in the second poem named after the river which flows through Prague, Vltava (also known as "The Moldau"). The melody was also used by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns in Rhapsodie bretonne.[13]
......
The adaptation of the music for "Hatikvah" was set by Samuel Cohen in 1888. Cohen himself recalled many years later that he had hummed "Hatikvah" based on the melody from the song he had heard in Romania, "Carul cu boi" (the ox-driven cart).[14]

Cohen was 18 at the time, recently immigrated from what is now Moldava.

[AnotherSpin]

[Mister Sharpe]

My daughter is re-watching the Alien franchise and astoundingly did not know about the Howard Hanson controversy (a segment of his Symphony #2, "the Romantic," was added to the first film's credit sequence without license or permission). She's an attorney and was more shocked by the producers' unlawfulness than the action on-screen.  Hanson was still alive at the time and though miffed, decided not to pursue legally.  Word has it he was actually pleased by the attention (despite his many accomplishments in and around music he was feeling that time had passed him by). Anyway, our discussion made me want to hear it again for the thousandth time!  Of the many performances I've heard, I favor this one:

[Madiel]

Mozart: Don Giovanni



Hoo boy, there's some good stuff here. I don't know that I've ever heard the entire opera before, but certain scenes positively zip along. Maybe that's partly Giulini, and to some extent it's Mozart, but ultimately I think Da Ponte takes a LOT of credit for constructing a libretto that rarely has dead air. It's striking that there aren't a lot of long solo passages, especially in Act One. You get characters singing with/at each other far more often. It's been a little while since I heard The Marriage of Figaro so I can't say for certain, but this did feel a little tauter.

Giulini and the orchestra are doing great stuff, and I love the way the recitatives are so sharp and incisive. My biggest negative in the performance is that Joan Sutherland basically has no diction** Even with the Italian libretto right in front of me it's very hard to work out what she's singing. Elizabeth Schwarzkopf is somewhat better, and all the male singers seem to have no trouble at all enunciating their words.

**A quick bit of googling is showing me that it was widely acknowledged, perhaps even by Sutherland herself, that her diction was lousy. But fans forgave her because her voice was so spectacular in other respects. One for the "I don't care about the words" school, then, which is not me. And yes I'm aware of my failure to be patriotic here, Dame Joan is basically one of the few things the average Australian knows about opera.

[Florestan]

The Concert Fantasia features in the 2nd movement a melody so achingly nostalgic yet so innocent that only Tchaikovsky could have written it.

[Karl Henning]

Henri Rabaud. Mârouf, savetier du Caire.

Most interesting!

[Karl Henning]

Shostakovich's two last song cycles:

Lebyadkin is something of a comic relief character in the very dark Dostoyevsky novel, The Devils.