Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov(1844-1908)

Started by Dundonnell, September 16, 2008, 01:42:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

vandermolen

Quote from: Cato on July 21, 2017, 01:39:04 PM
Amen!  In that catalogue are composers like Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov whose works have basically disappeared outside of YouTube.
Totally agree. He's still alive I think. He composed the marvellous soundtrack to the epic soviet-era 'War and Peace' which has also never been released on CD (there was an LP decades ago which I have). Symphony 2 for strings is fine as well.
"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).

Cato

Quote from: vandermolen on July 22, 2017, 12:40:07 AM
Totally agree. He's still alive I think. He composed the marvellous soundtrack to the epic soviet-era 'War and Peace' which has also never been released on CD (there was an LP decades ago which I have). Symphony 2 for strings is fine as well.

Yes, the last I checked, Ovchinnikov is 80 or 81 now.

Are you listening, Melodiya?  Is any body there?  Does anybody care?   ;)

https://www.youtube.com/v/_Fq4H4SAb6s
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

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

Jaakko Keskinen

Rimsky-Korsakov is my favorite composer of The Mighty Handful, beating even Mussorgsky. My favorite works from Rimsky-Korsakov are Sadko (both the opera and the symphonic poem), Golden Cockerel (both the opera and the suite) and Scheherazade. What a marvelous orchestrator!
"Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him. Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when hideous, remain grand."

- Victor Hugo

SymphonicAddict

Rimsky-Korsakov is clearly the best one in that group (IMHO), a convincing favorite of course. Scheherazade (despite its overexposure), Antar, Russian Festival Overture, Capriccio Espagnol, String Sextet, Mlada Suite, Christmas Night Suite, The Golden Cockerel Suite, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh Suite and The Tale of Tsar Saltan Suite are my chosen works. I suppose I have to give to the operas a try at some point.

Cato

Quote from: SymphonicAddict on March 02, 2018, 03:39:10 PM
Rimsky-Korsakov is clearly the best one in that group (IMHO), a convincing favorite of course. Scheherazade (despite its overexposure), Antar, Russian Festival Overture, Capriccio Espagnol, String Sextet, Mlada Suite, Christmas Night Suite, The Golden Cockerel Suite, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh Suite and The Tale of Tsar Saltan Suite are my chosen works. I suppose I have to give to the operas a try at some point.

Try the complete opera of Kitezh for a real treat!

[asin]B00002DF33[/asin]
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

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

TheGSMoeller

Go to 44:50 to experience the vocal styling of Leif Segerstam. He, and few orchestra members add some loud howls at the most intense moment of the final movement. I've never heard this done before in Scheherazade, but will now expect it from every future performance/recording I hear...


https://www.youtube.com/v/zY4w4_W30aQ

bwv 1080

Scheherazade is both the soundtrack and theme of the first episode of The Romanoffs (on Amazon Prime by the creator of Mad Men)

SymphonicAddict

Quote from: TheGSMoeller on October 21, 2018, 11:32:07 AM
Go to 44:50 to experience the vocal styling of Leif Segerstam. He, and few orchestra members add some loud howls at the most intense moment of the final movement. I've never heard this done before in Scheherazade, but will now expect it from every future performance/recording I hear...


https://www.youtube.com/v/zY4w4_W30aQ

Hilarious! The first time I see something like that! Rather original, but I'm not sure if it's good that it's done often

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

???

Idiotic.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. I doubt I will ever listen to a Segerstam recording again, since I won't be able to shake the impression that he is an imbecile.

TheGSMoeller

Quote from: Ghost of Baron Scarpia on October 24, 2018, 04:21:31 PM
???

Idiotic.

What has been seen cannot be unseen. I doubt I will ever listen to a Segerstam recording again, since I won't be able to shake the impression that he is an imbecile.



;D I own too many good Segerstam recordings to ignore them, but yes I'm afraid that every time I listen to his Sibelius 2nd I will now hear him howling right at the start of the finale.

Karl Henning

Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

North Star

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius

My photographs on Flickr

mc ukrneal

I just don't understand why he did it. It doesn't add anything to the music. It isn't asked for in the music. It doesn't correspond to what is happening in the music in any way. It distracts from the instrumental performance. It disrupts the flow of music. Why did the orchestra go along with it? It's a mystery to me...

I have lots of interesting theories that I'd like tried out (for example start from a chaotic tuning and start immediately into a piece - always wanted to hear what that would sound like), but one try of this in practice should have showed it to be immediately a dud. It is different....
Be kind to your fellow posters!!

Karl Henning

Karl Henning, Ph.D.
Composer & Clarinetist
Boston MA
http://www.karlhenning.com/
[Matisse] was interested neither in fending off opposition,
nor in competing for the favor of wayward friends.
His only competition was with himself. — Françoise Gilot

Cato

Albert Jay Nock was born in 1870 and died in 1945.  I discovered his works in the early 1960's.  He was one of the great essayists, public intellectuals, and - in a sense - philosophers (a designation he would violently reject) of the last century.

In an essay called The Purpose of Biography, Nock excoriates the salacious and sensational aspects of "popular biography," and proposes that biographers - or the person writing an autobiography - must limit themselves to only those things which pertain to the subject's art or to the subject's historical  importance.

You can find the essay here on p. 122:

https://books.google.com/books?id=raJsvZaqsQsC&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=Albert+Jay+Nock+%2B+Rimsky+Korsakov&source=bl&ots=NQlL8Rx4yU&sig=pSGvJx7ikIoA0OvPMjiAB3LMzHc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZ6JLzsazfAhUNj1kKHeYBB6YQ6AEwDHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=Albert%20Jay%20Nock%20%2B%20Rimsky%20Korsakov&f=false

A few excerpts:

Quote...Like Thoreau, Rimsky-Korsakov was in one capacity, and one only, a public figure.  In all other respects his life, like Thoreau's, had not a single feature of legitimate interest to the public.  The first signal merit of his book lies in its clear, consistent, consciousness that the public was entitled to the fullest information about anything which bore directly or indirectly on the author's character and activities as a musician, and was not entitled to anything which had any other bearing.  The book's fidelity to this principle is amazing...I have scanned it line by line for some sign or departure or wavering, but I have not found one....

The author had a wife, an "excellent musician," and has nothing else to say about her in any other capacity...Rimsky-Korsakov has a bit to say about his love for the sea...This seems irrelevant, but in the next chapter we find the author...in the Naval College...and this in turn is introductory to the account of sixteen years of effort to drive the two careers in double harness, and of the one's reactions upon the other....

(Concerning evaluating the efforts of Cui, Borodin, etc.) ...let the reader observe how Rimsky-Korsakov deals with them.  Not a word is said about anyone's personal character, qualities, or habits, except as bearing on music; then what is said is said in full, and with complete objectivity.  Balakirev went to pieces, Moussorgsky drank too much...well, that was that, and its effect on their productivity was such and such.

"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

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

Brahmsian

#155
Quote from: Alberich on March 02, 2018, 11:41:50 AM
Rimsky-Korsakov is my favorite composer of The Mighty Handful, beating even Mussorgsky. My favorite works from Rimsky-Korsakov are Sadko (both the opera and the symphonic poem), Golden Cockerel (both the opera and the suite) and Scheherazade. What a marvelous orchestrator!

He's mine as well.  I just listened again to the Russian Easter Overture on the weekend (von Matacic 1959 recording with the Philharmonia Orchestra).  What a fun and incredibly energetic work that is!  My favourite work of his, followed closely by Scheherazade.


kyjo

#156
I'm surprised by how little attention R-K's 3rd Symphony gets - it's a wonderfully energetic and melodic work with a particularly catchy scherzo in 5/8 time. In a way it reminds me quite a bit of some of Glazunov's symphonies. This BIS recording with the Malaysian PO under Kees Bakels (who also have a fantastic recording of the two Kalinnikov symphonies) is wonderfully crisp and engaging:

[asin]B0009JOPZ8[/asin]
"Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music" - Sergei Rachmaninoff

Cato

Quote from: kyjo on December 19, 2018, 09:58:11 AM
I'm surprised by how little attention R-K's 3rd Symphony gets - it's a wonderfully energetic and melodic work with a particularly catchy scherzo in 5/8 time. In a way it reminds me quite a bit of some of Glazunov's symphonies. This BIS recording with the Malaysian PO under Kees Bakels (who also have a fantastic recording of the two Kalinnikov symphonies) is wonderfully crisp and engaging:

[asin]B0009JOPZ8[/asin]

I have been trying for years to like his Third Symphony!  His first two are wonderful, but so far I just find very little of interest.  I will try your suggestion with the Malaysians: maybe they have the knack!  8)
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

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

SymphonicAddict

Quote from: Cato on December 19, 2018, 10:13:47 AM
I have been trying for years to like his Third Symphony!  His first two are wonderful, but so far I just find very little of interest.  I will try your suggestion with the Malaysians: maybe they have the knack!  8)

Same here. For my ears the No. 3 is not at the same level of the first 2 symphonies (including Antar), but again, I must revisit it to make a better idea of it.

Cato

Quote from: SymphonicAddict on December 19, 2018, 12:08:04 PM
Same here. For my ears the No. 3 is not at the same level of the first 2 symphonies (including Antar), but again, I must revisit it to make a better idea of it.

So this afternoon I listened to the Svetlanov performance on YouTube, which also offered the score.   The first two movements have what Schoenberg might term "inferior material," despite the Scherzo in 5/4.  The slow movement has a much more interesting main theme, and offers more in developing it.  The Finale... not the best, but it beats the first two movements.

I will still give it another chance with the Malaysians!  0:)   But I am thinking the fault is not in the performances, but in the score itself.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

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