What are you listening 2 now?

[Mandryka]

YouTube chanced to cue this up for me:

@Mapman @Tapio Dimitriyevich Shostakovich

Very nice music, Karl, as always. It must be one hell of a physical challenge to play it! What prompted you to write something so long?

And just as importantly, you've prompted me to explore Thoreau - who just has never figured in my education at all. Very interesting he is too.

[Florestan]

[Lisztianwagner]

Allan Pettersson
Symphony No.8

Thomas Sanderling & RSO Berlin

[Roasted Swan]

Doesn't it seem like another age when Sabine Meyer's appointment to the Berlin PO caused such a stir!?  She is a tremendous player and this is quite an unusual(?) album from her. 



It is an absolute cracker.  In essence the 3 main 20th century works written for Benny Goodman (Arnold, Copland & Stravinsky and Bernstein's Prelude Fugue & Riffs as a bonus) plus a substantial group of recreations of his own big band arrangements.  The playing throughout is just superb and the playing - solo, orchestral and big band is superbly idiomatic.  I just love this disc - great life affirming music played with joy and immense skill.

[vandermolen]

Allan Pettersson: Violin Concerto No.2. Ida Haendel, Herbert Blomstedt, Swedish RSO

I wish Blomstedt would conduct more Pettersson. It's not too late for him to start a cycle of the symphonies 

Arguably Pettersson's masterpiece and that's the best recording of it.

[Harry]

William Alwyn.
Symphony No. 4 in three movements.
London SO, Richard Hickox.


The first movement grips me always forcibly, such a depth and insight, almost with a deep spirituality.

[Florestan]

[Mandryka]

The Symphonic Etudes, it's a distinctive performance.

[Traverso]

Saariaho

 Excitingly beautiful

[Harry]

Malcolm Arnold.
Complete Symphonies.
No.7 & 8.
National SO of Ireland, Andrew Penny.

My preferred set when it comes to Arnold's Symphonies.

[vandermolen]

William Alwyn.
Symphony No. 4 in three movements.
London SO, Richard Hickox.


The first movement grips me always forcibly, such a depth and insight, almost with a deep spirituality.

I think that it's the best movement in any Alwyn symphony.

[vandermolen]

Kabalevsky: Symphony No.4

[Harry]

Kabalevsky: Symphony No.4

I love the music from this composer, he is in all respects a great visionair. My two cents anyway!

[Roasted Swan]

Malcolm Arnold.
Complete Symphonies.
No.7 & 8.
National SO of Ireland, Andrew Penny.

My preferred set when it comes to Arnold's Symphonies.

I agree - as a complete cycle I prefer this to Handley or Hickox/Gamba.  However for Symphony 7 alone I think Martin Yates' version on Dutton is the most searingly vehement of the lot (such a strange description for a work allegedly being musical portraits of the composer's 3 children!)

[vandermolen]

I agree - as a complete cycle I prefer this to Handley or Hickox/Gamba.  However for Symphony 7 alone I think Martin Yates' version on Dutton is the most searingly vehement of the lot (such a strange description for a work allegedly being musical portraits of the composer's 3 children!)

Handley gets my vote for No.7

[Harry]

I agree - as a complete cycle I prefer this to Handley or Hickox/Gamba.  However for Symphony 7 alone I think Martin Yates' version on Dutton is the most searingly vehement of the lot (such a strange description for a work allegedly being musical portraits of the composer's 3 children!)

Yes I was wondering about that too. I will seek out Yates performance too, thanks for the alert.

[Todd]

[Harry]

Richard Arnell.
Piano concerto, opus 44.
Symphony No. 2, opus 33 "Rufus".
David Owen Norris, Piano.
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Martin Yates.

What is there not to like about this composer. With a fresh burst of creativity and energy, he shapes an musical universe wholly independent of what is already existing.
For this music you can wake me up in the middle of the night and I happily listen into the wee hours of the morning. Great performances. Norris is in top form, but why does his last name remind me of a cat?  O, wait was that not the cat in the Harry Potter films?

Norris, the cat of Hogwarts caretaker, Argus Filch, is a long-haired striped cat with red eyes and first appears in the first movie, "Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone.

[Harry]

Malcolm Arnold.
Dances.
English Dances Set I & II.
Four Scottish Dances.
Four Cornish Dances,
Four Irish Dances.
Four Welsh Dances.
Queensland SO, Andrew Penny.

I played this disc for the first and last time somewhere in 1997, but for the life of me could not remember the interpretation. But now I do! The recording is quite frontal so great for detail, but also to keep in mind the volume, for it can get overbearing. I cannot say that the Queensland SO is a match for the idiomatic Irish orchestra Penny used for his Symphonies. I find them better as the sound of the Queensland's. But all in all I want to keep this recording, even though it does not quite reach a level I like, so I am open for suggestions of GMGers as to other interpretation that might do the trick for me in a different fashion.

[Karl Henning]

Very nice music, Karl, as always. It must be one hell of a physical challenge to play it! What prompted you to write something so long?

Many thanks! The first unaccompanied clarinet piece I wrote, Blue Shamrock, was just three minutes in duration, and I wrote it for an Italian clarinetist who (my publisher learnt) was asking for such pieces. So far as I know, he never played it. It's a busy, knotty piece, and demands a lot of prep for a piece with (so to speak) a small footprint. I like the piece, and I've performed it some three or four times. But since it looked like the only clarinetist willing to prepare the piece was the composer himself, and thinking of the lovely clarinet movement in the Messiaen Quatuor, I wrote a substantially longer piece, Studies in Impermanence, about 20 mins. long. This piece, too, I've played two or three times. Then one time I had a date for the King's Chapel series, but no fresh material to hand. The series is at lunchtime, so Heinrich liked to keep the program to 30 minutes, so that people who work could stop in to enjoy the program, and be back to work before their lunch hour expired. So I wrote Thoreau, designing it for 25 mins. This recording was my third performance of the piece, and I was comfortable enough with it then to give it time to a degree I had not, before.