What were you listening to? (CLOSED)

[karlhenning]

Henning
The Angel Who Bears a Flaming Sword, Opus 94b
Nicole Randall-Chamberlain, flute

Nicole does a great job with the piece.  Don't know whether I like it better for alto flute or regular flute!

[The new erato]

One of the great, voluptuous romantic outpourings:

[listener]

getting down on the stack of season-related discs with this one:
Pierné  Les Enfants de Bethlehem
and then an Earl Wild collection of 20th century piano sonatas: Barber, Stravinsky, Hindemith and Wild's own

[karlhenning]

Lord save me for an heretic, but I first read that as Les Enfants de Beethoven.

[jlaurson]

DSCH. 24 P & F, op.87.


Jenny Lin. Haenssler ***(*)

Colin Stone. Big ears *(*)

David Jalbert. Atma Classique *

Keith Jarrett. ECM *****

[c#minor]

Beethoven Symphony Cycle KARAJAN 1977 Deutsch Grammophon 33's

The ENTIRE CYCLE for 25 cents!!!!! Amazing the deals you can pull at thrift stores!

[Bogey]

Beethoven Symphony Cycle KARAJAN 1977 Deutsch Grammophon 33's

The ENTIRE CYCLE for 25 cents!!!!! Amazing the deals you can pull at thrift stores!

NICE!

[karlhenning]

Blame it on the boogie

[Bogey]

Blame it on the boogie

This is the classical listening thread, my friend, not the essential.

[Que]

Salzburg 1937, the first ever complete recording of Don Giovanni.
Bruno Walter, having left Germany four years earlier, had to flee the Nazis again in the next year and finally settled in the United States in 1939. Unfortunately this meant an end to his career as an opera conductor, which on the evidence of this and other recordings was an incredible waste of musical talent.

Q

[Lethevich]

The Études dans tous les tons mineurs have to be the most overtly mental work of the Romantic period, form-busting-wise Liszt has nothing on this guy.

[UB]

DSCH. 24 P & F, op.87.


Jenny Lin. Haenssler ***(*)

Colin Stone. Big ears *(*)

David Jalbert. Atma Classique *

Keith Jarrett. ECM *****

I have not heard the other three sets (I will certainly get the Lin when I get back to the States later this year) but I can certainly agree with your rating of the Jarrett. Although I have at least four other sets, it has been my favorite since the first time I heard it.

[jlaurson]

I have not heard the other three sets (I will certainly get the Lin when I get back to the States later this year) but I can certainly agree with your rating of the Jarrett. Although I have at least four other sets, it has been my favorite since the first time I heard it.

If I don't have every set of those pieces, I do nearly so... and Jenny Lin is now my favorite non-Jarrett-non-Nikolayeva. (The former towers over the others, the latter--no matter which one of the three--has obvious historical merits.)

Then comes "the rest", lead by Lin, a hair's breadth ahead of Sherbakov... then Ashkenazy, then the other two mentioned above. And even they are not in any way bad. Just not as good as the others.  Now I just have to figure out *why* exactly that is so...

Dip Your Ears No. 22: Keith Jarrett, DSCH P&F op.87: http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2005/01/dip-your-ears-no-22.html

[hildegard]

One of my favorite CDs by Jordi Savall and his group.

Gorgeous selections, performance, and history-telling.

[offbeat]

One of the great, voluptuous romantic outpourings:

oh you have sparked my interest - voluptuous romantic outpourings 
The only Zemlinsky i have is the Lyric Symphony which i like a lot  - is it similar ?

[PaulR]

Violin Concerto #3

[The new erato]

oh you have sparked my interest - voluptuous romantic outpourings 
The only Zemlinsky i have is the Lyric Symphony which i like a lot  - is it similar ?

Not really. This is a huge, 3 mvt symphonic poem with the same relationship to the Lyric Symphony as Strauss' Alpine Symphony are related to Mahler's Lied von der Erde. Very simply put of course, but I think it gives a reasonable idea about the differences between the two works.

[jlaurson]

Not really. This is a huge, 3 mvt symphonic poem with the same relationship to the Lyric Symphony as Strauss' Alpine Symphony are related to Mahler's Lied von der Erde. Very simply put of course, but I think it gives a reasonable idea about the differences between the two works.

Very well put, actually.   

[Brian]

Especially when it is really, really crappy music that masquerades as 'misguided genius'. As if "Kaddish" hadn't been embarrassing enough, Bernstein had to top it with the M(e)ss. Makes you wonder what potion it took to turn the Dr. Henry Jekyll-side of "Candide" and "Trouble" into the Edward Hyde of those pieces. When hearing either of those works, I just feel like bumping Lennie and ask him not to dump his ill-digested regressive emotional petulance and sexual confusion on my doorstep.

The M(e)ss, more than any other Bernstein work, always has been.
(I fooled myself into liking it, for a while... there was my 'home-town' connection, after all... and the Nagano recording issued around that time... but eventually I just could not deny my inner, deep seated distaste for that sort of thing. There's a difference between complex and confused.

I continue not to have a dog in that race.  But I am also content to continue to stand at the sidelines and watch.

It does indeed continue to be a surprisingly polarizing work ... but suffice to say that this is one time (very possibly the first time!) when I have been inclined to disagree strongly with our friend Jens. It's a long work, too long, and some of the lyrics are garbage, but the more I listen to this Naxos recording the more impressed I am by the music - and a brief listen to the Chandos disc last night opened my eyes to how much difference an interpretation can make. People incorrectly assume that the Bernstein Mass is a classical/art-music piece with jazz and Broadway "influences"; thus the Chandos recording casts an operatic lead and operatic bit singers into what are very clearly not operatic parts. There's a reason Bernstein called it "Mass: A Theatre Piece," rather than just "Mass." It is meant to dwell in the same soundworld as the Broadway plays: popular (or at least populist), theatrical, demonstrative, excitable, but underneath the jazz and rock and gospel there's classical training holding it all together. If Jens doesn't hear the strains of West Side Story in numbers like the (inarguably fantastic) "God Said," well, we will have to agree to disagree.

When Jens' review of the Naxos album came out, he dwelt on (to the point of naming the column after) a mid-Mass ditty of Swingle-Singers-style "do bing do bang do bong" jazz silliness. I agree with his sentiment that there was fat to be trimmed. But when he says that the "Mess" is a "confused" piece of "ill-digested regressive emotional petulance and sexual confusion," well, that's not what I hear.

[greg]

Bruckner: Overture in Gm (Dean Dixon, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester)
Eh... it's an okay piece. You can tell that he always liked "big sound," and a lot of times the writing tends to reflect that.

Haydn: Piano Sonatas 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, Variations in Fm (Jando)
The 53 sonata is one very stereotypically classical sonata. It sounds nice, but isn't that imaginative. Out of all of these, the Variations in Fm surprised me- I loved it. (Maybe I just have a thing for Theme and Variations more than I know). It sounds very much Schumann-Brahms, and I wouldn't be surprised if they studied this one for inspiration.