101 Classical Music CDs

Debussy: Preludes for Piano, Disc 1

2009-11-10T03:11:00.000-08:00

It's cheating to use the word impressionist when describing Debussy's music, and yet it's a simple fact that Debussy's piano compositions sound just as impressionistic as his orchestral compositions. Today's Preludes are stunning and vivid--they have splashes of wild color, strange chords, strange melodies and weirdly unorthodox techniques.

This guy is a true rule-breaker, no matter what instrument he works with.
**********************
Krystian Zimerman, piano
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Claude Debussy: Préludes
Deutsche Grammophon, 1994 [2 CDs]
**********************
Until today, I had only experienced Debussy's La Mer and Images, both of which are orchestral works which are at times is so vivid that you can literally almost see the music (the first movement of La Mer is an excellent example of this).

The Preludes for piano are equally vivid, but I'd argue that at times Debussy's special effects and musical gadgets interfere with the music itself. I'll cite some examples in the listener notes.

One final word: don't buy this 2-CD recording expecting to hear Schumann- or Chopin-style piano music. Be ready for something wildly different.

Listener Notes for Debussy's Preludes (Disc 1):
1) Prelude 1, Danseuses de Delphes: At the 1:44 and 1:48 marks, you'll hear dissonant chords that sound almost like mistakes (they're not). Man, this ain't Chopin. This music is much more challenging. Also, notice in this track how pianist Krystian Zimerman breathes so loudly that you can clearly hear it over the music. He's no doubt lost himself in his passion for the music.

2) Prelude 2, Voiles: One word. Creeeeeeepy.

3) Prelude 3, Le vent dans la plaine, is a particularly impressionist(ic?) sounding work.

4) Prelude 5, Les collines d'Anacapri: Here's an excellent example of Debussy using musical gadgets and special effects to excess. All of the excited zings!, swoops! and pings! sound interesting, but they aren't music.

5) Likewise, Prelude 7, Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest, is another effect-laden piece that quite frankly doesn't sound musical at all. It's full of banging chords and too much use of both extreme ends of the keyboard. Rumble-rumble, ping! ping!

6) But then Prelude 8, La fille aux cheveux de lin, shows how Debussy, when he doesn't try to overstuff his compositions with special effects, can write stunningly beautiful music.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Schumann: Second Symphony

2009-11-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

I stood by the body of my passionately loved husband, and was calm. All my feelings were absorbed in thankfulness to God that he was at last set free, and as I kneeled by his bed I was filled with awe. It was as if his holy spirit was hovering over me--Ah! If only he had taken me with him.
--Clara Schumann, after the death of her husband Robert Schumann

We return to George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra's exceptional recording of Schumann's Four Symphonies to hear his Symphony #2.
**********************
George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Schumann: Symphonies 1-4; Manfred Overture
CBS, 1958/Sony, 1996
**********************
When I sat down to listen to Schumann's Second Symphony, I assumed it would sound as Mozart-like as his First Symphony. I couldn't have been more wrong: these two symphonies sound strikingly different.

Listener Notes for Schumann's Symphony #2:
1) You can tell right away that this symphony is far more Romantic in style. If Schumann wrote his First Symphony in a style following Mozart, he wrote his Second following Beethoven.

2) Excellent examples of classic Romantic style: the passage beginning at 1:58 in the first movement; also the passage at 2:46 in the first movement.

3) The closing major chords of the first movement could be cribbed right out of a Beethoven symphony!

4) At 1:36 in the second movement, there's a tempo change that the Cleveland Orchestra doesn't get quite right.

5) The second movement is one of the more unusual scherzos I've ever heard. Quite frankly, it's odd enough that the second movement is a scherzo in the first place. And good lord, you sure wouldn't be able to dance to it. But wow, does it ever have an exciting ending!

6) The third movement is widely considered one of the most beautiful orchestral works Schumann ever wrote. I can't say I disagree. And nice to hear a beautifully played, in-tune clarinet solo at 2:59-3:10 (it repeats at 7:40).

7) I found the fourth movement to be somewhat of an anticlimax. It felt like the first movement had a much more rousing (and conclusive) ending.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Shostakovich: First Symphony

2009-10-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

I can't help it. I just don't like Shostakovich.

This is the second time I've tried my hand at a Shosty symphony, after listening to and heartily disliking his Eleventh Symphony.

Unfortunately, I felt no emotional connection to his First Symphony either. The music seems random and arbitrary to me--and to be honest, I even caught myself rolling my eyes at a few of Shosty's musical devices. And as I'll show in the listener notes, it's more film score music than symphony.
**********************
Leonard Bernstein and the Chicago Symphony
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 7
Deutsche Grammophone, 1989
**********************
Lucky me: I've still got three more of his symphonies left to listen to: his Second, Seventh and Twelfth.

A little historical background before we get to the listener notes: Shostakovich wrote his First Symphony in 1925 at the shockingly young age of 18. It was his graduation piece at the Leningrad Conservatory.

Audiences loved it. In the words of my Essential Canon of Classical Music, the First Symphony "was an unexpected triumph, and overnight Shostakovich became a hero of Soviet music, lauded as the first illustrious child of the [1917 Russian] Revolution."

Eventually, the Soviets would come to their senses and decide classical music was a petty bourgeois pretension, and the Soviet regime turned on Shostakovich in the 1930s. The composer drifted in and out of favor with his government over the remainder of his life.

Listener notes for Shostakovich's First Symphony:
1) Right from the opening moments of this work, I have misgivings about this symphony and the fact that it sounds like incidental music for a film. As we've seen before, this is a common criticism of Shostakovich's symphonies.

2) Regarding the arbitrariness of this music: the first movement features passages of strangely loud and then strangely soft music that seem to follow each other for shock value rather than any structural or musical reason. It all seems directionless and emotionless.

3) "Buh, buh-buh-buh buhhhh, budup, budup, buh-dahhhhh." I suppose that's the primary melody of the first movement? Yeesh.

4) Cinematic music alert in the second movement: at the 0:58 mark in the second movement, there's a flute duet with a a snare drum, triangle and strings playing in the background. This passage could easily be background music for an episode of the original Star Trek. In fact, I'm thinking specifically of this episode, and the scene when Kirk gets zapped after he falls into the obelisk (view from 4:50-5:07).

5) Interesting to hear the piano appear out of nowhere to play a solo part at the 3:07 mark in the second movement. Unfortunately, that part later devolves into really cheesy movie music from 3:58 until the end of the movement.

6) There is an admittedly fun trumpet part at 3:35 in the second movement. I'll give Shosty credit for that.

7) There's yet another passage in the fourth movement (it runs from the 2:00 minute mark to about the 2:48 mark) that is in my view a perfect example of Shostakovich's movie music. Listen to it and tell me why you don't agree.

8) And finally, as if to prove my case, there's a classic cinematic flourish at 6:30 in the fourth movement: a melodramatic sfrorzando from the entire orchestra, followed by.... solo tympani! If that isn't self-caricaturing music, I don't know what is. Consider me a petty bourgeois listener, but I'm just not sure what the Soviet regime saw in this symphony.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

The Piano Music of Robert Schumann: Klavierwerke: Sonata #2 for Piano, Night Visions, Three Romances and Forest Scenes

2009-10-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

Today, at long last, I'll finally cover the fourth and final disc of my four-CD recording of Schumann's piano works performed by Wilhelm Kempff. Here are discs 1, 2 and 3 if you missed them.

I've really missed Schumie and his incomparable solo piano compositions. And what's amazing to me about these works is how complex they are. It's actually easier for me to follow a symphony--with all its dozens of different instruments--than it is for me to follow a single pianist performing one of Schumann's works.

Despite repeated listens to each of the CDs in this four disc collection, I feel like I've only scratched at the surface of this music.
**********************
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Performed by Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991)
Schumann: Piano Works
Deutsche Grammophone, 1975
**********************
Before we get into the listener notes, let me say without reservation that I highly, highly recommend this exceptional recording to anyone interested in classical piano music.

Listener notes for Schumann's Sonata for Piano #2 in G minor:
1) Once again, it's amazing how many voices can sing out from just ten fingers and one piano. Fortunately, this extremely complex music doesn't have the uniform, machine-made sound of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.

Listener notes for Nachtstucke (Night Visions):
2) I can't help but imagine ghouls or zombies traipsing to and fro when I listen to the first movement of Night Visions (Track 5, Disc 4).

3) In the second movement (Track 6), I can see happy little sprites traipsing all over the place. And then in the third movement (Track 7), it sounds like the ghouls, spirits and sprites are all holding hands and doing some sort of frolicsome dance together in a field in some kind of a creepy dreamworld. Or something.

4) The fourth movement is so sad and mournful, and such a contrast to the first three movements that it hardly seems to belong.

Listener notes for Drei Romanzen (Three Romances):
5) Interesting use of dissonant chords in many parts of the main theme of the first movement (Track 9). You can hear them right away in first minute, and they are repeated in the final minute.

6) I wonder what love state Schumann had in mind for each of these movements. Perhaps the first movement with all the dissonance was a lover's quarrel, and the second movement (Track 10) is the mournful separation, and the third and final movement (Track 11) is the playful reunion of the lovers?

Listener notes for Waldszenen (Forest Scenes):
7) The first of the Forest Scenes, Entritt ("entry" in English, Track 12) is possibly the most beautiful and elegant piece of music I've ever heard in my entire life.

8) At the 0:17 mark of Track 14 (Einsame Blumen/Lonely Flowers) it sounds like Kempff makes a bad mistake. However, the same note pattern recurs at 1:01, so unless he deliberately made the mistake twice, Schumann probably wrote it that way. For a piece about flowers, it's a bit jarring.

9) I'm wondering what Schumann meant, exactly, by naming the fourth Forest Scene "Place of Evil Fame" (Verrufene Stelle).

10) Finally, Wilhelm Kempff's playing is extremely clean throughout this disc. I didn't hear a single error or missed note--in contrast to the (admittedly few) stray mistakes on disc 1.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Schumann: First Symphony

2009-10-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

To be sure, a Schumann score is not as foolproof, as "self-rising," as a score of Wagner or Tchaikovsky or Richard Strauss, nor has the musical substance of a Schumann symphony the kind of inexorable propulsion of some Beethoven symphonies, which will survive even a shabby performance relatively unharmed. But is it really Schumann's fault that it takes a little trouble on the part of the conductor and orchestra to make his symphonies come off?
--George Szell, conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, 1946-1970

Schumann didn't just write music for the piano, obviously. But there is a bit of a debate as to the importance of his four symphonies.
**********************
George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Schumann: Symphonies 1-4; Manfred Overture
CBS, 1958/Sony, 1996
**********************
Fortunately, George Szell worshipped Schumann's four symphonies, and he conducted and recorded with the Cleveland Orchestra what is widely considered to be one of the best recordings ever of Schumann's First Symphony.Today's post is dedicated to that recording, which I highly, highly recommend.

A few introductory words about the Cleveland Orchestra: While Cleveland might be better known these days for its appallingly bad pro football team, this underappreciated city actually has a world-class orchestra. And Clevelanders have George Szell to thank for this--under Szell's direction (some might say dictatorial control), Cleveland transformed from a competent regional symphony into one of the world's finest orchestras.

Listener notes for Schumann's First Symphony:
1) It's almost shocking to go back to a "traditional-sounding" classical music symphony immediately after experiencing the overwhelming power and weight of Mahler's Third. Only some 55 years separate the compositions, but they sound centuries apart, don't they? I will say it's more relaxing to listen to a symphony when you don't have to keep a fearful grip on the volume dial.

2) I can see how this symphony could sound like a Mozart knockoff to a first-time listener (this is one of the criticisms leveled at Schumann's symphonies), but give it a chance and a few extra listens. To paraphrase Woody Allen, it's more complex and original than it sounds.

3) At 5:17 in the second movement (Track 2) what should be a beautiful passage played by the trombones gets mangled by poor intonation. Note that according to this CD's liner notes, this recording took place over two days--I'm surprised they didn't notice and re-record that passage. Cleveland is a better symphony than that.

4) A few comments about the particularly enjoyable third movement (the Scherzo): The main theme/motif of the third movement is quite interesting, especially when Schumann morphs it though major and minor keys. That creates quite a bit of tension and release.

5) Further, there are also several quite interesting meter changes in the third movement. At 1:19 in Track 3, the third movement shifts from 3/4 meter (that's the typical meter for a scherzo movement) into an unexpectedly lively 2/4 meter. At 2:42, it switches back to the original theme and meter. Then, at 3:21, we switch yet another meter, before returning back to the original theme once again at 4:24. Finally, there's a soft coda at very end of the movement, during which Szell takes all sorts of liberties with the tempo. This is one of the more interesting Scherzo movements I've ever heard.

6) The opening to the fourth movement sounds almost like a major scale! Admittedly, this movement sounds quite Mozart-like--at first. But listen at the 4:14 mark, when an entirely different theme with a very un-Mozart like tension begins.

7) Readers who are familiar with my writing on the Philadelphia Orchestra will know that it's a sadly rare pleasure for me to listen to clarinet solos that are played completely in tune.

8) Finally, getting back to the criticism that this symphony sounds like a Mozart knockoff, the very last minute of the fourth movement sounds, unfortunately, exactly like something Mozart would write. I'll be quite curious to see if Schumann's other symphonies (I'll be writing posts on all four) share this trait at all.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Mahler: Third Symphony

2009-10-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

But I have surely written you that I am at work on a large composition. You cannot believe how this claims one's entire being, and how one is often so deep in it that for the outer world one is as if dead. Try to conceive a work so vast that in it the entire world is mirrored--one is, so to speak, only an instrument on which the whole universe plays. (I have explained this to you often, and you must accept it, if you really wish to understand me. Everyone who wishes to live with me must learn this. In such moments I no longer belong to myself.) ...These are fearful birth pains the creator of such a work suffers, and before all this organizes itself, builds itself up, and ferments in his brain, it must be preceded by much preoccupation, engrossment with self, a being dead to the outer world. My symphony will be something the world has not as yet heard!
--Gustav Mahler, in a letter to his lover Anna von Mildenburg, describing the gestation of his Third Symphony--and responding to her complaints that he was not writing to her often enough (quote thanks to The Essential Canon of Classical Music and Composers On Music: Eight Centuries of Writings).

I've been looking forward to listening to this monster of a symphony for a long time, but in a way I had to get up the courage to do so:

* It takes up 2 CDs.
* It has six movements (initially, Mahler considered a seventh).
* It lasts more than 90 minutes.
* And the first movement alone is a symphony in itself, at more than 33 minutes.

I can't imagine the courage it must have taken to write it.
**********************
Claudio Abbado and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)
Mahler: Symphony No. 3
Deutsche Grammophon, 1999
**********************
There is a fine line, however, between earth-shattering drama and melodrama, and in this symphony Mahler repeatedly stomps over that line--especially in the first movement.

And that flair for melodrama apparently infected the producers of this recording too: the final track on this CD (Track 19) is entitled "Applause"--and it is three minutes and twenty seconds long. Yes, you heard that right. There's a more than three-minute-long track, deliberately placed at the end of this symphony, that contains applause. Clapping.

And yet I love this symphony like very few in my collection. That's how it is with Mahler--you have to embrace the melodrama. What a fool I've been to let this CD sit on my shelf, collecting dust, for so long!

Listener Notes for Mahler's Third Symphony:
1) The Berlin Philharmonic must have some monster French horn players. They really let it rip in the opening passage.

2) An occupational hazard of a live recording: somebody on stage accidentally drops something during the pianissimo section at 0:42 in Track 1. I'm sure we'll hear a more than typical number of mistakes, as well as--shudder--coughs, from the audience.

3) There's a big trumpet mistake late in the first movement (at 1:39 in Track 8 on CD 1). In his "buh buh buh buhhhhhh!" part, he really whiffs the last note.

4) This first movement is truly a symphony within a symphony. At 32 minutes, it's materially longer than Beethoven's entire Fifth Symphony. Heck, Haydn could fit three or four "symphonies" into 32 minutes! But it does beg a question: How many times, for example, should you incorporate major musical climaxes, um, in your first movement? And after three, four, or even five major climaxes, what could possibly be left to say for the remaining hour of the symphony? After I finished the first movement, I couldn't believe that I had only heard one-third of this work.

5) Whoo. Onto the second movement--only 64 minutes to go! This is not a symphony for the attention-span-challenged.

6) The second movement is so quaint and beautiful, and so radically different in tone and style from the first movement, that it seems preposterous that the same composer could have written both.

7) The third movement has to be the kookiest Scherzo movement I've ever heard. It sounds like something out of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique.

8) A piece of trivia regarding the off-stage trumpet in the third movement (begins at 0:12 in Track 7 of Disc 2): That's actually not a trumpet, or at least it's not supposed to be. It's a flugelhorn, a brass instrument very similar to a trumpet but slightly larger and more mellow-sounding. At the beginning of Track 9, you'll hear a trumpet come in with a gentle call which is immediately answered by the off-stage flugelhorn--those two passages give you a good sense of the difference in sound between the two instruments.

9) I'm very pleased with the cough-related behavior of this audience. I noticed just a few barely-audible stray coughs during the third movement, another couple in the fourth movement, and that was about all. Further proof that the Europeans behave better than Americans in the symphony hall.

10) Lots of elements of the fourth movement are downright ghoulish. The vocal soloist singing in an unusually low register (the singer, Anna Larson, is a contralto, which is the lowest of female singing registers--if she were a man she could sing a mean tenor part), the really low notes from the bass viols, the odd glissandos (first the oboe, then the saxophone), the lyrics (drawn from Nietsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra), and then a children's choir entering with cheery major chords--that then warp into creepy-sounding minor keys. This movement is almost too much to take.

11) I think if you want to understand why musicians and audiences worldwide have deep affection for Mahler, listen to the fourth and fifth movements of this symphony. It's hard to believe that this much emotion and tension can take place in music.

12) Holy cow on the ripping brass parts in the final movement, especially towards the end of Track 16, and at the very end in Track 18. No brass player on earth would feel anything but love for this symphony.

13) And I have to eat my words from earlier in this post when I picked on the "Applause" track. It belongs there. It totally does. I understand now.

Please visit my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances

2009-09-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

The older we get, the more we lose that divine self-confidence which is the treasure of youth, the fewer are those moments when we believe that what we have done is good.
--Sergei Rachmaninoff, in an interview, at age 56.

The Symphonic Dances was the last work Rachmaninoff ever composed. He completed it some four years after his Third Symphony, during a period in his life when "he had become increasingly dissatisfied with himself as a composer and even as a pianist."

Yet more compelling evidence that the profession of classical music brings misery to the vast majority of those who enter it. The more I learn about the lives of major classical music composers and musicians, the more I'm relieved that, at age 17, I gave up any serious idea of becoming a professional trumpet player. I can only think how miserable and self-critical I'd be now at age 40.
**********************
Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Symphony No. 3 in A minor
Symphonic Dances
Deutsche Grammophon, 1998
**********************
Listener Notes for Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances:
1) Strange, and disappointing, to hear idiosyncratic instrumentation again--a classic symptom of dreaded film score music disease. Examples abound in the early minutes of the first movement: low-register piano notes, percussion used for effect, warbling saxophones solos, harp/piano duets, chimes, piano/flute unison parts, gongs, etc.

2) According to the liner notes with this CD, Rachmaninoff had never used a saxophone in a composition before (thus making my guess last week of the instruments used in the first moments of his Third Symphony incorrect, apparently), but he was influenced by Alexander Glazunov's Saxophone Concerto. Yep, despite the catastrophe that happened when Glazunov drunkenly conducted Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, these two men somehow managed to remain friends.

3) At 6:22 in the first movement there's a stunningly beautiful passage played by strings and piano. It lasts until about 8:40, and then, unfortunately, the film score music comes back.

4) The second movement has to be one of the weirdest, most macabre waltzes I've ever heard.

5) And then it's back to directionless film score music for the third and final movement.

6) I know I'm being a bit harsh on my boy Rachy here. But it's okay to not like a given classical music composer. You can't love everybody. Give everyone a fair listen or two and feel free to decide who you like best and least. You'll have better context, then, for where to invest your time and attention. And once you have enough context know which of the major composers or works you like or don't like, you'll never have to worry about buying the wrong classical music CD, or paying up for symphony tickets that you won't enjoy. You'll know in advance to bias your time towards composers you really like, or composers you don't yet know.

7) And while this CD is admittedly not a favorite of my collection, it is cleanly played. Thus if you're a fan of Rachmaninoff's symphonic works, this is a good CD to buy.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Rachmaninoff: Symphony #3

2009-09-22T11:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a drunk conductor and some harsh criticism, Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony came very close to never being written.

In 1897, at the young age of just 23, Sergei Rachmaninoff's career as a composer nearly ended before it began with the premiere of his First Symphony. He had already built a reputation for himself as a master pianist, and he had already composed an opera as well as a few other significant works. But the premiere of his First Symphony, which was poorly performed, badly conducted (by an allegedly drunk Alexander Glazunov) and excoriated by critics, nearly destroyed him.
**********************
Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Symphony No. 3 in A minor
Symphonic Dances
Deutsche Grammophon, 1998
**********************
Rachmaninoff fell into a period of deep depression. It would be four years before he would compose again, and it would be twelve years before he would write another symphony. Fortunately, that symphony, his Second, was very well received by critics and audiences alike.

Rachmaninoff completed his Third Symphony much later, in 1936, and he considered it among his greatest works. However, once again, a lukewarm reception from audiences deeply discouraged him, and it would be another four years before he summoned the courage to write his next (and last) work: his Symphonic Dances, which I will discuss in my next post.

Listener Notes for Rachmaninoff's Third Symphony:
1) I love the how the introductory soft passage (it sounds like a unison saxophone and clarinet) gets you to lean forward, ear cocked, and then whammo!--the whole orchestra comes in and blasts you right back into your seat.

2) I kept asking myself throughout the first movement, "where is this symphony going?" It's good music, and it has a beautiful 14 note melodic motif, but it has too many Shostakovitch-like film score accoutrements. This symphony doesn't really speak to me yet.

3) The opening few minutes of the second movement are another good example of film-score-itis: It sounds beautiful, yes, but at the same time it could be background music for The Blue Lagoon. The use of the harp, the glockenspiel, the soft triple-tonguing trumpets, the idiosyncratic use of percussion--they all sound like film-score gadgets to me.

4) Note the reprise of the opening "whammo chord" at the beginning of the third movement. At least this time I wasn't leaning forward in my chair!

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Sibelius: Fifth Symphony

2009-09-15T11:11:00.000-07:00

Forget the snotty music critics who berate Sibelius as a simpleton who wrote "insufficiently complex" music. I consider him a truly gifted composer who can create a wide range of emotions in his beautiful, grand and all-too-brief symphonies. In this journey of mine through my dusty classical music collection, Sibelius is turning out to be one of my most pleasurable discoveries.
**********************
Paavo Berglund and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Symphony No. 3 in C major
Symphony No. 5 in E flat major
EMI Records, 1988
**********************
Sibelius began his Fifth Symphony in mid-1914, and while the work contains overtones of war and gloom, the key themes of this symphony are optimism and triumph. It's interesting to note, however, that Sibelius wasn't happy with the original version, completed in mid-1915, and he reworked this symphony over the next year--and then reworked it yet again in 1919. Clearly, just because a symphony sounds triumphant doesn't mean the composer felt particularly triumphant while writing it. Apparently Sibelius wasn't entirely satisfied with his creation.

Listener notes for Sibelius' Fifth Symphony:
1) The first movement starts out sounding like something Bruckner would write, a likely reason why critics (at least the critics who fancy themselves in the vanguard of "radical" classical music) excoriate this symphony.

2) But when you hear the first movement morph from those Bruckner-esque major chords into a tense and creepy passage featuring the bassoon solo over shimmering strings (starts at about the 6:00 mark in Track 4 on this CD and runs to about the 7:00 mark), you can tell that there's more to Sibelius than meets the ear. This passage, and the next several minutes that follow it, show an underappreciated aspect of Sibelius' music: he takes you to many more emotional places than Bruckner, and he does it with subtlety, smooth transitions and without beating the listener over the head (unlike Mahler, for example).

3) The first movement ends in a moment of intense triumph. It's hard to believe Sibelius originally wrote this work in 1914-1915, not only given the outbreak of World War I. It's even more hard to believe he wrote this work during a period when much of his income was cut off. According to the liner notes accompanying this CD, royalty payments from German music publishers had been the largest source of his income at the time.

4) In the second movement (at the 1:33 mark in Track 5), listen for the flute and oboe duet. At first, I thought for sure that the flute made a bad mistake, but then the same dissonant note occurs ten seconds later at 1:43, then again at 1:58, and then again in a variety of forms throughout the movement. It's a strange-sounding motif, and it takes a few listens to get used to it.

5) What do you think of the ending of the second movement? Can you even call that an ending? It's as if the work just peters out, the musicians turn the page, and then "okay people, time for the finale!"

6) Admittedly the third movement contains some schmaltzy french horn chords (an example occurs at 1:15 in track 6, and then an even more schmaltzy example occurs at the 2:00 mark), but we should at least give Sibelius credit for massaging that motif into various keys and forms later in the movement. He could have just left that theme hanging there in its original form and gone for a cheap Bruckner-esque thrill (after all, triumphant major chords played by French horns is a common feature of every Bruckner symphony).

Instead, Sibelius builds this theme into the fundamental fabric of the movement. For example, you'll hear the oboe and woodwinds pick up this theme in a minor key at the 5:00 mark, and then the trumpets pick it up still later in a major key but with creepy, gloomy undertones. Finally, the entire orchestra tackles a variation of the theme near the ending.

7) I'd love to hear your impressions of the very end of this symphony, where the orchestra plays six final chords, separated by what feels like artificially and uncomfortably long rests. Do you consider this an unusual artistic device that serves to build tension? Or is this just cheesy? I'll admit that I sat up and took notice when I first heard this atypical ending, but it's my view that Sibelius sacrificed some of the sincerity of this symphony by giving it a gadget of a conclusion.

A final note: I've provided links on Amazon here and a graphical link below to a highly-regarded box set of all of his complete symphonies (there are seven) as well as all of his tone poems, suites and incidental music.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Sibelius: Third Symphony

2009-09-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

It's been a year and a half since I last listened to the music of Jean Sibelius. And if nothing else, I'm annoyed with myself for once again overlooking this often-overlooked composer.
**********************
Paavo Berglund and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Symphony No. 3 in C major
Symphony No. 5 in E flat major
EMI Records, 1988
**********************
Sibelius' Third Symphony represents a significant stylistic break from his First and Second Symphonies, both of which were typical examples of the so-called heroic-national style (Sibelius was a fierce Finnish nationalist during a period when Finland struggled under Russian control).

However, the Third Symphony, as my Essential Canon of Classical Music puts it, "entered into a different sphere of musical thought, using a radically condensed form totally devoid of the grand manner of his earlier music." Compared to Sibelius' Second Symphony, which I wrote about back in 2008, this work is simpler, more slimmed-down and--if I may say so--less pretentious. It avoids the overwrought schmaltz of Vaughan Williams (VW was a Sibelius contemporary), and yet it still features plenty of soaring and riveting passages. Like Mahler, but more concise.

Before we get to the listener notes, a quick item for listeners who would like to experience more works by Sibelius: I've provided links on Amazon here and a graphical link below to a highly-regarded box set of all of his complete symphonies (there are seven) as well as all of his tone poems, suites and incidental music.

Listener Notes for Sibelius' Third Symphony:
1) When you hear a french horn part as ripping as the one at 0:59 in the first movement, you know you're going to be in for a good symphony (listen for a reprise of the part at the 6:46 mark).

2) Listen to the parts played by the cello section from 4:45 to 5:45 in the first movement (also reprised at 7:34). There's a lot of tension here, as well as carpal-tunnel syndrome.

3) Do the last two chords of the first movement sound to you like the "ahhhh-mennnn" that comes at the end of a church hymn?

4) My favorite parts of the second movement are the wonderful syncopated bass viol plucks at the 1:23-1:33 mark and again at the 3:16-3:26 mark.

5) This symphony seems to lose direction a bit in the third and fourth minutes of the third movement. Not what you'd expect in a tightly composed, "slimmed-down" symphony. But this is a minor misdirection in an otherwise gripping work.

6) Finally, there are very few obvious mistakes in this performance, but two unfortunate ones arrive when the woodwinds play two overly feverish and shrill trills in the very last minute of the final movement. I'll give them an "E" for enthusiasm.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Does Bach Suck?

2009-09-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

It's not often that you see a classical music-related comment that makes you spit out your coffee:

"Bach sucks because he was not a true composer. A true composer hears the music before he writes it. Bach composed using a mathematical system of numbers which he tought[sic] his students. After his death one of his students published a book “How to write a menuet[sic] with little or no musical knowledge”. Frankly, the result of his work is not musical, the opening bars always sound musical because he copied someone else’s melody, broke it down into numbers and wrote counterpoint from it. Handel did not even like Bach, because Handel wrote music. Anyone who does like Bach does so because they are told to. For a comparison, listen to music by Frescobaldi, Rameau, or Couperin, then listen to Bach. The difference? Something that is musical throughout the entire piece, and something that is musical for 10 seconds and quickly loses interest."

Once I'd finished mopping the coffee off of my laptop, I had to admit I found myself agreeing.

Not with the claim that Bach sucks per se, but that Bach is one of the conundrums of classical music. How can a man who wrote such an impressive mountain of stunning music, who revolutionized Western music's entire conception of music theory, harmony and counterpoint (even to the point of revolutionizing how we tune our intruments), at the same time write music that all sounds the same?

Here's an example. Listen to the twenty-four Preludes and Fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier and try to come up with a single hummable melody or a single memorable motif. And, while you're enduring this exercise, tell me, do these works arouse any emotion in you, other than perhaps a sense of aesthetic beauty at the symmetry and mathematical perfection of the music?

Depending on your memory for music, you might find all twenty-four works interchangeable, even nearly identical. I think I understand now what Glenn Gould was trying to say in the liner notes to his ham-handed recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Yes, they are all beautiful. But it's a robotic beauty, a mathematical beauty. Not one of them has a climactic moment. There are no lulls, no surges, no sweeping emotion. Nothing. The music is hypnotic, but there is not a single component part that stands out as memorable or notable.

Perhaps this is why Bach's music collected dust for centuries, until Mendelssohn and others rescued it from obscurity.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D

2009-08-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Laura: What are you listening to?
Dan: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.
L: Which one?
D: He only wrote one.
L: So Violin Concerto Number 1 then?
D: Uh, well, just "Violin Concerto." I think.

If you thought the critical reaction to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 was bad, wait until you hear about the abuse heaped upon his Violin Concerto.
**********************
Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Itzhak Perlman, Violin
Violin Concerto
Piano Concerto No. 1
RCA/Papillon, 1987
**********************
Despite the fact that Tchaikovsky dedicated the work to Leopold Auer, a famous violinist of the time, Auer refused to play it, considering it too technically difficult. Later, violinist Adolf Brodsky, a fellow Russian, performed the work for an audience in Vienna in 1881--and the audience hissed (apparently, booing didn't become popular in Europe until years later).

Worse still were the critical reviews. As the (uncredited) liner notes accompanying this CD tell it, "the notorious critic Eduard Hanslick" said:

..."the violin is no longer played; it is yanked about, it is torn asunder, it is beaten black and blue" and that the concerto "brings to us for the first time the horrid idea that there may be music that stinks in the ear."

I wonder what this guy would have said after hearing Paganini's Caprices.

Listener notes for Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto:
1) Could there be a bigger contrast between the enormous, hippopotamus-like opening of the Piano Concert No. 1 and the quiet opening of this work?

2) Does anyone else find off-putting Perlman's excessive use of vibrato? I feel like I want to go up to him and say, "dude, just play the notes, okay?" It's disappointing when musicians (at any level, not just the pros) layer so much affectation on top of their playing that it detracts from the music.

3) One thing about Itzhak, though, is he has ferocious technical skills and he can make even preposterously difficult passages sound easy and effortless. A textbook example is the violin runs he plays from 4:40-4:52 in the first movement.

4) At the 7:15 mark of the first movement you can hear a particularly brutal "theme-and-variations" passage for the soloist. Even as a non-violinist I can tell that this passage is preposterously difficult. It sounds like something Paganini would write on a day when he was feeling ill will towards violin-playing mankind.

5) Listen at 9:47 and 9:57 in the first movement. Did you know a violin could play a note this high?

6) More ridiculously difficult parts: the solo violin passage from 12:57 to 13:54 contains difficult ascending runs. Perlman just blasts through them with no problem.

7) For headphone listeners and recording geeks only: the bassoon arpeggio in the opening of the second movement (it occurs at the 0:22-0:24 mark) jumps from the left speaker to the right for no apparent reason. If you close your eyes and imagine yourself watching the performance, you can almost see the musician teleport across the stage. Only the recording engineers and producers will know for sure, but this sounds to me like a splice of portions of two different takes. Also, at 0:37 in the same movement it sounds like there might be another splice when Itzhak comes in, another at 3:02 in the second movement, and yet another at 7:40 in the third movement.

I'm sure splicing like this is a common occurrence, simply because it's impractical to do repeated run-throughs of an entire symphony when you can just redo the dodgy passages and splice them in later. And of course it's nothing like what's done in pop music, where "singers" like Britney Spears will do 20 or more takes of any given song line in order to generate (out of pure luck?) the one take that actually sounds good and is sung on key.

9) Funny how an extremely minor (some would say unnoticeable) recording error can send a listener with sub-clinical OCD (uh, like myself) into a state where he's purely listening for recording errors and not really hearing the music at all. I had to put this disc away for a couple of days and tackle it again after a break.

10) The aggressive segue into the third movement is a real joy--and a bit of a shock, isn't it?

11) Itzhak's playing isn't anywhere near as clean in this movement as it is in the other movements. Then again, this movement truly does require him to do some serious yanking about and tearing asunder.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto #1 in B-Flat Minor

2009-08-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

I replied that I would not alter a single note, and that I would have the concerto printed exactly as it stood.
--Tchaikovsky, reacting to Nikolai Rubinstein's harsh criticism of Piano Concerto #1

Today's CD contains one of the very few examples of CD liner notes that are not only comprehensible, but actually fun to read.
**********************
Erich Leinsdorf and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Misha Dichter, Piano
Piano Concerto No. 1
Violin Concerto
RCA/Papillon, 1987
**********************
In a (sadly uncredited) essay, readers learn the story about the reaction Tchaikovsky received when he showed his first piano concerto to his boss at the Moscow Conservatory, Nikolai Rubenstein:

"Rubinstein excoriated the work after a private hearing.... Tchaikovsky was pitilessly flayed for what Rubenstein charged was tawdry, plagiaristic and unpianistic. The irate pedagogue even went to the piano and burlesqued page after page."

Tchaikovsky then did what any self-respecting genius would do: he got a second opinion. He sent it to the famous German pianist and conductor Hans von Bulow, who loved the work so much that he took it with him on a concert tour of America.

It only adds to the irony that Rubenstein eventually changed his mind and came to appreciate this work. There's no accounting for taste, is there?

Listener notes for Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto #1:
1) Who doesn't find the first 30 seconds of this concerto familiar to the point of parody? And what is it about Tchaikovsky's music that makes it so easy to parody? In fact, I'd go so far to argue that this concerto, along with the love theme from Romeo and Juliet and the 1812 Overture, are three of the top four "familiar to the point of parody" classical music works (the fourth? It has to be Beethoven's Fifth Symphony).

2) After learning of the deep cynicism behind his 1812 Overture, I can't help but listen for additional cynical musical devices and other compositional tricks Tchaikovsky might have used in this work. Quite frankly, I couldn't hear any.

3) It's interesting to listen to such a ponderous and lengthy first movement (more than 20 minutes), followed by two pipsqueak movements of less than seven minutes each.

4) Listen from 10:00 to 10:43 in the first movement: have you ever heard such tension and energy build in the middle of a movement? And then it's followed by an unexpected letdown when the orchestra cuts out and the piano takes over.

5) Bad playing alert: at 12:32-12:37 in the first movement, the trombone has a prominent part and he blows it, with high school-caliber play and no sense of phrasing or control.

6) Forgive me for saying this, but I come down on Rubenstein's side of the argument (rather than von Bulow's) on the quality of this concerto. To me, there's just too much pounding away, too much instantaneous grandeur for me to enjoy this work. I'd be curious to hear other opinions, however, and I'd love to hear the opinions of any piano players out there who can comment knowledgeably on the joys (or miseries) of performing this work.

7) The second movement is an example of why I prefer Tchaikovsky at his least pretentious. His simple and beautiful melodies are more compelling to me than his grandiosity. Recall how Liszt called the second movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata "a flower poised between two abysses"? This movement is more like flower poised behind a hippopotamus.

8) For those of you who are curious, the subtitle for the third movement, allegro con fuoco, doesn't mean, uh, what you might think it means. It means to play quickly and in a fiery and energetic style (or, literally, fast with fire).

9) The third movement is an excellent example of the gift Tchaikovsky had for adapting folk tunes into new and compelling classical music music (this gift was shared by his fellow Russian contemporaries too, including Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky).

10) The final few passages of the third movement make for an amazing climax. First you have the build from 4:46 to 5:29, then a slight reduction in tension when the piano takes over at 5:30, then more build of tension until the huge entry of the full orchestra at 5:46. My head was about to explode!

...and then I realized I had the volume turned up just a little too high on my headphones.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Saint Saens: Third Symphony (the "Organ" symphony), Paul Dukas: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

2009-08-11T11:11:00.000-07:00

Saint-Saens knows everything, but he lacks inexperience.
--Hector Berlioz

It's safe to say that Camille Saint-Saens' life was far more interesting than his music.
**********************
James Levine and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Saint-Saëns: Symphony No. 3 "Organ"
Dukas: L'Apprenti Sorcier (The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
Deutsche Grammophon, 1987
**********************
He was a true polymath: a musical prodigy, a scientist, a philosopher, a travel writer, a poet and a composer. He lived a life filled with tragedy: when Saint-Saens was in his early forties, his two-and-a-half-year-old son died in a fall from the balcony of his Paris apartment. Just six weeks later, his other son died of pneumonia at just seven months of age.

And three years after these incomprehensible tragedies, he walked out on his wife--in the middle of a vacation they were taking together! He left a note for her at their hotel and simply left.

Today we'll go over Saint-Saens' third and final symphony, widely known as the Organ Symphony. It's an enjoyable symphony with some interesting and unusual features, and it is probably the composer's best-known work. However, it is not a work I'd rank among my top classical music favorites.

I think most classical music critics would agree with me. My classical music bible, David Dubal's The Essential Canon of Classical Music, backhandedly refers to Saint-Saens' "slick, pseudo-Classical forms, and their refreshing neatness." And the liner notes accompanying this CD (which you would think would be a tad more promotional) contain this harsh gem: "...the symphony lacks the profundity of other 19th Century masterpieces."

Last, we'll also go over a few listener notes for the other work on this CD, Paul Dukas' forgettable The Sorcereror's Apprentice.

Listener notes for Saint-Saens' Third Symphony:
1) This symphony has an unusual structure, with just two movements rather than the more typical four. And yet the two movements have a substructure that roughly corresponds to a traditional four-movement symphony: the first movement has two primary parts, and the second movement begins with a Scherzo (albeit a highly unusual one, see below) and ends with a finale. Thus this work could easily be seen and heard as a four-movement symphony.

2) Another (somewhat) unusual feature: this symphony has an introduction lasting more than a minute. It doesn't add much to the work in my opinion, and a greater composer would consider the intro to be filler and strip it out. Beethoven, for example, never wrote symphonies with superfluous features like this.

3) That said, Saint-Saens can still write some darn good brass parts. Two examples: 4:30-4:50 in the first movement, and much of Track 4 (the second portion of the second movement).

4) The last minute of the first movement sounds like background music to a TV drama--something you'd hear on The Avengers perhaps.

5) You might ask, after ten minutes of this symphony, where the heck is this organ everybody's talking about? It makes a very quiet entrance in Track 2 (the third part of the first movement), but wait....

6) Track 2 is moving and emotional, and strangely, when I'm listening to this part of the symphony, I have this powerful feeling that I'm my younger self, at about age 8, sitting in church, and about to stand up and sing a hymn accompanied by our church's old $800 warbling electric organ. It's simply amazing how music can have such a powerful sensory force that it can literally transport you elswhere (or elsewhen).

7) I particularly like the Scherzo movement, with its quick tempo, shocking minor key and even more shocking pick-up-note-based motifs. I do feel like this portion of the symphony cribs stylistically from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

8) And then we have a piano? Listen at the 1:36 mark in the second movement (Track 3). I thought this was an organ symphony!

9) I told you to wait for the organ, and I hope when you hear the huge entrance it makes in the finale (at the opening seconds of track 4), the wait was worth it. All I could say was whoa. Brainsplitting.

Listener notes for Dukas' L'Apprenti Sorcier (The Sorceror's Apprentice):
1) A couple of words on this forgettable work. I don't understand why it's included on this CD, other than to make buyers feel less ripped off by buying a CD that only has 47 minutes of music on it (without Dukas' work included, this CD would be only 36 minutes long). But why not include another work by Saint-Saens? Ah, that would probably require extra effort to record another symphony, wouldn't it? Much easier to drop in some unrelated recording that's already made and sitting on file somewhere.

2) If it weren't for Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, and the famous animated film Fantasia,this work would be utterly forgotten by our culture by now. It's interesting how an icon of pop culture can overwhelm and co-opt a work like this, isn't it?

3) Finally, somebody clearly placed a microphone too close to the conductor during the recording of this work, giving listeners the distinct pleasure of hearing conductor James Levine muttering, grunting and groaning on a few places in this work (most notably at 6:03-6:30 and 8:00-8:11). Given his fashion proclivities for bad hair and worse glasses, I bet it would be fun to watch him bouncing and caterwauling all over the podium during a live performance.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas

2009-08-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

He has captured the click of castanets, the strumming of guitars, the thud of muffled dreams, the harsh better wail of Gypsy lament, the overwhelming gaiety of the village band, and above all, the wiry tension of the Spanish dance.
--Ralph Kirkpatrick, harpsichordist and Scarlatti biographer

Quite frankly, it's pure luck that any of Domenico Scarlatti's beautiful music survived at all.
**********************
Ivo Pogorelich, piano
Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
Scarlatti: Sonaten
Deutsche Grammophon, 1992
**********************
The original manuscripts of his famous harpsichord sonatas were discarded upon his death, and if it weren't for his wife who had seen to it that his work was copied, his entire oeuvre would likely have disappeared down the memory hole.

Worse, even those copies were ignored for more than a century.

Scarlatti was born into an extremely musical family in Italy, and he was a startlingly talented harpsichordist. But it wasn't until he left Italy to be the private teacher of a princess in Portugal's royal court (the gifted harpsichordist and future queen of Portugal, Maria Barbara) that his genius for composition began to shine.

Scarlatti composed some 600 sonatas for his star pupil, but only published some 30 during his lifetime, dedicating them to the King of Portugal. A deeply unpretentious man, Scarlatti modestly named the opus Exercises for the Harpsichord, as if it were some forgettable book of etudes.

Ironically, Scarlatti's works didn't find a wide audience until a century after his death. In 1838, Carl Czerny (once Beethoven's pupil and a gifted pianist and composer in his own right) edited and published some 200 hundred of Scarlatti's sonatas. And in the early 1900s another 300 of his sonatas became available, thanks to the Italian composer Alessandro Longo.

Listener Notes for Scarlatti's Sonatas:
(One preliminary note: I'll be using Kirkpatrick numbering for these sonatas)
1) This is the second time I've had the privilege of listening to Ivo Pogorelich: I wrote about his performance of Chopin's stunningly beautiful Preludes more than a year ago. Today's CD features an older, slightly more contemplative Ivo--at least that's what we're apparently supposed to think, judging by the cover photograph of him gazing sadly at us out of the corners of his eyes from what appears to be an Elizabethan-era parlor. One of the more amusingly pretentious examples of classical music cover art.

2) Sonata #20 (Track 1 on this CD): Obviously, these works were written for harpsichord, not piano. And Pogorelich plays this sonata in a particularly bouncy, staccato style, as if he's trying replicate the harpsichord's sound on his piano.

3) Another harpsichord vs. piano thought: the harpsichord has no dynamic range--it can only play notes at one volume level. The piano, however, allows the musician to change volume by striking the keys more or less firmly (hence the derivation of the piano's original name, the pianoforte). In fact, the piano enables many phrasing subtleties that cannot be played on a harpsichord. Thus it bears asking, how many artistic liberties is Pogorelich taking when he performs these works? And are they justifiable liberties?

4) Sonata #9 (Track 3): Have you ever heard this many trills in four minutes' worth of music?

5) These sonatas are all 3-5 minutes long, perfect for the modern listener's attention span, and a lot more profound and relaxing than most of the popular music out there.

6) Sonata #1 (Track 5) is a personal favorite of mine. I like the suspense, the minor key and the various flourishes and idiosyncrasies of this work.

7) Did the producers of this CD scramble the numerical order of these sonatas just to annoy me? Here's the order of sonatas: 20, 135, 9, 119, 1, 87, 98, 13, etc. It looks like some kind of Fibonacci sequence.

8) Sonata #13 (Track 8) is supposed to be played fast, at least according to the work's subtitle, Presto, but Pogorelich takes it easy and plays it at a tempo more like the Allegro of Sonata #1. More artistic liberties.

9) Sonata #8 (Track 9) sounds like something Chopin or Schumann might write--one hundred years after Scarlatti lived! Admittedly, this might be a function of Pogorelich's choice of a ponderously slow tempo rather than the Allegro marked on the piece.

10) Sonata #487 (Track 13) is another personal favorite. It sounds like an Eastern European folk tune, with dissonant chords, interesting syncopation--and lots of grace notes, trills and embellishments throughout.

And when the final track ends, all I want to do is figure out where I can more of these amazing sonatas. After all, there are 600 of them!

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Rimsky Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture; Capriccio Espagnol Redux

2009-07-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

One particularly annoying thing about the Rimsky-Korsakov works on this CD is that they are recordings of performances I already own, on a CD that I already wrote about.

Granted, these works are still a great pleasure to listen to (uh, again), but I'd prefer that that publishers at least chose another performance of the same work by the same symphony. At least then listeners could compare the two. But of course the publisher can make more money by simply re-copying an already recorded performance, and no one, except a few true classical music nerds, will ever know the difference.
**********************
Neeme Jarvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Tchaikovsky (1841-1904); Borodin (1833-1887); Rimsky Korsakov (1844-1908)
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture and Marche Slave
Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances and In The Steppes of Central Asia
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture and Capriccio Espagnol
Deutsche Grammophon, 1990
**********************
However, this is a blog about systematically going through all of my classical music CDs, and this is another CD in my collection. So, dammit, I'm going to listen to these works again and still make (just a few) comments.

Listener Notes for Russian Easter Festival Overture:
1) It's an interesting experience (to me at least) to re-read my prior notes from this recording and see to what extent my views differ a year later. An example: the opening oboe part really bugged me last time--yet I didn't really notice the intonation issue this time around.

2) The tubas and trombones have a delicious, huge sound in this work. If I close my eyes, I feel like I'm listening to the Chicago Symphony. It's a bit strange though, because these same musicians sounded underfed in the 1812 Overture, a work recorded two years later by the same symphony. Did the low brass section change personnel?

Listener Notes for Capriccio Espagnol:
1) I'll give the clarinet soloist an "E" for enthusiasm, but a B- for intonation for the solo at 0:13 and then reprised at 0:36.

2) Yep, I still like the second movement best with those wonderful opening French horn chords. There's something about a team of French horns playing clear, well-tuned major chords that really makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

3) The principal flutist is one of the standout musicians in this symphony. As an example, listen to the extremely difficult solo beginning at 9:07.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture and Marche Slave

2009-07-23T03:11:00.000-07:00

The overture will be very loud and noisy, but probably has no artistic merit, as I wrote it without either warmth or love.
--Tchaikovsky, writing about the 1812 Overture to his patron Madame von Meck

Tchaikovsky wasn't the only critic of his 1812 Overture. There isn't a music pundit anywhere who hasn't said something witheringly condescending about this work ("it is filled with cheap thrills," sneers my trusty Essential Canon of Classical Music). 1812 is the bane of high school bands anywhere and an eye-roll-inducer at summer pops orchestras everywhere.

And despite all this, it remains one of the most electrifying works of classical music ever written.
**********************
Neeme Jarvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Tchaikovsky (1841-1904); Borodin (1833-1887); Rimsky Korsakov (1844-1908)
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture and Marche Slave
Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances and In The Steppes of Central Asia
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture and Capriccio Espagnol
Deutsche Grammophon, 1990
**********************
Listener Notes for Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture:
1) This is a somewhat unusual recording in that it includes a chorus, which was not how Tchaikovsky wrote the piece. It's a bit disconcerting at first to those familiar with the instrumental version, but you'll find you'll quickly grow to like it.

2) At the 4:30 mark, you'll hear the woodwinds attempt to play the well-known theme, which is usually played using an articulation technique called triple-tonguing (I know it sounds a tad pornographic, but it's not, sorry to say). What makes me chuckle however, is how reed-based woodwinds, even at the professional level, cannot triple-tongue. It's something any decent brass player can do competently at the high school level.

3) This isn't a completely clean recording. One of the more noticeable muffs is the bass (or perhaps E-flat?) clarinet playing completely out of tune at 7:02-7:05.

4) From 7:15-8:10, listen for the soaring, Bruckner-esque strings--that is some heavy schmaltz Tchaikovsky's throwing in here. But I can't help it, I love this stuff. Who cares if these are cheap thrills? Also, note that this passage gets re-used at 11:03.

5) From 12:07 to the end, just let the tension build and let the music wash over you. If you know anything about the Russian character and this culture's ability to endure suffering and display heroism at certain unique moments of its history, you'll understand why this work can be so emotionally powerful.

6) A few words about the cannon shots that are regular features of any performance of The 1812 Overture (I know, more cheap thrills): The shots on this CD were fired by the Gothenburg Artillery Division, using cannons dated from 1863. I'm sure the original instrument purists were, uh, up in arms when they found out cannons from the mid-19th Century were used for a work celebrating a war that took place in the early 19th Century. Also, the liner notes from this CD, in a peculiar example of how to waste readers' time with useless information, contains this amusing little nugget:

"Bjorn Harmond, the Division's president since its foundation, supervised the firing of the shots, which were ignited using linstocks and detonated with black blasting powder."

Nice. I don't know how I got through life not knowing this.

Listener Notes for Marche Slave:
1) Tchaikovsky wrote Marche Slave in support of Russia's involvement in the 1876 Serb0-Turkish war, and it's filled with familiar-sounding Slavic folk tunes. He didn't view this composition with the same cynical derision with which he viewed his 1812 Overture.

2) Ah, but does the key theme at the 4:54 mark sound at all familiar to you? Yep, it's taken directly out of the 1812 Overture (actually, both are renditions of Russia's Tsarist National Anthem). But it's worth asking--which of these two works was more cynically composed?

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

The 100th Post of 101 Classical Music CDs

2009-07-17T03:11:00.000-07:00

Somehow it came and went and I never noticed. But my discussion of Grieg's Lyric Pieces was the 100th post here at this blog.

And so I'm going to take this opportunity, belated as it is, to thank you for reading and for sharing in this journey I'm taking through my classical music. I'm so grateful for this blog, because it's taught me an important lesson beyond the composers, the history and the music. It has taught me that there is amazing beauty and joy in life right in front of our noses--if we would just take the time to look, listen and pay attention.

But because I was too busy with life, all of the amazing classical music I owned just sat there, in a corner of our living room, dusty, forgotten and ignored. Those 101 classical music CDs were a metaphor for how I failed to appreciate the truly important things in life--and now they've become a metaphor for how I'm beginning to get it right.

Okay. Enough sentimentality. As some of you have noticed, I took a bit of a break from this blog over the past few months to travel and to work on some other writing projects--including a blog about writing I'm quietly launching.

But I'm back now--and it's time to get back to the music.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Alexander Borodin: In the Steppes of Central Asia; Polovtsian Dances

2009-07-15T03:11:00.000-07:00

I am a composer in search of oblivion, and I'm always slightly ashamed that I compose.
--Alexander Borodin

Today we're going to listen to two works by Alexander Borodin: the lesser-known In the Steppes of Central Asia, and the popular and well-known Polovtsian Dances.
**********************
Neeme Jarvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Tchaikovsky (1841-1904); Borodin (1833-1887); Rimsky Korsakov (1844-1908)
Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture and Marche Slave
Alexander Borodin: Polovtsian Dances and In The Steppes of Central Asia
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture and Capriccio Espagnol
Deutsche Grammophon, 1990
**********************
Borodin never gets top billing in symphony concerts or on classical music CDs, so it shouldn't be a surprise that he's on the undercard on today's CD. Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, a work well-known to the point of parody, gets to be the headliner.

It shouldn't be this way. If you take the time to have one close listen to Borodin's infectious Polovtsian Dances, you'll wonder why the 1812 Overture is so much more popular.

Borodin was a man of immense talents, but music was arguably one of his weakest subjects. He was a brilliant scientist (one of Russia's most prominent), a gifted and popular university teacher, and an early supporter of education for women--but he was an untrained and undereducated composer.

Unfortunately for us, Borodin died at the relatively young age of 53, and because of the many obligations of his scientific career, he did not compose that much music over the course of his brief life. We are all the poorer for it.

Listener notes for Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia:
1) Borodin composed this seven-minute work (it's usually called a tone poem for lack of a better descriptor) in honor of the 25th anniversary of Tsar Alexander II's coronation.

2) Off-key clarinet alert from 2:15 to 2:3o. Is the clarinetist from the Philly Orchestra sitting in on this performance? Another slightly less off-key solo from the clarinetist comes at 6:40. I'm already dreading the famous clarinet solo in the opening minutes of the Polovtsian Dances.

3) The flute player answers the clarinet solo at the very end of Steppes and has no trouble at all with intonation.

Listener notes for Borodin's Polovtsian Dances:
1) Well, I can't say our clarinetist flubs the well-known solo here (at 2:17-2:30), but I've heard it played better by a high-schooler at an all-state band performance (I'm serious). Note also that the flute really fumbles the following call-and-answer solo shared with the piccolo.

2) One of my favorite parts of this work is at 3:30, when the third dance starts. The tympani gets the tension going, then the tuba explodes with shockingly powerful downbeats beneath the rest of the orchestra. I love that.

3) It's a little strange listening to this work with a chorus singing along with it. I've only performed (and heard it performed) with instruments only. But these dances were originally part of the opera Prince Igor that Borodin wrote (and never finished by the way), so this is how the Dances were originally written.

4) The former trumpet player in me was never all that happy with the boring trumpet parts of the Polovtsian Dances, but now that my playing days are over, perhaps this isn't such a good measure of a classical music work any more, is it?

5) The interlocking solos between the oboe and clarinet (they occur twice during the work, at 5:46 and again at 8:38--and then the strings play the same parts a third time at 9:28) turn out to be really effective tension-builders. Sometimes the really unusual and creative musical effects like these can only come from a composer who spent his life as an untrained outsider.

Why Everybody Hates Modern Classical Music

2009-03-29T03:12:00.000-07:00

If there was a golden age for classical music, it certainly wasn't any time during the past fifty years.

In many ways, classical music has lost its way in our current cultural landscape. We've seen the Columbus Symphony close down and the San Antonio Symphony declare bankruptcy (admittedly both have re-emerged, but with truncated seasons and musicians working for lower pay). Thanks to our current economic straits, it's highly plausible that in the next few years we will see a number of other symphony orchestras either close down or significantly reduce their size and scope.

The key to the long-term sustainability of any art form is the quality, dynamism and impact of its new works. Unfortunately, that's where classical music is struggling most of all. Quick, name three classical music composers who published something in the last ten years. Uh, okay, name two? One?

Symphony orchestras all around the world have been subsisting on the crowd favorites like Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms because that's what audiences want to hear. But what happens when an orchestra tries to tackle truly modern works? For a particularly savage article on this very subject, read Joe Queenan's exceptionally well-written article in the Guardian. It hurts to read it, but you have to admit he has a point:

Last winter, I attended a performance of Luciano Berio's seminal 1968 composition Sinfonia. Two days later, the New York Times reported that the New York Philharmonic gave an "electrifying and sumptuously colourful" reading of this "all-embracing and ingenious" masterpiece. Maybe they did. But the day I heard it, I gazed down from the balcony at a sea of old men snoring, a bunch of irate, middle-aged women fanning themselves with their programmes, and scores of high-school students poised to garrote their teachers in reprisal for 35 minutes of non-stop torture.

I can only add, as a person who's been to his share of New York Philharmonic concerts, it is disturbing to see a fair percentage of grown adults sleeping during performances that they paid to attend.

But don't let Queenan's harsh condescension stop you from hearing his fundamental thesis, which has significant merit:

The debate about what is wrong with the world of classical music has been going on for at least a half a century. (Meanwhile, jazz, lacking the immense state funding to which classical music has access, is literally dying.) Specious arguments dominate the conversation. Why has the public accepted abstract art but not abstract music? (Discordant visual art does not cause visceral pain, discordant music does.) Why does the public accept atonal music in films, but not in the concert hall? (Jaws wouldn't work if the shark's attacks were synchronised with Carmen. We expect sound effects in the movies, but we're not going to pay to hear them in the concert hall.)

When your audience reaction ranges from polite applause to visceral pain, you have a problem.

Readers, what do you think is the solution? Should our orchestras just stick to the traditional concert repertory and give the people what they want? Should our orchestras really subject their audiences to pain?

Related Links:
Wall Street Journal arts critic Terry Teachout's rebuttal of Queenan's article
Joe Queenan's letter to the WSJ in response (whatever his views, you have to admit this guy can really turn a phrase. Anyone who writes "No one defending modernism would ever use Vaughan Williams as an example. It's like using Jane Austen to defend pornography" deserves to be read, if only for the sheer fun of it).

Grieg: Lyric Pieces

2009-03-16T03:27:00.000-07:00

What is so-called originality, so-called novelty? It isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is truth of feeling.
--Edvard Grieg

Grieg wrote a total of 66 lyric pieces for piano, and our pianist, Emil Gilels, chose the twenty works featured on this disc himself. It's refreshing to hear these beautiful works for solo piano played so lovingly, beautifully and with such perfection. This is the kind of classical music CD you'll listen to joyfully for decades.
**********************
Emil Gilels, piano
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Grieg: Lyric Pieces (Lyrische Stücke), performed by Emil Gilels
Deutsche Grammophon/Polydor, 1974
**********************
It's a pleasure to hear a CD of passionate music performed by a pianist who actually cares about the recording he was making, and it's a particularly stark contrast from our last CD of piano music grudgingly performed by Glenn Gould.

Before we get to the listener notes, I'd like to make a brief point about two inspiring moments in Grieg's life. The first occurred when Grieg was 15, when the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull visited Grieg's family and encouraged Edvard, both in his music and in his love of his native Norway. The meeting had an enormous effect on the young boy. Writing about the meeting years later, Grieg wrote: "I felt something like an electric current pass through me when his hand touched mine."

In his mid-twenties another inspiring meeting impacted Grieg's life. Franz Liszt, who at that time was one of the world's most acclaimed pianists, had discovered Grieg's compositions and encouraged the young composer to visit him in Rome, even helping the young man secure a grant to pay for the trip. The meetings between the two men and the encouragement Liszt gave him propelled Grieg forward.

"Keep steadily on, I tell you, you have the talent and the capacity, but don't let them intimidate you."
--Franz Liszt, to Edvard Grieg

Interestingly, Liszt had a similarly inspiring experience as a boy when he met Beethoven and received similar encouragement in his musical efforts.

What's the message here? It's this: spread encouragement, especially if you are a leader in your field. Your thoughts, words and moral support can carry immense weight with talented young people who may very well be tomorrow's great leaders. You never know who you might influence or how far your influence might propel that person.

If it weren't for these two chance encounters in Grieg's life, we may never have had this amazing music.

The artist is an optimist. Otherwise he would be no artist. He believes and hopes in the triumph of the good and the beautiful. He trusts in his lucky star till his last breath.
--Edvard Grieg

Listener notes for Grieg's Lyric Pieces:
For today's listener notes, I'll simply share a few thoughts on four of my favorite pieces on this CD.

#7 Norwegian Dance (Norwegischer Tanz): Perhaps my favorite work on the entire disc--in a minute and a half, it really shocks the ears with a really fun part for the left hand, and a touch of atonality at just the right times. When you hear this piece, you feel like you've been transported onto a sailing ship in the North Sea.

#8 Notturno: This is a particularly beautiful piece with a wash of colors and moods.

#12 Homeward (Heimwarts): I love the fun, the sense of nostalgia and the energy of this work.

#17 Once upon a Time (Es war einmal): This work paints a picture in the impressionistic style of Chopin or Schumann, and it includes some interesting key changes that keep you just a bit off-balance. Also, there's a bit of a political backdrop to this piece, as it supposedly refers to a one-time political union between Sweden and Norway, combining folk music from both countries.

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier: Glenn Gould

2009-03-11T03:06:00.000-07:00

Today we listen to possibly the most mediocre CD in my entire classical music collection, Glenn Gould's recording of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier.
**********************
Glenn Gould, piano
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I
The Glenn Gould Edition - Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II
Sony Classical, 1971/1993
**********************
It would take a nearly a century for his ideas to catch on, but aspects of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier would eventually come to revolutionize Western music. With this work, Bach promoted a new way of tuning keyboard instruments, using a twelve-tone chromatic system rather than the "meantone" system that predominated at the time.

Furthermore, this enormous collection of preludes and fugues heavily influenced composers--including giants like Beethoven and Mozart--for hundreds of years to come, as it established some of the key ground rules for harmony and counterpoint.

And the music is hypnotic. Well, at least it should be hypnotic. Only this two-part, four-CD collection has a problem. And the problem is the performer. Glenn Gould may be one of the 20th century's most highly regarded pianists, but he plays this music with open derision. The performance may be mostly mistake-free, but it is prickly, uninspired and ham-handedly phrased.

But by far the worst and most distracting feature of this recording is Gould mumbling, moaning and singing the parts along with himself while he plays. It is so distracting that I couldn't help but laugh out loud during the recording (and believe me, it wasn't a funny, ha-ha kind of laugh). This kind of error should result in the recording engineer's summary expulsion from the industry.

This isn't Mauricio Polini muh-muh-muh-ing along with a Beethoven piano sonata. That, at least, is real music played with honest passion.

But these Bach preludes and fugues need to be played with at least some passion and creativity, or they begin to sound like computer generated music. This is complex music that might be interesting on a compositional or harmonic level, but it sounds emotionally bankrupt if it's played by a performer who's sounds like he just doesn't want to be there.

Played by a performer who sounds like he just doesn't want to be there. Hmm. Kind of like Glenn Gould sounds on this very disc.

One more point about Gould's open derision to this music. In the liner notes to this CD author Michael Stegemann illustrates--with great success, by the way--the "undisguised lack of enthusiasm" Gould had towards doing a recording project of Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. Gould calls the preludes "prosaically prefatory" and he even compares the Well-Tempered Clavier to Muzak!

Here's a quote from the liner notes that you can interpret as you wish. I read it to be profoundly condescending:

"There is a real Muzak-like significance to the nature of the fugue itself... I would like to think that one could dip in and dip out of and experience of music just as easily as you get into an elevator (with a bit of Mantovani for 35 seconds) to get to the 19th floor."
--Glenn Gould

Ouch. This explains why Gould was so reluctant to make these recordings in the first place.

And if you study the dates of the recordings themselves, you'll see how this pianist, who is photographed in various recumbent and/or contemplative poses in this CD collection, took his time and dragged his feet plenty during these recording sessions. Most of the tracks have multiple recording dates, dates that are years apart in some cases. And the entire recording of Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, about 103 minutes of music, was done over more than four years.

That is some serious finger-dragging, and it also helps explains Gould's limp and uninspired performance.

I'm sorry that I'm running posts on two disappointing classical music CDs in a row! But when you are systematically working through CD collection, you're bound to catch a few losers here and there. After all, it's impossible for all of your discs have to be above average.

But if there is one thing you should take away from reading this post, it is this: don't buy this disc. Look for a performance by somebody who actually gives a damn about the music.

Perhaps consider instead Wanda Landowska's extremely well-regarded recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier on harpsichord, available in two volumes.

Respighi: Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals

2009-03-06T03:38:00.001-08:00

With today's CD we make a move into the modern era to listen to some of Ottorino Respighi's best known works: Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals.

These three works, the so-called "Roman Trilogy," were all written in the 20th century, but they are all throwback works that sound like they came from the mid-1900s. And this may sound harsh, but all three of them are largely forgettable.
**********************
Guisepe Sinopoli and the New York Philharmonic
Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)
Fontane Di Roma, Pini Di Roma, Feste Romane
Deutsche Grammophon, 1993
**********************
One of the common factoids you'll see when reading about Respighi is that he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov during a visit to Russia in 1900-1901, and learned many secrets of orchestration from him. You can also feel the influence of other symphonic "imagists" like Ravel and Debussy in Respighi's music.

You'll never find Respighi sitting among the true gods of classical music, but these particular works (well, at least Fountains of Rome and Pines of Rome) are thought of as admirable and among his better compositions.

Listener Notes for Fountains of Rome:
1) Each movement of this work represents one of Rome's fountains, viewed at a different time of day.

2) In the third movement ("La fontana di Trevi al meriggio") you'll hear some serious low brass parts. I've heard the New York Phil perform plenty of times over the years, but I've never heard the tuba and trombones rip it like they do in this movement. What a pleasure.

3) I'm not sure this work sounds particularly original. It feels like Debussy did this kind of music already, years earlier, and more skillfully too. Finally, does this work sound to you like a film score? I mean that pejoratively.

Listener Notes for Pines of Rome:
1) Notice the bright and cheery trumpet parts at the beginning of the first movement. Parts like this make Pines of Rome a popular staple for high school and college concert bands everywhere.

2) The second movement is as melancholy as the first movement is cheery and treacly. And we get to hear yet another good trumpet part, a solo, which is beautifully played by our New York Philharmonic principal trumpet.

3) Listen for the repeated theme at roughly the 3:40 mark in the second movement. Doesn't this theme sound like it should be the musical backdrop for a band of native Americans in a John Ford movie? Like when the Comanche come over the horizon in The Searchers? I'm probably just being unfairly condescending about music that--let's be honest--sounds suspiciously like a film score.

4) Credit where credit is due in the fourth movement: this recording features a professional clarinetist who plays beautifully--and on key--for an entire solo. Philly Orchestra, please take note.

5) Notice the recording of a bird call used in this performance (begins at 6:20 in the third movement "I pini del Gianicolo"). So I guess white guys invented sampling after all.

Listener Notes for Roman Festivals:
1) I don't mean to be overly harsh, but can't you just tell that this piece is going to be melodramatic with a capital "M" right from the very beginning? Even the liner notes accompanying this CD call Roman Festivals "an unashamedly gaudy showpiece."

2) Can you hear Christian martyrs being attacked by lions in the Roman circus in the first movement? If you can't, go back and listen again.

3) Did you notice the mandolin playing in the third movement (L'Ottobrata)? It happens at the 6:57 mark, just after the violin solo ends. I had to cringe just a little bit, simply because this is all the evidence that you need that Respighi is trying too hard with this composition.

4) Speaking of melodramatic, how about the entire fourth movement of Roman Festivals, and worse still, the nearly two minute-long finale? I considered this work to be the least noteworthy recording on a completely forgettable classical music CD. This is not one of my prized discs.

Schubert: Symphony #9 "The Great"

2009-02-28T03:20:00.000-08:00

I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.
--Franz Schubert

Today we will cover the last of my Schubert CDs, his Ninth Symphony in C major.
**********************
Leonard Bernstein and the Concertgebouworkest Amsterdam
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Schubert: Symphony No. 9 "The Great" in C Major
Deutsche Grammophon, 1989
**********************
As we mentioned before, Schubert contracted syphilis at age 26, and five years later his life was cut short at age 31. His early death was a horrible loss for classical music.

But something amazing happened to Schubert in his last years: in 1827, Beethoven, nearing his own death, had read some sixty of Schubert's songs. Impressed, he asked to see many of Schubert's other compositions. And, in the words of music historian David Dubal:

One week before Beethoven's death, Schubert was brought to his bedside. For a brief moment, two of the greatest musical geniuses met. At Beethoven's funeral procession, Schubert was one of the thirty-six torchbearers.

But Schubert himself had only twenty months to live. They were months of awesome productivity. Only his death stopped the heavenly flow of music. One masterwork after another poured from him as from a magic fountain.
--from The Essential Canon of Classical Music

During those final months of his life, Schubert composed some 30 piano works, several choral works, his famous song cycle Die Winterreise, an entire mass, and three chamber music works. Much of this work was done from his sickbed, while the man was in great physical pain. It was truly a period of godlike productivity. We were lucky to have this man among us for as long as we did.

And so, knowing what you now know about Schubert, go back and re-read the quote at the very beginning of this post. It suddenly seems less like a boast and more like an understatement, doesn't it? And it certainly puts my plans for the next two years in a whole new perspective.

One brief comment on the Schubert's Ninth Symphony before we get into the listener notes: It was originally thought that Schubert also composed this work during his final months. It turns out, however, that even though the score bears the date of March 1828 (Schubert died in November 1828), the bulk of the symphony was actually written in 1825. Schubert biographer John Reed, in his book Schubert: The Final Years, was the first to make the case that Schubert merely revised the work, rather than composing it, in his final year.

Listener notes for Schubert's Ninth Symphony:
1) Recall the leap in compositional style Schubert made from his Third Symphony to his Eighth, and how he leapfrogged from the Classical Era to the Romantic era? Well, the Ninth Symphony sounds like yet another leapfrog, to the era of Bruckner or even Mahler. The opening french horn theme is a particularly Brucknerian touch.

2) For another example of a compositional leap Schubert makes, listen to the descending chords played by the string section at 7:30 in the first movement. There are some dissonances in there that sound almost shocking. You would never hear anything like that in Schubert's early works.

3) This symphony provides further proof that unless you want your orchestra to sound naked, you must pay up for a good oboe player. A mediocre oboist would hinder the first movement and would utterly destroy the second movement of this symphony. Fortunately, the oboist from the Concertgeboworkest Amsterdam is exceptional and an absolute pleasure to listen to.

4) At 5:16 in the second movement the trombone section plays three descending chords. One of them is way off key. Ouch. And it happens again later in the movement at about the 11:54 mark.

5) The third movement is structured in sort of a weird way. We hear a light and lively, but relatively typical, scherzo in the first four minutes. But then there's a second scherzo theme that follows, also in 3/4 time, but slower and more sedate. Then, we return to a restatement of the first, faster scherzo. And then, that theme modulates up one tone (on this CD, it occurs at 8:04). After that, it's one more restatement of the original theme, and then the movement ends. I don't mean to bore you by reciting the various parts of the movement, it's just that this is an unusual structure, and the "second theme" seems out of place with the rest of the movement. It's as if Schubert just stuck it in there.

6) Have you ever thought to try to hum a few bars of the fourth movement? Uh-huh, exactly. One of the problems 19th century audiences had with the finale was its lack of any real tune or melody. In fact, there is a story from a rehearsal of this symphony (likely it's apocryphal, but it always seems that apocryphal stories make the best stories, so I'll tell it anyway) in which several orchestra members laughed aloud during the fourth movement, one of them asking another if he'd managed to hear a tune at all. Of course, we're still listening to this work more than a century after those laughing musicians came and went. I guess it just goes to show how badly contemporary audiences can misjudge great works of art.

Please take a look at my other blogs!
Casual Kitchen: Cook More. Think More. Spend Less.
Quick Writing Tips: Short posts on writing, twice a week.

Schubert: Symphony #8, The Unfinished Symphony

2009-02-23T03:06:00.000-08:00

After listening to this symphony, it's hard not to recognize the great leap in style Schubert makes from his very Classical-sounding Third in just seven years. He was barely 18 when he wrote his Third Symphony. By the time he had turned 25, he had composed (okay, partly composed) one of the quintessential Romantic-era symphonies.
**********************
Carlos Kleiber and the Wiener Philharmoniker
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Schubert: Symphony #3, Symphony #8
Deutsche Grammophon, 1979
**********************
If Schubert's Third sounds like Haydn, then his Eighth sounds like Brahms. Only Brahms wrote his symphonies some 30 to 50 years later.

It took Schubert seven years to go from writing a derivative and backward looking symphony to writing a work that was 50 years ahead of its time. Imagine what he could have done had he lived as long as Beethoven.

It makes me think that the greatest tragedy in the history of 19th century classical music was the early and untimely death of Franz Schubert.

Finally, I have to quote one of the all-too-few episodes of The Simpsons that involves classical music:

Principal Skinner: Tonight, Sherbert's, oops... heh heh... Schubert's Unfinished symphony.
Homer: Oh good, unfinished. This shouldn't take long.

Of course, the joke's on him. Even though the Eighth is only two movements "long," this work is actually longer than his four-movement Third Symphony. Later in the episode:

Homer: D'oh! How much longer was Sherbert planning on making this piece of junk?

Listener notes for Sherbert's Unfinished Symphony:
1) I didn't understand at first why Deutsche Grammophon would put Schubert's Third and Eighth Symphonies on the same CD. But it's the contrast that makes these two symphonies so enjoyable. After finishing the Third, a beautiful and pleasant symphony, it only takes the first five seconds of the Eighth to make you feel like you've been plucked from the Classical era and dropped into the late decades of the Romantic era. From Kansas to Oz in 16 bars.

2) Notice the simple and memorable six-note motif, the modulation and the inversion of that theme throughout the work, the use of an extensive dynamic range, and the overall gravitas of the music. Classic markers of Romantic era symphonies. Oh, and the brass parts are more fun to play.

3) The stress and tension at the halfway mark in the first movement is nearly unbearable. See passages at 7:30, 7:43, 7:55 and especially the entire passage from 8:07 until the music resolves back to the major key at around the 9:00 mark. What compelling music!

4) Listen for the clarinet solo, beginning at 2:14 in the second movement. That is how a clarinet should be played. In tune, mournful and not shrill. Maybe I should mail this CD to the principal clarinetist of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Come back in five days for our final Schubert post!

Schubert: Symphony #3

2009-02-18T03:30:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. Today's CD is not only further proof of my need to start this blog, but it is perhaps the most embarrassing example of how mindless and uncontemplative my life had become over the past several years.

This CD sat on my shelf with more than a hundred other CDs for years, unlistened to, unnoticed, and collecting dust. It was just like all the rest of my CDs, except, uh, in one key respect: It was still in its cellophane wrapper.

I had been so out of touch with myself that I bought CDs that I forgot I bought. I must have wanted to listen to this CD at some point, but apparently in the time between buying the CD and putting it on the shelf, I got distracted. For ten years.

That is a prime, and admittedly foolish-sounding, example of why I'm taking a break from my career, and why I started this blog. I guess I didn't want to wake up in another ten years and hear myself making excuses for myself like "I work too hard and make too much money to pay any attention to all the stuff I buy."
**********************
Carlos Kleiber and the Wiener Philharmoniker
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Schubert: Symphony #3, Symphony #8
Deutsche Grammophon, 1979
**********************
Enough about me: A few words about Schubert before we begin the listener notes. You'll find Schubert, especially his early works like his Third Symphony, written just months after his 18th birthday, sounds very much like Mozart or Haydn. Despite living in the Romantic era, Schubert sounds much more like a Classical-era composer:

[Schubert] stands between the worlds of classical and romantic music. He is, however, chiefly to be considered as the last of the classical composers.
--Maurice J.E. Brown, in his biography of Franz Schubert

And he was yet another brilliant composer who died too young. Schubert contracted syphilis in 1823 at age 26 and died just five years later of complications from the disease (the CD liner notes accompanying this CD bluntly describe him as a "stricken philanderer"). One wonders what music he would have written had he lived longer. Would he have evolved as Beethoven did and taken his music into and beyond the Romantic era?

Today's recording is excellent, and I highly recommend it. You can buy the exact recording featured in this post from Amazon by clicking on the text link above, or by clicking on the graphic link at the bottom of this post.

And for those of you interested in an excellent recording of all nine (or perhaps more accurately put, eight and a half) of Schubert's symphonies, let me suggest one of the best and most affordable collections out there: Schubert: Complete Symphonies, by Richardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic. Again, just click the link to be taken to the product page at Amazon.com.

We'll return to Schubert and his "Unfinished" Symphony in our next post.

Listener notes for Schubert's Third Symphony:
1) There's an opening introduction to the first movement, a la Haydn. It's not quite as catchy as a typical Haydn hook, but it's an obvious example of how "Classical" this symphony sounds.

2) I particularly like the two-note call and response parts from the woodwinds early in the first movement.

3) After you've listened to the second and third movements, both captivating and both as cute as buttons, convince me that you could tell this apart from any of the middle movements of Haydn's symphonies!

4) Only one minor criticism of an otherwise flawless work: the brass parts, and most notably the trumpet parts, are entirely oom-pah parts. Thus this is the sort of piece I'd like to listen to, not the kind of piece I'd like to perform.

Schumann: Fantasie in C Major: Arabeske; Humoreske; Novelette No. 9

2009-02-13T03:11:00.000-08:00

Today we'll pick up where we left off with Schumann's piano works, and we'll tackle disc 3 of my four-CD collection of this brilliant composer's piano works, which contains his Fantasie in C major (opus 17), Arabeske (opus 18) and Humoreske (opus 20).
**********************
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Performed by Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991)
Schumann: Piano Works
Deutsche Grammophone, 1975
**********************
It's interesting to read that Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, despite the fact that they lived in the 1800s, experienced one particular problem that any modern two-career couple might find familiar:

In 1844, Clara persuaded her husband to accompany her on a lucrative four-month Russian tour. At a reception, he was asked if he too was a musician. A part of him resented her career and her fame.
--from David Dubal's The Essential Canon of Classical Music

Instead of feeling blessed (uh, and enriched?) by his wife's professional success, Schumann felt jealous. A shame, especially considering that over the next ten years his accelerating decline into insanity would sorely test--yet never break--Clara's loyalty and dedication.

Let's get into the listener notes. First, note that the three primary works on this CD are quite a bit longer than the three- or four-minute scenelets on disc 1 and disc 2 of this collection.

Listener notes for Fantasie in C major:
1) Right from the beginning, this work sounds very much like Chopin. Remember: the two composers were almost exact contemporaries--both born in 1810 and both dying young (Schumann at 46 and Chopin at 39).

2) There's a melody that appears a couple of times in the first movement (first at about the 2:45 mark, then again at 9:50) that sounds very much like the "recitative" passage of the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata #17, (Der Sturm/The Tempest). Hopefully I'll get to writing about some more of Beethoven's piano sonatas in the coming weeks!

3) Wilhelm Kempff seems to be playing this piece quite a bit more cleanly than some of the other works on this 4-CD collection. Ironically he was 76 years old when he recorded "Fantasy", some four or five years older than he was when he recorded the first two works on disc one, which I claimed had so many mistakes. There goes that theory.

4) Is it just me, or do I hear another passage in the third movement that sounds like an homage to the middle movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Piano Sonata? It starts at the 2:09 mark, then repeats at different points in the movement, most distinctly at 6:25.

Listener notes for Arabeske:
1) This all-too-brief piece (just six and a half minutes) may be the most hypnotically beautiful work on this entire four-CD collection. A perfect piece to help you de-stress on the commute home from work.

Listener notes for Humoreske:
1) Notice how the first movement of this four-movement composition has multiple discrete sections, each of which could be considered a mini-movement, or a standalone piece. Much like many of the works in Schumann's Papillons or his Carnaval.

2) I hear a few mistakes creeping into Kempff's playing in the second movement.

3) The third movement contains segments entitled "Sehr Lebhaft" and "Mit einegem Pomp" which roughly translates to "Very lively" and "With some pomp." I guess that's sort of humor-esque.

How to "Learn" a Piece of Classical Music

2009-02-08T03:27:00.000-08:00

Classical music isn't meant to be listened to once and then forgotten. It is complex and many-layered music that is meant to be learned.

But what does it even mean to "learn" a work of classical music?

If you were in a music appreciation class, you might be subjected to a "needle drop" test, where the teacher plays a brief section of a symphony for the class. If you can name the symphony and the composer (and likely some other trivia like the year it was written or the year the composer was born or died), congratulations! You've "learned" that piece.

A professional musician would say he "learned" a classical music work once he can play--and play well, hopefully--all of the relevant parts in that symphony assigned to his instrument.

But for those of us who are not in class or working as pro musicians, those of us with busy lives and a limited amount of time to dedicate to classical music, I'll submit a more entry-level definition of what it means to "learn" a classical music work: can you recognize it?

For a person with an average ear and an average memory for music, it should take four or five attentive, careful listens to a symphony to satisfy this definition of classical music familiarity.

If that seems like a lot of work, just know that there's a reward waiting for you at the end of this journey: After those four or five listens, you'll really start to know the key themes, motifs and melodies of the work. You'll know how each movement starts and ends, and you'll build your own mental list of your personal favorite parts of each movement. You'll truly understand the "arc" of the symphony.

Many classical music works are simply too complex for the listener to ingest and fully understand right away, and thus most symphonies sound better and better upon repeated listens. To use an analogy, think of them as films like Citizen Kane where many of the most interesting cinematic techniques and other subtleties don't become apparent until you've seen the film a few times.

Other symphonies, perhaps Mozart's or Haydn's, might have witticisms and "in jokes" that you may only discover after repeated listens. And to stretch the film analogy still further (and give you an unexpected window into my amazing cultural sophistication), these works are akin to films like Talladega Nights, where you catch some of the best lines and jokes only after a few viewings. And hey, comedies are always funnier once you've memorized a few of the best quotes.

In fact, I'd argue that the real pleasures of listening to any classical music work begin to manifest after the second or third close listen. It's ironic, but it's more fun to listen to a symphony once you know what's coming.

Try this with the next symphony you choose to listen to. If you're not sure where to begin, I've compiled a list of key works that you can use to start your own classical music collection. Pick a out a few these CDs and let me know how it goes!

Mendelssohn: Symphony #4

2009-02-02T03:29:00.000-08:00

Mendelssohn began the initial sketches of his Fourth Symphony after a visit to Italy. His visit there was part of a tour he took across Europe in his early twenties, something any newly-minted college kid might appreciate.

Of course Mendelssohn didn't exactly stay at youth hostels. Having been born into an extremely wealthy family, and already famous for his musical skills, he spent his tour dazzling the highest echelons of European society.
**********************
Herbert Von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Five Symphonies
Deutsche Grammophon, 1973
**********************
Unfortunately, this symphony never really satisfied Mendelssohn. He made repeated and wholesale revisions to the work, and it was never published during his lifetime. And yet this work was loved when it first premiered, and it remains one of Mendelssohn's most popular works to this day. Once again, a brilliant composer judges his own music far too harshly.

A quick musical recommendation for any readers interested in buying Mendelssohn's symphonies. The Five Symphonies CD from Deutsche Grammophon featured in today's post is definitely worth owning, but since his Third and Fourth Symphonies stand out above the others, there's an even better option: this highly regarded CD, also recorded by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, which contains the Third and Fourth Symphonies by themselves. You can get the best of Mendelssohn while saving yourself an extra thirty bucks.

Listener notes for Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony:
1) Right away we have quite a contrast to the Third Symphony, as this symphony lacks a lengthy dramatic intro and instead starts right in on the main theme.

2) Nice to hear a clarinet play a few parts and only be slightly off-key at times, unlike the clarinet playing on the last few discs I've listened to. I'm still reflexively cringing whenever I hear a clarinet, and I wonder how long it's going to take me to break that habit.

3) The second movement starts out like a kind of a fugue, adding layer upon layer as it goes. The movement builds tension as the key shifts from minor to major several times. And then the music just fades away, softly and mysteriously. It's beautiful.

4) The trumpets don't get to do much during this symphony. And when they do come in, with some obligatory "bup bup-bup buhhhh" parts at the 5:54 in the third movement, it's clear that their instruments have gone cold and out of tune. Sigh.

5) Did I like this work more or less than Mendelssohn's Third? Only slightly less. I really enjoyed both symphonies, but the twists and turns and extra drama and excitement of the Third makes it my favorite of this composer's symphonies. What a privilege it has been to have the opportunity to listen carefully to each of these works!

Mendelssohn: Symphony #3

2009-01-28T03:11:00.000-08:00

Over the next two posts, we will finish off the remaining two Felix Mendelssohn's symphonies on my 3-CD collection of his Five Symphonies. Today, we'll cover his Third, the "Scottish" Symphony.
**********************
Herbert Von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Five Symphonies
Deutsche Grammophon, 1973
**********************
In my view, Mendelssohn's Third Symphony is the best one I've listened to yet, after having listened to his First, his marathon Second, and his Fifth.

And my boy Felix himself backs me up on this one: according to the unusually well-written liner notes accompanying this CD (written by Ivan March), Mendelssohn "valued the 'Scottish' Symphony above the others."

Mendelssohn was inspired to compose this work after a visit to Scotland in 1829, and the introductory theme of this symphony burst into his mind upon seeing the famous Holyrood Abbey ruins.

It's interesting, however, that my primary classical music reference source, David Dubal's The Essential Canon of Classical Music, barely mentions the Third. Only Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony warrant any discussion. That's a significant oversight in my view.

I'll see for myself how well Mendelssohn's Fourth stacks up against his Third in my next post. I can tell you right now, however, that it's going to be a challenge to beat out this wonderful symphony.

Listener notes for Mendelssohn's Third Symphony:
1) Most of the drama in this symphony happens in the surprisingly long first movement, and there are some really intriguing harmonies and unusual melodies here. Right away, this symphony sounds more intriguing, and has a lot more drama and torment, than Symphonies 1, 2 and 5 combined.

2) Listen to the unusual chord the orchestra plays at the 0:21 mark, and in particular, listen to the note that the french horn plays in that chord. I can't remember enough music theory to tell you what that chord is exactly, but it is a chord that doesn't belong in the year 1842, especially from someone seen as a conservative among the Romantic-era composers. I'm beginning to develop more and more appreciation for Mendelssohn's compositional risk-taking.

3) Also, listen at 5:54-6:10 in the first movement--there's an almost modern-sounding violin part. This guy sounds more like he's ahead of his time, not behind it.

4) A comment on the structure of the first movement: it appears to have an extremely long, Haydn-style introduction, with the true theme not starting until almost four minutes into the movement.

5) After that long and tense first movement, the second movement practically seems like an amuse-bouche.

6) When I listen to the third and fourth movements of this symphony, I can't help but appreciate how Mendelssohn can drive quite a bit of power out of just a smallish orchestra--it makes you think that composers like Mahler cheat a little bit by scoring their music for supersized symphonies.

Tchaikovsky and Discipline

2009-01-23T03:16:00.000-08:00

"Inspiration is a guest that does not willingly visit the lazy."
--Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
**************************
The more I learn about Tchaikovsky, the more I see him as one of the most inspiring composers in all of classical music.

Here was a man who suffered throughout his life. His mother died when he was an adolescent. He was mentally unstable during much of his adulthood, suffering from depression at best and derangement at worst. And he was a gay man living in a society that considered homosexuality to be criminal.

As if these enormous hardships weren't enough, he had just as many barriers blocking him from his dreams to become a composer: he had almost no background in the subject, having chosen a more "respectable" career in law. He had little musical training and less compositional training. He knew nothing of harmony, counterpoint or music theory. Worst of all, his first attempts at composition have been charitably described as "feeble."

In short, he had a long, long list of potential excuses to quit. He could have easily given up and settled for being just another frustrated and depressed lawyer, rather than rising up to become one of history's best known classical music composers.

Moreover, Tchaikovsky chose to build some exceptional habits that drove his outstanding creative output and productivity. He studied zealously, stayed humble and remained "skeptical of his own aptitude." And he composed in every spare moment. Tchaikovsky didn't sit around and wait for inspiration to come to him:

"I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o'clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous."

And, in a trait so rarely found in our relentlessly results-based society which seems to be increasingly focused on immediate success (or worse, success just for the sake of success): he placed process before product in his art. In a letter to his sister dating from in the early days of his musical education, he wrote:

"Do not imagine I dream of being a great artist. I only feel I must do the work for which I have a vocation. Whether I become a celebrated composer or only a struggling teacher--'tis all the same."

I've spend years confusing process with product in many areas of my life, particularly in my musical life years ago, when I was a young, perfectionist musician held back by the fear of making mistakes and looking foolish as a result. Only in the past few years, since I've begun writing, have I been able to (at times) get out from under my own perfectionism and concentrate on enjoying the creative process.

Once again, I thank this blog for introducing me to a new source of inspiration.

Tchaikovsky: Symphony #6

2009-01-18T03:24:00.000-08:00

Today we'll cover Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, from a live CD recording by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Valery Gergiev.
**********************
Valery Gergiev and the Wiener Philharmoniker
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6
Philips, 2004
**********************
The Sixth was Tchaikovsky's last symphony, and many music historians consider it his requiem, as he died just nine days after the work's premier. Also, the circumstances surrounding his death were unclear--did he die of cholera, or did he commit suicide?--adding to the controversy surrounding this composer's already highly controversial life.

We'll discuss more about Tchaikovsky's life, and in particular his, uh, eccentric personal life, in future posts.

Listener notes for Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony:
1) It's strange, but after really enjoying this symphony earlier this year (on another CD), I seem to have gone a bit limp on Tchaikovsky's Sixth. This is kind of a new experience for me: typically once I decide I like a classical music work, I keep on liking it. For some reason, however, this symphony just doesn't enthrall me quite like it did back in June. Why?

2) However, I still fell in love, all over again, with the second movement. Only a Russian could write such beautiful music about death and suffering.

3) Back to the first movement for a second: one feature I do like very much comes at the very end. Listen underneath the melody to the descending notes plucked by the basses and cellos during the last minute or so of the first movement.

Dvorak: Symphony #7

2009-01-13T03:20:00.000-08:00

It's ironic that Dvorak's Seventh Symphony and his Eighth Symphony are commonly found on the same CD, because they are a study in contrasts. The Seventh Symphony is as dark and stormy as the Eighth is joyful. The Eighth is suffused with Slavic folk tunes, while the Slavic themes in the Seventh, if they show themselves at all, appear late in the work in camouflaged form.
**********************
Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
Symphonies 7 and 8
EMI, 1990
**********************
But there is one thing Dvorak's Seventh and Eighth Symphonies inevitably share: both are unjustifiably overshadowed by his more commonly performed Ninth.

I'm grateful that this blog has caused to listen closely to these two symphonies. Until I started this blog I had never heard Dvorak's Sixth, Seventh or Eighth Symphonies, despite the fact that for years they've been sitting over on my CD rack collecting dust.

Listener notes for Dvorak's Seventh Symphony:
1) It's dramatic how the first movement fades away into nothing, isn't it?

2) Once again, AGGGH! on the clarinetist in the Philly Orchestra! He's reliably off-key (usually flat) throughout the symphony. The solo early on in the second symphony is particularly bad, as is the particularly awful off-key and poorly phrased solo at the 3:50 mark in the second movement. I can't help but reflexively cringe every time the clarinet comes in, since I'm waiting for a mistake or an off-key note. I know I need to let this go, but it is horrifying to me that an otherwise world-class symphony could have an important musician this subpar. How does this guy keep his job?

3) Listen for a barely perceptible mistake in the string section, during the final two chords of the second movement. Some of the second violins hold that chord longer than they are supposed to and break off abruptly right before the final, soft chord. Oops.

4) It's not until the third movement scherzo that we finally get a little Bohemian action--but as I mentioned above, these folk music-inspired themes seem restrained and camouflaged somehow.

5) Interesting transition to the major key at the very end of the fourth movement. One one hand it makes the music sound triumphant, but on the other hand, it sounds like the symphonic equivalent of a Hollywood ending.

Dvorak: Symphony #8

2009-01-08T03:02:00.000-08:00

In the eyes of the average casual classical music listener, Dvorak's Eighth Symphony is generally overshadowed by his much more widely known Ninth Symphony.

But in the eyes of true Dvorak lovers, however, the Eighth is more popular by far. Real Dvorak fans cherish the raucous and exuberant folk music of Dvorak's native Bohemia--and that's exactly what suffuses this symphony. It makes listening to this symphony an experience of pure joy. And at an all-too-brief 35 minutes or so in length, this thrilling symphony is over before it begins.
**********************
Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
Symphonies 7 and 8
EMI, 1990
**********************
Dvorak's Eighth Symphony is proof that not all great symphonies are conceived in suffering. Occasionally a symphony--like this one, or Brahms' Second--bursts out of a composer during a period of contentment and happiness. And Dvorak composed this entire work in just two and a half months.

Of course it only takes a cursory survey of the landscape of classical music composers to see that this "happiness exception" is just that--an exception.

Listener notes for Dvorak's Eighth Sympony:
1) I'm sorry to complain about bad intonation right off the bat, but is there something about the Philadelphia Orchestra and their principal clarinetist? Listen to the first movement of this CD at the 8:05 mark. Why is this guy so often out of tune?

2) In the second movement, you can hear conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch let out a big grunt after the violin duet and right before the full orchestra enters. It's at about the 4:00 mark. Feel it, Wolfie!

3) How great are the flourishes and ornamentations of the Slavic folk themes throughout the third movement? Grace notes and glissandos abound. What a blast it is to listen to this movement.

4) Also, listen very closely at the 0:52 mark of the third movement for a beautiful, hard to play, and almost throwaway run by the violas (it comes right after the violins finish their own beautiful folk melody; also you'll hear it again at the 4:12 mark). This is sort of emblematic of the "ornaments" in Dvorak's symphonies. If you weren't listening closely, you'd miss the part; but once you know it's there, it's thrilling to hear such a difficult subordinate musical line rise up and then disappear in an instant.

5) The trumpet parts, for lack of a better word, suck in this symphony. They aren't quite as bad as Mozart's oom-pah parts, but they're close (Dvorak has a thing for giving the trumpets "bup bup bup bahhh" parts). It's not until the start of the fourth movement that the principal trumpet gets to shake himself out of rest-counting somnolence and play a real (if brief) part.

Beethoven: Symphony #9

2009-01-03T03:18:00.000-08:00

"Whosoever has built a new Heaven has found the strength for it in his own Hell."
--Nietzsche

"The mightiest of Beethoven's symphonies."
--David Dubal, from The Essential Canon of Classical Music

With today's post, I've now finished listening to and writing about the entire cycle of Beethoven's symphonic works. And I have to thank this blog for helping me accomplish a task I've wanted to do all my life: listen closely and carefully to every single one of Beethoven's nine symphonies. It's been a profound and deeply moving experience for me.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Symphonie No. 9
Deutsche Grammophon, 1984
**********************
Classical music fans with at least a passing knowledge of Beethoven's life and biographical details will know the story of the premiere of the Ninth: Beethoven was actually on the stage with the musicians, assisting the conductor with setting the tempos. Completely deaf, he heard absolutely nothing of the performance.

Anecdotes abound about what exactly happened when the performance ended, but let's let the well-known music biographer George Grove tell us the story in his engrossing description of the event:

The master, though placed in the midst of this confluence of music, heard nothing of it all and was not even sensible of the applause of the audience at the end of his great work, but continued standing with his back to the audience (and beating the time), till Fräulein Ungher, who had sung the contralto part, turned him, or induced him to turn around and face the people, who were still clapping their hands, and giving way to the greatest demonstrations of pleasure. His turning around, and the sudden conviction thereby forced on everybody that he had not done so before (because he could not hear what was going on) acted like an electric shock on all present, and a volcanic explosion of sympathy and admiration followed, which was repeated again and again, and seemed as if it would never end.
--From Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies by George Grove

I know of no more compelling story in all of classical music.

Before we get to the listener notes for this symphony, let me share two resources that should be extremely useful if you are interested in learning more about Beethoven:

1) If you would like to listen to and learn all of Beethoven's nine symphonies, I strongly recommend this highly regarded box set, performed by the Chicago Symphony. You'll be able to acquire an excellent quality collection of all of his symphonies with one purchase.

2) Also, an extremely interesting (and free) online resource on Beethoven's Ninth is the lecture series Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: Then and Now by Harvard professor Thomas Kelly at the Harvard@Home site.

Listener notes for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:
1) Doesn't the opening few moments of the symphony, right after the initial "falling fourths" notes, sound like an orchestra tuning up? It raises the suspense in the listener.

2) Dut dah! dut dah! Once again, Beethoven brings us a simple and yet utterly compelling musical motif.

3) Perhaps the opening of the second movement is as memorable as any opening in any movement of Beethoven's other symphonies. As is common in his symphonies, this opening motif is a variation of the motif from the beginning of the first movement.

4) By far, the most important musician in the third movement is the principal clarinetist. The clarinetist in the 1984 Berlin Phil/Karajan recording is unfortunately a bit shrill and a bit flat. It detracts from the performance.

5) At 8:33 in the third movement, the french horn has an interesting part--a simple eight-tone ascending major scale. When I hear a major scale, I think of all-county music auditions or boring musical drills, thus it's a bit shocking to hear this scale perfectly incorporated into this symphony.

6) Even though you know that there's going to be singing in this symphony, it's still seems slightly unreal when the male singer enters early on in the choral movement (in this recording, it is baritone singer Jose van Dam). In Beethoven's era, the use of choral singers in a symphony may not have been exactly revolutionary (after all, there already existed a tradition of combining chorus and orchestra in cantatas and oratorios), but I think you could reasonably call it progressive. And the way Beethoven combines the singing, the musical power, and the spiritual nature of this work makes the entire symphony overwhelming. It's almost too much to take in.

Ten Things I've Learned From Starting a Classical Music Blog

2008-12-28T03:14:00.000-08:00

101 Classical Music CDs is now one year old, and if you'll permit me a brief fit of gratitude, I'd like to list ten things I've learned and discovered from my first year of finally listening to my collection of classical music.

1) I learned how much I loved Mozart. I spent years hating Mozart's music as a high school trumpet player--as far as I was concerned, it was all oom-pah parts and rest-counting. It wasn't until I started this blog (and had high school recede 20 years into my past) that I could at last hear him through fresh ears.

2) I learned even more how much I loved Haydn (yep, trumpet playing again), and it taught me never to take great composers like these for granted.

3) I became much more familiar with each and every one of Beethoven's symphonies, by itself a worthwhile exercise if there ever was one.

4) It taught me about less-well known composers like Sibelius, who were sitting on my CD shelf, collecting just as much dust as my Bach, Brahms and Beethoven recordings.

5) It taught me how wonderful it is to compare, closely, different recordings of the same classical music work.

6) It taught me much greater appreciation for classical music outside of the typical symphonic repertory. In particular, it taught me a profound appreciation for the great chamber music works of both Brahms and Beethoven.

7) It taught me that there's a whole world of classical music blogs out there, written by a great group of musicians and thinkers.

8) It taught me all sorts of historical and personal details on each of the composers I wrote about.

9) It taught me never to be ashamed of loving Bruckner.

10) It has started to teach me to stop being so hard on myself. Brahms was hard on himself and it didn't help him one damn bit.

Thank you for reading!

Vaughn Williams: Orchestral Works

2008-12-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to Vaughan Williams for the very first time today.

Today will also likely be the last time I'll listen to Vaughan Williams.
**********************
Barry Wordsworth and the New Queen's Hall Orchestra
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Orchestral Works: Fantasia on Greensleeves; Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis; Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1; In the Fen Country
Argo/Decca, 1994
**********************
Among England's best known and best regarded composers, Vaughan Williams follows a long line of European classical music composers (Brahms, Liszt, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Borodin) who were inspired and influenced by folk music from their native countries.

However, here is the challenge for me with Vaughan Williams' music: it is simply too rich. Too rich with emotion, too rich in orchestration, too rich in sickly-sweet major keys, too rich in swelling chords and too rich with melodrama.

If you are a music composer and you want your listeners to experience strong emotions from your music, at least gradually build things up. Vaughan Williams, however, starts all of his works in a state of high drama--and then keeps them pegged there--the entire time.

But once you start with melodrama, where do you go from there?

Here's an analogy: In film, can you make your moviegoers start crying the instant the movie starts? In literature, will your readers feel connected to your main characters if you kill them off with some plot device in the first chapter? Even if you tried to extract that much of an emotional connection with your audience that quickly, your audience will likely resent you, thinking they're being cheaply played. You have to let things build gradually, work up to things a bit. Hold off on the bathos for a little while.

Listener notes for Vaughan Williams: Orchestral Works:

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis:
1) The melodrama starts as early as the 1:20 mark in this track. And if you want to hear a textbook series of maudlin, swelling, shimmering, string chords, there's an excellent example at 2:20, and then a particularly good (and long, and overwrought) example from 9:40-11:50.

Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1:
2) This work is based on three fisherman's folk tunes: The Captain's Apprentice, A Bold Young Sailor, and On Board a Ninety-Eight.
3) Talk about horribly boring trumpet parts: they get to play "bah bah bah bahhhh" at 3:25 and again at 5:12, and then it's counting rests most of the rest of the way. Only in the seventh and ninth minute of this 11-minute work do they finally get an all-too-brief, somewhat interesting part to play. I wouldn't want to have to play this work too many times in a classical music season.

The Lark Ascending:
4) A question for the string players: Are these works considered fun for you to play? I have no context, but it does sound like the violin solo in The Lark Ascending might be both challenging and interesting to play.

Fantasia on Greensleeves:
5) This theme, instantly recognizable, gets wrapped up in a big cloak of melodrama, replete with plenty of harp parts, layers and layers of string chords and enough violin tremolo parts to send the musicians into physical therapy.

Five Variants of "Dives and Lazarus":
6) Oh the melodrama! It starts right away in this work and never lets up. Sometimes I feel like I'm listening to an Enya CD. But just to prove that opinions differ, the liner notes accompanying this CD describe this piece as "sensuous."

In the Fen Country:
7) This work was one of Vaughan Williams' earliest efforts to compose music around traditional folk melodies, setting him off in a creative direction that he followed for the remainder of his life: in my Essential Canon of Classical Music, author David Dubal writes that Vaughan Williams' "creative world was born: he would become a sophisticated and complex composer, but the nourishment he received from the simplicity and sincerity of folk sources would always remain a spiritual necessity."
8) Nice to hear the deceptively-named English horn get a little bit of a chance to shine at the beginning in this work.
9) There are some intonation problems in the orchestra in this track, notably among the trumpets in the rare instances that they play. I'll admit, though, that the music on this CD is otherwise exceptionally well performed. There is hardly a single missed note, and very few off-key notes, on the entire disc.

Beethoven: Symphony #8

2008-12-18T03:44:00.000-08:00

Many classical music writers seem to want to group Beethoven's Eighth symphony together with his Sixth (the "Pastoral") and his Seventh symphonies. Perhaps it's because there are some musical traits common to all three works (peasant dance themes, for example), or perhaps it's because he wrote the Seventh and Eighth symphonies at the same time and the Sixth just a few years before that.

Or maybe it's just that these symphonies are afterthoughts, grouped together arbitrarily by virtue of the fact that they are bracketed by the Fifth and the Ninth symphonies, works that are of such importance in the world of classical music that they dwarf nearly everything else Beethoven wrote.

Let's never make the mistake of overlooking Beethoven's "overlooked" symphonies.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 8 / Fidelio Overture
Deutsche Grammophon, 1977
**********************
Listener notes for Beethoven's Eighth Symphony:
1) Note how brief this symphony is: just 24 minutes for the entire thing. And people say they don't have time to listen to classical music.

2) This symphony opens with a real attention-grabbing bang. It's reminiscent of the Third Symphony. Also, at several points throughout this symphony, you can hear hints of the overwhelming force that would explode out of Beethoven in his final symphony, the Ninth.

3) Listen very closely at 1:14 in the first movement and you'll hear the flute let out a really bad note. You can barely hear it, fortunately.

4) It's funny, but this recording seems a lot more "full" and more dramatically played than the staid and weakly played performance of the Fifth that I was complaining about in my last post. This is the same darn symphony, and they may have even recorded these two symphonies on the same day. Yet for some reason the lower brass just don't show up during the Fifth.

5) The ending of the first movement sounds almost tongue-in-cheek, as does most of the second movement. It sounds almost like a throwback to classical era symphonies by Haydn or Mozart, doesn't it? The entire second movement, at a very brief 4:37, also shares the typical length of a Haydn symphony movement. What a far cry from some of the Bruckner or Mahler symphonies I've written about this year, which have "short movements" lasting three to four times as long.

6) Bad intonation alert: at 2:20-2:23 in the third movement, the clarinet veers wildly out of tune during a duet with the bassoon. Ouch. I'd give anything to not notice these things.

7) Our man on the clarinet has another solo at 3:54 in the third movement which ends in a really high note at the extreme upper register of the instrument. This is a classic time where a bad mistake could happen, especially in a live performance. This guy gets out of it okay, although who knows if they had to re-record this portion of the symphony a couple of extra times to get it right? If you ever get the chance to hear this symphony performed live, sit up and listen closely at this point and see if you hear an inadvertent "FREEEP!" come out of the clarinetist. This sounds like a tough note to play.

8) One thing particularly interesting about the fourth movement of this symphony, and about many of Beethoven's works in general, is how he cycles a motif or a musical theme through different keys. Listen to an example of this at 4:34 where he plays one of the central fourth movement themes in one key, then at 4:46 where he changes the key, then at 4:53 where he changes the key again, and then yet again at 5:01. Listen to this portion of the fourth movement a few times and see what you think.

9) A final comment on the last track on this CD, the Overture to Fidelio: because of the mediocre intonation and generally uninspired performance of the orchestra here, it would have been better if the Deutsche Grammophon people had just left this work off the CD.

10) A final note about collecting a full set of Beethoven symphonies:
One of the annoying things about the classical music recording industry is how difficult it can be to gradually acquire a complete collection of symphonies by a given composer. The only reason I have two copies of Beethoven's Fifth is because I needed a copy of his Eighth Symphony to complete my collection--of course, the only recording of the Eighth I could find had the Fifth on the same CD.

My advice to new collectors is this: if you find a symphony that you particularly like and you decide you want to hear more symphonies by this composer, just buy a complete set and get it over with. It will save you the trouble of playing "symphony jigsaw puzzle" later on. This collection would be an excellent to buy to get all of Beethoven's nine symphonies in one shot.

Finally, today's CD is bit of a milestone of sorts: it leaves us with only one more Beethoven symphony left: his massive, earth-shattering Ninth. I can't wait to get to that one!

Off-Topic, But Still Having to do with the Holidays

2008-12-15T14:28:00.000-08:00

I know that the readers of this blog don't often mingle with the readers of my food blog, but I thought I would just put in a brief mention here of a post on how to avoid holiday overeating that I've written over at Casual Kitchen.

15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating

Enjoy--and happy holidays!

Beethoven: Symphony #5 and a "Temporal Comparison" of the Berlin Phil

2008-12-13T03:20:00.000-08:00

"Beethoven brought three startling innovations to music: first, he altered our very conception of the art by emphasizing the psychological element implicit in the language of sounds. Secondly, his own stormy and explosive temperament was, in part, responsible for a dramatization of the whole art of music....

Both of these elements--the psychological orientation and the instinct for drama--are inextricably linked in my mind with his third and possibly most original achievement: the creation of musical forms dynamically conceived on a scale never before attempted and of an inevitability that is irresistible."
--Aaron Copeland, from David Dubal's The Essential Canon of Classical Music

We return to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to give a close listen to an alternate performance of this exceptional classical music.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic
Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Symphonies 5 & 8 / Fidelio Overture
Deutsche Grammophon, 1977
**********************
And this recording, done by the Berlin Philharmonic in 1977, is a good one, although not perfect. Already in the first minute and a half of the first movement you can hear intonation problems in the woodwind section, and from the clarinet in particular. And the Berlin Philharmonic isn't in a tight unison when they play many of this symphony's syncopated parts. Even some of the "dut dut dut dahhs" in the early in the first movement sound muddy.

But these are relatively minor criticisms. I've argued before that if you are starting to collect some works of classical music and you are concerned that you might inadvertently buy a bad recording of something, don't worry. As long as you choose a recording done by a major symphony (e.g.: US cities big enough to have a major pro sports team, or any major European city), you will be happy with your purchase.

Listener notes for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:
Just one lengthy listener note today, where I'll compare today's recording of the Fifth to another recording of the Fifth that I wrote about earlier this year.

We've discussed before in this blog what a great pleasure it is to compare different recordings of a favorite symphony. Usually the comparison will be between two different orchestras playing the same work, for example when we compared the acceptable but imperfect Philadelphia Orchestra's performance of Brahms' Symphony #2 to a cleaner and more consistent performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

But today, I get to compare this 1977 CD to an alternate recording of the Fifth made eight years later by the same orchestra, and directed by the same conductor. And what's most surprising is that the two versions are surprisingly, even shockingly, different.

The 1977 recording seems staid, orderly, restrained and seriously underpowered. Conductor Herbert Karajan hardly deviates from any of the set tempos. The brass section, and indeed the entire orchestra, seems to lack a foundation, as the lower brass simply don't have a big enough sound to support the rest of the ensemble.

Nothing makes a symphony sound more powerful than having monster trombone and tuba players on your payroll--unfortunately, the Berlin Philharmonic (at least in 1977) clearly didn't have that advantage. In fact, after I finished listening to this symphony, I wanted to go out and buy a copy of Beethoven's Fifth done by the Chicago Symphony so I could hear how an orchestra with a real brass section would perform this work.

The 1984 recording is a stark contrast from the 1977 version. Karajan takes many more liberties with both tempo and with the dynamic range (the loudness and softness) of the performance. He brings out the "big" parts much more. It's almost as if over the eight years since the 1977 recording Karajan took some Leonard Bernstein pills and became a much more theatrical composer.

And, for whatever reason, the lower brass have far more power in the 1984 recording, despite the fact that it's likely that the musicians playing on this recording are likely the same people that played in the orchestra in 1977. Perhaps the recording engineers did a better job with microphone placement for the 1984 taping. Or perhaps the low brass sounded muffled in the 1977 recording because the source tape is analog (the 1984 recording is all digital). Or, perhaps they got rid of the wimps from the 1977 orchestra and replaced them with real men with real lungs. It's anyone's guess.

All of these differences combine to make the 1984 version the more suspenseful and emotionally charged rendering of Beethoven's Fifth. And if you read the quote from Aaron Copeland at the beginning of this post, you can see that suspense, drama and powerful emotion is precisely what Beethoven offers us in his symphonies. I never want to hear this symphony played in a suppressed or repressed manner. I'd rather hear it played to the hilt.

Midori Plays Paganini's 24 Caprices

2008-12-08T03:08:00.000-08:00

"Paganini's music is virtuosic for the sake of virtuosity," a relative of mine, a professional viola player, once said, "and it has no musical substance whatsoever."

We return to Paganini's 24 Caprices to hear the renowned violin prodigy Midori try to tackle these preposterously difficult works.
**********************
Midori, violin (b: 1971)
Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840)
Paganini: 24 Caprices
Sony Classical, 1989
**********************
When I listened a month ago to Michael Rabin trying his best to play the Caprices, it was immediately obvious, even to me as a non-violinist, that these works are so technically challenging that even world-class musicians cannot play them cleanly.

Midori, however, with her ferocious technical prowess, attacks these works with more success and better results than Michael Rabin. She may not sound entirely effortless, but she gets these notoriously difficult exercises done with a relatively minimal number of stray and off-key notes, and, quite frankly, she makes Rabin sound average by comparison. And note that Midori was only 17 when she recorded her CD of the 24 Caprices, while Rabin was a comparatively ancient 21 years old when he recorded his Paganini.

And in case you think I'm being overly harsh in my judgment of either violinists' performances, note that both of these CDs are studio recordings--both Rabin and Midori had the opportunity to do take after take of any or all of these caprices until they got them as close to perfect as they possibly could. The fact that almost every caprice on both CDs has stray or off-key notes just proves how impossibly hard this music is to play.

Moreover, it brings into question, arguably, the artistic merit of these compositions. Even after hearing these works played by a much better violinist, I still can't help but continue to call this stuff "boop bleep" music--my personal term for musically bankrupt, ego-crushing etudes designed to torture students until they learn finesse and technical skills on their instruments.

Two more quick points:
1) One of the more amusing reviews of this Midori CD on Amazon mocked Henry Roth in his book Violin Virtuosos for using the word "impeccable" to describe the Michael Rabin performance of the Caprices, suggesting that Roth redefined "impeccable" to mean "being able to play 90-95% of the notes in tune." If two of the modern era's best violin prodigies can't make the Caprices sound effortless or even graceful, then no human can. Ergo, Paganini cannot be human.

2) A final note on comparing these two recordings: it's easy to argue that the Midori performance of Paganini's 24 Caprices is far, far better then Michael Rabin's. In fact, it's even a bit painful to go back to the Rabin CD after hearing Midori's much higher quality work. I had originally thought that Paganini's Caprices were so difficult that Rabin's recording was as good as a human (even a prodigy) could do. Apparently, not all prodigies are created equal.

Bruckner: Symphony #8

2008-12-03T03:07:00.000-08:00

The Eighth Symphony was the last symphony Bruckner completed, and it will be the final Bruckner symphony covered in this blog. We've already written about his First, Fourth and Seventh Symphonies.
**********************
Herbert Von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmoniker
Felix Mendelssohn (1824-1896)
Anton Bruckner: Symphony No.8
Deutsche Grammophon, 1989
**********************
Bruckner was 59 when he began work on this symphony, but rather than being at the height of his powers at this stage of his life, he was in many ways at the height of his personal insecurity.

Unsure of himself, he was prone to accept the suggestions of his fellow musicians, some of them made in less than admiring spirit, some well-intentioned but not always perceptive... which a more self-confident man might have rejected.
--John Warrack, in an unusually well-written CD liner note.

In 1887, Bruckner thought he had finished this symphony after roughly three years of work, but when he sent the score to the conductor Hermann Levi, the reaction from the famous German conductor was decidedly negative.

The criticism was unexpected to say the least. Levi had considered Bruckner's prior symphony, his Seventh, to be on the level of Schubert or even Beethoven, and thus his opinion of the Eighth Symphony nearly destroyed Bruckner, who suffered a near-nervous breakdown. It took him three years, but over that time he recovered enough to rewrite a new version of the symphony, completed in 1890. Bruckner then completed a third rewrite of the symphony in 1892.

Needless to say, this leaves some confusion as to which version of this symphony is the "real" one, although most classical music experts have settled on the 1890 version--the second one--as the primary text.

I've said this before: it's hard to believe that a composer as gifted as this could be more insecure and self-conscious on his best day than the rest of us are on our worst day. But what's even harder to believe is how often Bruckner's works were mocked, vilified or (worst of all) ignored by audiences at the time:

Once, when [Bruckner] was conducting, nearly the entire audience left in the middle of the piece. Bruckner, rapt in his music, heard neither the footsteps nor the snickering. When he turned to the audience at the conclusion to receive his due applause, he found fewer than ten people remaining. Bruckner left the hall alone and in tears.
--David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music

Listener notes for Bruckner's Eighth Symphony:
1) One thing I always love about Bruckner is his ability to build suspense and tension very early on in his symphonies. It really makes you want to stick around and find out what's going to happen.

2) The trumpets get a little bit out of control in the unison notes they play at around 15:30 in the first movement. An "E" for enthusiasm though.

3) The second movement consists of three parts--the key theme at the beginning, then a second part that begins after a pause at the 6:04 mark, and then at 10:20 another pause and a return to the original theme. It's somewhat strange to hear a movement with a seemingly unrelated interlude.

4) Many classical music critics consider the third movement of this symphony, the Adagio, to be Bruckner's most beautiful composition. Even Bruckner considered it his single greatest work. In my view, however, the first movement of Bruckner's Fourth is at least equally beautiful. But after listening to the beautiful sweeping and swelling chords from 2:10 to 2:40 and from 4:00 to 4:20, it's clear why this movement is so loved.

5) And then we launch right into the suspense and thrills of the final movement. The introductory few measures remind me of Mars from Gustav Holst's The Planets.

6) And--true to form!--Bruckner's brass parts are, quite literally, a blast to play: they sound showy, yet they aren't at all technically difficult, and the musicians get to play them really loudly. How can you be a brass player and not be a Bruckner fan?

Bartok: Violin Concerto #2

2008-11-30T03:12:00.000-08:00

We will take a few more tentative steps into modern classical music today as we listen to Béla Bartók's Second Violin Concerto.

This is the first time I've listened to Bartok here at 101 Classical Music CDs, and despite the fact that I've been listening to classical music for some 30 years, it took me a surprisingly long time to acclimate to this work. This extremely complex concerto only started to make sense to me after three very close listens.
**********************
Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin
Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Bela Bartok (1881-1945)
Violin Concerto #2
Deutsche Grammophon, 1991
**********************
And this is why, if you are still new to classical music and are just starting up your collection of recordings, I would suggest you do not buy this CD until you've first become familiar with key works from earlier classical music eras. For some additional thoughts on the various challenges and rewards of listening to modern classical music, see listener note #6 below.

One other housekeeping item before we get into the listener notes: the CD I own isn't currently available at Amazon as a standalone disc, but it is available as part of an excellent 3-CD compilation of performances by Anne-Sophie Mutter (see also the graphical link to Amazon below). If you are interested in a good survey of the work of this amazingly talented violinist--and you'd also like to leave me a tip in my tip jar--feel free to click on these links to visit Amazon.

Listener Notes for Bartok's Violin Concerto #2:
1) It is interesting to hear Anne-Sophie Mutter's playing style after having just spent time with a violin playing prodigy from a few decades earlier, Michael Rabin. While listening to Mutter really dig her bow into the strings, I can't help but notice how much more florid, powerful and masculine Mutter's playing style is compared to Rabin's (how politically incorrect does that sound?). Of course, as a former trumpet player, I'm stating these opinions with absolutely no context on how to play the violin.

2) It's worth listening a couple of times to Mutter's cadenza in the first movement (from 12:40 to 14:33). If you are like me and your exposure to cadenzas is limited to the works of classical-era composers (Haydn, Mozart, etc), you'll find this to be an extraordinary-sounding solo.

3) Listen at 15:43 in the first movement to how Mutter picks off that ultra high note.

4) There are two notably beautiful passages in the second movement of this concerto: at the very beginning (0:00-4:35), and at the very end (9:09-9:55). But here's a caveat for those of you new to classical music: most modern classical music isn't really all that beautiful, at least not in the sense that, say, a Mozart concerto is beautiful. In many cases I'd argue that it's more accurate to describe the "beautiful" portions of many 20th century classical music works by using made-up compound words like creepy-beautiful, or eerie-beautiful, or weird-beautiful. Or perhaps "you'll-get-used-to-it-beautiful."

5) Listen to the cellos and violas whapping at their strings with their bows in the second movements (at 7:37, 7:42 and 7:59). An interesting sound effect.

6) Let me close this post by discussing a typical conundrum of modern classical music. Listen to the first 14 seconds of the third movement a few times in a row (this is where the string section and then the violin soloist state the initial themes of the movement).

Is this passage distinctive? Yes, certainly. Is it extremely complex? Yes, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Do you have to listen to it several times to "get it"? Yes, and that's also not necessarily a bad thing--music that's "too easy" won't hold your attention for long, but truly challenging music can hold your interest for years, as it will reward you with new nuances each time you listen to it.

But can you hum or sing this melody? Will it stick in your mind when you're walking home from the symphony hall?

Ah. Now, we face head-on a key problem with 20th century music. There is often so much nuance and complexity baked into music from this era that--for lack of a better term--there's no tune. When you think of the greatest works of the so-called "golden era" of classical music (arguably the classical and romantic periods), these works were often highly complex and nuanced, but the listener didn't have to work so hard to get at the fundamental essence of the music. To me, many modern classical compositions overwhelm the listener with too much complexity. And more often than not, this excess complexity only obscures the beauty and musicality of the work itself.

I hope to discuss more of the challenges of listening to modern classical music in future posts.

Dvorak: Symphony #6

2008-11-25T03:07:00.000-08:00

We return to Dvorak after an extremely long hiatus to listen to his Sixth Symphony, performed on a CD recorded live by the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Sir Colin Davis.
**********************
Sir Colin Davis and the London Symphony Orchestra
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)
Dvorák: Symphony No. 6
LSO Live, 2004
**********************
If you're in the early stages of building a classical music collection and are wondering whether you should include this work, let me be brief: don't bother. Dvorak has more impressive symphonies. If you want his best-known work, get this excellent recording of his Ninth; if you want to impress your friends with your originality by owning one of Dvorak's less-well-known work, then get the Seventh or Eighth Symphony (or both--they can be found on one CD here).

This symphony was beautiful and well-played, don't get me wrong. But I failed to connect with it on an emotional level, and the four movements just didn't seem to go together. The symphony didn't sound like a coherent whole to me.

Listener notes for Dvorak's Sixth Symphony:
1) The primary melody of the first movement is simple and kind of catchy.

2) Mumbling conductor alert: if you listen very closely at 4:30 in the first movement, you can hear the microphones pick up Sir Colin mumbling the melody along with the strings. You'll hear him off and on throughout the entire symphony. Somebody put a mike just a bit close to the podium, eh?

3) The tension that Dvorak puts into the first movement seems to me to be a bit artificial. I can hear that he's trying to create tension, yet I don't actually feel the tension. Do any readers out there who are familiar with this symphony agree with me?

4) Off-key clarinet alert! In the second movement from 0:19 to 0:24. Contrast this with two parts later in the movement, from 2:46 to 3:00 and 3:48 to 4:15, where he does a much better job of nailing the part.

5) I consider the second movement to be the most beautiful movement of the symphony, but don't you agree that it doesn't really go with the first movement? An example of this work's lack of coherence.

6) The third movement is classic Dvorak: pure, toe-tapping, Eastern European folk melodies. I love it!

7) Listen to the fourth movement from 2:35 to 2:38 for the offsetting eighth notes played by the strings. I'm sure this part gets screwed up more often than not in live performances. The LSO sounds great here.

8) The last two minutes of the fourth movement, particularly the passage from 8:35 to 9:00, are really rollicking, aren't they?

Chopin: Four Scherzi, Berceuse and Barcarolle

2008-11-20T03:40:00.000-08:00

After last week's derisive post on Paganini, I thought I'd shift to a composer who writes difficult-to-play music that doesn't threaten the very health of the musicians who play his works.

Chopin. The poet of the piano. Today's Four Scherzi are masterpieces, full of emotion, tension, lyricism and complexity. They were among Chopin's last publications before his untimely death from consumption at age 39.
**********************
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Frederic Chopin (1810-1849)
Chopin: 4 Scherzi, Berceuse, Barcarolle
Deutsche Grammophon, 1991
**********************
What is a scherzo, exactly? Usually the word refers to one of the middle movements of a traditional symphony; typically it will be a lively dance-like piece in 3/4 time.

Unfortunately, the word scherzo also means "joke" in Italian, leaving us to wonder if Chopin was being ironic or serious in using this name for these deeply emotional one-movement works for solo piano:

How are seriousness and gravity to be clothed if jest is to go about in such dark-colored garments?"
--Robert Schumann, referring to Chopin's Scherzo #1 in B minor

Listener notes for Chopin's Four Scherzi, Berceuse and Barcarolle:
Scherzo #1:
1) This has the angst and loaded emotional content of a Beethoven piano sonata, doesn't it? I don't really know what to call a work like this (a sonata in miniature?), but it is certainly not a joke. Not in any way.

Scherzo #2:
2) Listen to the passage from 2:20 to 3:09. Doesn't it sounds like four hands playing, not two?

Scherzo #3:
3) This is another particularly beautiful work. The more I think about this CD and the arresting music on it, the more I think this might be my all-time favorite classical music CD!

Berceuse:
4) Another arresting composition, flawlessly performed by Mr. Pollini. This work is quiet, relaxing and beautiful; it also sounds almost improvisational in nature. Particularly interesting to me is the increasingly complex melodic line played by the right hand over a simple repeating left hand phrase.

A completely unrelated side note: After listening to music that is so incomparably beautiful, I can't help wondering: what have I done (or what will I do) that will ever be worth remembering?

At times it can be extremely difficult for me to listen to great music like this because its greatness almost definitionally proves the basic fact of my own insignificance. Do you find this to be the case when you listen to great music too?

Music is a highly emotional medium to begin with; when it also reminds you of how insignificant you are, it can be psychologically devastating to listen to it. Of course, this entire avenue of thought is fundamentally unhealthy--and more importantly, it is not at all the point of listening to classical music. But nevertheless, I can't help but recognize, from time to time, the simple and highly likely fact that most likely I will do little worth remembering at all. In fact, it's quite possible that I--and you, and most everyone we know--will over the course of an entire life do absolutely nothing that will be remembered.

That's pretty discouraging isn't it? Unless of course you join the struggle to write, create, produce, or offer up something of value that remains after you leave this life. Otherwise, yes, it is the basic nature of things that we will all likely be forgotten.

Wouldn't it be easier to just stop listening to Chopin if it makes me dwell on this? Perhaps.

But should I? No. Why give up something so beautiful? In any event, it would only be treating the symptom. One must either accept one's place in the collective memory of the world, or one must engage in a fierce, daily struggle to change that place. I think this is why I write.

Paganini: 24 Caprices Performed by Michael Rabin

2008-11-15T03:30:00.000-08:00

Today's post is about not one, but two of history's greatest violin prodigies, and one of the most challenging collections of classical music ever written for the violin.

Nicolo Paganini, our first prodigy, was not only the greatest violinist who ever lived, he can also be thought of as classical music's first rock star, with worldwide fame, groupies, mistresses, and stupefied audiences of weeping and crying fans, some of whom were convinced that Paganini was under the control of Satan himself. I like to think of him as a 19th century version of The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
**********************
Michael Rabin, violin (1936-1972)
Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840)
24 Caprices For Solo Violin
EMI Classics, 1958/1993
**********************
On the other hand, our second prodigy, Michael Rabin, never made it to his 36th birthday. Widely seen as one of the 20th century's most gifted violinists, he died in a freak accident in his New York City apartment--he slipped on the floor and hit his head on a chair. Fortunately, Rabin left for posterity this highly-regarded recording of Paganini's most difficult violin works.

Perhaps to use the word "difficult" to describe these compositions is a grievous understatement. Paganini's 24 Caprices are so physically and technically demanding to play that professional violinists have to take particular care when practicing them to avoid injury. It's even been speculated that Paganini had hyper-extensible joints, or may have even had Marfan's syndrome, otherwise he would not have had large enough and flexible enough hands to perform these works.

And herein lies the problem. Much of this is CD is what I consider "boop bleep" music, a technical term dating from my days playing from my Arban's Method for Trumpet practice book. The Arban, the bane of teenage trumpet players everywhere, contains countless etudes and musical works designed to help the musician learn control and finesse by playing technically, often preposterously, demanding exercises.

Think of the 24 Caprices as an Arban composed for gods. Even a musician completely ignorant of the subtleties of the violin will be able to tell that this music is preposterously difficult. You could argue that these caprices are so far beyond the normal capabilities of the violin that even a world-class musician like Michael Rabin sounds strained, off-key, and at times just plain bad, playing them.

This music is challenging, yes; but it doesn't sound like it's any fun to play, and it is decidedly not beautiful. Contrast the Caprices to the unstrained and beautiful music by Chopin or Schumann, both of whom wrote music that was not only beautiful and emotionally compelling, but also designed perfectly for the capabilities of the piano.

I understand and appreciate why impossible-to-play music like this exists, but it should be relegated to practice rooms, not concert halls. The violin is difficult enough to play as it is.

Are there Paganini fans out there who differ in their views? I'd love to hear a compelling argument for why this is great music.

A brief final note: In addition to a link to today's CD, I've also included a link to a boxed set of violinist Michael Rabin's collected works for those readers interested in learning more about this brilliant prodigy who died all too early.

Mendelssohn: Symphony #2

2008-11-10T03:42:00.000-08:00

Today's post will cover Felix Mendelssohn's Second Symphony, from disc 2 of our 3-CD set of his five symphonies.

Admittedly, the Second is a bit of a marathon. It starts off innocently enough like any other symphony, with three instrumental movements. But instead of finishing things up with a predictable fourth movement, Mendelssohn takes us into a nine-movement choral work. Collectively, the entire work is as long as two "normal" Mendelssohn symphonies.

Mendelssohn dedicated his Second Symphony to the 400th anniversary of the invention of printing, which he believed to be one of the most important events in history.
**********************
Herbert Von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Five Symphonies
Deutsche Grammophon, 1973
**********************
Listener Notes for Mendelssohn's Second Symphony:
1) I'll say this for Mendelssohn: in this symphony he finally puts the brass section to work.

2) I don't see what's so aesthetically disappointing to music critics about this symphony. It has a wonderful, simply stated 10 note introductory theme, a pleasant fast waltz second movement, and a very moving third movement. Granted, I may not be contemplating life's greatest questions or overcome by emotion as I listen to this work, but other than that, this is really quite a nice work of music.

3) The third movement, in fact, is as beautiful as any slow movement I've heard recently for this blog. Perhaps it doesn't quite measure up to the second movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony, but it certainly holds its own against any of Beethoven's early symphonies or any of the works by Haydn I've listened to lately.

4) Woodwind intonation alert: It's highly disappointing to hear quite a few off-key woodwind notes in the third movement. The clarinets are the primary guilty party here. Imagine if this third movement were played perfectly? The hair on the back of my neck would be standing up.

5) At the 6:25 mark in the third movement, hear the oboe (barely) pick off a really difficult high note in a solo. Then hear him hit it with a lot more confidence on the second try at 6:45.

6) Listen to these Germans sing! Feisty, aren't they?

7) Classical music newcomers will likely find the unintelligible German singing a bit disconcerting. My advice is don't worry so much about what they're saying; just let the music wash over you. In a nutshell, the singers are praising the lord, worrying if the night will pass, and once the night does pass, thanking God and praising him some more. If you don't understand the words, you aren't missing all that much.

Mendelssohn: Symphony #5

2008-11-04T03:22:00.000-08:00

We return to classical music's second best-known prodigy, Felix Mendelssohn. Today I'll be writing about his Fifth Symphony.
**********************
Herbert Von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Five Symphonies
Deutsche Grammophon, 1973
**********************
It's been a long while since I returned to this three-CD set of Mendelssohn's five symphonies. I covered Symphony #1 way back in March 2008, and somehow eight months passed by before I came back to this collection (a side note: a commenter left a link on that post to a weirdly mesmerizing performance of Louis Farrakhan--yep, that Louis Farrakhan--playing a Mendelssohn violin concerto. You just never know who might be out there in cyberspace reading your blogs).

In any event, what is taking me so long to finish off this CD? It's certainly not because the music isn't wonderful. But I will say that on some level, Mendelssohn's symphonies lack the powerful feeling of some of the other Romantic composers we've been listening to lately. It's been such a pleasure exploring more intense works of that era that I guess I just haven't been drawn back to Mendelssohn until now.

Forgive me for borrowing a couple of exhausted terms from the political arena, but Mendelssohn was the "conservative" of the Romantic era. His music evoked the greats of the past like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and, to borrow a quote from The Essential Canon of Classical Music, he "repressed some of the more violent aspects of Romanticism"--meaning in part that his music neither challenged Classical era rules nor burst with the intense emotion of less repressed Romantic composers like Liszt, Chopin and Schumann.

Thus Liszt, Chopin and Schumann were the "progressives" of the Romantic era. These men, variously alienated or at odds with conventional society, wrote music that shattered the rigid structures of Classical-era music and had a level of emotional content (and in the case of Schumann, a level of madness) that shocked audiences at the time.

It's understandable, then, that Mendelssohn's music was seen as more comfortable and approachable by music fans of the day, although in my opinion the "progressives" ultimately won out--their music simply sounds more compelling today than Mendelssohn's pleasurable and innocuous symphonies.

Listener Notes for Mendelssohn's Symphony #5:
1) Why on earth would you release a CD that plays Mendelssohn's symphonies in this order?:

Disc 1: Symphony #1 and #5
Disc 2: Symphony #2
Disc 3: Symphony #3 and #4

Ironically, these symphonies are exactly in order, if you ignore their deceptive numbering and list them in the order in which they were written. Mendelssohn's Fifth Symphony was actually his second, his Second was actually his third, and so on. Make sense? I didn't think so.

2) The Allegro section of the first movement sounds Bach-like in structure, but in temperament, it sounds like Mendelssohn trying to imitate Beethoven.

3) Recognize the theme of the second movement? It's the hymn "Away in a Manger."

4) I have to say that I particularly enjoyed the short but sweet third movement. It's a pleasure to listen to the tightly restrained emotion of the string section.

5) Yet another familiar music alert: do you recognize the key theme of the final movement? It's the well-known hymn "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" which should be familiar to most Protestants.

Liszt: Eine Faust Symphonie

2008-10-29T03:19:00.000-07:00

Prior to today, I can't remember ever listening to a single work by Liszt in my life. What a spectacular oversight!
**********************
Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra
Franz Liszt (1811-1886)
Faust Symphonie
Deutsche Grammophon, 1977
**********************
In his day, Liszt was better known for his piano playing than his composing. His prowess at the keyboard was legendary, and he may have been the greatest pianist who ever lived. Just two quotes from my Essential Canon of Classical Musicwill suffice to illustrate how even the great composers of his era held him in awe:

I should like to steal from him the way to play my own etudes.
--Chopin

I've just witnessed a miracle! I was with Liszt at Erard's [a piano maker], and I showed him the manuscript of my concerto. He played it at sight--it's hardly legible--and with the utmost perfection. It simply can't be played any better than he played it. It was miraculous.
--Felix Mendelssohn

Of course, today, Liszt's reputation is based more on his compositions. Today's CD, a recording of Liszt's A Faust Symphony, is a three movement rendering of the legend of Faust, a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for youth, success and love on Earth. The first movement represents Faust, the second represents Gretchen (Faust's love interest) and the third, Mephistopheles.

This symphony is musically complex and challenging. It doesn't have the more obvious tonality and musicality of the music I've been listening to lately, mostly works by Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. Thus it took me a couple of thorough passes through this CD before I really had my arms around the key musical themes. But I felt like I was richly rewarded for my patience.

If you listen to this other works by Liszt and don't "get it" at first, don't be discouraged--in many ways his compositions were a hundred years ahead of their time. Try to listen attentively to the work a few of times over a few days, and see what you think of it after that. He just might grow into one of your favorite composers.

Also, if you're interested in pursuing the music of Franz Liszt further, I've included a list of some of his key works below, as well as links to Amazon to two high-quality box sets of his complete piano works and orchestral works.

Listener Notes for A Faust Symphony:
1) Be prepared to be challenged by this symphony if you are new to classical music. This work has long movements (the first movement alone is longer than two entire Haydn symphonies stacked end to end) and you'll likely find the music somewhat difficult to follow. There are other works that would be much better to start with if you're a classical music novice.

2) Doesn't the tuba entrance at 3:39 in the first movement shake the ground? I love it.

3) You can hear just the slightest mumbling from a transported Leonard Bernstein at 6:08 in the first movement.

4) Listen for the principal trumpet's nervous and unsteady entrance to his solo at 23:46 in the first movement. When I hear high-school caliber playing like this done by a supposed professional, it makes me question my decision to not go pro as a trumpet player. Come on man! This is a solo! You're stating the key theme of the entire symphony, and it's supposed to be beautiful! Sheesh.

5) One comment on the second movement, which is one of the most beautiful musical works I've ever heard. Listen carefully at 7:02 and 7:12. The strings are collectively taking a big breath before they play each phrase! Who do they think they are pretending that they're playing wind instruments?

Actually, I've performed under conductors who have encouraged string players to do this very thing, because it gets them to think like wind instruments with regard to the length and arc of their phrasing. The audible breaths also have the effect of adding an layer of eerie mournfulness to this performance. I like it.

6) The third movement sounds like something Debussy might write (it has some of the auditory techniques we heard in La Mer). The only thing is, Liszt wrote this fifty years earlier--a testament to how he was far ahead of his time. In fact, this entire symphony sounds more like 20th century music than a work completed in 1854.

7) Here's a translation of the German chorus at the end of the third movement:

All things transitory are but parable;
Here insufficiency becomes fulfillment,
Here the indescribable is accomplished;
The ever-womanly draws us heavenward.

8) Notice the full cathedral-style organ playing underneath the orchestra in the last few minutes of the third movement.

Key Recommended Works by Liszt:
These are some of Liszt's most exemplary works. See also the links below for two high quality box sets of Liszt's compositions.

Hungarian Rhapsodies for Piano
Hungarian Rhapsodies for Orchestra
The Transcendental Etudes
Sonata in B Minor for Piano
Preludes for Orchestra
Concerto #1 in E flat Major for Piano and Orchestra

Beethoven: Symphony #2

2008-10-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

Today's post will cover Beethoven's Second Symphony, the other symphony on my 1985 CD of the Berliner Philharmoniker under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

Like the First, this symphony is part of Beethoven's "backward looking" period. Most of what we hear in this symphony bears striking resemblance to what you'd hear from Mozart, Haydn or other composers of the Classical era.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2
Deutsche Grammophon, 1985
**********************
And yet, while the structure and many of the melodic and harmonic elements sound "Classical" you can also hear, at times, a level of stress and emotional content unheard of in a typical Classical-era symphony.

Part of the increased emotional content of this symphony was doubtless a function of Beethoven's personal struggles. It was at this time he was beginning to suffer from the deafness that would ultimately rob him completely of his hearing:

"But what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing! Such incidents brought me to the verge of despair; but little more and I would have put an end to my life; only my art held me back. It seemed impossible to leave the world before I created all that I felt myself called upon to accomplish and so I endured this wretched existence."
--Beethoven, ca. 1802 (about the time when he completed his Second Symphony)

As I spend more time repeatedly listening to Beethoven's early symphonies and thinking about them in the context of Beethoven's personal history, I'm finding these works more fascinating than I ever imagined. And they take on even more significance and gravity when you think of these works as precursors to the next seven symphonies Beethoven would write, which include two or perhaps three of the greatest symphonies in the entire history of classical music.

One brief point of order before we get to the listener notes. Let me clear up what might be a source of terminological confusion for classical music newbies: the term "Classical" with a capital C refers specifically to the Classical era of classical music (usually considered the period from the early 1700s to the early 1800s). When I use the term "classical" with a lower case C, I'm referring more broadly to classical music of all eras. Hopefully that clears things up a bit!

Listener Notes for Beethoven's Second Symphony:
1) The opening chord is quite a contrast from the First Symphony, isn't it?

2) I particularly like how the meter changes from eighth notes to triplets early in the first movement (occurs at about 1:27 in track 5 on this CD).

3) Listen at the 2:52 mark in the first movement: That's when the "Mozartian" portion of this symphony begins, and it lasts essentially until the end of the movement. It almost makes you want to say "Too many notes!"

4) If you have good set of headphones, turn up the volume from 5:08 to 5:16 in the first movement (during the brief flute solo). You can hear the musicians frantically turning the pages of their music.

5) Am I the only person who thinks of the opening notes from Home, Home on the Range when I hear the key theme of the second movement? I'm probably going to go straight to classical music hell for saying that. I don't mean to make fun.

6) I struggle for a word to describe the third movement because it's just not a word you'd use to describe Beethoven's music. But for better or worse, that word is "fun." This brief, four minute long movement is genuinely fun music.

7) Have you ever heard Beethoven give a bassoonist the kind of action he doles out in the fourth movement? I wonder if bassoon players out there enjoy playing this work.

8) At 2:58 in the fourth movement (track 8) you can hear more frantic page turning, and at 3:30-3:33 you can hear the french horn miss an entrance. And for the next 20 to 30 seconds the entire woodwind section loses its footing. The clarinet comes in slightly off-key, the bassoon flubs an entrance and then the oboe flubs an entrance. Only the flutes hang tough here. But everyone quickly gets back on their feet to finish off the movement.

Beethoven: Symphony #1

2008-10-19T03:33:00.000-07:00

Today we will cover Beethoven's First Symphony, from a 1985 CD of the Berliner Philharmoniker under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

I can see why music critics and historians consider Beethoven's First Symphony to be backward looking. There are times when you can hear Beethoven's stormy temper lurking in the First, but otherwise this symphony work sounds stylistically and structurally quite a bit like the music of Haydn or Mozart, key composers of the Classical era.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2
Deutsche Grammophon, 1985
**********************
Most music historians group Beethoven with Classical-era composers. But he wasn't really of the Classical era, nor was he truly of the Romantic era. He straddled both.

His work evolved from Classical in style into forerunner works of the Romantic era (the Third Symphony is arguably a proto-Romantic work), and then evolved into true Romantic works (the Fifth and the symphonies that followed). And of course his later works (e.g., the Late String Quartets) went far beyond the Romantic era, which were a hundred years ahead of their time in their experimention with atonality.

Listener Notes for Beethoven's First Symphony:
1) The gentle soft opening chords of this symphony is a shocking contrast to the familiar "dut-dut-dut dahhhhh" sledgehammer opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, isn't it?

2) The rapid eighth notes that begin at about 1:58 in the first movement sound like they could be the backdrop of any of Mozart's symphonies. But then Beethoven throws a wrench into our perceptions at the 5:52 mark of this movement, and he shows how this symphony differs from Classical era works. Mozart or Haydn would probably be about ready to wrap up the first movement at this point. But Beethoven? No way. He's just getting going. He modulates the key up a step, goes on to compose and extended bridge, and then returns to the main theme at the 7:20 mark.

3) Crappy trumpet part alert: After playing a few chords in the second minute of the first movement, and some desultory chords here and there (but mostly counting rests), the trumpets finally get to come in for real for a few arpeggios at the very end. Bor-ing! Not the kind of of symphony I would have liked to play as a teenage kid, that's for sure.

4) The entire second movement sounds exactly like something Haydn might write, particularly considering its brevity.

5) The fourth movement opens up with a really neat feature: the strings softly hint at the main theme, playing portions of an ascending scale, adding notes to them each time, and then letting loose with the main theme. What an interesting way to gently build tension! And Beethoven uses this effect a few more times in the movement to build tension elsewhere. Really creative.

6) Note at 5:38 in the fourth movement (right near the end), when the trumpets play a unison high note with the violins. Can you hear how the trumpets are quite a bit flat, and out of tune with the violins? It's always a bit annoying to hear a bad intonation mistake at the climax of a symphony--it kind of kills the moment.

In our next post, we'll cover the other work on this CD, Beethoven's Second Symphony.

Haydn: Symphony #40, #50

2008-10-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

Today we will cover listener notes to Haydn's Symphony #40 and Symphony #50, the final two works on this exceptional CD of four Haydn symphonies.

Haydn was a giant of the classical era of classical music, and if you're interested in getting a representative sample of his music, you should seriously consider buying today's recording, as well as a recording of either his "London" Symphonies, or his "Paris" Symphonies.

Let me just repeat for emphasis from last post that the four symphonies on this CD are performed brilliantly, and nearly flawlessly, by the Heidelberger Sinfoniker.
**********************
Thomas Fey and the Heidelberger Sinfoniker
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 39, 34, 40, 50
Hanssler Classic, 2001/2003
**********************
Listener Notes for Haydn's Symphony Nos. #40 and #50:

Symphony #40:
1) 30 seconds into the first movement of #40 (and it happens again at 1:38 when the initial theme is repeated) there's a an interesting musical feature Haydn puts in here: while the oboe and the first violins are playing long high notes, the second violins and violas play a repeated pattern of three eighth notes beneath them. It sounds almost like a needle skipping on a record--except that's impossible with a CD. That's another thing I love about Haydn: music in his era was supposed to be highly structured, and on casual listen, Haydn's music sounds like it plays by the rules. Yet if you listen closely, you can't help but notice all the little subversive musical things he sneaks into his works.

2) Do the four movements of Symphony #40 sound like they belong together? They don't to me at all, particularly the second movement. In fact, I'd argue you could substitute the slow movement from any other Haydn symphony in here and only a few classical music geeks would ever know the difference.

3) The fourth movement is a fugue! That's a first for me: I've never heard Haydn trying his hand at composing a fugue before. It's beautiful. And just like Bach, only happier.

Symphony #50:
1) For the first movement of this symphony, Haydn recycled music he had written for a one act opera called Philemon und Baucis. I can see why he did it: not only was it a great way to save time (how else was he going to write 104 symphonies?), but this movement is excellent--a truly triumphant piece of music.

2) Triumphant or not, though, the strings and woodwinds get all the good parts here. The brass are stuck counting rests and playing oom-pah parts.

3) The second movement has an interesting feature: the violas play the same melody along with the violins, except the violas play it one octave lower. It gives the string section an added dimension of depth and body.

4) Tell me you can listen to the fourth movement of this symphony and not get an ear-to-ear grin on your face. This movement was so captivating on the first listen that I had to listen to it again right away. And it's one of the key reasons this symphony is my runaway favorite of the four works on this CD.

Haydn: Symphony #39, #34

2008-10-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before how I had never really appreciated Haydn before starting this blog. I had always thought of his music as rigid, highly structured and filled with more ornamentation than emotion.
**********************
Thomas Fey and the Heidelberger Sinfoniker
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 39, 34, 40, 50
Hanssler Classic, 2001/2003
**********************
This batch of four Haydn symphonies puts the lie to those assumptions just like all my other Haydn CDs. Haydn did amazing, facetious, challenging and even shocking things with the symphony. He was every bit the flexible risk taker that Mozart was, despite that era's relatively strict sense what the structure and format of a symphony should be.

And this CD of the Heidelberger Sinfoniker, under the direction of Thomas Fey, is an exceptional performance across the board. There is hardly a mistake or off-key note in the entire CD, a particularly significant achievement as this recording was done with period instruments. For pathological listeners like me, it's a treat simply to enjoy the music rather than be distracted by playing errors.

But let me share one complaint: Why would you record Haydn's 39th, 34th, 40th and 50th symphonies not only out of sequence, but also out of order? Not only does this make categorizing your music more difficult, it makes it nearly impossible to be systematic about acquiring Haydn symphonies.

We saw this phenomenon with my Haydn London Symphony CDs, which contained a total of six of the composer's 12 London symphonies. Don't get me wrong, it was a (mostly) exceptional recording, and listening to and writing about these symphonies was a great joy.

But guess how these symphonies were sequenced on the CD? #94, #100, #101, #96, #103, #104. How is this logical?

Let's say I wanted to have a complete collection of all twelve of Haydn's London Symphonies. If all I could find were randomly (or idiosyncratically) sequenced partial collections, I'd most likely end up having to buy half a dozen separate recordings to approach a complete collection. Worse, this hypothetical six CD mini-collection would probably have six versions of the "Drum Roll" Symphony and no versions of Symphony #102.

If anyone can articulate a legitimate artistic reason for recording symphonies both out of sequence and out of order, please share it with me. I'd love to hear it.

And until I hear a real reason, I'll just assume that this is just a scheme to force consumers to buy extra music. It certainly must help drive sales of boxed sets.

Listener Notes for Haydn's Symphony Nos. #39, #34, #40 and #50:
Indulge me while I rearrange these symphonies into an order that doesn't hurt my eyes so much:

Symphony #34:
1) The long (at least for Haydn) opening movement of the 34th Symphony is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard by the man.

2) Haydn's music is often a study of contrasts, and the 34th Symphony is no exception. After being lulled by the first movement, he makes you jump out of your seat with the Allegro of second movement. Better still is how Haydn flaunts symphonic convention. After all, the first movement is supposed to be aggressive and fast, and second movement is supposed to be slow and quiet. Not the other way around.

3) I particularly love the grace-note-inflected triplets played by the strings in the beginning of the fourth movement of #34.

4) Yet another symphony that's over too soon. After the beautiful nine-minute first movement and the speedy five-minute second movement, the next two movements are barely six minutes long together. All of a sudden this symphony is over before it starts, and we're off to yet another wonderful (and arbitrarily sequenced) symphony!

Symphony #39:
1) I know I recently called Haydn's symphonies the auditory equivalent of an amuse-bouche (although I never meant this statement to sound so condescending). But after being overwhelmed by Beethoven the other day, the contrast between Beethoven's gravitas and Haydn's light-hearted fun seems extreme. Perhaps I should listen to my own advice and avoid listening to classical music composers out of order.

2) Haydn puts a catchy and amusing "hook" at the very beginning of Symphony #39. It's an introduction of the theme of the first movement, but at the same time it's a bit of a headfake. We hear 8 measures of introduction, a fade into a few uncomfortable seconds of silence, and then the symphony starts for real.

3) The tension of the opening few moments of the fourth movement of #39 is real shock. Maybe this symphony isn't quite such an amuse-bouche after all...

I'll be back in a few days with listener notes to the two remaining symphonies on this CD, Symphony #40 and Symphony #50!

The Classical Music of Disney's Fantasia

2008-10-07T04:24:00.000-07:00

This blog's core purpose isn't really to address classical music in film, but I just spent the other day watching the full-length version of Fantasia, and I wanted to share on this blog how this movie can provide you and your family a fascinating way to experience classical music.

The animation work in this 1940 film was revolutionary for its day, and of course it contains The Sorcerer's Apprentice, one of the best-known and most memorable animated film shorts of all time.

And the rest of Fantasia is equally memorable. One of the film shorts is an animation of the geological and evolutionary history of Earth set to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, with underwater scenes of the first ocean life, scenes of fish evolving into amphibians, the birth and dying off of the dinosaurs, and a memorable (but paleontologically improbable) battle between a T-Rex and a triceratops. If you introduce your sons or daughters to this film at an age when they're showing interest in dinosaurs, you'll get them interested in classical music too.

And who could forget the unicorns, pegasuses and centaurs (including some rather fetching looking centaurettes) prancing and gamboling to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony?

This film features some of the most amazing hand-drawn animation of all time, some of it kitschy, some of it outright funny, all of it beautiful. Enjoy this movie it with your family and see if it doesn't put classical music in a whole new light for you!

Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music

2008-10-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

Just a quick link to share with readers today. This one stings a bit (a century beyond its relevance??), but it's still funny and oh, so true:

Stuff White People Like: Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music

Beethoven: Symphony #3 and Leonore #3

2008-10-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

The most commonly told anecdote about Beethoven's Third Symphony is the story of its dedication. After completing the symphony in 1803, Beethoven initially dedicated it to Napoleon as a representative of the freedoms and ideals of the French Revolution.
**********************
Herbert von Karajan and the Berliner Philharmoniker
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony #3; Leonore Overture III
Deutsche Grammophon, 1966/1977
**********************
And then, of course, Napoleon crowned himself emporer.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Beethoven literally wigged out when he heard the news. He flew into a rage and tore up the title page of the symphony manuscript. And as told by his longtime friend and assistant Ferdinand Ries in the book Beethoven Remembered, Beethoven shouted:

"So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, too, he will trample the rights of man, indulge only his ambition. Now he will think himself superior to all men and become a tyrant!"

And yet this symphony's historical significance goes far beyond a mere anecdote about Napoleon. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the Beethoven's Third established the modern conception of the symphony.

Certainly this work represents a break from the "Classical era" of classical music, the period from the early 1700s to the early 1800s which featured more modest, though no less beautiful, symphonies by brilliant composers such as Mozart and Haydn. However, in the expansive emotional range of Beethoven's Third, we begin to see the first stirrings of classical music's Romantic era. The symphony was leaving the 18th century--and it would rarely look back.

In fact, of all of the music written in the prior century, perhaps only supra-symphonic works like Mozart's Requiem or Handel's or Haydn's oratorios cover as much emotional ground as Beethoven's Third Symphony. In some ways, the Third has such broad scale and scope that it makes even the most beautiful Haydn symphony seem like a trifling amuse-bouche by comparison. But the Third also stumbles at times (as we'll see below), as Beethoven hadn't quite yet found the voice that would ultimately give the world his greatest work, the Fifth Symphony.

Listener Notes for Beethoven's Third Symphony:
1) The first movement is almost too much to take. There's such power and triumph in just the first few minutes that it overloads the senses. Just the other week, I wrote that the first movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony felt like an entire symphony. Same here.

2) And yet the second movement feels like another full symphony! Indeed, composers like Haydn wrote entire symphonies that were shorter than just this one movement.

3) Shrill clarinet alert: listen at 8:05 in the second movement for the clarinets bleating out a nasal-sounding unison part.

4) I particularly like the fugue-like section near the end of the second movement (runs from about 13:55 to 14:30 in my recording), where the strings and woodwinds answer to each other.

5) The french horns really blow it during their key part in the third movement (begins at about the 2:48 mark). Not only are they off-key, but they fail to play the part in tight unison and they play the part weakly.

6) While I'm on the subject of the brass, let me make a general comment on the caliber of the overall brass section in the Berliner Philharmoniker. Frankly, I'm not impressed. No power, poor intonation and no spirit. The trumpets in particular have a tendency to veer out of control at key, high-volume parts throughout the performance. I should have bought a recording of Beethoven's Third Symphony as performed by my idols from the Chicago Symphony.

7) Listen to the extremely technically demanding flute solo at 3:37 in the fourth movement. Our flutist nails it here.

8) There is at least one instance in this recording where the french horns really nail a big part: at 7:55 in the fourth movement, when the horns state the key theme.

9) Honestly, I was disappointed with the structure of the fourth movement, and in particular by the sudden and surprise finale, which starts off with a sudden loud chord at 10:46 and races off to an equally sudden finish less than two minutes later. It seems like every critic and commentator is quick to celebrate the inexorable logic inherent in the structure of Beethoven's symphonies, including the Third. To me, however, this conclusion sounded (dare I say it?) abrupt and almost random.

Listener Notes for Leonore #3:
1) Nobody really thinks of Beethoven as a composer of operas. In fact, he struggled mightily to write just one, Fidelio. The opera premiered in 1805, but afterward Beethoven heavily revised it three more times. This work, Leonore #3, is the best known version of the overture to this opera. And despite being named #3, it was part of the second version of the opera, performed in 1806.

2) Isn't the main theme, when it gets introduced by the full orchestra at 4:18, absolutely inspiring?

3) I've played the off-stage trumpet call back in my playing days (on this disc it begins at 7:51 in track 5). It's more difficult than it sounds. It's one of those parts that is quite easy to play in a small practice room, but it's another thing entirely to play it off-stage in a concert hall with an appropriately big but controlled sound.

4) At 9:39, can you hear the bassoonist bungle that run in the duet with the flute player? Whoops.

Debussy: La Mer and Images

2008-09-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

"I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it."
--Claude Debussy

Today we'll listen for the first time to Debussy, one of the greatest rule-breakers in all of classical music.
**********************
Los Angeles Philharmonic/Boston Symphony Orchestra
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
La Mer; Images
Deutsche Grammophon, 1971/1980
**********************
If you enjoy vivid musical imagery, this is a composer you should get to know. And if you enjoy salacious personal details, you'll want to read all about the controversies of Debussy's personal life (an example: not one, but two of his jilted lovers attempted suicide by shooting themselves after he left them. Both recovered).

Fairly or unfairly, Debussy has been labeled an "impressionist"--many listeners consider his music to be an auditory representation of the well-known painting movement. I'll offer my own impression: if we have to define Debussy's music this narrowly, it's more accurate to call him a Fauve--he's more Matisse than Monet in my view.

Whatever the word modern listeners use to describe him, Debussy wrote some of history's most vivid music, and today, in the 90th year since his death, he remains an enormous influence on classical music.

Unfortunately, I can't find a link on Amazon to the same Debussy CD I have in my collection. But for those of you interested in acquiring recordings of Debussy's music, here are links to two definitive collections of his complete orchestral works, as well as a third link to a lower-cost 2CD set of his key orchestral works:

Debussy: Complete Works for Orchestra
Debussy: Orchestral Music
Debussy: Orchestral Music

Please keep in mind, when you buy anything at Amazon via links on this blog, I will receive a small commission on your purchase, and there's no added cost to you. Thank you, readers, for your support and attention!

Listener Notes for La Mer:
1) In just the first movement alone there are so many overlapping melodies and unusual harmonies from such a wide variety of instruments that it's difficult (for me at least) to keep track of all the moving parts in this music. Perhaps, rather than trying too hard to over-analyze the music, it's better to just let this work wash over you (pun intended).

2) One of my favorite parts of this work starts at the 3:51 mark on this CD. Listen to the many layers of sound here: the flute and English horn (I think) play one part in unison, which blends seamlessly into a beautiful french horn melody. And then the strings splash enormous blotches of sound on top of the french horns. If that isn't vivid music, I don't know what is.

3) As a former trumpet player, I of course love the fact that the trumpets really get to let it rip at the climax of the first movement (from the 8:45 mark until the end).

4) In last 30 seconds of the second movement, listen for the very soft cymbal rolls in the background. They sound exactly like gentle waves.

Listener Notes for Images:
1) Be sure to pronounce this work "ee-MAZHH" or you'll incur the derision of every music snob within earshot.

2) When I hear the beautiful oboe solo in the first movement of Images (begins at 0:47), and compare it to the shrill and whiny oboe in the wind quintet of my Mozart/Dennis Brain CD, it again reminds me of a fundamental truth: if you are running a symphony and you have anything less than a spectacular oboe player, you are screwed.

3) I love the first movement of Iberia ("Par les rues et par les chemins") but I think Debussy broke one rule too many by scoring two clarinets to play the key theme in unison (first occurrence is at the 0:08 mark in track 5 of my CD, and then again at about the 0:50 mark of track 5). It's going to sound shrill and off-key when two musicians play this part, no matter how well-tuned they are. A similarly shrill clarinet unison occurs about a minute and a half into the third movement of Iberia ("Le matin d'un jour de fete").

4) For still more beautiful solo oboe playing, listen to the second movement of Iberia ("Les parfums de la nuit").

5) Funny, but I was wide awake and totally alert when I sat down to listen to Images. But by the end of the "Les parfums de la nuit" movement, I had drifted off to somnolence--my eyes were half closed and I suddenly felt like I really needed a nap. It was temporary; I was back to wide awake two minutes into the next movement.

6) I actually found a useful liner note accompanying this CD! Here's how the author, Paul Griffiths, describes the final movement of Images: "The music keeps skimming in other directions, like a mind unable to concentrate." Well said.

Strauss and Mahler T-Shirts

2008-09-27T07:25:00.000-07:00

Just a brief post today: Here's an awesome t-shirt design of Strauss and Mahler available for sale that I thought I'd share with my readers.

Available from the blog Soho the Dog in short and long-sleeved versions from $15.40. Proceeds go to the charity organization Christopher's Haven, which provides a housing for a nominal fee for pediatric cancer patients at the MassGeneral Hospital for Children.

(Also a tip of the hat to Chantal at Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks for bringing this to my attention!)

Mozart: Horn Concertos

2008-09-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

Today's CD, a glorious recording of Mozart's Horn Concertos, gives me a chance to share a few thoughts on the miserable difficulties of playing the french horn.
**********************
Dennis Brain and the Philharmonia Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Mozart: Horn Concertos; Quintet, K.452 EMI Classics, 1954, 1955
**********************
I may be a trumpet player, but I've fooled around with the french horn enough to appreciate how hard an instrument it can be to play. And the french horn is, at its core, an uncontrollable instrument. All it takes is a very, very tiny change in your embouchure (that's a fancy word for the shape and formation of your lips when they're up against the mouthpiece), and you'll play a completely different note from the one you expected to play.

And in Mozart's day, brass instruments (including the horn) were valveless. Thus you changed notes entirely by changing your embouchure-- and probably every third note was off-key. It helps explain why Mozart never wrote any good parts for the trumpet. He probably was too busy cringing at the thought of how it would sound.

One more point on the french horn before we get to the listener notes. French horn players, like most brass musicians, usually have power or finesse. Rarely do they possess both. The guy in your trumpet section who can nail those high notes usually looks pretty naked when it's time to play a soft air in the middle register. Likewise, the precise french horn player who rarely chips a note isn't the kind of horn player who can unload over an entire orchestra during the third movement of Beethoven's Fifth.

But there are occasional musicians out there who are hybrids--freaks of nature who have both power and control. And when it comes to the french horn, two players come to mind: Dennis Brain (who is the featured musician on today's CD), and Barry Tuckwell.

I once saw Barry Tuckwell do something live that I will never forget: he was appearing with the Syracuse Symphony in a conductor and performer role, and had just finished conducting (not playing) the first piece of the evening. He then went backstage, picked up his horn (cold), played no more than two or three warmup notes, and then walked out on stage and flawlessly played a difficult horn concerto. He made no mistakes and had not a single chipped note. It was pure finesse. And he never even had a chance to warm up.

Normal humans cannot do this.

Listener Notes for Mozart Horn Concertos featuring Dennis Brain:
1) If you think you're too busy to dedicate the time to listen to classical music, these horn concertos are perfect for you. Individual movements from these works tend to be very brief, ranging from four to six minutes in length. This is perfect music for listeners accustomed to 3-4 minute long popular music songs.

2) Mozart wrote these works for the horn player Joseph Leutgeb, who was his lifelong friend. Mozart wrote jokes, tasteless comments and insults to his friend in the original scores.

3) Concerto #1 (which ironically should be the last concerto if you were put them in the order in which they were written) was unfinished at the time of Mozart's death. The first movement was complete, but the Rondo movement had to be finished and arranged by one of Mozart's pupils, Franz Xaver Sussmayr. It's also unlikely that this work was originally intended to have just two movements. Mostly likely it would have also had a slow middle movement, just like the other concertos.

4) There's an ever so slight background hiss underneath the music, a relic of the analog source tape of this 1954-1955 recording. You'll be able to hear it with high quality headphones if you really crank up the volume, although I didn't find it to be a meaningful distraction.

5) And if you're snickering at the notion of "cranking up the volume" with Mozart, I don't take it personally. Go ahead and laugh.

6) At the 6:02 mark in the first movement of Concerto #3 (track 6 on this CD), you'll hear a cadenza, a passage where the orchestra drops out briefly, leaving the featured musician to play entirely by himself. Cadenzas were standard features of concertos written during Mozart's era--soloists would compose their own cadenzas in order to show off their skills with an instrument. Think of it an 18th century version of freestyling. With powdered wigs.

7) Another brief comment on the perfection of Dennis Brain. Everything he does on this CD is done flawlessly. He nails every high note, plays every run clearly, never chips a note and even plays trills cleanly.

8) Since Mozart only wrote four horn concertos with a combined playing time of under an hour, we get treated to a bonus work on this CD, Mozart's Quintet in E flat major. Unfortunately, it's a weirdly uneven performance, with Brain's usually perfection marred by mediocre playing by the woodwinds. While the oboe and clarinet often sound shrill and often off-key, the bassoonist is worse. He's completely in over his head. Listen, for example, at 3:40 in the first movement (track 12)--can you hear the bassoonist fumble all over those arpeggios? That's a community band-caliber performance, not something you should hear on a professionally recorded classical music CD.

Brahms: Symphony #4

2008-09-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

I've dealt with Brahms' Fourth once before in a recording by the Weiner Philharmoniker under Carlos Kleiber. Today's post will cover an alternate recording of Brahms' Fourth, and it will complete our journey through the Philadelphia Orchestra's recording of Brahms' complete symphonies.

Recall how I said that the simple act of picking up that Klieber disc, dusting it off and playing it made this entire blog worthwhile? Well, today's CD has helped me get to know Brahms' Fourth even more intimately. It's one of the greatest classical music works I've ever heard, and I'm starting to think it might be my favorite symphony of all time.

And I never knew it existed until I started this blog and began systematically working through my collection of classical music CDs.
**********************
Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Complete Symphonies
Philips, 1989
**********************
We've talked before about how comparing different recordings of the same symphony is not only a great pleasure, but it can deepen your knowledge and familiarity with the music. This is a more advanced level of classical music exploration, and I hope you take time to try it out for yourself. Feel free to share your experiences with other readers in the comments section of this blog!

Listener Notes for Brahms' Fourth Symphony:
1) Have you noticed how the greatest symphonies of the Romantic era (usually thought of as the 1800s) are based on extremely simple melodies? Obviously the best example is Beethoven's Fifth and the four note "dut-dut-dut-dahhhhh" theme. But Brahms' Fourth is no exception, with a simple opening four note theme (dah-dum, dah-dum) that is the foundation of the entire first movement. It just goes to show that the composers who thrived on complexity (Bach and perhaps Mozart come to mind immediately) didn't have a monopoly on great music.

2) After you've listened to the first movement of Brahms' Fourth, doesn't it feel like you've listened to an entire symphony? There's so much drama and emotion and such a climactic conclusion to this single movement that it feels like an entire symphony packed into one brief movement.

3) The second movement of this symphony one of the most elegant, modest and beautiful works of classical music I've ever heard. One measure I use to judge a truly great composition is whether it still evokes a strong emotional reaction in me despite minor mistakes or errors in the performance. This movement is so elegant that the music washes over me--it almost subverts analysis. I hear, but don't really notice, the occasional minor mistakes in this recording.

4) Typical Brahms: Supposedly, when Brahms sent the score of the Fourth Symphony off to Hans von Bulow for a first look, he was "extremely insecure" about the reaction he'd get from the famous conductor. At this point in his life, Brahms had become wealthy off of the success of his compositions. He was literally a living monument in Vienna. And he had just completed a monumental symphony that would be miles beyond the capabilities of all but a few of history's greatest composers. And yet, to co-opt a modern phrase, he probably thought it sucked. This is the man, remember, who burned more than 100 of his earliest compositions.

What I'm finally beginning to learn from the story of Brahms is this: it might be good to be humble, but never judge yourself too harshly. You only hurt yourself, and more importantly, you'll be wrong.

Brahms: Symphony #3

2008-09-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

The Third is the most overlooked of Brahms' symphonies. In fact, The Essential Canon of Classical Music (which has become a veritable bible to me as I write this blog) gives the work only three bare sentences, saying that the Third "is infused with a genial lyricism," a phrase I view to be more condescending than insightful.
**********************
Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Complete Symphonies
Philips, 1989
**********************
I consider this symphony simple and direct. It is a pearl. And it has one element that at the time was considered shocking in its originality: a quiet, peaceful ending during an era of loud and drawn-out symphonic climaxes. With the minor exception of an out of tune clarinetist (more on this below), this is an excellent recording.

Before we get to the listener notes, let's spend a brief moment on my favorite pet peeve: atrociously written liner notes. Here's a particularly inscrutable line from Bernard Jacobson, who wrote the text accompanying this CD:

"In the quest for organic unity the Third Symphony admittedly relies as pervasively as its companion works on intricate developments of motivic detail."

I suppose he could say that the themes are complex and detailed, but that just doesn't have quite the same pseudo-intellectual heft, does it?

Listener Notes for Brahms' Third Symphony:
1) This symphony starts out lightly, with none of the seriousness and gravitas of Brahms' First or Fourth Symphonies. Of course that means more emphasis on the woodwinds, which as we've seen before aren't exactly the forte of the Philadelphia Orchestra. And unfortunately it's the clarinet who's the worst offender in this recording. Listen to the clarinet at 0:59, 1:26-1:40 and 2:20 in the first movement and tell me you agree that this musician has a poor tone and is often out of tune.

2) In the beginning of the second movement, the clarinet soloist is again out of tune on many notes. I find it hard to believe the the Philly Orchestra has a clarinetist with such a tin ear. The first minute or so of this movement is painful--and I mean fingernails-on-a-chalkboard painful.

It's unfortunate, because when a clarinet is played really well, it sounds so mournful, so unutterably sad and beautiful, that there's just no instrument like it. But when played poorly or off-key, this unforgiving instrument can make even professionals sound like high school hacks. I'll attempt to stop complaining about this now.

3) Notice at 7:48 in the second movement, the trombones enter with a chord that is off key. I actually blame Brahms for errors like this--one of the liabilities of composing a symphony where you keep wind players sitting there not playing for periods of 10 minutes or more, is their instruments cool down. When the instrument cools down, the acoustics change, and this can especially be a problem with brass instruments, particularly long coiled brass instruments like the french horn and trombone. So let's give the trombones a bit of a break here and lay the blame on Brahms instead. Plus, it doesn't take the trombones long to get back in sync with each other. By the next entrance they make, at 8:20 and then again at 8:28, they nail their chords perfectly.

4) Despite the minor mistakes by our friends in the clarinet and trombone section, doesn't the second movement end beautifully?

5) The third movement is a perfect showcase for Philly's exceptionally expressive string section. When I listen to works like this heartrending third movement, it makes me feel like the luckiest man on the face of the earth, simply because I'm alive and able to experience music like this.

6) What's your take on how this symphony ends? I find myself struggling for a way to write about it. It's not really fair to say that it goes out with a whimper instead of a bang, nor is it fair to say it ends in an anti-climax. I guess it's just best to just listen it rather than to try to do it justice by describing it in words.

Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition, Russian Easter Festival Orchestra and Night on Bald Mountain

2008-09-07T06:51:00.000-07:00

Today we'll go over a disc that you could almost call a mix tape of Russian classical music favorites. If you're a classical music beginner looking to sample some truly memorable musical works, this is a great disc to buy or download.
**********************
Charles Dutoit and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition No 1-10; Night on the Bare Mountain; Khovanshchina - Prelude; Rimsky-Korsakov: Russian Easter Festival Overture
Decca, 1987
**********************
I generally hate to buy classical music CDs containing works by multiple composers (after all, which composer do you file it under?) but I gladly made an exception for this exceptional CD. I challenge you to find works more thrilling than Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Festival Orchestra. And one listen to Pictures at an Exhibition and you'll wish you were a brass player.

Before we get to the listener notes, I'll tell a brief story about a time when I performed Pictures at an Exhibition. Too many years ago, I was involved in a brass quintet made up mostly of the principal chairs of the Syracuse Symphony Youth Orchestra. We formed the group to have some fun and make a little extra money playing weddings and other performances in the community.

But at one of the weddings we played, the bride wanted to have the Promenade from Pictures at an Exhibition performed during the processional. Don't get me wrong: it's a beautiful work, and it sounds great when played by a brass quintet. But the problem is that the Promenade is in 5/4 time. The bride, along with everybody else in the bridal party, would have to do a stutter-step every fifth beat!

It turned out that the bridal party just walked up the aisle, and we were just being anal to worry about it. Oh, and the second trumpet player's digital watch alarm went off right in the middle of the ceremony, thereby proving the maxim that the things you worry about are never the things that actually go wrong. Fortunately, weddings are (usually) one-shot deals--I don't think we would have gotten repeat business out of this bride.

Let's get into the listener notes for this CD:

Listener Notes for Night on the Bare Mountain:
Whenever you see this work on a CD or in a concert program, it will typically be credited to Mussorgsky, but written with the words "Orch. by Rimsky-Korsakov" or "Arr. by Rimsky-Korsakov" written in small print below it. And like many of Mussorgsky's compositions, the history of the work is confusing. Mussorgsky composed a version of this work in 1867, and later incorporated the work as the third act in one of his operas, Mlada. Neither of these compositions saw the light of day during Mussorgsky's life.

After Mussorgsky's death in 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov arranged this work for orchestra, but he so heavily edited the composition that the work in many ways became entirely his own. It was this work that went on to become famous. Ironically, Rimsky-Korsakov has since come under criticism for his edits and so-called "corrections" of Mussorgsky's work, and classical music listeners are now increasingly going back to the original Mussorgsky composition. Of course, if R-K hadn't revised and modified this work, it would have never been heard in the first place. There's just no satisfying people sometimes.

1) Do you recognize the very first theme of this work? This theme was used in the Disney movie Fantasia, and you could argue that the theme was co-opted by the movie to such an extent that our culture now associates the work with the movie and practically forgets the original composition. Another example of this co-opting phenomenon: in the minds of most modern listeners Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries is associated either with Bugs Bunny ("Kill the Wabbit!") or the movie Apocalypse Now. Only classical music buffs know it from Wagner's own opera.

2) Listen for the brass, led by the trumpets, playing the theme at the 2:57 mark. This (along with several other examples in this piece) is a good example of triple-tonguing, an unfortunately named technique that I used regularly in my days as a former trumpet player. Maybe that's why I was so popular with the ladies back then.

3) Note also at 4:39 the french horns and the trombones repeat this triple-tonguing theme, but their articulation sounds far muddier (at 5:04 you can hear the trumpets play this theme again for a quick and clear contrast). That's why the trumpet player always gets the girl.

Listener Notes for Russian Easter Festival Overture:
We've listened to this work once before in this blog, so I won't spend a lot of time on it today. But as a quick reminder, this is one of R-K's best known works, and it's one of my personal favorites as well.

1) Listen at 0:57 for the cello playing the melody over a bevvy of flutes playing a surprisingly difficult part involving "double-tonguing" which is a variation of the triple tonguing done by the trumpets above. Yep, woodwind players, especially flute players, can double- and triple-tongue too.

2) At 5:23, the key theme ("Dahhh dut dut dahhh") is played by the entire orchestra. Crank up the volume all the way and listen to this part again, but pay special attention to the enormous foundation of the tubas and base strings. Is that gripping or what?

3) At the 12:23 mark, listen to the awesome yet controlled power of the low brass playing the key theme. Once again, this is a great time to really crank up the volume--and I'd suggest leaving it cranked up for the rest of the work. I'd love to hear the Montreal Symphony Orchestra live so I can see for myself exactly what kind of monsters they have for trombone and tuba players.

Listener notes for Pictures at an Exhibition:
This work is a musical representation of stroll through a gallery of artwork. And, as Mussorgsky fans have come to expect, there's also a confusing history behind this work. Mussorgsky originally wrote this in 1874 (in only about 20 days by the way) as a suite for piano, but the work was re-edited by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov after Mussorgsky's death. Fortunately, Mussorgsky's original manuscript survived, but it wasn't until 1931 that the original version became available so that pianists could perform an "as intended" version of the work.

I'll confuse you even more. The version we are listening to here is an orchestration of Mussorgsky's piano suite by Maurice Ravel, and Ravel was one of more than 20 composers that have arranged this work for orchestra (Ravel's orchestration is by far the most widely known however).

But set aside your confusion for now and just listen to this spectacular work, which features some of the most triumphant themes and some of the best brass parts you'll ever find in classical music.

1) The trumpet solo of the Promenade theme at the very beginning of this work has to be done right. You have to hit each note with confidence, use a round tone, and don't use so much damn vibrato. Inxay on the ibratovay. This guy simply uses way too much. The notes should be solid, not quavery. There's no reason to sound like you're playing with an advanced case of Parkinson's disease.

2) I'm sorry to harp a second time on vibrato, but at the 1:18 mark, the saxophone uses so much vibrato that he sounds like he ought to be in a 1930's era big band. One of my worst pet peeves about classical music is when otherwise well-trained musicians confuse a heavy vibrato with artistry.

3) You can see images of some of the artwork represented in this suite on Wikipedia.

4) The opening of the eighth movement ("The Catacombs") is an excellent showpiece for any brass section. If you want to see how your local symphony's brass players measure up, see how the principal trumpet handles the solo at the beginning of the work and then see how the brass section handles the eighth movement.

5) At the beginning of the final movement, when the entire brass section plays the Promenade theme, can you hear the trumpet playing the melody above it all? Notice how the trumpet player doesn't use any vibrato here. To me that's proof that his over-use of vibrato in his solo at the very beginning of this work is artistically inappropriate.

Comparing Recordings: Brahms Symphony #2: Boston vs. Philadelphia

2008-08-24T04:37:00.000-07:00

Today I'll evaluate a second version of Brahms' Second Symphony and use the opportunity to get to know this beautiful work even more intimately.
**********************
Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Complete Symphonies
Philips, 1989
**********************
I'll spend a fair portion of this post highlighting differences between today's recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the more polished, almost mistake-free version by the Boston Symphony Orchestra that we listened to back in April.

Before we get started, however, let me be clear on one point: despite the fact that I'll be citing strengths and weaknesses of one performance versus another, the actual differences in quality between these two performances is extremely small. So small, in fact, that it's simply further proof of my prior assertion that you can purchase pretty much any recording of any symphony performed by any major orchestra (think NFL cities), and it will be an excellent recording.

Still, there is a detectable quality difference between these two performances--and in my opinion the Boston Symphony Orchestra's version of Brahms' Second is slightly better than the Philadelphia Orchestra's. While Philly's string section is, surprisingly, far more expressive than Boston's, its woodwind and brass sections have occasional distracting lapses (I'll point out a few below), and it's these lapses that slightly drag down Philly's overall performance quality. Boston has more talent and consistency across its entire orchestra and it simply records a cleaner performance.

Listener notes for Brahms' Second Symphony:
1) A perfect example of a lapse in the Philadelphia recording is the whiny and wimpy trombone entrance at the 11:50 mark of the first movement. They don't sound like they were quite ready to play, and you can hear the difference ten seconds later when they repeat the part again. That time, they sounded like they were actually ready to go.

2) However, you can hear great examples of the expressiveness of Philly's string section throughout the first movement. A good section to compare the two orchestras is at the 15:29 mark in the Philly recording (this same passage is at 16:08 in the BSO recording). If you have each of these recordings, listen to both passages and see if you don't agree that Philly's strings play this part with more heart and soul than Boston. It just goes to show how a performance can still be beautiful and emotional even if it has a few imperfections here and there.

3) No doubt about it, the woodwind section is one of the weakest links of the Philly symphony. A typical example: the 1:09 mark in the fourth movement when the clarinet plays a brief solo. He comes in off-key and his tone sounds pinched and nasal.

Granted, that solo is extremely difficult--the poor clarinet player has to traverse about a two-and-a-half-octave range in just a couple of seconds. It's nearly impossible to play something like that on a clarinet while maintaining an easy rounded tone, so I'll cut him a tiny bit of slack here. But again, a comparison of this passage to the BSO recording (at 1:09 in the fourth movement on that disc), is instructive: the BSO's principal clarinetist plays the part, comes in totally in tune, and maintains a rounded and less strained tone.

4) The fourth movement of this symphony always lulls me with the soft opening, only to jolt me upright in my seat when the main theme begins, loudly, at the 0:28 mark. No matter how many times I've listened to this symphony, it makes me jump every time.

5) Another good comparison point between these two recordings is the last minute or so of the fourth movement. Here's where Boston's brass section fires up a really rich and deep pyramid of sound for the symphony's finale. All of the brass instruments are perfectly in balance, from the tubas creating a massive sonic foundation to the trumpets ringing out over the top of it all. It is beautiful to hear.

Philly's guys just don't seem to have the ability to do this: its trombones let it rip for a brief moment at 8:15 in the fourth movement (compare that same part at 8:28 in the fourth movement on the BSO CD), but they're surrounded by weakish trumpets and a barely audible tuba. There's no triumph and no power here--and certainly nothing like the rich sound pyramid of Boston's brass section. Yes Philly's strings might be more expressive, but at the end of this dramatic symphony you need some serious brass to get at all of the gripping emotion that Brahms wrote into this score. That's what the BSO has that Philly lacks, and that's a big part of what makes the BSO performance just a little bit better overall.

Schumann: Symphonic Etudes, Kinderszenene (Scenes From Childhood) and Kreisleriana (Fantasies)

2008-08-21T04:03:00.000-07:00

Today we're going to cover disc 2 from this amazing four CD set of Schumann's piano works, performed by pianist Wilhelm Kempff.

After listening to these recordings, I've never been more inspired to want to learn to play the piano. It's amazing what this man can do when he composes for this instrument. One work is a spare, beautiful and unforgettable melody, and the next work resonates with the depth and complexity of an entire symphony.
**********************
Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
Performed by Wilhelm Kempff (1895-1991)
Schumann: Piano Works
Deutsche Grammophone, 1975
**********************
And yet this man lived such a short life with so much suffering. If there's anything that even a cursory survey of the history of classical music shows, it's that so many of the world's greatest composers ranged from insane to insecure to shockingly miserable. More evidence of how true geniuses are doomed to suffer in this world.

Let's get right into the listener notes:

Notes for Etudes (opus 13, tracks 1-13, disc 2):
1) What exactly is an etude, anyway? Since I grew up playing etudes on my trumpet, let me share my own definition: It's a brief musical composition designed specifically to torture beginning and intermediate musicians. Etudes are almost always musically boring to play; many of them just suck. And they typically contain technically difficult passages designed to make the musician acutely aware of his shortcomings. All etudes are written by sadistic and downright mean composers who like to drive musicians to tantrums, fits of swearing and otherwise utter misery.

At least that's what I thought an etude was until I heard these beautiful works by Schumann. If I had had etudes like these to play on my trumpet when I was a kid, I would have been unstoppable. You'd have to lock the basement door to keep me from running down there to practice.

2) This work is structured in the form of a simple theme (track 1, disc 2) followed by twelve variations. See if you can recognize and pick out the main theme undulating under each of the following etudes. I found it fairly easy until Etude #7 (track 8, disc 2)--where exactly is the theme in that work?

3) My top favorite of all of the Etudes is the impressionistic, Debussy-like Etude #11 (track 12, disc 2).

4) Listen at the 6:16 mark in Etude 12 (track 13, disc 2), where there's a surprise jump into a new major chord. That beautiful unpredictability is one of Schumann's trademark gifts and one of the key reasons his works are such a pleasure to listen to.

Notes for Kinderszenen (opus 15, tracks 14-26, disc 2):
1) These are works meant to represent Schumann's remembrances of his childhood. Given his fierce battles against depression and mental illness throughout his adult life, they are surprisingly--almost unbelievably--peaceful and happy.

2) Once again, many of these works sound like they'd be playable by relatively novice pianists (with the obvious exception of "Catch Me"), and yet they are detailed, well-painted scenes, packed with emotion. Scene #1, "About Foreign Lands and Peoples" is possibly one of the most elegant, simple and beautiful pieces of music you'll ever hear. Who says you have to write sadistically difficult music in order to show your genius at composition?

3) Scene #12, "Child Falling Asleep" perfectly captures the restless uncertainty and fear a child experiences when drifting off to sleep. It's perhaps the one work of this collection that lets you into the recesses of Schumann's unsettled mind.

Notes from Kreisleriana/Fantasies:
1) Kreisleriana is one of Schumann's most highly regarded compositions. It was dedicated to Chopin, perhaps the only other composer of piano works who could be considered Schumann's equal.

2) The first movement is technically demanding, and unfortunately it's surprisingly imprecisely played by Kempff in this recording.

3) Fantasy #2 (track 28, disc 2) shows yet again how Schumann can create compelling music and emotional tension with a simple melody.

4) Notice at 7:29 in Fantasy #2 (track 28, disc 2) how Kempff flubs a note right in the second-to-last chord?

5) Works like Fantasy #6 (track 32, disc 2) bring me practically to tears--how does Schumann do this with such simple and elegant melodies? I'm beginning to think that this guy is one of the greatest composers of the 19th century.