What Are You Listening To?

[brianvds]

After starting back to work... distance teaching for at least the first quarter... beginning with 3+ weeks of professional development... learning a slew of platforms for distance learning/teaching/meeting: ZOOM, Microsoft Groups, Schoology, Office 365, Seesaw, etc... etc...

I don't know how the heck one can teach an art class online anyway.

The Russians have always been "hit or miss" with me... depending upon my mood... but Rachmaninoff has always been far more hit than miss.

I should go look (or rather, listen) into these trios. I am quite a Rach fan.

I noticed Brian's been listening a lot recently to Mendelssohn. Of all the big name composers of the Austro-Germanic Hegemony
Mendelssohn may be the composer who appeals least to me. Of course, I love his violin concerto and several other works, still... But I quite enjoy a good many of his chamber works... including this trio.

With Mendelssohn, the famous works are also listenable, but I find one does not easily make wondrous discoveries with his output. He was one of the most precociously gifted composers in history, but the promise perhaps fizzled out a bit, to some extent. I think the problem was that he was both too polite and too multitalented and energetic for his own good, and thus perhaps a bit reluctant to be adventurous in his composition, and also simply too busy to really focus on it.

Bach, Mozart and Beethoven couldn't do anything but music (unless billiards counts?) and perhaps this helped them really focus on it. But Mendelssohn was good at anything he tried his hand at. It might have served him (and us listeners) better had he suffered from Asperger's, with a particular obsession for music.

 

[brianvds]

Yes... a "Bieb-ear" would definitely be among the worst cases of ear worm.

Ludwig van Bieberhoven, working on his Missa Pubenscis...

Years after I created and posted this on TalkClassical, I am still proud of it.

 

[stlukesguild]

You really gotta give Mendelssohn credit for reviving Bach's reputation. That alone would make him worthy of being remembered. I need to listen to Mendelssohn again before I really dismiss him. I should especially give Elijah another listen.

 

[stlukesguild]

The rich sound of the clarinet that is suggestive of chocolate and coffee inspired a number of Mozart's finest works... but Mozart was not alone. A good number of composers of the Classical and Early Romantic Era composed some of there most beautiful and lasting works for clarinet. Glossa is an especially fine classical music label and this recording of Clarinet Quintets bt Weber and Krommer with the London Haydn Quartet and Eric Hoeprich is quite delicious.

 

[stlukesguild]

Let's continue in the same vein... or at least the same instrument(s).

 

[stlukesguild]

I'm quite liking this one... but I'm going to have to put it aside and listen tomorrow. My wife has gone to bed... right next to the computer and the speakers where I'm listening to this on Spotify.

 

[Iain]

I did tell you I was line-orientated? 12" wow! I loved Grandmaster Flash in the eighties (and the Sugarhill label in general) and I can still appreciate the music now. I must search out a documentary as I don't know a great deal about them. Big Daddy Kane on Tiny Desk is still kickin' it. There is a lot of good live performances on NPR, I discovered. The Roots feat. Bilal is steaming hot, and I don't think I've enjoyed a performance this good since B. Holiday, such class.

I sneezed once and accidentally blew a line of cocaine off the ceramic surface in which a fella had just deposited it. It was his last line. And he was mad. In both senses.

Well, it was called Blow.

 

[musket]

Beautiful woman for sure.

 

[Iain]

❤

 

[stlukesguild]

In the mood for some vocal choral music.

 

[Artyczar]

Iain, I love all those rap bands, and still have those CDs...and a "best of" Billie Holiday. Were you into Public Enemy at all? I was a big fan.

 

[Iain]

I didn't really know their music, if I'm honest. Although I mentioned B.D.Kane, it was more the earlier (?) stuff, Sugar Hill gang, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, also with Melle Mel, Afrika Bambataa, early Electro. I forget the more obscure stuff now. I did like the whole style of De La Soul.

 

[stlukesguild]

The three biggest musical entities of the 60s into the 70s:

I created a playlist on Spotify that includes the singles from 1968 as well as the "White Album": Revolution, Lady Madonna, Hey Bulldog, Hey Jude, The Inner Light, etc...

-Not Dylan's best... but who could compete with the white heat of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, and John Wesley Harding? Having said that, Nashville Skyline is still a very good album. I especially love Girl From the North Country with Johnny Cash.

-The last LP from the Rolling Stones' incredible run that began with Beggar's Banquet and continued through Let It Bleed, and Sticky Fingers ending with this grungy two-LP set: Exile on Main Street.

And last night? Haydn!

 

[stlukesguild]

More Haydn:

 

[brianvds]

Keep it up, and in another twenty years or so you will finally have listened to everything he wrote.

 

[brianvds]

In the mood for something gently lyrical, I tried out some Hovhaness:

 

[Dave Woody]

I probably won't make any friends, but 'Revised Music for Guitar and Low Budget Orchestra'
is a favourite of mine. Searching it on YouTube, you'll find an orchestral version of it too...
...interesting delivery compared to the original recording.

 

[stlukesguild]

Keep it up, and in another twenty years or so you will finally have listened to everything (Haydn) wrote.

You might spend a good deal of time on Hovhaness' symphonies alone.

 

[stlukesguild]

Taking a clue from Brian I gave this recording a listen again:

Alan Hovhaness' music is indeed lovely, lush, and lyrical. I was struck at how much Hovhaness... who was born in Armenia... sounds so much like American Late or Neo-Romantic composers like Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, etc... whose music strikes me as emphasizing the broad pastoral. Quickly perusing the Wikipedia article on Hovhaness, I found one of the composer's critics suggesting that Hovhaness conscious stroke to fit within the American Neo-Romantic idiom.

I followed Hovhaness with another composer I haven't listened to in a while: Karol Szymanowski.

Szymanowski is commonly recognized as the greatest Polish composer of the first half of the 20th century. Like Hovhaness, he fits with the Romantic tradition... but more so within the more urban and Modernist Post-Romantic strain. He was strongly influenced by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Alexander Scriabin, Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and of course his great Polish predecessor, Frederic Chopin. Like Wagner, Strauss, Mahler, etc... Szymanowski pushed tonality. He also challenged the usual classical music forms. Symphony no. 4 is closer to a tone poem meets a piano concerto. His violin concertos avoid the traditional solo passage for the violin. Rather, the violin is but one of the instruments within the lush orchestration... albeit the most dominant.

This disc has long been a favorite. I purchased it not long ago... maybe 10 or 15 years... when the available oeuvre of recorded classical music was far smaller than it is today (largely thanks to Amazon). Songs of a Faerie-Tale Princess is an exotic song cycle for soprano and orchestra that reminds me of Stravinsky's Russian works (Petruschka, Firebird, Rite of Spring and the Nightingale). Harnasie is a ballet pantomime for orchestra and choral passages. The Love Songs of Hafiz sets poems of the classic Persian poet, Hafiz, for Soprano and Orchestra. The music... especially that of the Songs for a Faerie-Tale Princess and the Love Songs of Hafiz are exqusitely and lushly orchestrated.

 

[brianvds]

Alan Hovhaness' music is indeed lovely, lush, and lyrical. I was struck at how much Hovhaness... who was born in Armenia... sounds so much like American Late or Neo-Romantic composers like Samuel Barber, Howard Hanson, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, etc... whose music strikes me as emphasizing the broad pastoral. Quickly perusing the Wikipedia article on Hovhaness, I found one of the composer's critics suggesting that Hovhaness conscious stroke to fit within the American Neo-Romantic idiom.

As far as I can tell, many of his contemporaries were rather dismissive of his work, but at least some of his huge output seems to have slipped fairly firmly into the repertoire now.

I followed Hovhaness with another composer I haven't listened to in a while: Karol Szymanowski.

Not very familiar with his work, but what I have heard so far I rather enjoyed. I once saw his name mentioned in an article in which the writer lamented the way in which contemporary classical composers have become completely alienated from the public. Szymanowski was mentioned as an example of the days when people actually flocked to the concerts of contemporary composers.