What Are You Listening To?

[stlukesguild]

For all I love Ravel and Debussy, Faure may just be my favorite modern French composer. His gorgeous Requiem... perhaps second only to Mozart's IMO... has much to do with this... along with his marvelous mélodies or French "Art Songs". But his chamber music is also quite delicious. This afternoon... after logging off with my students in online teaching... I listened to the first two discs of this 5-disc French boxed set. The performances are as fine as one could desire... and expectedly so considering the quality of the soloists involved.

 

[Hermes2020]

Eric Le Sage and Fauré — what a great combination. I should try to get this set. I have his wonderful Fauré piano quintets with the Quatuor Ebene.

 

[brianvds]

Another of YouTube's cool suggestions - something really, really obscure, but quite pleasant on the ear:

Rainer Music for Baroque Guitar

The fact that the album cover picture is a dead ringer for Mr Bean adds to the fun.

 

[Iain]

That is pretty nice, Brian. Something I might listen to in the dark before sleep. "Life is a disease, relieved every sixteen hours by sleep..." etc.

My YT algorithm however is not so refined, I know not why.

 

[brianvds]

Joachim Raff was wildly popular in his day. Nowadays, a somewhat obscure figure. To be sure no Beethoven or Brahms, but his music is often quite pleasant and worth a listen:

 

[Maybenartist]

 

[stlukesguild]

An unsurpassed recording of Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) and 12 0ther orchestral songs sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf... arguably the finest German soprano of the post-WWII era and conducted by the equally brilliant George Szell. Strauss was one of the finest composers for soprano... likely in part due to his being married to a soprano. The Vier letzte Lieder are achingly beautiful songs with lush orchestral settings and rank among the greatest works of late Romanticism as well as of the 20th-century. While Strauss was a German heir of Richard Wagner and built heavily upon Wagner's work, like Mahler he also embraced elements that suggest the influence of the Viennese... the delicate melodies of Mozart and Schubert.

After the Vier letzte Lieder I decided to continue on with Strauss... this time with his Eine Alpensinfonie (Alpine Symphony). Herbert von Karajan's performance with the Berlin Philharmonic is my usual "go-to" recording... but I thought I would try a more recent version... that of Frank Shipway with the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra. One reviewer exclaimed:

"The São Paulo SO, sagely conducted by Frank Shipway, bring their South American heat to Strauss’s Alpine expedition. Icy peaks melt away just a little in the face of their panache. You might argue that nobility has to some extent been sacrificed to the brazenness of the playing but you cannot deny the fervour of what they bring. I don’t know of a more exciting account on disc."

Arguably the SPSSO is not as polished as the Berlin Philharmonic... especially under Karajan... and perhaps a bit too Bombastic. But it strikes me as pouring forth true the cinemascopic splendour of Strauss' score. And of course the one could not wish for greater sound than that of BIS’s engineers.

Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie makes me almost agree with Brian in wishing that he had composed more orchestra works and fewer operas... but not really.

 

[brianvds]

Strauss was one of the finest composers for soprano... likely in part due to his being married to a soprano.

Most married men are married to a soprano. But perhaps mostly not ones as fine as Frau Strauss.

Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie makes me almost agree with Brian in wishing that he had composed more orchestra works and fewer operas... but not really.

I confess that apart from the Four Last Songs, very little of Strauss' work does anything at all for me.

 

[stlukesguild]

An anti-Romantic? But then we have Brahms?

 

[brianvds]

An anti-Romantic? But then we have Brahms?

By no means an anti-romantic; just anti-some-of-them.
I have tried to work out some commonalities in my tastes and distastes, and find I can't really. I seem to prefer more abstract music, but then, I love Scheherezade. So I'm at a loss to tell you why I like what I like, and remain indifferent to what I don't like.

Same thing with jazz: I profoundly respect it, and I am very well aware that jazz musicians are perhaps the most fluent and accomplished of all. But the vast bulk of it does not the slightest thing for me, and I don't really know why, particularly since I sometimes quite enjoy jazz-influenced work, like some of Gershwin.

In the case of Strauss, I should try him out gain. My indifference to his music formed many years ago, and tastes change and mature over time. If I try it again, I might find I love it. Hey, he could even be a gateway drug to Wagner...

 

[stlukesguild]

I have tried to work out some commonalities in my tastes and distastes, and find I can't really. I seem to prefer more abstract music, but then, I love Scheherezade. So I'm at a loss to tell you why I like what I like, and remain indifferent to what I don't like.

I don't know much about Art/Music... but I likes what I likes.

Interesting that your would like a bombastic and thematic tone-poem like Scheherezade (I love it as well) and not Strauss'.

 

[stlukesguild]

Can you believe I was actually listening to Brahms last night?

Of course, it's actually Beethoven's 10th.

Gardiner's Brahms remain my "go-to" recordings for the symphonies and the Deutsches Requiem.

After Gardiner? Bruno Walter, Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, and George Szell, Carlos Kleiber's 4th and Otto Klemperer's Deutsches Requiem.

 

[JohnEmmett]

 

[stlukesguild]

The "Trio Sonatas" by J.S. Bach are a collection of six sonatas in trio sonata form written for organ. The collection was put together in Leipzig in the late 1720s and contained reworkings of prior compositions by Bach from earlier cantatas, organ works and chamber music as well as some newly composed movements. The collection might partly have been intended for private study to perfect organ technique... and might have been played on other keyboard instruments such as the pedal clavichord. The collection of sonatas is generally regarded as one of Bach's masterpieces for organ. The sonatas are also considered to be amongst his most difficult compositions for the instrument. Like other works by Bach composed for solo keyboard such as the Goldberg Variations, the Trio Sonatas have frequently been arranged for other instruments and ensembles. This recording is scored for a string quartet:

 

[brianvds]

I have tried to work out some commonalities in my tastes and distastes, and find I can't really. I seem to prefer more abstract music, but then, I love Scheherezade. So I'm at a loss to tell you why I like what I like, and remain indifferent to what I don't like.

I don't know much about Art/Music... but I likes what I likes.

Interesting that your would like a bombastic and thematic tone-poem like Scheherezade (I love it as well) and not Strauss'.

Indeed, but so it goes with tastes - there's no accounting for them.

Can you believe I was actually listening to Brahms last night?

As far as I can work out, you're actually quite the fan of Brahms - just not as much as Wagner.

 

[brianvds]

And today's edition specially dedicated to StLukes...

 

[stlukesguild]

Watching this video and the presentation of the divide between the Conservatives (Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn) and the Progressives (Wagner, Liszt, and I might add Strauss, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Ravel and Debussy) I certainly far prefer the Progressives. Of course there are exceptions. It would be hard to place Chopin. His works retain the classical clarity and simplicity of Mozart and Haydn... and yet employ non-Classical forms that point toward Romanticism. And then there's Faure... whose work I absolutely love... and yet compared to Ravel or Debussy he is again quite the classicist. And of course, I love the classicism of Mozart and Haydn and early Beethoven. Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, argued that the greatest inventions or progressions in literature came about as a result of a strong misreading of great predecessors. James Joyce, for example, powerfully interpreted Shakespeare and Homer. Both Brahms and Wagner built upon Beethoven... but upon different aspects of Beethoven interpreted in very different ways. It is interesting that Schoenberg built upon both Brahms and Wagner.

 

[brianvds]

The big fight between the progressive and conservatives strikes me today as slightly quaint - their music is not all that radically different, at least not to my ears. I very much like works from both groups, and can't really say that I have a preference for one or the other group as such, although, as you well know, some individual members of the groups don't do all that much for me.

 

[stlukesguild]

I don't know that I'd think of the conservatives vs progressives duel as "quaint". It certainly continues today. Remember over on the old music site we frequented how there were those who seemingly couldn't stomach anything composed before 1900... and dismissed anything written after that year that they deemed "old fashioned": Puccini, Strauss, Aaron Copland, etc... while there were also the opposites who could not handle anything from Schoenberg onward... and they often even struggled with Strauss, Stravinsky, Mahler, Debussy, etc... We certainly have the same dichotomy in the visual arts. There are those who cannot abide anything before Modernism and almost any aspect of "realistic" or figurative art. At the same time, we have the ARC and their ilk that swear by Romantic Realism. I remember reading in Paul Klee's journals the suggestion that it is not enough to have a negative philosophy... a philosophy of what you do not like, One must more importantly have a positive philosophy... a philosophy of what you admire and strive for.

 

[stlukesguild]

Another one of those "progressive" Romantics that Brian probably doesn't like. When I first started listening to Classical Music as a teen I bought recordings through a publisher's clearinghouse through the mail. I would often just pick up the best buys. Many of the works I picked up at the time were broad and sprawling pieces by composers such as Schubert, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, as well as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. As a result, I fell in love with these before I really began to explore the more classical works of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven... to say nothing of Bach and Handel and the rest of the Baroque. I might also point out that I fell in love with vocal music from the start as well thanks to my mother who sang mezzo-soprano in the church choir.