Classical Corner Classical Music Corner

When you live in a house without contiguous and sizable wall space, splitting up your music collection is the only option you have. Of course if your house has 2o foot ceiling, you will have other options, like adding a ladder to get to your music located at 15 foot above your floor ...

 

Spinning the hits this afternoon/evening. Symphony #4 from this set.

 

Looks like the words have gotten around that Ophélie Gaillard is an excellent cellist. I bought the twofer from across the pond last year ...

 

Now playing the following SACD, which arrived from across the pond a few weeks ago for a first listen ...

 

Hey, George,

Love the way you milked CD storage out of the space under the top of the kitchen island. And I see Lili Kraus peeking out from the end of the second row on the wall. So I'd say,

I hope you and she [your girlfriend, that is--not Lili Kraus, although I'm sure you'd enjoy her company were she still around to offer it] have nothing but happiness there.

 

Thanks! You are too kind!

 

Now listening to "Romantic Favorites For Strings" performed by the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein on CBS.

I really like the two Vaughan Williams pieces.

Barber - Adagio For Strings Op. 11
Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis
Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on "Greensleeves"
Tchaikovsky - Andante Cantabile
Mahler - Adagietto

(Image shows the LP cover but I'm listening to the CD)

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I think our family may have had this one on cassette when I was a kid. The cover is distinctive. (unless there was a whole series of Great Performances with this design and coloring)

 

It was a series; there was 100 of them.

 

After more than once expressing doubt about this composer, at least as I've heard his works on the local public radio affiliate, I guess at last I've joined the club. Won the following on eBay a few days back:

Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758)
Sinfonia No. 16, D Major 7:29
[ 1 ] Allegro 2:03
[ 2 ] Larghetto 2:16
[ 3 ] Allegro 1:38
[ 4 ] Presto 1:31
DSBO, Mogens Wöldike
Columbia LDX 8, Mtx CCX 1333-34,
DSBO = Statsradiofoniens Symfoniorkester
The Danish State Broadcasting Orchestra

12" original UK Columbia 78 rpm records

 

This AM: the Szell/Fleisher/Cleveland Beethoven piano concertos on Columbia LP. A little listening before doing some yard work.

 

Now playing:
Franz Schubert – 4 Impromptus Op.90 D899, Sonata in E major D459 (Fünf Klavierstücke), 3 Menuette mit je 2 Trios D380
— Michel Dalberto, piano (Brilliant Classics Piano Library)

 

Disc 2. Concertos 3 & 4.

 

Now enjoying symphonies 21-24, conducted by Hogwood. Really liking how as you listen through the symphonies you can really hear the composers development in writing for the genre. And I especially love how the symphonies become increasingly more energetic, dramatic and robust as you move forward chronologically. I used to have a hard time with Haydn, always wishing he'd push things further, like Beethoven does. Perhaps it's due to getting older, but I like the more toned down classical style of Haydn now. If I want Beethoven, I always have him.

 

The thing about Haydn: when he wrote most of his music, there was no Beethoven, and even toward the end, as one professor puts it, for the most part "Beethoven wasn't Beethoven yet." In his own way, Haydn was pushing the boundaries, but the boundaries were the rather drab ones he inherited from the Galant era, not what they would be after that wild-haired bomb-thrower from Bonn got done with them. I guess one way to put it would be that Beethoven overturned lots of the rules, but first we needed Haydn to set those rules up in the first place.

Right from my very earliest days of listening to classical music, when I was a tyke playing my parents' little collection of LPs, I've always loved Haydn's syms., or at least the ones from the second half of his career (the early ones to this day aren't recorded all that often, and in the 1960s the chances of one turning up in the a typical casual music loving homeowner's collection outside the major metropolitan areas was about as high as those of finding a workable oil well in the back yard, next to the kids' swing set).

 

Excellent post, thank you. You hit the Haydn nail right on the head, so to speak

 

Oh, of course, but I cannot go back to Haydn's time and listen to those works in historical context. And as it is, I started with Beethoven's symphonies, something I now see as a great disadvantage, since he was and is my favorite composer, the one who best expresses how I feel music should be, how I would write it, if I could. I have heard that many of the composers that followed Beethoven felt the same way. I once told my music professor, after he played an excerpt from a romantic composer, that it sounded like Beethoven, thinking that was a bad thing, far better to be unique, right? My professor assured me that the composer would have been very flattered to hear that said about his music. And of course, there are the stories about how hard it was for Brahms to follow in Beethoven's footsteps. It's kinda like taking over for Michael Jordan after he retired. An impossible task.

 

"wild-haired bomb-thrower from Bonn"
Love that.

 

This morning:

 

Now playing:
Maurice Ravel – Sonate posthume for violin and piano, Tzigane — Rapsodie de concert for violin and piano
George Enescu – Impressions d'enfance Op.28 for violin and piano, Sonata No.3 for violin and piano A minor Op.25
— Leonidas Kavakos (violin), Péter Nagy (Piano) (ECM New Series)



Nice library find for $2 (sealed).

 

My dog walked across my keyboard while the iTunes album cover screen saver was active. It triggered the launch of this CD, one I had not played in a while. This is magnificent, and deserving of the Amazon reviews that the cognoscenti have given it.

 

Now on the turntable, "Hanz Werner Henze - 2 Concertos for Piano and Orchestra" performed by Christoph Eschenbach with the London Philharmonic Orchestra led by Hanz Werner Henze on DG.

 

Now on the turntable, record 2 from "Brahms - Sonatas for Violin and Piano Nos. 1-3/Franck - Sonata for Violin and Piano" performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Alexis Weissenberg on Angel.

Brahms No. 3 & Franck

 

This new recording has received some very polarized reviews: critics either love it or hate it! I haven't quite made up my mind yet. Sure, there are staggering feats of virtuosity (which I can assure you she couldn't pull off in concert so cleanly having seen her live and watched some videos)--I'll have to listen to it again without a crushing headache to see if it's a keeper. Good but rather bright sound. Oh...the liner notes consist of one of the most pretentious interviews I've yet read, along with some very alluring glamor shots of her.

 

There aren't two Piano Concertos...just the 2nd Piano Concerto! I've always liked that cover--it probably symbolizes the exhausted pianist after playing the piece! (I like it, too.)