Classical Corner Classical Music Corner (thread #65)

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

john greenwood said: ↑

Fortunately for me - the price for the post-performance reception I attended with her was only $80.
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Did you get Helene to autograph any CD's?

john greenwood · Jan 23, 2015

coopmv said: ↑

Did you get Helene to autograph any CD's?
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No - I barely got to shake her hand. I actually went because I was hosting a potential donor to the 92nd St. Y, and he wanted to go. He chatted with her more extensively.
The dinner with the Tokyo String Quartet and Sabine Meyer is a better story, but I think I've related it before.

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

john greenwood said: ↑

No - I barely got to shake her hand. I actually went because I was hosting a potential donor to the 92nd St. Y, and he wanted to go. He chatted with her more extensively.
The dinner with the Tokyo String Quartet and Sabine Meyer is a better story, but I think I've related it before.
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It would have been highly interesting to ask Sabine Meyer about her work relationship with Karajan ...

George P · Jan 23, 2015

Now enjoying Op. 33 from the above set.

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

George P said: ↑

Now enjoying Op. 33 from the above set.
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How is the SQ of this set? It will be a few weeks before I receive this box from across the pond ...

J.A.W. · Jan 23, 2015

coopmv said: ↑

How is the SQ of this set? It will be a few weeks before I receive this box from across the pond ...
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I don't have this set (yet), but as far as I know it's a repackaging of the individual Mosaïques Haydn CDs.

George P · Jan 23, 2015

coopmv said: ↑

How is the SQ of this set? It will be a few weeks before I receive this box from across the pond ...
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SQ is LOVELY!

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

Now playing CD12 - WTC 2 from the following box for a first listen ...

Robin L · Jan 23, 2015

drh said: ↑

As to why I like this sort of thing, well, please forgive me if I offer this article by Richard Taruskin, originally published in the December 1986 issue of the late, by me much lamented to this very day classical music magazine Opus. I admired MAK even before, but his insights solidified that unfocused opinion and, while I freely grant that they are by no means immune to debate, greatly influenced me going forward.

Ostensibly reviewing a then newly-issued recording of the Bach Trio Sonatas:

One of the bonniest postconcert mots ever to reach my ears was uttered after a performance by a touring English early-music group, by the leader of one of its best-known American counterparts. “They’re one of the best straight groups I’ve heard,” he said. After his listeners had recovered from the apparent sexual innuendo, he continued: “It’s like this: There are the straight players and the crooked players. I can respect the straight players, but my heart is with the crooked players.” That is how I feel about this release, and for the same reason. I can (and do) respect it, but my heart it not with it.

Straight players have their strengths and virtues. At their best (and they come, just like crooked players, both good and bad, and in various shapes and sizes), they display really solid and reliable all-purpose technique at the service of a very scrupulous musicianship, and they work very hard at ensemble. You can sit back and relax with them, confident that every jot and tittle will be perfectly executed and in place. They are not by any means necessarily conventional-minded musicians: the “one-on-a-part” Bach performers on both sides of the Atlantic have been straight players to a man. Nor are they necessarily lacking in spirit: Their fast movements rollick, their slow movements sigh, their tempo ordinario is as ordinary as can be. In short, they do what they’re told (by a conductor, by a score, by “evidence”), and do it well. What’s wrong with that? Nothing at all, if what you want out of music is something to sit back and relax to, and if your idea of life or art is an infinite mosaic of jots and tittles. The mind of a straight player is like a well-stocked and well-ordered musical emporium: The customer (conductor, score, evidence) places his order (for a tempo, an articulation, a dynamic), and the proper item is quickly found on the shelf or rack, just where it was last time.

The crooked players, the ones who claim my heart, do not get their phrasings and tempos off the rack. Their responses are conditioned not by generic demands that can be easily classified, filed away, and retrieved, but by highly specific, unclassifiable, personal and intensely subjective imaginings, the sort of thing that makes logical positivists and their abundant musical progeny see red. They seek not to group and generalize, but to distinguish and differentiate. Every musical event ideally possesses a unique, never-to-be-repeated shape—even phrases in a sequence. The task the crooked players set themselves—and it’s the hardest task in the world—is to find a way of realizing and rendering the exact shape in palpable, intelligible sound. They are the real artists among performers, in the sense of T.E. Hulme’s wonderful metaphor—the one by which he sought, in his immortal essay on “Romanticism and Classicism,” to convey what it is to be an artist, what an artist does, and why an artist is often misunderstood.

After first describing what are known as architect’s curves, or templates—“flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature, by a suitable selection from [which] you can draw approximately any curve you like”—Hulme went on: “The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that ‘approximately.’ He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.”

All that comes under the headings “period style” and “performance practice”—those are the templates. And most performances of early music—of any music—consist of matching the nearest template to the music at hand. But the crooked performers…are forever bending the templates out of shape, struggling against ingrained habit in quest of a really exact, and therefore authentic, rendering of what it is that makes this piece this piece and not that one.

Struggles do not make for relaxed listening. And listeners, who have their own ingrained habits of the ear, can find the poking and twisting to which crooked performers subject their mental templates as unbearable as they would busy fingers mauling and mashing their very brains. Hence the really big reputations in any field of musical endeavor are always likeliest to be made by straight musicians. …

What prompts these thoughts is [that the musical content of the recording under review] can be experienced in really classic straight and crooked renditions, the latter being those of the Cologne Musica Antiqua. Hearing them side by side is an education.

The very accomplished London performers give an immaculate representation in sound of what one sees on the page when one looks at the score. It is an ideal positivist job (if you’ll pardon the oxymoron), and those who think of musical performance as “compliance” (as Nelson Goodman would say) with notation will get all they could ask for here. It follows, then, that a good score-reader doesn’t even have to hear these performances. A lay listener, on the other hand, will be very well served by them insofar as they will acquaint him, with a minimum of distortion, with the generic contents of the pieces performed. There is nothing in them that is not referable to the printed page, and hence “verifiable” in old-fashioned scientific terms. …

By comparison, the Cologne performances are apt to seem at first like fun-house reflections. A score reader could form no idea of them a priori. Every moment brings a surprise. No articulation is taken for granted. Phrasings are asymmetric, arbitrary, “different to what [they] would assume naturally,” that is, on the basis of the normal templates of antecedent/consequent or sequential patterning. Tempos tend toward the extreme, and are in any case extremely variable. None of this is “verifiable” by recourse to external norms. Its validation comes from within the players’ minds as they confront the music on the page, and to make sense of these performances one must make an effort to penetrate those minds and through them to confront the music anew. A listener whose impression of the music has been formed on the basis of the score or … straight performances will be made at first uncomfortable by this defamiliarization of what he thought he knew, but (unless unwilling to make the effort of empathy) he will be quickly entranced by it. Fascinated and involved, one joins the artists in pursuit of the exact curve. One begins by wondering at every turn, “What will these jokers think of next?”, and ends by asking, “What will Bach think of next?”. Made attentive to Bach’s argument as never before, one comes through the experience of the performance knowing the music more intimately than one has ever known it, regardless of whether one has “agreed” with every admittedly arbitrary twist along the way.

[Taruskin urges readers to listen to both recordings and make up their own minds.] …(B)e under no illusion that the crooked performance is automatically the “better” one, or that the straight performance is the more “authentic” one. These points can be debated without end or profit unless the object of fidelity and the nature of authenticity are rigorously specified. Better to abandon all those loaded terms and concentrate on the music.

…That is why I wish the crooked performers Godspeed, and why my heart is with them…. By taking the excruciating extra pains to fashion for themselves the exact image of their Bach, the crooked performers help us find our Bach—whom we can feel personally close to, and love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I should note in passing that Taruskin, while an admirer, was by no means an uncritical MAK booster. For example, in an earlier issue he wrote this about MAK's recording of Couperin's The Nations:

Not that everything about these performances is perfect, or that there is no room for disagreement. I have a feeling Couperin himself might not have cared for them particularly. Sensitive as he was to national characters and nuances, he would probably have thought them too “German.” There is a certain deadpan, chew-'em-up-and-spit-'em-out quality to the playing that I find refreshing, but that Couperin, if I understand his prefaces aright, would have thought too severe and external. “Experience has taught me,” he wrote in one of them, “that vigorous hands, able to execute the quickest, lightest things, are not always the most successful in tender and sensitive pieces, and I will candidly confess that I would rather be moved than astonished.” Musica Antiqua Köln’s playing is more astonishing than moving. In part, this is because the tempos…tend at times to be a bit too brisk.
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Have to agree about MAK and Les Nations, Astringency and crookedness do not aid this uniquely mellifluous score. Again, my difficulty with the MAK box of Bach's chamber works had less to do with the novelty of approach than the crookedness of the pitch.

john greenwood · Jan 23, 2015

Listened to the Fiedler/Wild/Gershwin disc. Exhilerating.

Followed it with Heifetz/Reiner/Tchaikovsky.

bluemooze · Jan 23, 2015

coopmv said: ↑

Or you can buy all 8 tickets for a total of $20,000.
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George P · Jan 23, 2015

George P said: ↑

5. Sviatoslav Richter Chopin: Ballade No.3 Op.47, Scherzo No.4 Op.54, 4 Mazurkas Op.24, Barcarolle Op.60, Debussy: 10 Preludes from Book 1
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I can't believe they included CD1 from the set linked to below, but left off CD2! Richter's Debussy is incredible and CD2 had ALL of book two. And the original set is OOP. I strongly suggest that piano/Debussy lovers pick up one of the used copies available at amazon. I just noticed that the first five star review was written by none other than the pianist Sergey Schepkin!

http://www.amazon.com/Ballades-Etud.../tracks/B00001W07K/ref=dp_tracks_all_2#disc_2

Bachtoven · Jan 23, 2015

Lovely playing and spectacular sound.

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

Now playing CD13 - continuation of WTC 2 from the following box for a first listen ...

[/QUOTE]

Hawkman · Jan 23, 2015

Reading my Third Ear Classical Music book brings me to this question regarding Sir Thomas Beecham's Orchestral Delius recordings:

Mono or Stereo? The book seems to prefer the stereo but also gives a nod to the 'pre-Stereo'. I'm leaning 'stereo' for feel.

Any preferences??

coopmv · Jan 23, 2015

Hawkman said: ↑

Reading my Third Ear Classical Music book brings me to this question regarding Sir Thomas Beecham's Orchestral Delius recordings:

Mono or Stereo? The book seems to prefer the stereo but also gives a nod to the 'pre-Stereo'. I'm leaning 'stereo' for feel.

Any preferences??
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It there is a decent stereo version, I will always go for it. I have found solo piano work, if remastered well, can be quite nice even in mono. But for orchestral work, mono sound always sounds too thin to me ...

George P · Jan 23, 2015

Hawkman said: ↑

Reading my Third Ear Classical Music book brings me to this question regarding Sir Thomas Beecham's Orchestral Delius recordings:

Mono or Stereo? The book seems to prefer the stereo but also gives a nod to the 'pre-Stereo'. I'm leaning 'stereo' for feel.

Any preferences??
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Haven't heard Beecham's Delius, but I agree with Stuart about stereo and orchestral recordings. When possible, I try for stereo for orchestral.

bluemooze · Jan 24, 2015

Now listening to "Haydn - Symphonies 94, 100, 101" performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra led by Sir Colin Davis on Philips.

Mr. H · Jan 24, 2015

john greenwood said: ↑

Sony's Bream mega-box is on Spotify, so I have listened to their duet albums.
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Brilliant box.

coopmv · Jan 24, 2015

bluemooze said: ↑

Now listening to "Haydn - Symphonies 94, 100, 101" performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra led by Sir Colin Davis on Philips.

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bluemooze · Jan 24, 2015

Now on the turntable, "Haydn - String Quartet Op. 33 Nos. 1 & 2" performed by The Aeolian String Quartet on Decca.

bluemooze · Jan 24, 2015

Now listening to "Reflection" performed by Helene Grimaud and the Staatskapelle Dresden led by Esa-Pekka Salonen on DG.

Featuring Anne Sofie von Otter.

Works by Robert & Clara Schumann & Brahms.

Soulpope · Jan 24, 2015

(CD Audite 95.465)

john greenwood · Jan 24, 2015

bluemooze said: ↑

Now on the turntable, "Haydn - String Quartet Op. 33 Nos. 1 & 2" performed by The Aeolian String Quartet on Decca.

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My first Haydn Quartet recordings were their performance of Op. 71,74, 76, 77 and 103. Were they ever released on CD?

john greenwood · Jan 24, 2015

Coffee to music by Caccini - Figueras, Savall et al on DHM.

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Classical Corner Classical Music Corner (thread #65)

coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

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Classical Corner Classical Music Corner (thread #65)

coopmv Newton 1/30/2001 - 8/31/2011

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