Classical Music Thread -

[Positron]

You won't find any biography on the composer "Anton Hasefeld"; this is the nom de plume of music publisher Irving Thomas Wilson. Wilson's Musica Festiva is a finely crafted, airy, transparent piece based on Slovak folk styles -- a more laidback Dvořák, if you will. Wilson might have chosen to go incognito, but this music has nothing to hide.

 

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

You won't find any biography on the composer "Anton Hasefeld"; this is the nom de plume of music publisher Irving Thomas Wilson. Wilson's Musica Festiva is a finely crafted, airy, transparent piece based on Slovak folk styles -- a more laidback Dvořák, if you will. Wilson might have chosen to go incognito, but this music has nothing to hide.

That was very enjoyable, thank you for the discovery.

Here's a comfy, Mozart-esque at times, piano concerto by Irish composer John Field (1782-1837).

 

[Positron]

The CD "Stabat Mater", by Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Choir, is one of the most felicitous example of music programming I can cite. The solemn, strait-laced Palestrina setting leads directly to the sparse ascetism of Arvo Part', the accompaniment of six viols (instead of the original string trio) renders the piece even icier. This is the Holy Virgin as an Icon, an object of distant spiritual contemplation rather than emotional attachment. After this soul-cleansing experience, the setting by John Brown, from the Eton Songbook, blossoms like a rich, dewy red rose.

Yet on Youtube I find this even better rendition of Browne. The voice parts are clearer; Parrott's Taverner Choir sound a tad monochromatic by comparison.

 

[Positron]

"Shallow Brown", a sea shanty arranged for baritone, male chorus, and orchestra by Percy Grainger. Note how effectively Grainger evokes the tremors of winds with strings, and how the chorus sound as if they were the crew on a ship buffeted by waves.

The soloist in this recording is Stephen Varcoe. He is supported by the Joyful Company of Singers and the City of London Sinfonietta, conducted by the deeply missed Richard Hickox.

 

[Exuvia]

I'm grateful for the person in my life who introduced me to Bach's lute suites, and also grateful for the few dedicated instrument makers who have made the effort to reconstruct lautenwerken for recordings like this.

 

[Positron]

Bliss is the first opera by Brett Dean, Australia's preeminent composer today. Dean claims he was strongly impressed by Peter Carey's novel of the same name since his school days and, being taken by its colorful characters, considers it full of operatic potential. Misjuging the operatic effectivness of a text or a story is very common among composers; one may name John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, or Hugo Wolf's Der Corregidor as examples, yet it is rare that a composer should bestow his expertise on such a banal and essentially odious story.

Henry Joy, the protagonist of the story, is the top exec of a big Australian advertising firm. While holding a party in celebration of his career, Henry suffers a heart attack. He recovered from open-heart surgery, but is convinced he is in Hell. The hospital chaplain offers endless dirty jokes -- the opera is often as vulgar as Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre -- but no consolation. Henry behaves erratically: he drunk-drives and is convinced that a circus elephant has sat on his car. He becomes estranged to his career-minded wife Betty (who wants Henry to help her to break into the advertising-design business), accuses his daughter of being a commie and junkie, and his son of being a money-mad predator and drug dealer (because he chooses Business rather than Med School). Yet Henry also considers himself a do-gooder. He cancels the contract with the firm's biggest client, much to the chagrin of his friend and colleague Alex, because he no longer wants to work with a company whose products cause cancer. Here, Henry and Alex sings a duet (marked Duettino Barocco in the libretto, but it sounds more like a madcap cabaret): Henry is convinced -- and Alex and the audience are led to believe -- that he is capable of steering between Scylla and Charybdis, when in fact he is crashing the lives of those around him.

One night, Henry snoops on his family, and all he suspected turn out to be true and worse. So he leaves and take up residence in a luxury suite in the local Hilton Hotel. Out of loneliness he dials for company, and there comes Honey B. The two bond instantly. Honey claims she "doesn't comes from anywhere" but lives among the bushes. She recognizes Henry as an incarnation of Krishna (cue flute solo), shows him the miraculous effects of Leatherwood Honey, and advises him on clean living. Observant reader will recognize Honey as the three archetypes of womanhood combined: she is the Whore, but only in the sense that she is accessible without pesky sweet-talks and mind games. She is the Virgin who comes from a la-la land without a name, a land as unspoilt as herself. She is the Mother who takes good care of her man. When she leaves, Honey implores Henry to promise he will find her.

Meanwhile, worried about his sanity and the mounting hotel bills, Henry's family decide that he must be committed to the asylum (called the Free Enterprise Hospital). The hospital staff caught the wrong person (don't ask). To cut the short story even shorter: Henry's wife Betty gets the career success she has strived for, but the story punishes her with terminal lung cancer. She immolates herself during a meeting with the execs (no Wagner references; that "ambitious bitch", as she calls herself, doesn't die for love). Henry cannot forget Honey and his promise to her, so he leaves his newly-bereaved children and let them suffer another loss.

Such a vile, narcissistic take on midlife crisis, so filled with unsympathetic cardboard characters, is Bliss that I cannot see the opera as anything more than a curiosity. Dean's music is overactive, attention-deficit, just like TV ads. And while his handling of the orchestral palette is adroit, he also cheats by using oodles of recorded sounds. On the plus side, Bliss is very much a singer's opera with a melodic impetus; there is little or no screeching or other types of bizarre vocalise that plagues so much modern opera. And despite the story insisting that we shouldn't identify with Betty, the cheating "ambitious bitch" who chronically "poisons" her family with microwave dinner, the solo she sings before her cancer diagnosis nevertheless tugs my heart -- she is brought up by her single father, who ran a gas station, and the petrol she inhaled since she was a baby eventually kills her.

Moments after, she laments her dreams and ambition are in vain:

By comparison, the solo-duet (Henry, then with Honey) that ends the opera is as bland as water-boiled rabbit food. It may be Richard Strauss with all the color drained and bleached.

 

[Mister Qwerty]

I was listening to the music of Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos. One of the tracks is Symphony No.19 by Alan Hovhaness, a composer who I’m not knowledgeable of. Anybody here familiar with his works or recommendations?


Alan Hovhaness: Symphony No.19 'Vishnu' (the music from Cosmos track starts at 18:25)

Other works;

And God Created Great Whales, Op. 229, No. 1

Alan Hovhaness(1911-2000): Symphony Nº 50" Mount St Helens"

 

[Positron]

I was listening to the music of Carl Sagan’s TV series Cosmos. One of the tracks is Symphony No.19 by Alan Hovhaness, a composer who I’m not knowledgeable of. Anybody here familiar with his works or recommendations?

You asked the right person because Hovhaness is my personal favorite. He has a daunting work list, although most of the works remains unrecorded. The work I rate most highly is his Magnificat, which shows his free-flowing, measure-free writing (you'll see from the score in the video that much of the score has no time signatures or bar-lines) at its most evocative.

A shorter, but equally mysterious work is Prelude and Quadruple Fugue for orchestra, which shows how seemingly free-flowing music is compatible with structural rigor:

Hovhaness also wrote plenty of music for solo piano, and I'm partial to Sonata: Prospect Hill. Most of Hovhaness's works are suffused with modal Orientalism, reflecting his strongly-identified Armenian ancestry. Prospect Hill, however, reveals a fondness of Celtic folk music, perhaps inherited from his mother.

Visionary Landscape is more modernist in conception and techniques.

 

[Captain Hastings Official]

I'm not really the most sophisticated listener of western art music - I'm too incompetent to play an instrument, I have just enough of an acquaintance with music theory to sound impressive to the absolutely ignorant and not one iota more, and there's huge gaps in my familiarity with even the standard repertoire - but I know what I like. And what I like is Wagner instrumentals. I can't just listen to opera, I've got to watch it for it to work for me at all, but I can listen to orchestral excerpts from Wagner until I get too melancholy to go on. It makes me a little sad to know that someday I will here the Tristan Prelude for the last time.

Also, Glenn Gould's unrepentantly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Siegfried Idyll doesn't quite bring me to tears every time, but it comes close. The constant yearning, searching for a glorious fulfillment that you know you'll never quite reach...a sunset that never swings round to become morning again.

 

[Positron]

I've been enjoying the young violinist Vlad Stanculeasa playing Enescu's Impressions d'enfance. I know this work previously through the playing of Gidon Kremer. Kremer is, well, Kremer -- very precise, very passionate, but there is no sugar-glaze in his playing. Yet in a essentially romantic work like Impressions, a little voluptuousness, a little indulgence, makes a lot of difference.

Both renditions are on Youtube and you can compare them:

Stanculeasa's techniques are highly subtle and his control is incredible, and he is massively uplifted by crystal-clear, dynamic recorded sounds. In the fourth movement Stanculeasa's "bird" seems more vivid Kremer's (the recording quality must have contributed to it) but Kremer's is more at ease:

Enescu's Impromptu Concertant (1903) is new to me, and Stanculeasa and pianist Thomas Hoppe play this big-hearted, arch-romantic work with passion. My heart sings with it.

The other works on this CDs, of lesser-known Romanian composers, didn't make a very strong impression on me, although the final movement of Tiberiu Olah's Sonatina (1953) has some delightful sonorities: