Classical Music for Aficionados
Jim I think some pianists turn to conducting as they age and are losing their physical skills. Physically, it is easier to conduct than play a piano. I recall reading that Sv Richter was despondent in his 80's for this reason, and stopped playing in public. He also once said that he did not want to conduct because that would mean taking a 6 months break from his piano practice, and he doubted he could recover after that. As you say, Ashkenazy is a good case in point. Barenboim is another. Many first rate pianists are fully capable of being conductors, but it is hard to do both. In USA we have very few athletes who succeed at two professional sports. Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders are the only two that I recall. Danny Ange played baseball just enough to get some leverage about which basketball team he would play for. Remember when Michael Jordan quit basketball to attempt pro golf? It did not work out for him. In college I knew a guy who lettered in 5 sports in his freshman year, went on the play on the Davis Cup tennis team. But he never played but one sport professionally (tennis). |
This is a remarkably interesting and erudite thread containing both mainstream and offbeat suggestions. But reading through it, I did miss two of my favorite recordings. There are a few recommendations for Nielsen’s music, but nothing praising his Third Symphony which is well deserving of all the praise its fans send its way. Frankly, I think it is a masterpiece, and since there are few recordings available, I may as well recommend the one where I first heard the piece: Leonard Bernstein conducting the Royal Danish Philharmonic Orchestra on a CBS recording released in 1965. The second of the "missing" recommendations is a very recent recording on the 2L lablel of two song cycles for voice and orchestra by the Norwegian composer Henning Sommerro: Ujamaa and the Iceberg. This might be a little weird for some, but it is tonal, attention grabbing, stunning, and simply the best recording I have ever heard. |
Yes Jeremy he has quite an arsenal of technical ability , let's hope he never takes up the baton as I'd hate to hear that technique dissipating as it did with Ashkenazy and now I notice in hia last concert Mikhail Pletnov has lost a good bit of flexibility in his playing. What I mean is he is relying on muscle memory which happens when you don't ge enough time to practice on your instrument . I remember Menuhin in his later years when he was spending so much time guest conducting and with his roll in Unesco his playing was awfull through lack of practice. |
Jeremy - I love the playing of young Grosvenor, he has a lot of charm to his playing. I have a stunning Ravel - Gaspard di La Nuit that I recorded from BBC Radio 3 last year and the playing is phenoninal. He also has some super recordings also, have a look on Discogs and you will see some lovely recitals there. Jim. |
here it is on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ8JoNkYA9I&list=PLfdMKJMGPPtxpmk56XOCl7Vn34Cs5Senq |
Love Sokolov. Have a ton of his recordings, never heard him live. So many superb recordings, cannot choose a favorite. His many recordings of live performances stand out. Here's a nice collection (9cds): https://www.amazon.com/Sokolov-Complete-Recordings-GRIGORI-SOKOLOV/dp/B005OZDXR8 He follows Gilels in the procession of great russian pianists. |
I had the pleasure of listening to Grigory Sokolov a number of years ago at the Edinbugh Festival in the Queen's Hall. He came on and did a medley of Wm. Byrd pieces.That one set was enough for me to see how great he was / is. He then played Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op.2 No 3. and unfortunately I can't remember the rest of his progam except for an encore a Brahm's intermezzo Op.117 which was absoloutly divne. What made me love his playing was that no matter what he played in the repeats when thing can get a little taxing he did not slacken the pace any and he just threw the decorations as if flicking a piece of fluff off his sleeve. Last year I purchased his CD of Beethoven's Hammerklavier and Schubert's Piano sonata D960. l love the Schubert but hate his Hammerklavier as I find the playing slow and leaden which is very unlike him but I am afraid he does polarise opinions. |
Just discovered Grigory Sokolov. Not very well known in the US, and not many recordings to choose from. But his live performance of Schubert and Beethoven on DG is unparalleled. Full video available on Amazon prime. I can not stop listening to this guy. His sound and tone are truly unique. Also, check out his Mozart Salzburg recital, also a live performance. Has anyone heard this guy live? |
Sergei Lyapunov, Etsuko Hirose I read that Lyapunov's Trancendental Etudes were incredibly difficult to play. They are a continuation/completion of Liszt. So I tried to find a recordning, and found Etsuko Hirose. Fabulous recording, highly recommended. Hirose was born in Japan, and gained fame first in France. Most recently she has studied with Brendel. I cannot find any other of her recordings. |
@schubert Len you are dead right about Fischer she is a stunning violinist. Have you heard her on the piano she is superb, I’m of the opiion she could have made it on either instrument she is that good. A few years ago she was concertising with the Grieg Piano Concerto in the first half of the concert and the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in the second. Not so long ago she did a concert in I think The Wigmore Hall with her on piano and accompanying Alina Ibragimova who is no mean fiddler herself. One of my memories going back I think about five years ago was her on The Proms and she played a spellbinding Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. When it was over she came back onstage to play an encore and tha place went hushed and after a good pregnant pause of about 20 seconds she suddenly said "I am sorry for taking so long but there are twenty four of these and I am trying to decide what one to play" . No guessing what it was she was deciding on the Paganini 24 Etudes. Playing one of those finger twisting devilish things is bad enough but deciding from the twenty four that you have up your sleeve is surely rubbing it in. |
also includes 16. Raymonda, Op. 57: Entr'acte by Alexander Glazunov Performer: I. Kollegorskaya (Piano), David Oistrakh (Violin) |
David Oistrakh Edition Vol 3 / Oistrakh, Richter
here http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=93218&album_group=14 includes 19. Sonata for Violin and Piano no 2 in A major, Op. 100 by Johannes Brahms Performer: David Oistrakh (Violin), Sviatoslav Richter (Piano) 20. Sonata for Violin and Piano no 3 in D minor, Op. 108 by Johannes Brahms Performer: Sviatoslav Richter (Piano), David Oistrakh (Violin) 21. Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major, M 8 by César Franck Performer: David Oistrakh (Violin), Sviatoslav Richter (Piano) 22. Sonata for Violin and Piano no 1, Sz 75 by Béla Bartók Performer: David Oistrakh (Violin), Sviatoslav Richter (Piano) 23. Sonata for Violin and Piano, Op. 134 by Dmitri Shostakovich Performer: David Oistrakh (Violin), Sviatoslav Richter (Piano) |
Richter plays Glazunov Concerto #1 here https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-beginning-of-the-legend-mw0001552153 " his Glazunov First Concerto makes the work sound like the most cogent, charming, and appealing concerto written by a nineteenth century Russian -- pace Tchaikovsky " |
Schubert, I just did a search on Amazon with the search words “Glazunov Oistrakh” and it came up as the first listing. If you can’t find it, I’ll be happy to buy it and send it to you gratis if you PM me with your address. I have the Shaham recording. Excellent, but not the passion of Oistrakh. No, I haven’t heard any of that Royal Scottish Glazunov set. Sounds interesting. I’ll look for the Steven Coombs set. |
rvpiano, went through Amazon and my mess of CD’s for an Oistrakh . no luck. I have heard Gil Shaham play the Glazunov live here with the SPCO , its one of his standards, and he is superb with it . Ordered him and Julia Fisher on Telarc , Fisher is my favorite living violinist and Oistrakh my #1 not with us .Fisher does remind me of him at times . Did find an 8 CD set of all of his symphonies and concertos with Serebrier and the Royal Scottish , ordered those . One has Rachel Barton-Pine with the Russian National Orch . Have you heard any of those ? What I did find in my treasure was two CD’s of Glazunov’s solo piano on helios with Stephen Coombs(never opened).Very interesting and very complicated with counterpoint on a Bachian scale. .To my hears he does everything to a piano that can be done to it , lyrical over the rolling thunder always there in his music, pushing emotion to the top but never going over it ! I imagine most players just stay away from it .In any event I was simply enveloped by it .His Sonata No 1 in B flat minor ,Op 74 is breathtaking . |
As one of my grans was born and raised in the Gorbals I have some idea, Jim The other one was a "rich" girl from the Florida area . Since Hollinger is surely one of the greatest artists alive not surprising he is able to produce the lyricism of Schubert The 3 times I heard him live it was literally hard to believe he was human . You are spot on with the reduced forces . Heard our World Class St.Paul Chamber Orch . do Schubert’s 1 and 5 two weeks ago , to die for .Schubert is played more today than 50 years ago, thank God .When I first started with classical all the pundits treated his symphonies, as "juvenilia"compared to the mighty Beethoven. I kept playing both their 3, 5 and 9th and thought I must be an idiot to think Schubert was better .Haven’t got any smarter . Classical music changed my life 180, never heard a note of it till I was 30and heard the Great Jussi Bjorling sing a song in German on Armed Forces Radio . It was like turning on the light in a dark room and there stood beauty itself . On a Glazunov note try his 6th with Jose Serebrier and the Royal Scottish on Warner Classical . superb !Few days ago I heard his Ballet"The Seasons " on FM . A beautiful piece of music. To me he is like Brahms in that I feel like I’m having an intelligent adult conversation . |
Jorge Demus died on April 16, 2019, age 90.
“I do not have a career,” he said. “I’m a person who had a life to live.
I am leaving ‘careers’ to other people. A career is like a racetrack
for horses — I’m neither a horse nor am I running on a racetrack.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/arts/jorg-demus-dead.html Now listening to his Chopin - Debussy, PIano of Erard Freres Wonderful recording |
@schubert Len you are dead right about the monster bit as I grew up in a rough part of our town and they always thought I was a bit "OFF" with my liking for classical music but I survived that part of my life thank goodness.With classical there are so many variables that there is no time to get bored. @rvpiano RV I gave the Schubert with Holliger conducting a listen yesterday and enjoyed it greatly. There is a lovely lightness about it all that you only get with reduced forces. Next week I shall make sure I listen to his Schumann. |
@schubert I think you could be right and I remedied that this afternoon also. I listened to his harpsicord suites today as I was doing a bit of digitising my CDs and I came across Dido and Aeneas and of course I had to listen to it and what a pleasure it was to revisit it.It’s the one with Catherine Bott as Dido and Emma Kirkby gets a look in with a contribution.The Orchestra is a Period band that I like, The Academy of Ancient Music and conducted by Christopher Hogwood. The bass is provided not by a double bass but a Theorbo and Beautifully played as well.No wonder I am very slow at digitising my collection as I keep comming across "Finds" and I get distracted and my dear wife comes up to my garret and gently chides me for wasting time with that infernal recording thingamy as she calls it and me forgetting it’s a nice day and the garden is very untidy !!! |
RV I'm quite sure you are being overly modest but I am glad your a harpsicordist now as there is quite a ressurgence in harpsicord popularity at the moment and I am heartily glad of it. I love the sound of the instrument with those wonderfull treble overtones, it must be a nightmare to record. I spent months one time trying to get an acceptable recording of the Goldbergs on it and I found it last week again on Idagio, Kenneth Gilbert .I must admit that I have allways loved the instrument but mostly live but now with modern digital recording techniques they don't now need to insert various mikes inside the poor instrument. I also think that todays instruments have a super tonal range from new but I do wonder if any of them will last for three hundred years as the old clavecins have. I will certainly look up that Schubert with Holliger conducting but a the moment I am listening to Sibelius Symphony No 1 with the Gothenburg SymphonyOrchestra cond by Santtu-Matias Rouvaly. Its on Idagio and it really is quite stirring. Well thanks for the recomenation and I'll let you know in a few days. |
Jim, Currently, listening to the Purcell harpsichord suites. Really beautiful, sensitive playing. And the sound really makes the speakers sing. The lute stop you mention is quite lovely. Truth be told, I’m not much of a harpsichord player myself, merely a pianist who has filled in on harpsichord when needed professionally. |
@rvpiano Hi RV just thought I'd let you know of a good harpsicord find which I am listening to now on Idagio. It's Henry Purcell , Suites for Harpsicord played by Ewa Rzetecka-Niewiadomska which I am playing at least three times a day at the moment. She has a beautiful technique and her ornaments are very tasteful and the harpsicord has a lovely lute stop which sounds really superb in the recording. The recording is really well done with the mikes not in the guts of the thing. Talking about lutes I played the lute and classical guitar for forty years but I'm afraid I was also a closet keyboard lover who never had a chance to study it. Never mind I'll leave it to folks who do it a whole lot better than I could ever dream to. |
The first Classical I heard was on TV when I was a teenager (I didn’t come from a musical family). Being a modern, "raised-on-rock" kinda guy, I found it SO boring: slow, plodding tempi, orchestras with huge ranks of stringed instruments played with an extreme degree of vibrato, all sweet and cloying (think Montovani ;-) . Bla! Those adjectives I now associate with the overly-Romanticized performances of what can and should be bracing, energetic music. That was done to Beethoven and Mozart by the 20th Century Symphony Orchestra, and it imo emasculated their music. Then a couple of things happened; I heard the debut albums of Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman, both of which featured orchestration. And, I got a job at the best record store in San Jose, Discount Records (owned by CBS), which had a complete Classical inventory and clerks who knew the music, a couple of them music majors at nearby San Jose State (now University of California San Jose). Van Dyke Parks had collaborated with Brian Wilson on the ill-fated Smile album, with which I was obsessed. Van’s Song Cycle album was a revelation; if you haven’t heard it, remedy that situation! On that album Van included a song by some guy named Randy Newman, so when his first album came I had to hear it. And I loved it. I asked the Discount Records Classical clerks for advice on music less "easy-listening" than that which I had heard, and they steered me to Stravinsky and the other 20th Century composers, even Penderecki ;-) . Next came recording with a songwriter who was a music major at The University of California Riverside. He helped me navigate my way into Mozart, and finally to the source of all: J.S. Bach. This songwriter (who died at a young age, the victim of his terrible diet) used his knowledge of composition to write his songs, just as does Brian Wilson. See, that’s "the problem" I have with guys like Keith Emerson/ELP and other Progressive bands; they wear their "Classically-trained" badges on their sleeves, but the songs they write exhibit no evidence of compositional wisdom.
|
Whoo, you guys are a tough crowd. I think bdp hit the nail on the head.-And, the liner notes on the Schumann symphonies relate that Norrington used scores that as close to what Schumann wrote, if I recall correctly. When I recall listening to the Brandenburg concertos when I was young and then listening to them performed on 'Period Instruments', it seemed like a breathe of fresh air. I, for one, like the 'cleaner' sound of period instrument recordings. And, though Schumann was in the Romantic Period, he was at its' beginning. B |
I'm afraid Norrington in anything is not to my taste . I attended one of his Edinburgh Festival appearances some years back and it was awfull with violin playing that had your ears bleeding nearly. I hear also that he will not countenace any violin soloist performing with him unless they eschew Metal strings for gut. I heard a Proms performance some years ago and it was Victoria Mullova playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto on gut with little or no vibrato. It was absoloutely dreadful robbing that girl of her wonderful golden tone and replacing it with a dreadful screech that reminded me of those dreadful busking pipers who plague the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh . No wonder tourists think we reside in caves . |
Yes, I’m afraid you’re right about HIP in this case. However, there are numerous examples of imaginative use of this practice that I like, Francois-Xavier Roth, for example, using period instruments, manages to convey Mahler symphonies very convincingly. .Norrington’s application in Schumann, though, is not my cup of tea. |
@rvpiano, Yup, that’s the sound "Historically-informed" or "Period" performers (of which Norrington is) are after. Their argument is that the sound of the modern Symphony Orchestra is far too influenced by the Romantic period (the number of players, use of vibrato, tempi, etc.) to "correctly" perform (as the composer intended) music from earlier periods. It started with the Baroque period, and has moved forward in time to the Classical (Beethoven, etc.). Not everyone agrees with that assertion, or likes the results. |
@rvpiano, Yes, the Lalo concerto is a seldom played gem. Glazunov never rocked my boat. He was a little too romantic for my tastes. One recording of Oistrakh that I always remember is the Khachaturian Violin concerto. I got it on a MHS record decades ago, but have never forgotten how good a recording it was. I listened to other versions, but they never came close. I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but Anton Rubenstein's 4th piano concerto is one my favorite 'Romantic' pieces. BTW, did you ever listen to the Schumann symphonies with Norrington that I loaned you? I listened to the Holliger versions, but I think Norrington got it down pat. Bob |
I would just like to cite two not very well-known concertos that I regard as sublime masterpieces of the Romantic era. First is Glazunov’s Violin Concerto. There are many recordings available, including Heifetz, but the most beautiful one, for me is a mono recording that Oistrakh made in the fifties, available on Amazon for about six dollars. Secondly, is Eduardo Lalo’s Cello Concerto, available in a great sounding Mercury Living Presence recording, played spectacularly by Janos Starker. To me, these works represent the pinnacle of Romantic music. Its really a pity they’re not better known |
