Classical Music for Aficionados

I remember once seeing a BBC television program about Nichola Benedetti and the Orkney fiddler Alli Bain playing music together and it was fascinating. The two of them were virtuosos of entirely different styles of music and yet they both adapted to each others sryles and created beautiful music together. Thats real musicians for you.!!

Aye, and courage abounds when a top artist changes her normal style !

Here is a piece almost as beautiful as her in body and soul .

I saw Nicola in Chicago a few years ago .  After she played the WarHorse Concerto she encored with a few Scottish ditties, and her personality really came out.  She is a tiny person, btw, barely 5 feet and probably a size 1.5….

Have any of you heard of the 18 year old sensation Yoav Levanon who hails from Israel. He has a technique that is absolutely astonishing and also produces a beautiful tone from the piano. There is a recording from Warner from him entitled A Monument for Beethoven where he plays music from the pianists who helped to raise the money for the monument to him in Bonn. The piano playing is stunning  and the  interpretations of the pieces are so accomplished.

Sorry Len you won't like it as he plays the Liszt Sonata in the best recording and interpretation I think I have ever heard..

@jcazador   Thanks for the link, it's nice to put fingers to an interpretation. Isn't it amazing that he is not even 20 yet. I see he takes lessons from Murray Perahia.

I sure like Perahia, I imagine I might like him  too .

If I can find him .

I sure like Perahia too , I saw him play the Goldberg Variations in the Glasgow Concert Hall some years ago and he was very very good. One of the best Goldbergs I have ever witnessed.

Here's another underrated Scottish composer, William Wallace.  Hyperion have a couple of very good CDs.

Indeed , I have one on NAXOS .

My two Scottish grandmothers schooled me on being Scottish .

Listening to four of his symphonic poems right now.

William Wallace, Now there's a very patriotic name.

My thought exactly ! 

One of his symphonic poems is called "Sir William Wallace"!

Why on earth would someone want a gun that can fire 11 rounds a second !!!

Pure madness. The usual "man thing" mines is bigger than yours.

Len your Bach on the lute was lovely, I used to play that on the guitar and let me tell you it was not at all easy.

Petra Poláčková performs "Chaconne" from Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor, BWV 1004, by J.S. Bach - YouTube

I'm sorry I couldn't get the video to appear on this you tube video to appear on this post but have a listen to this lady play th Bach Chaconne in D minor on an augmented guitar , it is stunning to hear.

Very good !

Can’t miss that fantastic Czech music with both my best player, Fournier. and conductor, Celibidache.

May they rest in peace .

Nobody will say that you lack in taste here...😊

Celibidache is unique.... And Fournier too is my favorite interpreter for Bach cello suites...

My first vinyls purchase was a Beethoven symphony and a Dvorak one 58 years ago for 2 dollars if i remember well...

With Schubert and some few others, Dvorak is a poet of the highest order...

Thanks for this work i did not listen to before.... ...

My deepest respect....

Thanks mahgister , I knew the clip was not the best , but I also knew a true Classical person would git it !

I may be wrong that the Czech composers are helped by the Czech life

but in the few times I was in Prague it seemed so to me .

In the one concert I took in it was a joy to see so many young acting like it was a

rock band

Only other place like that is Hungary .Austrians who came there for cheap Opera said the same to me .

P.S. The one thing I do think I have,  but usually say only to me is , I have good taste.

I’l make it clearer . A s a combat soldier I tend to see another one .

IMO it was the czech people. "We’re only 5 million but Russians can go to hell"

They fought the Russians hard when no other under the Russian thumb would blink

their eye .

Dvorak is the Recent.

There are dozens of others.

Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) was held high by both Bach and Teleman and

Bach was in tune with him.

Jose Mys livecek (1737-1781 ) Was a friend of Mozarts dad and he did models for Mozart

for Symphony and Violin concerts ,

Haydn was in touch with several Czech composers .

Could go on for quite a while .

Smetana, Leos Jancek , Martinu, Suk ........... All in this tiny land ,

Most be something in the water .

I just read the autobiography of Zuzana Ruzickova...

For me easily the greatest harpsichordist...

His musicality is not matched for me by anyone....

I discovered her long time ago with Bach complete recording for Klavier...The first one made...By a woman who loved so much Bach that she defended harpsichord against the prejudice that it was an instrument inferior to the piano.... Which is false...

I discovered her 2 times....The last time this year with my audio room finished and a sound so iridescent than no other artist can compare in this instrument.... Her choices of colors, hues and rythm specific for each music piece is so various that it become heavenly beautiful and refreshing....Good sound conditions can help indeed and she shines in Scarlatti, Handel, Couperin,  Purcell, Dowland, Spanish masters or any other works.... A revelation....I am flabbergasted that a so great musician was so underestimated.... But there is many factors i will not touch here...

I listened to all the others albums i can look at and my ears were amazed one album after the other.......She registered perhaps one hundred, where are they?

it is a Czech woman of Jewish origin who loved his country dearly....

His autobiography is moving and a life lesson about music....( she befriended Vaclav Neuman and Karel Ancerl in the Nazi concentration camp for 4 years among other great musicians)

Yes to answer Jim, it is in the water, which is the source of all poetry...

The sound of the video is bad, but it is for the heart more than for the ears...

A well recorded one  on youtube yes but very well  acceptable..¯Alas i have this one only on youtube...

This recording is better than the one i put above...

This work is the wedding present from the husband composer Viktor Kalabis to his pianist harpsichordist wife, Zuzana Ruzickova, she played it here , absolute poetry of the Czech soul...

A VERY great Clip, perhaps the best ever for me .

I knew Neuman and Ancerl were in a camp. but need to check up on Ruzicko.

The soul of the Czech is mighty !

I put it with Beethoven,always forward and never quit .

Also Jan Hus .

I think you are right...

I put it with Beethoven,always forward and never quit .

They never quit because they are and always had been and always will be there....

Like Beethoven deaf was always anyway in music land....

Also Jan Hus

I will add Comenius the genius father of modern pedagogy...

It was under the guidance of Comenius disciples in Germany that the world see the emergence of the astounding Henri Christian Heinecken....He dies at 4 years old, a genius so precox that Kant wote a book about him...

(«It is said that when he was ten months old, he could speak German. He read the Pentateuch at age one,^[1] and between the ages of two and three, he read the Old and New Testament in Latin.^[1] When he was three years old, he was said to have recited his own History of Denmark when visiting the King of Denmark.^[1] Also at three, he testified in court to the murder of his friend, another boy named Reid.^[1] He died at age four of celiac disease.^[3] He was breastfed until close to his death, which was very likely caused by the ingestion of grain products.^[4]

While his exploits may seem hard to believe, they are relatively well documented. In 1726, his tutor (a man named Schöneich) published a study of Christian entitled The Life, Deeds, Travels and Death of the Child of Lübeck.^[1][5] Immanuel Kant wrote an essay about the child calling him an "ingenium praecox" (someone "prematurely clever").«) Wikipedia

I apologize for this part about Heinecken but i think the importance of Comenius in history is underestimated...Like the goddess Ruzickova for harpsichord and music...

Yes , I had forgotten that , did a paper about him about 50 years ago.

The Czech Republic is Industrial . Things I know ,Skoda auto , best VW gets ,

I know I had one . I was born a hunter , no longer have Czech hunting rifles, which cost a lot and were the best .Still are .

The Germans pushed the Rifle factory’s night and day , The Czech Mausers were

better then they could make .

P.S . anything Couperin is OK with me , her job was unreal !

P.P S . Science in last few years thinks someone like the boy genius is autistic .The scale is that, but extreme aka 1 in a million .

I did not know about the Mauser...

😁😊

Couperin and Scarlatti between Bach pieces...It is a treat....

😁😊

P.P S . Science in last few years thinks someone like the boy genius is autistic .The scale is that, but extreme aka 1 in a million .

Comenius insisted on education at young age and a genius without stimuli at young age will shine way less....

The more honest and rational people and interesting people i encountered in my life were often asperger type...

I wrote a poem years ago in Rhymes resuming the life of Heinecken...

😁😊

Among the best in North America.

John Adams' recent "Must he Devil Have All the Good Tunes" with Wang, Dudamel and the LAPO is worth hearing.  IIUC is it available only on LP and on the usual streaming sources.

John Adams' recent "Must The Devil Have All the Good Tunes" with Wang, Dudamel and the LAPO is worth hearing.

Indeed, I heard it performed last week at the San Francisco Symphony and enjoyed it very much. The pianist was Víkingur Ólafsson (one of my favorites) with conducter Esa-Pekka Salonen. The musicians looked like they had fun playing it, and John Adams was in attendance.

I never got the Celi cult.  All I can say is that his Munich concert goers must of had strong bladders to make it through his glacial performances.  

I cannot vouch for all his performance but Celi interpretation was always about time not as a passing rythm , like the seasons, but more about one instant where everything is enclosed...

We sometimes must learn to listen something, and for sure all is not for everybody...

I already posted a piece of Indian Sarangi, one of the most fascinating instrument of India, and a poster say to me that it got on his nerve...😁😊

We cannot like eveything at the same times and sometimes our preference are right in a way....

Our taste are also a miror of our own ongoing evolution.... It takes me time to appreciate jazz for example... I never got it young.... But i loved Bach at first chords...Nothing is wrong and right, only an evolution...

But the "cult" about Celi come from this concept of time, no other Conductor explored his way...

Celi express and give to everything the density of eternity...

Eternity can be boring so to speak ... 😊

Anyway some composers are more suited for this maestro "suspended" stick than some other...

Bruckner’s interpretation for example are certainly stupendous...It is here i catch his art and unique vision...

The greatest examples in the way to  use of time for me by conductors are Furtwangler and Celibidache...No one is able to imitate them perfectly though... They become myths...Or examplar of the art of conducting...Most maestros distributed themselves between these 2 ways to express time...

In Furtwangler: Music pass with his own beating time completely out of everyday time...

In Celibidache : Music dont pass, but surge directly from his timing eternal origin or source...

No one is right here or wrong , Celi. or Furt. only gods waiting for us to listen...

But we cannot got their specific way at the same time and the same day...

Our listening life is an evolution...

I never got the Celi cult. All I can say is that his Munich concert goers must of had strong bladders to make it through his glacial performances.

Bernstein is a genius between Celi and Furt...

His concept of musical  time is between these two...

Bernstein is one of the great maestro for me with these two...And some other few...

But here frogman you pick the young Celi , a better example of his musical original  time conception will be the Stuttgart 1976  more mature  version of Coriolan....

😊😊

I did not say here which one i prefer, it is not my goal... 😊

I think you meant “Egmont”, not “Coriolan” 😊.

Thanks for your comments. First, my choice of the young Celi was in great part for the visual element in that clip. I agree that it could be said that the 1976 Stuttgard version is “more mature”. However, the question must asked whether in this case “maturity” (of time conception), better serves the music’s intent. I’m not so sure.

The music was composed as the overture to incidental music for a play (Goethe) celebrating the life and heroism of a Dutch count (Egmont) in his country’s struggle for liberty against imperialistic Spain; culminating with the count’s execution. The music was composed while the Napoleonic wars were raging. All a pretty dramatic backdrop, I would say. Perhaps partly due to the more distant and less present sound of the 1976 recording, and certainly no intention on my part to diminish the wisdom of maturity, but the 1976 has, for me, less of the drama and angst which I think the historical setting would demand. Examples: the introduction, intended to represent “The Prison” and the feeling that imprisonment might convey seems to be better served by the young Celi’s version which gives me a stronger feeling of drama and tension. For me, the sometimes excruciatingly long rests (silences) in the 1976 detract from the drama and urgency. Likewise, in this version the first statements by the woodwinds give the music an almost pastoral feeling; not what I would expect given the circumstances to be conveyed. What is it they say, “mellows with age”? Not so sure “mellowing” fits in the context of war, imprisonment and execution. Bernstein, for me, strikes a more convincing balance balance in this regard; hence my choice.

Thank you for the clip and for your thoughts, mahgister; always thought provoking.