Classical music thread welcoming your suggestions and why...

Richter could be disturbingly demonic as well.  Try his “Bydlo” from the live Sofia (Bulgaria) recording of Pictures at An Exhibition.  I have never heard anyone project the menace in that piece as he did.  Or his numerous recordings of Beethoven’s Appassionata

Reading these posts I was reminded of the Toscanini quote about the famous first movement of Beethoven Fifth:  “For some, this represents Fate Knocking at the door: for me it’s just Allegro Con Brio”.   The point being that we can become so enthusiastic about a piece of music, or a certain performer, that we overload the language to try and express our enthusiasm.  Music is a language of its own, and it is difficult to place in a language that relies upon words instead of tones to describe it.  I once saw a You Tube of someone explaining a Debussy Chanson in Mandarin.  The attempt was earnest but didn’t survive the translation, and I suspect the recreation of classic Mandarin Poetry wouldn’t survive the reverse.

  Furtwangler had the effect of making Music escape bar lines.  The Orchestra seems to speak in paragraphs not in short phrases.  His Schumann Fourth sounds more like a Shakespeare soliloquy as delivered by a great tragedian than a series of emails (for contrast, try the same work conducted by Yannick Sezet -Neguin.).

  I was readin an article in the Gramophone the other day. A young conductor had been hired to rehearse the Luxembourg Orchestra in Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique.  He was a stand in for Gergiev, who was too busy having dinner with Putin or something to actually rehearse prior to the concert.  So this young pup is rehearsing the grousing orchestra until 20 minutes prior to the curtain, at which point Gergiev shows up.  The rookie is amazed that from the first downbeat the Orchestra sounds totally different.

    How does this happen?  What black magic do the really great conductors stash in their batons and transmit to players?  They have a vision and they communicate it, non verbally, to players who speak the language.  And imho, most of the greats phrase like singers

Scriabin has always impressed me for his color.  He was vey interested in synesthesia, the pairing of visual colors and tones.  It can be heard to isolate the contours of his work, as it isn’t as driven by the traditional type of sonata form, with the usual ideas concerning development of thematic material.  My favorite Scriabin Piano Sonatas impress more for their musical pointillism, like a Serraut canvass.  All those beautiful musical colors, metaphorically turning in the wind.  It’s fascinating to hear the same piece played by Pianists as different as Horowitz and John Ogden.  Horowitz is like a black and white photograph taken by a master photographer that seems to play with light to achieve multiple shadings of grey.  Ogden plays with the colors more.  It’s hard to recognize that they can be playing the same work.

  I think that your comments about Furtwangler and my previous are discussing the same phenomenon, but here since I am talking about Pianistic color, let me discuss Furtwangler’s use of color.  It’s a pity that he died on the cusp of the stereo era, but he built his sound from the ground up.  Double basses, cellos, low brass all lay a rock solid foundation of sound.  Then within that supple phrasing that we have been referencing he could draw contrasting sounds that were part of the magic, because different choirs of instruments would phrase organically around that firm , enveloping scaffold

My piano teacher was just recommending a Nyir….recording yesterday.  He then started giving me a brief bio of the performer.  I was thinking what are the chances that two people in my orbit would be extolling him a few days apart.   In the late 1970s I worked in a record store in Ann Arbor, Mi and I remember that one of his releases was in demand, particularly with the mMusic School faculty 

So how do you regard the art of Celibidache?  Another artist famous for going his own way, for conceiving of music as statements, rather than a series of notes?

I had read your previous posts on Celi but I was wondering if you could fit into the context of the present discussion.  I do like your analogy of Celi being sort of of the racemic isomer, to use a biochemical term, of Toscanini ; in two dimensions they are similar, but since music is more than two dimensional, they arrive at completely different results.

  Do you have any thoughts on one of our most prominent’ Furtwangler-wanna-be’ Daniel Barenboim?

I love Pollini.  I was asked recently who my favorite pianist was and after a lot of thought, and all the disclaimers that I couldn’t pick just one, etc, I settled on him.

The Gramophone did one of their pieces on their favorite recordings of a given work on the Chopin Etudes and I was apoplectic when they dismissed M.P. His recording  is supremely, eye poppingly virtuosic yet brings out Chopin’s harmonies, especially for the left hand, like no one else.

  I have been out of town for my mothers funeral so I haven't had a chance to keep up here.  I agree that Pollini and Moravec are two very different Debussy players.  Moravec has that warm buttery tone while Pollini has such fine etching and leonine strength.  The music however, can survive both approaches.  I prefer M.P. here, but for years the only recordings that I knew of the Debussy Preludes were those of Michelangelo, who was M.P. teacher.  Pollini very different Art does lead to equally exquisite poetry. 

   Barenboim has stated throughout his career that he wants to emulate Furtwangler.  He was the chief conductor here in Chicago for many years so I am very familiar with his work.  A recording that he made of Beethovens Third Piano Concerto, when he was a teenager and before discovering his Furtwangler Passion, was one of my earliest acquired ops.  Lets just say that D.B. has phenomenal natural musical instincts, but in attempting to superimpose the style of W.F., he frequently misfires.  He just doesn't seem to have that innate ability to convey his vision to others unless he slows things down to near stasis, but without the inner light that a Furt or Cell had, it just sounds slow and bloated

I am not much of a Liszt-o-philiac, as I think there is more style than substance there. Some of the Etudes are nice.  Claudio Arrau and Jorge Bolet are enough for me, and Brendel in the Sonata 

I’ve been listening to a big box set of Musica Antiqua Koln. There are a lot of the Baroque “usual suspects” here but what is really grabbing me is the Telemann. That composer, who published a veritable ton, is frequently dismissed as being formulaic. Oh, but what a practioner of formulas! The invention seems inexhaustible. He wrote for every instrument of his time but his Violin and recorder pieces seem particularly daring.

I need to explore more Renaissance Music. I can’t comment meaningfully on Gesualdo at present. I’ve been meaning to turn my focus there for some time.

Marriner and the ASMF are frequently overlooked because they were non HIPP practitioners, but they did pioneering work in terms of popularizing Mozart and others for smaller ensembles. I cherish their records

@edcyn Interesting, I had read the Goebel could be a bit standoffish, nice to see something to the contrary.

  @mahgister No one is disputing that Telemann was to prodigious for his own good, in the Historical Appreciation sweepstakes.  He worked on the model of great painters of the day, in that he had a room full of apprentices.  How that system worked is beyond me. Perhaps he whistled a tune he had thought up while using the water closet and told them “Use formula IIIb on this and show me what you have before lunchtime “. Presumably there is a fair amount of chaff in there, and we rely upon the likes of MAK to be sort of a quality control expert.

  However, we can only judge the results. At the end of the day I don’t care if a canvas by Rembrandt has 20% or 80% painted by an apprentice with the great man supervising.  One cannot imagine Beethoven or Brahms using Telemann’s compositional method (actually, there is some evidence that a substantial amount of Beethoven’s Works without opus—the stuff that he churned out to make a living-may largely be the labor of students such as Ferdinand Ries), but ultimately one should accept the music on it’s own terms.  It may not storm the gates of heaven like J.S. Bach, but it paves the streets leading to those gates, if you will accept that mixed metaphor 

There is a large Barbirolli box that has been released, with many 78 recordings.

My impressions of J.B. Are from his stereo recordings, in his last decade or so.

His Mahler is impressive, but ultimately just to slow and world weary for me.  I like the Sibelius stereo set with the Halle Orchestra, but  the Orchestral deficiencies are wearying.  It would be interesting to hear the younger J.B.

  Re Curentzis, I admit that I am one of those that is off put by his relentless P.R. Machine.  The one recording of his that I did stream, Tchaikovsky 6, didn’t begin to live up to the hype.

  I second the comments about Barenboim as a Furtwangler wanna be.  The young D.B. was so phenomenally talented.  It just seems weird to want to ape another musician to the extent that he has, and to alter the natural growth curve that he may otherwise have experienced.  Furtwangler make it seem as though he was playing the Orchestra like an individual instrument, exercising complete command, apparently able to manipulate the musicians to follow him wherever he went.   I think it was that improvisatory feel that D.B. the Pianist wanted to bring to his conducting 

In college in Ann Arbor in the seventies I worked at a store called Liberty Music.  They aspired to have a copy of every recording currently in print.  I don’t know how they succeeded with that but it was certainly an Aladdin’s Cave for all kinds of obscure music.

Ogden was my favorite Schumann Piano Concerto recording, with Paavo Berglund conducting.  The perfectly capture the rhapsodic nature of that piece