 | This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from December 25, 2015. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast212 |
Today isn’t
a usual Podcast Vault post, as I am not proposing a new take or a filler
YouTube clip. I will refer you back to what I provided as
commentary when I originally issued the montage.
What I will
do instead is use this opportunity to do my “Year in Review”.
We will all
agree that 2020 is a forgettable year, dominated by the pandemic, the
public health emergency and the socio-economic impacts that followed. Speaking
for myself, I was fortunate that I could work from home, and that my immediate
family has (so far) avoided contracting the ‘Rona.
As far as
our activities are concerned, I kept going in the hope that my posts and shares
could serve as a momentary distraction to our daily concerns. In 2020, we
completed our Project 366 and launched with another daily podcast
series, this time focused on our Friday Blogs ad Podcasts. We are now nearly a
third of the way through that series, and are on track to publishing our 350th
montage next week (as we traditionally do for milestones, it will be an
extended montage that blows past our self-imposed 90-minute limit).
The series
will conclude on Tuesday August 31st with Montage #365, a “Fifth
Tuesday” quarterly release which will introduce our “anniversary series” for
the Tuesday Blog. Look for more on that when we get close!
The pace at
which we have been publishing new podcasts has been somewhat unpredictable ; we
have 16 montages planned between now and late August, which maps out to about 2
a month, though the timing is interweaved with our greater calendar. Please
consult the calendar (or subscribe to our podcasts) so you don’t miss anything!
As for the
Tuesday Blog, we will continue to publish them fortnightly with both YouTube
and Pod-O-Matic shares. As this year will be our 10th
anniversary of the Tuesday Blog, I plan to resurrect “classic” music
link/YouTube playlist shares and will interleave them with our Vinyl’s
Revenge and Cover 2 Cover series.
In the
Fall, we resumed providing some content on OperaLively – mostly in the form of
“Short Stories” that are coupled to already planned Daily Podcasts. I plan to
keep to that formula until the Fall, where we may provide more Opera
programming – as our collaboration with Luiz and his forum are also nearing the
10 year mark.
Before
sharing our “video favourites” (a running playlist of most of the single clips
we used throughout the year), I wanted to again thank our friends and followers
for their continued support and (too few) comments against our material. I’d
love to see more of you subscribe to our Podcasting channel, though I’m always
pleased to see you subscribe to our YouTube channel…
Happy Holidays to all
Pierre
Video Favourites Playlist - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6swnss9F7SEXDc9zpMAlTLn2Vmduc_qD | This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
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 | No. 349 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast349 |
Though he
was unfavourably reviewed by critics – many of whom saw his work as immoral –
German dramatist and writer August von Kotzebue was one of the most popular
writers of his time. IHe was politically conservative and cosmopolitan in
outlook and spoke out against the antisemitism of student nationalists.
He was
approached in 1812 by Beethoven, who suggested that Kotzebue write the libretto
for an opera about Attila, which was never written. Beethoven did, however,
produce incidental music for two of Kotzebue's plays, The Ruins of Athens
(Beethoven's opus 113) and King Stephen (opus 117).
Beethoven
write few works for the stage; in addition to his only opera (Fidelio) and the
incidental music to the aforementioned incidental music to Kotzebue’s two
plays, he left us his overture to Heinrich Joseph von Collin's tragedy
Coriolan, his ballet music The Creatures of Prometheus and the incidental music
to Goethe’s tragedy Egmont.
Today’s
montage features the music from Egmont and the Ruins of Athens, both featuring
sung numbers, as well as displaying some of Beethoven’s flair for pace and
drama.
Beethoven
wrote the incidental music for Egmont between October 1809 and June 1810.
Composed during the Napoleonic Wars when the First French Empire had extended
its domination over vast swathes of Europe, Beethoven had famously expressed
his great outrage over Napoleon Bonaparte's decision to crown himself Emperor
in 1804, furiously scratching out his name in the dedication of the Eroica
Symphony. In the music for Egmont, Beethoven expressed his own political
concerns through the exaltation of the heroic sacrifice of a man condemned to
death for having taken a valiant stand against oppression. The overture to Egmont
is well known, and so are som of the sung passages, Die Trommel gerühret and
Freudvoll und leidvoll.
The Ruins
of Athens was a play commissioned to August von Kotzebue for the dedication of
a new theatre at Pest. Perhaps the best-known music from The Ruins of Athens is
the Turkish March, a theme that has claimed a place in popular culture. The
overture and the Turkish March are often performed separately, and the other
pieces of this set are not often heard.
In 1822 the
play was revived for the reopening of Vienna's Theater in der Josefstadt with a
revised libretto by Carl Meisl, for which Beethoven wrote a new overture, now
known as The Consecration of the House, Op. 124, and added a chorus
"Wo sich die Pulse" (WoO 98).
The music
for The Ruins of Athens was reworked in 1924 by Richard Strauss and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal in 1926.
I think you will love this music too!
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from June 8, 2012. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/7And11 |
This week’s
we take out a montage from the podcast vault that dates from early 2012 that
features a work by our birthday boy, Ludwig van Beethoven.
The Piano
Trio in B-flat major, Op. 97, was completed in 1811. It is commonly referred to
as the Archduke Trio, because it was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria,
himself an amateur pianist and a patron, friend, and composition student of
Beethoven. Beethoven dedicated a total of fourteen compositions to the
Archduke, who dedicated one of his own to Beethoven in return.
Although
the "Archduke Trio" is sometimes numbered as "No. 7", the
numbering of Beethoven's twelve piano trios is not standardized, so that in
some sources the Op. 97 trio may be shown as having a different number,
if any.
The use of
the number 7 is significant today, as all the works on the playlist harbor
number 7 or 11 – a reference to games of chance and spirituality.
The
fundamental bet in craps is the pass line bet, which is a bet for the shooter
to win. If the come-out roll is 7 or 11, the bet wins. But there’s more…
The number
7 symbolizes spirituality and spiritual evolving, spiritual awakening and
enlightenment. This number also symbolizes knowledge, faith, education,
learning, studying, teaching, deep understanding of things, psychic abilities,
healing, inner guidance and wisdom, intuition, empathic abilities, philosophy
and mysticism.
The number
1 symbolizes initiative, beginning point, new beginnings, new projects, new
endeavors, success, intuition, progress, moving forward, ambition, pursuing
your goals, inspiration, determination, confidence, leadership, and making your
reality with your thoughts and expectations.
Eleven is
made up of two ones, but also the Master Number 11 symbolizes illumination and
enlightenment, teaching, idealism, consciousness, mysticism, prophesy, visions,
enthusiasm, creativity and inspiration.
And you
thought we were shooting craps!
As filler
today, keeping to the 7-11 theme, a concerto grosso by Giuseppe Valentini – his
opus 7, number 11.
I think you
will (still) love this music too.
| This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
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| No. 348 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast348 |
The
Beethoven catalogue has many trio combinations: string trios (violin, viola and
cello), wind trios (two oboes and cor anglais), trios for piano, clarinet and
cello but the most well known are for the standard piano trio (piano, violin
and cello). For that specific combination, he composed at least seven trios,
two series of variations as well as a few stand-alone movements. From his first
collection (his opus 1), I retained is trio no. 1, from the original
configuration of the Beaux Arts Trio.
The ten
Beethoven sonatas represent the most important body of work for violin and
piano. The Beethoven violin sonatas do not quite span his whole life’s work, as
do the piano sonatas or string quartets for instance. His last example is from
1812, whist he was still just managing to perform in public and a full 15 years
before his death. As always with this unique genius, the standard across the
cycle is unwaveringly superb, often touching absolute greatness. There is no
weak sonata – but then we would be amazed were we to find one. They give a
particular insight into Beethoven as a young man, full of confidence as
composer and pianist, and blazing a trail for a new way forward. I retained the
sonata no. 2, performed by Martha Argerich and Gidon Kremer.
Beethoven
inherited the string-quartet tradition from his predecessors and shaped it into
something unsurpassed in virtuosity, invention, and expressiveness. He wrote 16
string quartets, and they reveal his evolution as a composer and a man. It’s
all there: earthy wit (yes, Beethoven could crack a joke), volatile temper (his
fury was state of the art), and personal sorrow (he had plenty to weep about).
On today’s montage, I retained no. 3, performed by the 1950’s lineup of the
Budapest String Quartet.
I think you will love this music too.
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from November 8, 2013. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/Pcast130 |
As we close out the month of November (already!), we have one last Friday Podcast Vault selection that feeds our ongoing “In November we remember” series, with this revisit of our homage to the late great Canadian conductor Mario Bernardi.
Mario Bernardi was a national figure who played a seminal role in the life of classical music in Canada. He was born in Kirkland Lake, Ont. in 1930, not a hotbed of classical music in the early years of the Great Depression. He displayed talent at the piano and he moved to Italy when he was six years old with his mother to foster a musical career. He would study at the Venice Conservatory. After graduating in 1945, his family returned to Canada where he finished his studies at The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. He then was a concert pianist.
In 1957 he conducted the Canadian Opera Company, and in 1963 was coach and assistant conductor at the Sadler's Wells Opera Company (now the English National Opera).
Bernardi was hired by the late Hamilton Southam to move to Ottawa in 1968 to build the 45-member orchestra for the new National Arts Centre. Virtually from scratch, Mario Bernardi built an orchestra that was considered the finest of its kind in the world, and began a tradition of excellence that continues today with the National Arts Centre Orchestra.
One of the rules in establishing the ensemble was that NACO was not allowed to poach players away from other orchestras. Even with that limitation, they were able to find players in Canada, in the U.S. and Europe, and even one from South Africa. He left the orchestra in the early 1980’s, but returned regularly as a guest conductor and became the NACO's conductor laureate in 1997.
After his tenure in Ottawa, he led the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra from 1984 until 1992. From 1983 until 2006 he was the principal conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra, based out of Vancouver.
The montage features Bernardi with all three ensembles, on a large swath of compositions from the standard and the Canadian repertoire.
As we are approaching the Holidays, I thought that for a filler I would share a 1964 complete performance of Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel sung in English by the Sadler’s Wells Opera, with Mario Bernardi conducting.
Album details - https://www.discogs.com/Mario-Bernardi-2-Sadlers-Wells-Opera-Present-Humperdinks-Hansel-And-Gretel/release/14646421
YouTube link - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_kwezUZN99sA1T0gwKuTDBOa4YawHnZYnI
| This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
| No. 347 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast347 |
Our second
of two new montages this month, in our “In November we remember” series,
showcases performances by cellist Lynn Harrell, who passed away on April 27.
According
to his obituary in the Washington
Poet, Mr. Harrell was convinced that the cello had more direct appeal to an
audience than any other instrument, and compared it to the human voice. “The
cello covers all vocal ranges — soprano, alto, tenor and bass,” he told the New
York Times in 1982. “Besides that, there is the visual appeal.”
Lynn Morris Harrell was born in 1944 to a musical family. His mother, Marjorie Fulton Harrell, was a violinist, and his father, Mack Harrell, was a baritone who sang for many years with the Metropolitan Opera. Later, the family moved to Dallas, where his father taught at Southern Methodist University and his mother gave private lessons. Most summers were spent in Colorado, where Mack Harrell was one of the founders and then the second director of the Aspen Music Festival and School. He started on piano at 8 and was an unenthusiastic student. But when his parents presented an evening of chamber music at the family home, he became fascinated by the cello and became a pupil of Lev Aronson, principal cellist of the Dallas Symphony. The fiercely exacting George Szell hired him for the Cleveland Orchestra’s cello section while Mr. Harrell was still a teenager and made him principal cellist at 20. He went on play solo recitals, chamber music concerts and solo appearances with orchestra.
His
complete discography spans more than two dozen other recordings, and his
repertoire spanned from Bach to a new concerto by composer Augusta Read Thomas.
The three works I chose for today’s podcast are emblematic of his broad
repertoire; he recorded both of Victor Herbert’s cello concerti, and his
performance of the Schumann cello concerto is a go-to reference. To complete
the programme, I opted for a quaint duo for cello and violin by Zoltan Kodaly.
I think you will love this music too.
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from November 14, 2014. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast173 |
This week’s
throwback montage concludes our week-long “War and Peace” series with a complete
performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem; a work that was also featured
(in part) in our World War II montage yesterday.
Britten was
an avowed pacifist, and even registered as a conscientious objector in his
homeland when he returned from a prolonged self-exile in 1942. Still, including
his Ballad of Heroes we featured in our Remembrance Day montage, he left a
number of works dedicated to the theme of war, but mostly on the human cost of
war, and the War Requiem us his most enduring and brilliant example – as I
noted in the original musing from 2014.
Our bonus track is a work from the early days of World War II, during the period Britten and his longtime companion Peter Pears found refuge (from homophobic persecution and the war in Britain) in North America. This Canadian Carnival (in French, Kermesse Canadienne) is a work that is intended as a playful concert overture, with tinges of French-Canadian folklore and I’d argue sounds a lot like Copland’s Salon Mexico.
I think you
will (still) love this music too.
| This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
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| No. 346 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast346 |
Quoting
from Hogwood’s obituary,
at its height in the 1980s, the early music revival was regarded by many as
virtually synonymous with the Academy of Ancient Music and Christopher Hogwood.
Established in 1973 with instruments of the baroque period, under Hogwood's
direction the AAM examined aspects of historical performance practice with
scholarly rigour, paving the way for the achievements of other contemporaries
such as Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner and Trevor Pinnock. The AAM was
at this time one of the most frequently recorded period ensembles, soon moving
from the baroque era into the classical, to record the complete symphonies of
Mozart and Beethoven, the complete Mozart piano concertos (with Robert Levin)
and a wide range of other music.
Hogwood's
philosophy with the orchestra, and indeed in all his projects, was to attempt
to understand and recreate the composer's intentions, in terms of both notation
and performance. To this end he would return to the original sources, correct
publishing errors and evaluate textual alterations in subsequent editions. Much
of the repertoire the orchestra performed was given in editions prepared by
Hogwood himself.
By the
1980s Hogwood achieved superstar status in the classical sphere, dubbed
"the Karajan of early music" on coming third in the 1983 Billboard
chart, behind Plácido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa but ahead of any other
conductor.
The three
works I retained for this homage podcast are from the baroque – two of Johann
Sebastian Bach’s less heard orchestral suites (numbers 1 and 4) and a work with
vocal soloists, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater.
I think you will love this music too.
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from April 20, 2018. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast277 |
A few weeks ago, we spent a weekend exploring the music of The Mighty Five, the group of Nationalist composers that reshaped Russian music. Today’s throwback post revisits the music of one of their disciples, Alexander Glazunov.
In many ways, Glazunov was a transitional figure in Russian – later Soviet – music; not so much in terms of a late romantic to modern transition (that was more left to Stravinsky and Scriabin) but in terms of a nationalist transition.
Glazunov was not supportive of the modern direction Stravinsky's music took. He was not alone in this prejudice—their mutual teacher Rimsky-Korsakov was as profoundly conservative by the end of his life, wedded to the academic process he helped instill at the Conservatory. Unlike Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov was not anxious about the potential dead end Russian music might reach by following academia strictly, nor did he share Rimsky-Korsakov's grudging respect for new ideas and techniques.
Stravinsky was not the only composer whose modernist tendencies Glazunov disliked. Shostakovich mentioned Glazunov's attacks against the "recherché cacophonists"—the elder composer's term for the newer generation of Western composers, beginning with Debussy. Once, while looking at a score of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, he commented, "It's orchestrated with great taste.... And he knows his work.... Could it be that Rimsky and I influenced the orchestration of all these contemporary degenerates?"
Both Glazunov and Rachmaninoff, whose first symphony Glazunov supposedly had conducted so poorly at its premiere (according to the composer), were considered "old-fashioned" in their later years. In recent years, reception of Glazunov's music has become more favorable.
Glazunov served as director of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory between 1905 and 1928 and was instrumental in the reorganization of the institute into the Petrograd Conservatory, then the Leningrad Conservatory, following the Bolshevik Revolution. The best-known student under his tenure during the early Soviet years was Dmitri Shostakovich.
Glazunov toured Europe and the United States in 1928, and settled in Paris by 1929. He always claimed that the reason for his continued absence from Russia was "ill health"; this enabled him to remain a respected composer in the Soviet Union, unlike Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff, who had left for other reasons.
In 1934, he wrote one of his final works; a virtuoso and lyrical concerto for the alto saxophone. This is our filler work for today.
I think you will (still) love this music too
| This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from October 18, 2013. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/Pcast127 |
For a few years, we used to feature Podcast Vault podcasts on the Tuesday Blog, and this week's selection was indeed redone in March of 2014. The title I used at that time was "Three Organs and Three Organists" and though the bulk of the musing essentially repeated the original Friday musing, there was a notable exception and let me recycle iy here:
This description of the mouth of a whale, quoted from the Melville novel Moby Dick makes a direct reference to the historic Christiaan Müller organ of the St.-Bavokerk in the Dutch city of Haarlem. It is one of the world's most historically important organs, whose original construction dates back 1735-38, thus contemporary to Bach’s lifetime. Dutch organist and composer Piet Kee performs eight short preludes and fugues for organ (BWV 553-560) on this venerable instrument.
Our two other organists - and organs - come from different parts of the Globe; Ian Tracey performs the Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582 in this montage on the grand Blancfort organ at Our Lady of Incarnation church in Marbella, Spain. Glenn Gould plays selections from The ARt of the Fugue on the Casavant organ at All Saints' Kingsway Anglican Church in Toronto.
The original post (under my old bilingual format) proposed two YouTube clips (on in the French commentary, the other in the English commentary). Today's filler is an altogether different performance of the Art of the Fugue, this one on the Ahrend & Brunzema organ, , Kirche St. Johann, Bremen-Oberneuland by Herbert Tachezi.
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 7, 2014. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast142 |
In order to complete our series of podcasts entrusted to “memorable conductors”, this week's throwback montage cedes the podium to the late Arthur Fiedler, associated with the current of “popular concerts” in the United States (and elsewhere) where we program works from the repertoire to others we don’t usually hear during symphonic concerts.
A seriously trained musician and member of the Boston Symphony (as was his father for that matter), in 1924 he created the Boston Sinfonietta, with which he began a series of concerts outside of his duties at the BSO. This orchestra - which would later become the Fieldler Sinfonietta on record – stuck to the traditional repertoire. In 1930 he was hired as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, where he held musical direction for nearly half a century. Under Fiedler's direction, the "Pops" have made more recordings than any orchestra in the world, selling over 50 million records and cassettes. In addition, Fiedler collaborated for 26 seasons with the San Francisco Pops Orchestra, and occasionally conducted other orchestras around the world.
The montage explores the more or less “typical” content for Fiedler and his “Pops”. Our bonus clips feature more Fieldler and the Pops. The album title (Evening at Pops) refers to his decade of television concerts produced WGBH fir PBS.
I think you will (still) love this music too.
| This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. |
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| No. 345 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast345 |
| This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from October 31, 2014. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast171 |
Our Podcast Vault selection this week feeds a thematic arc on our podcasting channel this week which I called “Operation Opera”.
Two of the titles released this week featured works by George Gershwin, a composer who is usually associated with musicals and with the famous New York theater district, Broadway.
One of the works we shared - Blue Monday - was included in a revue and the other, Porgy and Bess, was a daring attempt to put on a "grand opera". Even though Porgy is now staged by major operatic companies, its premiere was on Broadway, not the Met.
The post that originally accompanied today's share explored the opera phenomenon in the context of accessibility, and the pair of operas composed in the mid-1940s by Menotti are fine examples of this attempt to bring together the medium of opera and access to an audience that is less familiar with the same medium.
The bonus clip, another short opera by the same composer, attempts the same experiment with the radio audience. The Old Maid and the Thief is a short 14-scene opera composed expressly for radio, exploring a contemporary theme, in a language familiar to listeners. The chosen performance is the original feed from the NBC company, with the introduction (and synopsis) of the time.
I think you will (still) love this music too.
