Scherzi & Menuetti

No. 378 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast378

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Blogger’s Note: As we review our many musical shares from our musical forum activities under our ongoing “222 Day Binge Challenge”, the Friday Blog and Podcast will revisit some themes from past Tuesday Blogs. Today’s montage is part of that exercise. The Tuesday post in question was issued on September 10, 2013. The below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

Minuets and scehrzi are close cousins both in their form and their use in classical music. The scherzo, as in the dance-like, musical joke has come to replace the minuet in three or four-movement works. The transition from the minuet (espooused by Haydn in particular) to the scherzo is a key step in the evolution from the classical period to the early romantic.

I don't now if we can call this the first instance of a scherzo, but certainly the third movement of Beethoven's First symphony (deceptively marked Menuetto. Allegro molto e vivace) is really a scherzo:



The playlist I assembled proposes a set of scherzos (and minuets) for different combinations of instruments - going from the solo piano to the full orchestra - from Haydn and Mozart to Maurice Ravel.  The playlist has few selections from the original 2013 set. We note Litoff's Scherzo and less-heard works by Borodin and Lalo.

Enjoy!

A LA CARTE #9- Classical Symphonies à la carte

We are repurposing the music from a Vinyl's Revenge post of July 5, 2018 as a new montage in our ongoing A la Carte series on For Your Listening Pleasure.  The following notes are an update.

Over the coming months, we will be repurposing several of the Haydn symphonies contained in a pair of Once Upon the Internet posts featuring Herrmann Scherchen. This first post in the series combines a selection from a 2011 “Musical Links” post from our Friday series we called “Mozart’s EuropeanVacation” and a third hitherto unpublished selection – Schubert’s Second symphony from Riccardo Muti’s Schubert cycles with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Enjoy!

Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791)

Symfony no. 31 en in D Major, K. 297  "Paris"

Mozart Akademie Amsterdam

Jaap Ter Linden, conducting

[WoO 110729]

Joseph HAYDN (1732-1809)

Symphony No. 100 in G Major, Hob.I:100 « Military »

Wiener Symphoniker

Hermann Scherchen, conducting

[OUTI-61]

Franz SCHUBERT (1797-1828)

Symphony No.2 in B Flat Major, D.125

Wiener Philharmoniker

Riccardo Muti, conducting

[NEW]

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/alc-09

Rossini/Respighi – La Boutique Fantasque - Suite Rossiniana

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog.

This week’s Vinyl’s Revenge digs out an old cassette I acquired in the early 1980’s featuring the music of Ottorino Respighi inspired by music composed by his compatriot, Gioacchino Rossini.

Respighi had written the ballet La Boutique fantasque for Léonide Massine and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1919, basing it on short piano pieces from Rossini's collection Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age).

Massine described how, in Rome for a ballet season, Respighi brought the score of Rossini's Péchés de vieillesse to Diaghilev. Toulouse-Lautrec was an influence on the period setting and style of La Boutique fantasque, and Massine envisaged the principal character "quite Lautrec-like".

The story of the ballet has similarities to Die Puppenfee ("The Fairy Doll") of Josef Bayer, an old German ballet that had been performed by Jose Mendez in Moscow in 1897 and by Serge and Nicholas Legat in Saint Petersburg in 1903. Others note the similarities to Hans Christian Andersen's The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Massine's scenario centers on the love story between two can-can dancer dolls in a toyshop, incorporating elements of comedy, national folk dance and mime, as well as classical choreography.

In 1925, Respighi returned to Rossini's music, but not as a ballet, simply as concert music. He again used Sins of Old Age, specifically Quelques riens (Various nothings) from Volume XII, and applied what he called a trascrizione libera (free transcription) to them.

The four-movement score is brilliant, but also dark and evocative. Although not written for ballet, Rossiniana has been choreographed as a dance performance work.

Antal Dorati recorded many of Respighi’s seminal orchestral music for Mercury with the Minneapolis and London symphonies in the 1950’s, and his recording of the Ancient Airs and Dances with the Philharmonia Hungarica (again for Mercury, featured here a few years ago) is a reference recording. This coupling of the two Rossini-inspired scores comes much later, in the mid-1970’s for Decca, with the Royal Philharmonic. I note that the Boutique score is labelled a “ballet suite”, meaning some sections of the complete ballet are omitted in this performance – it still remains crisp and enjoyable.

Happy Listening!

Ottorino RESPIGHI (1879-1936)
La boutique fantasque (ballet after Rossini), P.120 – ballet suite
Rossiniana, P.148 (after Rossini)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Antal Dorati, conducting

Decca Jubilee Series – KJBC 79

Discogs - https://www.discogs.com/release/1068...ite-Rossiniana

Archive Page - https://archive.org/details/13-respighi-suite-rossiniana-p.-148

Salvatore Accardo (*1941)

No. 377 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Friday Blog and Podcast. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/377-salvatore-accardo-1941-alc

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

Today’s A la Carte montage is fashioned around Salvatore Accardo’s visit with the Montreal Symphony in May of 1986, which we featured on a past Once Upon the Internet post.

Salvatore Accardo was born in Turin in a family coming from the South of Italy: his father Vincenzo, artist engraver of cameos was passionate with music and his mother was a primary school teacher. At 3 he asked for a violin and began to play to ear, at 5 he began his studies in Naples with the musician and pedagogue Luigi D’Ambrosio, later he entered the Naples Conservatorio of San Pietro a Majella where at 13 he graduated  full marks playing for the first time Paganini’s Caprices, earning the first prize of the 1958 Paganini Competition in Genoa. 

Admitted ad honorem at the Accademia Chigiana of Siena, Accardo studied there with Yvonne Astruc, former pupil and assistent of George Enescu, starting to be friends with his classmates: Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Zubin Mehta, Charles Dutoit, and Maurizio Pollini.

 He was a leader of "I Musici" (1972-1977) and has long been associated with Italian and European ensembles; he founded the Settimane Musicali Internazionali in Naples, the Accardo Quartet in 1992 and he was one of the founders of the Walter Stauffer Academy in 1986. and the Cremona String Festival in 1971. In 1996, he re-founded the Orchestra da Camera Italiana (O.C.I.).

He has an extensive discography of almost 50 recordings on Philips, DG, EMI, Sony Classical, Foné, Dynamic, and Warner-Fonit. Part of today’s montage includes selections from the Italian RCA release "Salvatore Accardo’s magic bow" featuring violin and piano showpieces.

From the MSO concert, we packaged his performance of the Stravinsky violin concerto and Ravel’s Tzigane,

I think you will (still) love this music too.

A LA CARTE #7- The Oscar Peterson Trio – Night Train (Expanded Edition)

 

We are repurposing the music from a Vinyl's Revenge post of January 26, 2016 as a new montage in our ongoing A la Carte series on For Your Listening Pleasure. The following notes are an update.

This classic jazz piano album Night Train was recorded by The Oscar Peterson Trio almost 60 years ago in Los Angeles on December 15 and 16, 1962. It’s a record that belongs in every collection, whether you’re presently a jazz fan or whether you’ve taken a vow against improvised music, thinking it’s incomprehensible and annoying.

The original album contained just 11 songs, and the re-released digital version adds several more. Verve recordings were always known for their quality of music and the outstanding artwork on their covers. Night Train is one of the most famous jazz albums of all time, and deservedly so.

Today’s re-post expands the original offering with a number of bonus tracks, including some alternate takes of the original material, and a few more hitherto unreleased contemporaneous studio recordings.

Tracks:

Happy-Go-Lucky Local (Aka "Night Train")

Written-By – Duke Ellington

C-Jam Blues

Written-By – Barney Bigard, Duke Ellington

Georgia On My Mind

Written-By – Hoagy Carmichael, Stuart Gorrell

Bags' Groove

Written-By – Milt Jackson

Moten Swing

Written-By – Bennie Moten

Easy Does It

Written-By – Sy Oliver, Trummy Young

Honey Dripper

Written-By – Joe Liggins

Things Ain't What They Used To Be

Written-By – Mercer Ellington, Ted Persons

I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)

Written-By – Duke Ellington, Paul Francis Webster

Band Call

Written-By – Duke Ellington

Hymn To Freedom

Written-By – Oscar Peterson

[VR-13]

Happy-Go-Lucky Local (Aka "Night Train") [Alternative Take]

Written-By – Duke Ellington

Volare

Written-By – Domenico Modugno, Francesci Migliacci*, Mitchell Parish

My Heart Belongs To Daddy

Written-By – Cole Porter

Moten Swing (Rehearsal Take)

Written-By – Bennie Moten

Now's The Time

Written-By – Charlie Parker

This Could Be The Start Of Something

Written-By – Steve Allen

[NEW]

Discogs - https://www.discogs.com/The-Oscar-Peterson-Trio-Night-Train/release/2165814 

YouTube Playlist - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5ae6iB5xkhF61vFUWGGD4RGnLgdf1BwR

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/alc-07

Sibelius, Sir Colin Davis, London Symphony Orchestra – Symphonies Nos 5 & 6

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog.

For our second post featuring the symphonies of Jean Sibelius, I am featuring Cover2Cover a disc I acquired (of all places) at the Virgin store at Heathrow Airport about 15 years ago.

Since the beginning of his recording career, Colin Davis has been a champion of the music of Jean Sibelius, and his highly regarded cycle of the seven symphonies recorded between 1975 and 1979 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra has been a mainstay of many LP and CD collections over the years. This disc, however, is much more recent, part of anther Sibelius cycle from the early 2000’s with the London Symphony on the orchestra’s LSO Live home label.

In my opinion, the performances compare well to the oft-reissued BSO set. Crisp and clear, and helmed by a more mature (and restrained) Davis, these two symphonies get a very valid reading.

Hope you agree!

Jean SIBELIUS (1865-1957)
Symphony No 5 In E Flat Major, Op 82
Symphony No 6 In D Minor, Op 104

London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis, condicting
Recorded live 10-11 December 2003 (No 5) and 28-29 September 2002 (No 6) at the Barbican, London

LSO Live – LSO0037
Format: CD
Released: Jun 2004

Discogs - https://www.discogs.com/release/1329...honies-Nos-5-6

YouTube - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OL...MshGIfGq7mxmB0

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/01-sibelius-symphony-5-in-e-flat