The Piano Society

No. 384 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/pcast384

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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 January 24, 2012. The below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

Today’s Friday Blog and Podcast repurposes a topic we explored during January 2012 under what we coined “Pianothon month” The three works featured were uploaded from The Piano Society’s main and free website. As it rightly states, “Piano Society is proud to present its large collection of more than 5,600 high-quality classical keyboard recordings, produced by our artists consisting of both professionals and skilled amateurs.”

The Society page host most of Schubert’s piano sonatas, and Tom Pascale recorded two of them, including the one I retained to open the podcast. Tom grew up in Brooklyn, New York and studied mathematics at Fordham and Yale, and later pursued a career in banking while raising a family in the New York suburbs. After years of obligatory piano lessons, Tom quit in his teenage years and never entertained the idea of making music a profession. But listening to classical music, attending concerts, and finding time to play the piano has remained an important part of his life. Tom's experience in music is personal he does not play publicly but does enjoy sharing his amateur music-making through recordings.

The middle work, Dvorak’s Eight Waltzes, is also provided by a Mathematician/amateur keyboardist. Chris Breemer is a Dutch IT tech support specialist by day, and a born-again pianist (thanks to the discovery of the Piano Society in the mid-2000’s). Additionally, he enjoys playing with other people: accompanying church services, playing piano regularly together with other people, having a violinist partner, a cellist partner, and a piano partner.

The final work is a concerto performance by Neal O’Doan and the Seattle Philharmonic. In 1999 he retired from his professorhip at the University of Washington Music School in Seattle, Washington having taught piano there for twenty-three years. O’Doan has a few concerto recordings on the Society’s website, all with semi-professional or student orchestras from the Pacific Northwest Moszkowski’s Piano Concerto No. 2 is an 1898 composition dedicated to pianist Josef Hofmann.

I think you will love this music too.

Lorin Maazel “A la Carte”

No. 383 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/pcast383

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

 In the past few years, I have programmed Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique to mark “4-20” *which happens to have been last Wednesday) and Mahler’s Song of the Earth for Earth Day (today). As it turns out, we posted the Mahler song cycle a few days ago, and today (as part of this A la Carte post), it’s time for the Berlioz.

As I stated in the original post, the work itself doesn't need introduction, as its back-story, and programme, have been well documented. What we have here is a straight-forward, honest and for Maazel not too pretentious. Considering that the Cleveland Orchestra isn't a French repertoire orchestra per se, it is quite enjoyable!

To fill the montage, I added another Maazel CBS recording from his tenure in Cleveland. Theearly digital album featured three Richard Strauss tone poems, and I thought matching the Berlioz work to Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration was a fitting choice. Hope you agree!

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

Changes to Tuesday Blog on TalkClassical

 

TalkClassical changed its underlying forum infrastructure around Easter, and as such the impact to our past Tuesday Blog posts is as follows:

• TC does NOT support a blog feature any longer. However, it did retain all past blogs and maintains them under a distinct thread heading: https://www.talkclassical.com/forums/blog.91/
• None of the embedded hyperlinks on this blogger site relating to "old" Tuesday Blogs aren't resolvable. However, the forum's advanced search is quite good, and you should be able to search and find past posts.

I have updated most of the 2022 post hyperlinks on our blogger site to the new URL's.

In the future, my Tuesday posts will be found at the above "Imported Content/Blogs" thread. Because I lost the ability to pre-schedule posts on TC, they will appear sometime before the usual Tuesday or sometime later.

Apologies in advance

Pierre

Mahler, Maazel, Orchestra Del Teatro La Fenice – Das Lied Von Der Erde

 

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

NOTE: I see TalkClassical's format has changed, and the old "Blog" feature seems to have disappeared. As I take stock of how this format change impacts my use of this platform, let me attempt a thread-style post and see how that works.

For the next four days on our Podcasting channel we will be sharing recordings by the late Lorin Maazel. For this month’s lone share, my Vinyl’s Revenge selection is a live recording by Maazel of a 20th Century German work, Mahler’s Song of the Earth, but with an unlikely orchestra, that of the Teatro La Fenice in Vennice, Italy.

Also, consider this an early Earth Day celebration.

The history of La Fenice Orchestra is associated with that of the theatre, which held such an important place in opera in the nineteenth century, with premières including Semiramide, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Rigoletto, and La traviata. The second half of the century brought an internationalisation of repertory, broadened also by symphony concerts and collaboration with leading soloists (among them Enrico Mainardi, Mstislav Rostropovich, Edwin Fischer, Aldo Ferraresi, Arthur Rubinstein).

In 1938 La Fenice became an autonomous entity and the orchestra was developed further with active participation in the Festival of Contemporary Music of the Biennale. In the 1940s and 1950s under the guidance of Toscanini, Scherchen, Bernstein, and Celibidache (with a complete cycle of Beethoven symphonies), Konwitschny (with Wagner’s Ring cycle), and Stravinsky, the orchestra presented a series of historic concerts. In concerts the orchestra has undertaken cycles, including those dedicated to Berg and to Mahler, under the direction of conductors such as Sinopoli, Kakhidze, Masur, Barshai, Tate, Ahronovitch, Kitajenko, Inbal, and Temirkanov.

I am reminded of a documentary I saw decades ago, featuring Michael Tilson Thomas, discussing how he found it difficult to conduct Mahler with Italian orchestras, because their natural rhythm is lyrical (Uno, Due, Tre) when compared to German rhythm that is more strident (Eins, Zwei, Drei).

But one thing Italian theatre orchestras do well is opera and song, and even though Mahler’s work is a hybrid between a symphony and a song cycle, it is very rooted in the latter, and under Maazel’s usual stern guidance (yes, even at this early stage in his career), the results are quite surprising.

Happy Listening

Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)
Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) (1908-09)

Contralto Vocals – Kristhine Meyer
Tenor Vocals – Richard Lewis
Orchestra Del Teatro La Fenice
Conductor – Lorin Maazel
Recorded live Venezia 11.9.1960

Label: Longanesi Periodici – GCL 35
Format: Vinyl, LP

DISCOGS - Mahler - Maazel, Orchestra Del Teatro La Fenice Di Venezia - Das Lied Von Der Erde

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/vr-72-mahler-das-lied-von-der-erde

The pilgrimages of Francis Poulenc

No. 382 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/pcast382

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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 forum posts; today’s montage is part of that exercise. The Once or Twice a Fortnight post in question was issued on February 29th, 2012. The below commentary is taken almost verbatim from the original post.

Today’s post focuses on the sacred and secular works of spiritual inspiration by French composer Francis Poulenc. Poulenc’s life has its many paradoxes – Poulenc is an early 20th century “born again Catholic” who happened to live an openly gay lifestyle in a rather liberal Parisian artistic entourage. This paradox leads, in my personal opinion, to some inner turmoil which also manifests itself in Poulenc’s output; something critic Claude Rostand coined in the expression «moine ou voyou» (monk or punk).

There are two specific notewirthy losses in Poulenc’s life that were followed by pilgrimages to the well-known French shrine of the Black Virgin at Rocamadour: the passing of composer and critic Pierre-Octave Ferroud in 1935, and that of fellow gay artist Christian Bérard in 1949. Biographers suggest that the 1935 Rocamadour pilgrimage also was the beginning of Poulenc’s re-embracing of his Catholic faith (which he’d more or less put aside after his father’s death in 1917).

Though one selection from the original OTF post is part of today’s playlist, the majority of the pieces on the montage are settings of latin sacred text sung a capella. The one piece that harkens back to the original share, and the only set with musical accompaniment, is his Stabat Mater, composed in 1950 and dedicated to Bérard.

I think you will love this music too

A LA CARTE #11- Ton Koopman Plays J. S. Bach (EXTENDED)

We are repurposing the music from a Vinyl's Revenge post of March 10, 2015 as a new montage in our ongoing A la Carte series on For Your Listening Pleasure. Mobile followers can listen to the montage on our Pod-O-Matic Channel, and desktop users can simply use the embedded player found on this page. The following notes are an update.

As we have done a few times before under this series, I am extending an old Vinyl’s Revenge post that was well-short of 60 minutes by adding like-material. Here, I added a few Koopman Bach recordings I found off YouTube.

Enjoy!

Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)

All works feature Ton Koopman, organ

Prelude and Fugue in C  Minor, BWV 546

[J. Gabler organ, Basilika St. Martin, Weingarten]

[NEW]

Toccata and Fugue in D-, BWV565

Toccata and Fugue in D-, BWV538 ('Dorian')

Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C, BWV564

Toccata and Fugue in F, BWV540

[Rudolf Garrels organ, Maassluis, Grote Kerk]

[VR-07]

Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 683

Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, BWV 691

[Silbermann Organ, Leipzig]

[NEW]

Concerto for solo organ No. 3 in C major (after Vivaldi Op. 7ii/5, RV 208), BWV 594

[Arp Schnitger's baroque organ in Groningen, the Netherlands.]

[NEW]

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/alc-11-ton-koopman-plays-j.-s.-bac

A LA CARTE #10- Richard Strauss à la carte

We are repurposing the music from a Vinyl's Revenge post of February 12, 2019 as a new montage in our ongoing A la Carte series on For Your Listening Pleasure. Mobile followers can listen to the montage on our Pod-O-Matic Channel, and desktop users can simply use the embedded player found on this page. The following notes are an update.

Today’s podcast builds on the Karajan recording of the Alpine Symphony with another Strauss/Karajan recording, this one of the Metamorphosen from 1969.

By 1944, Strauss was in poor health and needed to visit the Swiss spa at Baden near Zürich. But he was unable to get the Nazi government's permission to travel abroad. Karl Böhm, Paul Sacher and Willi Schuh came up with a plan to get the travel permit: a commission from Sacher and invitation to the premiere in Zurich. The commission was made in a letter by Böhm on August 28, 1944, for a "suite for strings". Strauss replied that he had been working for some time on an adagio for 11 strings; In fact, his early work on Metamorphosen was for a septet (2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and a bass). The starting date for the score is given as 13 March 1945, which suggests that the destruction of the Vienna opera house the previous day gave Strauss the impetus to finish the work and draw together his previous sketches in just one month (finished on 12 April 1945).

Enjoy!

Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Metamorphosen, for 23 solo strings, Op.142, TrV290

[NEW]

Eine Alpensinfonie, Op.64, TrV233

[VR-47]

Berliner Philharmoniker

Herbert von Karajan, conducting

 

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/alc-10-richard-strauss-a-la-carte