Programming - November 2015

=====================================================================

Docstoc is Shutting Down

We were recently advised that the document repository website Docstoc will cease to operate in December, which means that nearly 200 playlists in PDF format that we have been harboring there will soon disappear.

As podcasts get recycled and reused, I will move old playlists to the Internet Archive (as I have been using the IA as the playlist repository for several months now), but do not plan a mass migration (the task is just too much for me to handle at this time).

If listeners need a specific playlist, simply drop me a line and I will post it on the IA for sharing. My apologies for this unplanned inconvenience.

This month’s posts

We traditionally use November to undersco  re departed artists and composers from this year and the past.

• November 3 – Our Podcast Vault Selection of the Month for November is my August 2011 homage to Leonard Bernstein, who left us 25 years ago. As usual, the podcast will be featured on our Pod-O-Matic channel until the end of November. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/11/in-memoriam-leonard-bernstein-1918-1990.html
• November 10 – Once Upon the Internet presents a few works from Alexander Scriabin, once available on MP3.COM, honoring the 100th anniversary of his passing. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/11/in-memoriam-alexander-scriabin-1872-1915.html
• November 15 – Once or Twice a Fortnight features Canadian tenir Jon Vickers (who passed away this year) in a vintage studio recording of Verdi's Otello.  http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/11/jon-vickers-sings-otello.html
• November 27 – This month’s new podcast looks at The Blues, with works by Robert Johnson, Leonard Berbstein and the late great B.B. King, who passed away earlier this year. http://itywltmt.blogsp ot.com/2015/11/the-blues.html

Subscribe to our ITYWLTMT Fan Page on Facebook

All of our Tuesday, Friday and ad-hoc posts, as well as OTF and YouTube Channel updates get regularly mentioned (with links) on our Fan Page. If you are a user of Facebook, simply subscribe to get notified so you never miss anything we do!

Scary Classics

No. 210 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast210

=====================================================================

Note - This is also offered as a "tandem" post on Once or Twice a Fortnight (http://operalively.com/forums/showthread.php/2602-OTF-Scary-Classics)

Tomorrow is Hallowe'en, and I thought we should take this opportunity to consider some musical selections that are "appropriate" for the circumstances.

The first selection in the montage, Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is forever associated with either reclusive organ-playing ogres, or classic shots of Gothic castles with assorted thunderstorms. Very cliche, but also very appropriate.

Every small town has a ghost story and this one is from the small municipality of Carleton Place (Ontario), up the Ottawa River valley from my home in Ottawa..

According to local folklore ,the ghost of Ida Moore is still present in the family home - Ida passed away in 1900 from consumption just as she was about to go off to music school to become a teacher. LOcal composer Mark Bailey provides this cute musical sketch inspired by the local legend - over the many years, since the untimely death of Ida, people in the house have reported strange noises, movement of objects, radios being turned off and on and windows being opened and closed.  It is said by all who have encountered Ida that she is a very friendly spirit but one that likes to play tricks on the inhabitants of the house.

The first if two piano trios from Beethoven's opus 70 is known as the Ghost, is one of his best known works in the genre (rivaled only by the Archduke Trio). The D major trio features themes found in the second movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. The All-Music Guide states that "because of its strangely scored and undeniably eerie-sounding slow movement, it was dubbed the 'Ghost' Trio. The name has stuck with the work ever since. The ghostly music may have had its roots in sketches for a Macbeth opera that Beethoven was contemplating at the time."

And, indeed, three "ghosts" from our recent past collaborate in this rarely-heard radio performance: violinist Alexander Schneider, cellist Zara Nelsova and pianist Glenn Gould.

Two more pieces on th emontage evoke stormy weather, also a classic part of any good scary story - works by American composers Kerry Turner and Wendy Carlos.

We don't think of the movie Fantasia as being a "scary movie" but it does have its scary moments... In addition to the Bach Toccata (heard then under the orchestration of Leopold Stokowski) we also had Paul Dukas' tone poem The Sorcerer's Apprentice and the final tableau, a combination of Schubert's Ave Maria and Mussorgsky's Night at Bald Mountain, juxtaposing Heaven and the Underworld...I  retained the Mussorgsky tone poem, again as orchestrated by the great Stokowski.

To close things off, works by Grieg and Gounod.

I think you will love this music too!

Art Song at the Gardner

This is my post from this week's Once or Twice a Fortnight.

This month on OTF, I have not planned to present any opera. My next opera post will be in November, and I promise that it will be a doozy.

Instead, for this installment anyway, I wanted to concentrate in what I think is the simplest, purest form of musical expression – one that involves a singer, and an accompanist, nothing more, nothing less. Just music that’s as naked as it comes.

Art song puts together all the basic ingredients of a great musical experience – it requires great music and musicians of course, but also great texts, great lyrics. The experience is incomplete if the words don’t match the sincerity and beauty of the music.

I hope we’re on the same page here…

All the performances I bring to your attention today are from the extensive chamber music library of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. According to the Museum’s website, Isabella Stewart Gardner filled the Museum with artists of all kinds during her lifetime, including many notable musicians and composers who drew inspiration from the museum’s unique atmosphere. Still today, the Gardner Museum honors this musical legacy by welcoming world-renowned musicians and exciting emerging artists to perform classical masterpieces, new music, and jazz on Sunday afternoons and select Thursday evenings. The Museum’s rich musical program is also available to listeners across the globe through concert videos, audio recordings, and a free classical music podcast.

In many of my posts on my blog and other platforms, I have relied on the ISGM Music library to illustrate some of my musical musings, as I am doing today. I wanted to share with you four particular performances from the library, each providing something unique.

We begin with Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs. The cycle of seven songs is based on Czech poetry by Adolf Heyduk about the lives of Slovakian gypsies. But Dvořák chose to premiere and publish the songs in a German translation of the original text. The cycle was fairly successful; in particular, the song at the heart of the cycle—the fourth of seven—has become one of his best-known, usually translated in English as “Songs My Mother Taught Me.” Throughout, the songs are both lyrical and spirited, combining the flavor of gypsy music with the sophistication of Western art song.

From Czech and German to Spanish, we next consider seven popular songs by Manuel de Falla, a delightful and varied collection of Spanish folksongs that is quite possibly the single most popular piece of classical Spanish vocal repertoire out there. The songs vary, from lovelorn laments to intimate lullabies to spirited dances, but all share an incredibly sensitive and evocative approach to the piano accompaniment—creating a sense of place and mood, while putting the traditional tunes front and center.

Some composers distinguish themselves in a single genre: Hugo Wolf, for example, whose brilliant lieder are like mini-monodramas, containing a whole world of feeling in less than two minutes of music. Wolf's first published songs were his Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme (Six Songs for Female Voice), collected and printed in 1888. Like those of other cycles (like his Goethe-Lieder, for instance), these songs were not composed as a set, but were assembled from the numerous lieder Wolf had written up to that point. Thereafter, the composer would begin to conceive of large groups of interrelated songs, either by the same poet or drawn from the same source.

To complete our sampling of art songs, we will feature a tenor in Liederkreis, a set of songs based on poetry by Heine. The poems tell the tale of a love gone wrong. In nine songs, the singer recounts stories of lost love and painful separation.

Enjoy!

Antonín DVOŘÁK (1841 –1904)

Cigánské melodie (Gypsy Songs) for voice and piano, B. 104 (op. 55)

7 songs after poems by Adolf Heyduk

Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano

Christopher Cano, piano

http://traffic.libsyn.com/gardnermuseum/dvorak_op55_cano.mp3

Manuel de FALLA (1876 - 1946)

Siete Canciones Populares Españolas (Seven Spanish Popular Songs) for voice and piano, G. 40

Jennifer Johnson Cano, mexxo-soprano

Christopher Cano, piano

http://traffic.libsyn.com/gardnermuseum/defalla_siete_canciones_cano.mp3

Hugo WOLF (1860 – 1903)

Sechs Lieder für eine Frauenstimme (Six Songs for Female Voice), for voice and piano (1888)

6 songs, texts by Anonymous (attributed to Reinhold), Friedrich Hebbel, Friedrich Rückert, Robert Reinick and Eduard Mörike

Jeanine De Bique, soprano

Warren Jones, piano

http://traffic.libsyn.com/gardnermuseum/wolf_sixsongs_debique.mp3

Robert SCHUMANN (1810-1856)

Liederkreis (song circle), for voice and piano, op. 24

9 songs, Texts by Heinrich Heine

Mark Padmore, tenor

Jonathan Biss, piano

http://traffic.libsyn.com/gardnermuseum/schumann_liederkreis_op24_padmore_biss.mp3

Internet Archive URL - https://archive.org/details/02SchumannLiederkreisOp.24Mark

.

Vivaldi - New Philharmonia Orchestra - Leopold Stokowski ‎– Le Quattro Stagioni

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

This month. Vinyl’s Revenge returns with a somewhat nostalgic look (or should I say listen) at a “guilty pleasure” recording that has been part of my vinyl collection for years.

An Amazon reviewer says it best:

Stokowski's performance of The Four Seasons made me enjoy this work as no other performance has […] If you already love this music, please listen to it as conducted by this great artist.

Indeed, as teased in my recent post on Leopold Stokowski, we are of course talking about Stokowski’s “Phase 4 Stereo” recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the “New” Philharmonia Orchestra featuring its then-concertmaster (leader) Hugh Bean as soloist.

Why is it a guilty pleasure? I guess it's the unashamedly "big band" sound... For the record, this recording was displaced in my music collection by the 1982 original instrument version by Simon Standage and the English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock. 

Perhaps the finest "big band" Seasons comes from this oft-reissued Phase 4 recording which brims with the conductor's characteristic and highly personal tonal color, rescoring and inflection, but it's deeply heartfelt and thoroughly delightful. Indeed, the dynamic continuo and vivid recording even render it highly stylish. 

At 45 1/2 minutes it's seductively slow, but as our soloist Hugh Bean once said of Stokowski's generation,” they made time vanish”.

And Bean would know a thing or two about that generation of conductors, having served as co-leader, and later leader of the “old” Philharmonia under the great Otto Klemperer. Hugh Bean was, by all accounts, one of the finest British violoinists of his day, a tenured teacher at the Royal Conservatory of Music and an accomplished chamber and orchestral performer. Bean is also well-known for performances of great British violin works: the Elgar Violin Concerto and Vaughan-Williams’ The Lark Ascending, which he both recorded at around the same time as these Vivaldi concerti.

Happy Listening!

Antonio VIVALDI (1678-1741)
The Four Seasons from "Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione" op. 8 (nos 1-4)
Hugh Bean violin
Charles Spinks, Harpsichord
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Leopold Stokowski, conducting
Recorded at Kingsway Hall, London, 11 June 1966 
AAA, London VIVA Series, VIV 3

The Great Leopold Stokowski

This is my post from this week's Tuesday Blog. This "encore" of no. 122 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/Pcast122

Both of my Tuesday Blog posts this month are dedicated to the late great conductor and arranger, Leopold Stokowski. In fact, this week’s selection from the Podcast Vault features three relevant aspects of Leopold – his adaptations of great works for Symphony Orchestra, his incisive conducting and his love for the Baroque.

In recent years, advocates of early instruments and “Historically Informed” performances may have gained the upper hand over those who want to hear baroque music played on today's fuller-sounding instruments. In spite of our ears being “tuned” to these tendencies, the legendary conductor eloquently makes a case for antique music on modern instruments. Old-fashioned gut strings? Forget it. Smaller ensembles? Quite the opposite.

This week’s podcast, for example, provides one of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” under Stokowski’s baton – the entire set will be featured in an upcoming post. Truly, one cannot mistake this for HIP, yet the colour of Vivaldi’s music and the inventiveness of his use of the harpsichord, at times as the continuo, and at times as a soloist itself, is something only a master interpreter would exploit.

Of course, controversy lingers over whether Stokowski actually penned some of his transcriptions. Some have attributed the ``Bach-Stokowski'' works to Lucien Cailliet, clarinetist and resident orchestrator in Philadelphia from 1920 to 1938. The exact truth may never be known; but there is no doubt that the transcriptions convey Stokowskian ideals. As a conductor, the Philadelphia Orchestra's third music director knew the coloristic potential of an orchestra; as an organist, he played Bach, and had a concept of sound consistent with the instrument's big rumble.

Stokowski's orchestrations boldly declare “drama is King”, and the bigger the emotion the better. Less evident in the Purcell pastiche I programmed, the drama, and the “Philadelphia Sound” in all its early stereophonic glory is in the front lines in Stokowski’s orchestration of Wagner’s Love Music from Tristan und Isolde.

The final piece, an electric reading of Nielsen’s “Four Temperaments” symphony (performed with the Danish Radio Symphony, no less) explodes with colour and energy.

Happy Listening!

ITYWLTMT Montage #122 - Leopold Stokowski
(Originally published on Friday, 13 September 2013)

Antonio VIVALDI (1678-1741)
Concerto for violin, strings and continuo in F Major, RV 293 
L'autunno (Autumn)
Hugh Bean, violin
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Leopold Stokowski, conducting

Leopold STOKOWSKI (1882-1977)
Purcell Suite, for orchestra (transcriptions after Purcell) (1949)
BBC Philharmonic
Matthias Baemert, conducting

Tristan und Isolde: Liebesnacht (Symphonic Synthesis after Wagner) (1932, rev. 1935)
Philadelphia Orchestra
Leopold Stokowski, conducting

Carl NIELSEN (1865-1931)
Symphony no. 2, FS 29 (op. 16) 
De fire Temperamenter (The Four Temperaments) 

DR SymfoniOrkestret
Leopold Stokowski, conducting

·         Original Bilingual ommentary: http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2013/09...stokowski.html

·         Detailed Playlist: https://archive.org/stream/pcast122-Playlist

·         Internet Archive Link: https://archive.org/details/Pcast122

Programming - October 2015

=====================================================================

Docstoc is Shutting Down

We were recently advised that the document repository website Docstoc will cease to operate in December, which means that nearly 200 playlists in PDF format that we have been harboring there will soon disappear.

As podcasts get recycled and reused, I will move old playlists to the Internet Archive (as I have been using the IA as the playlist repository for several months now), but do not plan a mass migration (the task is just too much for me to handle at this time).

If listeners need a specific playlist, simply drop me a line and I will post it on the IA for sharing. My apologies for this unplanned inconvenience.

This month’s posts

Our posts this month don’t follow an arc per se, though three of the posts have a common (albeit thin) thread that unites them.

• October 6 – Our Podcast Vault Selection of the Month for October is my September 2013 post dedicated to the late great conductor and arranger Leopold Stokowski. As usual, the podcast will be featured on our Pod-O-Matic channel until the end of October. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-great-leopold-stokowski.html
• October 13 – Vinyl’s Revenge returns for October with a complete performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons from a 1960’s recording by soloist Hugh Bean and Leopold Stokowski conducting the New Philharmonia. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/10/vivaldi-new-philharmonia-orchestra.html
• October 18 – Once or Twice a Fortnight presents art song performances from the Gardner Museum’s Music Library. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/10/art-song-at-gardner.html
• October 30 – This month’s new podcast celebrates Hallowe’en with some Scary Classics. Music by J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Gounod, Grieg and many more. http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2015/10/scary-classics.html

Subscribe to our ITYWLTMT Fan Page on Facebook

All of our Tuesday, Friday and ad-hoc posts, as well as OTF and YouTube Channel updates get regularly mentioned (with links) on our Fan Page. If you are a user of Facebook, simply subscribe to get notified so you never miss anything we do!