Tchaikovsky: The Sleeping Beauty

No. 400 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/pcast400

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Our 400^th and final montage for this year (and the concluding montage for our ongoing Friday series) is a crossover post from our survey of the complete Tchaikovsky ballets, which we began this part Tuesday.

The Sleeping Beauty was the second of Tchaikovsky's three ballet scores, composed and orchestrated from October 1888 to August 1889, with minor revisions during stage rehearsals in the last three months of 1889. The score consists of an Introduction and 30 individual numbers, laid out as a shoirt prologue, and three acts.

"I am planning to write a libretto on La belle au bois dormant after Perrault's fairy tale. I would like a mise en scène in the style of Louis XIV, which would be a musical fantasia written in the spirit of Lully, Bach, Rameau, etc. If this idea appeals to you, then why not undertake to write the music? In the last act there would have to be quadrilles for all Perrault's fairy-tale characters—these should include Puss-in-Boots, Hop o' My Thumb, Cinderella, Bluebeard, etc." - Ivan Vsevolozhsky, in a letter of 13/25 May 1888

In 1888, Ivan Vsevolozhsky (Director of Imperial Theatres for Saint Petersburg) commissioned a new ballet from Tchaikovsky — The Sleeping Beauty — for which he provided a detailed scenario, as well as suggestions as to how the epoch of Louis XIV was to be reproduced in the music and on the stage. This time the composer was enthusiastic about the subject and readily set to work on the assignment.

Vsevolozhsky arranged the initial meeting between Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa (choreographer and principal dancer at the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg), and throughout their fruitful collaboration on this first joint project he acted as an intermediary between them. A fine draughtsman, Vsevolozhsky also produced sketches of the costumes for the ballet's fairy-tale figures and supervised the work of the set designers, always striving for historical authenticity. The successful premiere of The Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre on 3/15 January 1890 vindicated his creative vision, and Yelena Fedosova has rightly emphasized that Vsevolozhsky anticipated by two decades the idea commonly attributed to Sergey Diaghilev (1872–1929) of "uniting composer, ballet master, and visual artist in the creation of a work".

Tchaikovsky acknowledged Vsevolozhsky's vital contribution and support by dedicating The Sleeping Beauty to him. Although the authorship of the libretto is normally attributed to Vsevolozhsky, it is possible that Marius Petipa also had some involvement, since in the archive of the latter there is a manuscript dated 3/15 July 1888, with a list of characters in the ballet, and descriptions of the numbers in every scene .

The performance is from the same Royal Philharmonic Orchestra anthology of the complete Tchaikovsky ballets (under Barry Wordsworth) we are surveying under the Cover2Cover series.

I think you will love this music too.

Ernest Ansermet A la Carte

No. 399 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/pcast399

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Original Post - TalkClassical, Blogger

Our final two Friday podcasts for 2022 (and conclusion to our long-running series) aren’t as much about new material as they are feeding ongoing curation initiatives we have undertaken for the past few years.

This penultimate montage is part of our A La Carte series that repackages old montages, in this case a 2019 odd-looking Vinyl’s Revenge post that we more aptly titles “Tape Deck’s Revenge” as it featured two old London VIVA cassette releases by Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet. The VIVA series was a b udget re-issue platform at a time where digital releases we beginning to invade the shelves, often displacing these excellent recordings, which did merit reissue. The format of these reissues was both cassette and vinyl, not CD.

The first cassette on the original montage was packaging J.S Bach’s suites nos. 2 and 3 with a pair of filler tracks from his cantatas. Ansermet, at the time of the original release, also issued a pair of albums of Bach Cantatas, which London/Decca later packaged with this disk into a 2 CD Bach anthology by Ansermet.

The montage inserts Cantata 130 between the original A and B sides of the VIVA cassette.

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

Jean Martinon (1910-1976)

No. 398 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/pcast398

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This week's Blog and Podcast picks up on a thread we started as part of Project 366 – montages featuring conductors who have more than one string up their bow. In this case, conductor and composer Jean Martinon.

Martinon entered the conservatory of Lyon, his hometown, at the age of thirteen. Three years later, he will leave to enter the National Conservatory in Paris. There he worked on the violin, composition (with Albert Roussel and Vincent d'Indy), and conducting (with Roger Désormière and Charles Munch). Quite the apprenticeship!

Working mainly as a violinist after his studies, he had the misfortune of being a prisoner of war for two years, interned in a stalag, where he composed several works for soloists, small ensembles and for choir.

It was after the war that Martinon took to the podium: first conductor of the Dublin Radio Symphony Orchestra (1947-1950), Colonne, Pasdeloup, and the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire (later the Orchestre de Paris) as substitute for Charles Munch.

From 1946 to 1948 he was associate conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra; it is with this orchestra that we find him as the curtain raiser of our montage, with three French operatic overtures from the 19th century.

From 1951 to 1958, he was president and conductor of the Concerts Lamoureux in Paris, then artistic director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (1957-1959). In 1959, he was appointed to the post of general director of music in Düsseldorf (a prestigious post occupied in the 19th century by Schumann and Mendelssohn). His career then took him to the United States where, in 1963, he became musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Back in Paris, he became director of the National Orchestra of the ORTF, a position he held for six years. We find him with them on the montage for Bizet's bohemian dances.

Despite a busy schedule, he finds time to compose throughout his career. As an example, I have chosen one of his string quartets dating from 1966.

I think you will love this music too

The Impostor

No. 397 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/pcast397

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This week’s podcast has a very odd theme, and one we’ve encountered before in rare instances – performances that involve, well, imposters.

There is a rather infamous story involving recordings attributed to the late great British pianist Joyce Hatto when, in her last years, more than 100 recordings falsely attributed to her appeared. The recordings were released, along with piano recordings falsely attributed to Sergio Fiorentino, by the Concert Artist Recordings label run by Hatto's husband William Barrington-Coupe, who had a long history in the record industry.

The result of such subterfuge, in a way, is mistrust by the record-buying public!

In a way, this situation was largely exacerbated by the rise of smaller record labels in the early days of digital media. Who hasn’t dug through the check-out CD bins in pharmacies and bargain retailers? One popular classical label was Point Classics, a multinational classical music label, specializing in budget releases. After the label's parent company went bankrupt in 1993, the catalog was acquired by Telos Holdings Inc which sold it to One Media iP Ltd in 2014. The record label and its catalog is still active, and distributed/sold under many different budget labels.

There is a subset of the Point Classics catalog which credits performers who have never been seen or heard in a live performance. The most prolific producer of such performances was Alfred Scholz.

According to discogs, Alfred Scholz was a prolific producer of budget recordings, who fraudulently sold recordings credited with non-existing artists and orchestras. Sometimes the names of real people were given credit for performances which were not theirs. Working as a conductor, he performed under the guise of Alberto Lizzio as well as many other names.

"Alberto Lizzio" was a pseudonym used by Scholz and attached to older recordings which he obtained and then credited to non-existing artists like Hans Swarowsky (who was a real conductor and also Scholz's teacher, but was never on any of Scholz's recording) or himself. "Hans Zanotelli" (the name of a real conductor and also Scholz's fellow student) was another name fraudulently used on Alfred Scholz's records, as are Milan Horvat and Carl Melles.

It is not clear if Alfred Scholz was a real conductor who was also a fraudster, or the perpetrator of the fraud, who was using his name as well as many others, real or imaginary as "conductors" on his recordings.

The most common orchestra used by Scholz in his falsified productions was the Süddeutsche Philharmonie or "South German Philharmonic". If the attribution is correct, this was originally a short-lived pick-up ensemble assembled by Scholz from members of the Czech Philharmonic in Prague and the Bamberg Symphony around 1968. Other non-existing orchestras conducted by non-existing conductors include Philharmonia Slavonica, London Festival Orchestra and New Philharmonic Orchestra.

Many dozens of budget labels use the recordings originally obtained from Alfred Scholz, who had a catalog of about 2000 titles. Most of these were old analogue recordings made between 1968 and 1970 for Polyband and Primaton and by the Austrian Radio prior to 1977. The recordings by the Austrian Radio were sold in 1977 to PREMIS, a company owned or controlled by Scholz. His catalog also includes a limited number of legitimate digital recordings made in England (London), Slovenia (Ljubljana), Slovakia (Bratislava), and Hungary (Budapest).

Please refer to this article for insight on the Scholz catalog and how to recognize his releases.

Today’s podcast assembles a number of these performances, including Mozart’s Coronation piano concerto and other well-known classical favourites who may (or may not…) be performed by the referenced artists.

I think you will love this music too

Alfred Brendel & Mozart

No. 396 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/pcast396

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Our new montage this week features pianist Alfred Brendel in three works by Mozart – his piano sonata no 14, and concerti 11 and 21.As we near the end of our ongoing series of montages, I don’t believe we have shared any tracks featuring Brendel – certainly haven’t made him the central artist in any of them, unlike other pianists. Time to fix that!

Born in what is now the Czech Republic to a non-musical family, Brendel and his family moved afew times before settling in Graz, Austria, where he studied piano with Ludovica von Kaan at the Graz Conservatory and composition with Artur Michel. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year-old Brendel was sent back to then-Yugoslavia to dig trenches. After the war, he never continued formal training as a pianist and was largely self-taught after the age of 16. In many ways, I think Brendel’s musical training missors that of Sviatoslav Richter.

At age 17 (no less!), Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz which he called at the "The Fugue in Piano Literature" featuring fugues by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Franz Liszt, as well as his own. In 1949 he won fourth prize in the Ferruccio Busoni Piano Competition in Bolzano, Italy. He then toured throughout Europe and Latin America, slowly building his career and participating in a few masterclasses of Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann and Edwin Fischer.

Some sixty-five years later, Brendel is recognized as a premier interpreter of the german piano repertoire and has played relatively few 20th century works but has performed Arnold Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. He was the first performer to record the complete solo piano works of Beethoven. He has also recorded works by Liszt, Brahms (including Brahms' concertos), Robert Schumann and particularly Franz Schubert.

Brendel's playing is sometimes described as being "cerebral", and he has said that he believes the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own spin on the music: "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece". Brendel cites, in addition to his mentor and teacher Edwin Fischer, pianists Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Kempff, and the conductors Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler as particular influences on his musical development.

In November 2007 Brendel announced that he would retire from the concert platform after his concert of 18 December 2008 in Vienna. His final concert in New York was at Carnegie Hall on 20 February 2008, with works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

An important collection of Alfred Brendel is the complete Mozart piano concertos recorded with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields;the two concerti featured today are from that seminal cycle.

I think you will love this music too.

Mahler: Symphony no. 5

No. 395 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/pcast395

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In this second of a two-part set of montages featuring Hermann Scherchen conducting German repertoire, and in our continuing look at the symphonies 0of Gustav Mahler, today’s Blog and Podcast montage features Scherchen’s 1952 Westminster recording of Mahler’s Fifth symphony.

A survey of discogs suggests Scherchen recorded almost all the Mahler symphonies (in studio and as live recorded performances) – surprisingly, he did not record the Fourth, though he did record two song cycles (kindertottenlieder and Songs of the Wayfarer).

Here’s a portion of a Grammophone review of today’s featured recording:

We are often assured that great conductors of an earlier generation interpreted Mahler without the ‘lurid excesses’ of a Leonard Bernstein‚ always assuming they played him at all. But there is a starker‚ more disturbing quality in Scherchen’s conducting which has made his Mahler recordings much­prized collectors items. Having devoted his career to the promotion of contemporary music‚ Scherchen left relatively few studio recordings‚ but his scholarly reputation and restrained‚ objective conducting style are belied by the white­hot communicative power (and‚ it has to be said‚ the frequent technical lapses) of these pioneering mono LPs.

First the good news: this is […] a complete performance‚ and in many respects a very compelling one Now for the bad news: time and time again the intensity and drive of Scherchen’s conception is scuppered by the inability of his players to keep up.

The review goes on with many examples of the orchestra (which I always thought was an alias for members of the Vienna Philharmonic…) falling short of the conductor’s envisioned performance; yet the reviewer agrees with me with this sentence near the end: “Nevertheless‚ Scherchen and his Viennese forces offer us a piece of history that belongs in any serious Mahler collection.”

For more insiht on the work, I’d point you to a 2018 Tuesday Blog featuring Mahler’s Fifth.

I think you will love this music too!

Herrmann Scherchen (1891-1966)

No.394 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/pcast394

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This week’s montage is the first of a pair that feature conductor Hermann Scherchen, who made several interesting recordings for the Westminster label in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. His recorded repertoire was extremely wide, ranging from Vivaldi to Reinhold Glière.

Originally a violist, Scherchen played among the violas of the Bluthner Orchestra of Berlin while still in his teens. He conducted in Riga from 1914 to 1916 and in Königsberg from 1928 to 1933, after which he left Germany in protest of the new Nazi regime and worked in Switzerland.

Scherchen played a leading role in shaping the musical life of Winterthur (n the canton of Zürich) for many years, with numerous premiere performances, the emphasis being placed on contemporary music. From 1922 to 1950, he was the principal conductor of the city orchestra of Winterthur (today known as Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur).

Making his debut with Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, he was a champion of 20th-century composers such as Richard Strauss, Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Edgard Varèse, and actively promoted the work of younger contemporary composers including Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Nono and Leon Schidlowsky.

Scherchen recorded an unusually wide range of repertoire, from the baroque to the contemporary. His Mahler recordings, made before Mahler became a part of the standard repertoire, were especially influential; so too were his recordings of Bach and Handel, which helped pave the way for the period-performance practice movement. Included as well were significant recordings of music by Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Glière, Bartók, Schoenberg and many others.

We featured many of his Westminster recordings of the Haydn London symphonies as part of Once Upon the Internet and more recently in a few A la Carte podcasts. I programmed his recording of the symphony no. 102 here today.

He is probably best known for his orchestral arrangement (and recording) of Bach's The Art of Fugue, however, the main work today is another set of keyboard variations, his Musical Offering.

All of the ditties that constitute this opus are based on a single musical theme given to Bach by Frederick the Great (King Frederick II of Prussia), to whom they are dedicated. They were published in September 1747. The Ricercar a 6, a six-voice fugue which is regarded as the high point of the entire work, is also occasionally called the Prussian Fugue, a name used by Bach himself.

The "Ricercar a 6" has been arranged on its own on a number of occasions, the most prominent arranger being Anton Webern, who in 1935 made a version for small orchestra, noted for its Klangfarbenmelodie style (i.e. melody lines are passed on from one instrument to another after every few notes, every note receiving the "tone color" of the instrument it is played on).

According to Discogs, Schechen made two recordings of this work, both based on an arrangement for small orchestra in 1937 by Swiss composer Roger Vuataz – one for Westminster from 1951 and this one (which I uploaded from LiberMusica) from 1949 featuring the first chairs of the Berlin RSO.

I think you will love this music too.

Saint-Saëns Showcase (2 of 2)

No. 393 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/pcast393

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For the second of two Fridays, I have prepared an all- Saint-Saëns program, this time featuring two piano concertos, a symphony and a short orchestral piece.

The corpus that composes his five piano concerti provides a chronological tour through much of his career: the period of composition spans from 1858 to 1896. 

A highlight of No.3 is the second movement Nocturne, with its tender melody, while No.4 features hymn-like melodies and dazzling brass fanfares. These performances are taken from the Pascal Rogé cycle with Dutoit conducting. Dutoit also conducts the Marche Heroïque, used as an entr’acte between the two concerti.

The Second Symphony written some seven years after the First,  displays more imagination, ingenuity and elegance in, for example, the use of a fugue as a basis of the opening movement. The new Symphony was not performed until 1862, under the baton of Jules Pasdeloup to whom the work is dedicated. It is more sparingly scored than the First Symphony. After much assertive material, the brief second movement is hesitant and delicate in character and treads daintily. There is much to recall eighteenth century gentility. The following scherzo third movement with interesting springy cross-rhythms skips confidently and the work concludes with a sunny tarantella reminiscent of Mendelssohn.

I think you will love this music too

Saint-Saëns Showcase (1 of 2)

No. 392 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/pcast392

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For the next two Fridays, I have prepared a pair of all- Saint-Saëns programs. The scheme I adopted for both is to complete the cycle of piano concertos (building on concertos 2 and 5 shared earlier on our podcasting channel) by featuring one here (and two on the next program), a symphony and a short orchestral piece.

In addition to the First concerto (taken, as are the two next week from the Pascal Rogé cycle with Dutoit conducting), today’s post includes a pair of short pieces for wind instrument, one with orchestra accompaniment the other with harp accompaniment.

The opening piece, Phaeton, is a short tone poem inspitrd by the Greek myth about the son of the Oceanid Clymene and the sun-god Helios. Out of desire to have his parentage confirmed, he travels to the sun-god's palace in the east. There he is recognised by his father, and asks him for the privilege to drive his chariot for a single day. This joy ride does not end well…

Prodigiously gifted, Saint-Saëns entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1848, at the age of 13. There he discovered the symphonies of the great German and Austrian composers and soon began to try his own hand at the genre. The Symphony in A major stems from this period and although it was most likely never performed in his lifetime it demonstrates his exceptional talent to the full. 

I think you will love this music too

Haydn Symphonies No. 78-81

No. 391 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/pcast391

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Over the past several weeks, we undertook a survey of Haydn’s late symphonies, spanning from the six so-called Paris symphonies through to the 12 London symphonies.

To close out this review, I am offering the set of four symphonies (nos 78 to 81) that immediately precede the Paris set.

Few composers show such remarkable growth as Haydn; from his insignificant youthful pieces, entirely dominated by the style of his pre-Classical elders, to the towering achievement of his last works, his symphonies display an evolution in form and content that had tremendous effect on his followers.

Let me make a bold statement – should you ever do 104 original widgets of a certain type, chances are some may look eerily similar. Not identical – after all, they are all unique – but in many ways they would have some common threads. In Haydn’s case, it as to do with “the formula”. In a way, producing so many symphonies is helped quite a bit by a formulaic approach. But to call this a “cookie cutter” style is a stretch. By turns rigorously contrapuntal and lucidly witty, the vitality evident in the formula reflects Haydn’s overflowing adventurousness.

No two movements are alike; the “mosaic” of theme elements pervades even transition sections and codas; each instrument shares in the melodic development; minuets grow in fire or dignity while finales exploit varieties of rondo form. The formula reaches its zenith in the London symphonies, but even the four works featured today exemplify the variety behind Haydn’s methods.

I think you will love this music too!

Ballets par Erik Satie

No. 390 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/pcast390

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Our new montage this week explores the music of Erik Satie, and specifically some of his dance and ballet music.

According to Musicaneo, French composer Erik Satie is one the most enigmatic composers of the 19th century. Like many creative people, he had his own weird habits and features that may seem way too strange today.

How eccentric?. Erik Satie didn’t let a single person in his tiny room at No.6 at Rue Cortot for… 27 years. After composer’s death, piles of all kinds of trash were discovered there. Amid dozens of umbrellas and newspapers, two pianos were found, one above the other, with pedals interconnected. That weird sculpture served as storage for various parcels, papers and scores of music. Among them, the music for Jack in the Box thought lost since 1905.

In June 1926, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of his birth, Jack in the Box was produced by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with choreography by George Balanchine, settings by André Derain, and the music orchestrated by Satie's friend Darius Milhaud.

Parade is a ballet choreographed by Leonide Massine, with music by Erik Satie and a one-act scenario by Jean Cocteau. The ballet was composed in 1916–17 for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Satie welcomed the idea of composing ballet music (which he had never done before) but refused to allow any of his previous compositions to be used for the occasion, so Cocteau started writing a scenario (the theme being a publicity parade in which three groups of circus artists try to attract an audience to an indoor performance), to which Satie composed the music (with some additions to the orchestral score by Cocteau).

Mercure is a 1924 ballet with music by Satie. The original décor and costumes were designed by Pablo Picasso and the choreography was by Léonide Massine, who also danced the title role. Subtitled "Plastic Poses in Three Tableaux", it was an important link between Picasso's Neoclassical and Surrealist phases and has been described as a "painter's ballet."

Relâche is another 1924 ballet. Imagined by Francis Picabia, the title was thought to be a Dadaist practical joke, as relâche is the French word used on posters to indicate that a show is canceled, or the theater is closed.

To complete the podcast, I added some piano music by Satie composed for the play Le piège de Méduse. The musical score is a series of very short dances in popular modes (quadrille, waltz, mazurka, polka, etc.), written in Satie's most humorously straight-faced manner, and reminiscent of some of Satie's other works.

I think you will love this music too.

 

 

Brahms in Philadelphia

No. 389 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/pcast389

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This week, I programmed a Brahms week – with the two concertos for violin and violin and cello, the two serenades and over the next couple of days, symphonies 1 to 3 to complete the cycle started Wednesday with the Fourth. This Friday montage features symphonies 1 and 3 from the complete Brahms cycle Riccardo Muti recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra for Philips in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s.

Using power of suggestion and conscious engineering, Leopold Stokowski (1912-1938) initiated the idea of “The Philadelphia Sound”. He famously introduced unsynchronized bowing and a magical air of conducting without a baton. Sergei Rachmaninoff was hopelessly captivated — the sound always seemed more Russian than Viennese — and wrote his Symphony No. 3 (among other works) for what became known as The Fabulous Philadelphians. Eugene Ormandy (1936-1980) is said to have insured the sound’s continuation by doubling second violins with violas, sometimes too indiscriminately, maybe to cover significant lapses in his conducting technique.

During his tenure in Philadelphia from 1980 to 1992, Riccardo Muti took the sound a bit underground. He stated that his approach was to remain faithful to the intent of the composer, and this  meant a change from applying the lush "Philadelphia Sound" to all repertoire; however, many of his recordings with that orchestra largely seem to do away with its hallmark sound. As the late, longtime violinist Morris Shulik put it, “He said that when we play Brahms, we should have a Brahms sound. When we play Ravel, it should be a Ravel sound. But all he ever got from us was a Martucci sound.”

YouTube has many recordings of Ormandy performing the two works featured today with the Philadelphia Orchestra (and its distinctive sound) and I retained versions from the 1950’s for you to compare:

Symphony no. 1

Symphony no. 3

And, here the complete Muti cycle, including the symphionies 2 and 4 and usual “filler”pieces (including a good version of the Alto Rhapsody with Jessye Norman as soloist)

I think you will love this music too.

Hugh Bean (1929 – 2003)

 

No. 388 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/pcast388

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

This week’s new podcast is part of our A la Carte series, and extends an October 2015 Tuesday post dedicated to Leopold Stokowski’s 1966 recording  of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by adding some more works featuring the soloist from that session, Hugh Bean.

Hugh Bean attended the Royal College of Music where at age 17 he was awarded the principal prize for violin. A further year's study with André Gertler at the Brussels Conservatory on a Boise Foundation travelling award brought him a double first prize for solo and chamber music playing, and in 1951, he was awarded second place in the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition.[

He was appointed professor of violin at the RCM at the age of 24 and became a freelance London orchestral player, until he was made sub-leader and then leader (1956–67) of the Philharmonia Orchestra. He was co-leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1967 to 1969. In 1989, he returned to the Philharmonia Orchestra as co-leader, and became Leader Emeritus.

Hugh Bean performed concertos with many leading orchestras, both in the UK and abroad. With the Philharmonia Orchestra he recorded Vivaldi's The Four Seasons with Leopold Stokowski, and Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending with Sir Adrian Boult (featured on today’s playlist. He made many recordings of chamber music with the Music Group of London, and together they toured extensively.

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

“Otto Klemperer A la Carte

 

No. 387 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/pcast387

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

As may has five Tuesday, my A la Carte post doubles as our quarterly Tuesday podcast. For the occasion, I am extending my Vinyl’s Revenge share from 2016 by adding a Mozart symphony, which in turn uses one of the three symphonies we had featured in our 2011 post called “Mozart’s European Vacation”. Here’s what I wrote then about the Prague symphony:

Mozart is often said to have had a special relationship with the city of Prague and its people. Mozart is claimed to have said, "Meine Prager verstehen mich" ("My Praguers understand me"), a saying which became famous in the Bohemian lands.

Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, which premiered in Vienna, was produced in late 1786 in Prague with tremendous success. The orchestra and some affiliated music lovers funded a personal visit by Mozart so he could hear the production. Mozart arrived on 11 January 1787 and was feted everywhere. On 19 January he gave an "academy" (that is, a concert for his own profit) at which the “Prague” Symphony in D major was premiered.

Again, this performance features Otto Klemperer and the Philharmonia Orchestra

I think you will (still) love this music too

Carl Nielsen A la Carte

No. 386 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/pcast386

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Original posts: TalkClassical; Blogger

With this A la Carte poat, we conclude our week-long look on the #FYLP podcast at the symphonies of Carl Nielsen with two of my favourites – the second and fourth, performed here by Herbert Blomstedt but this time in an earlier Nielsen cycle he recorded for EMI with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Herbert Blomstedt’s first Nielsen Symphony cycle has made the rounds of reissues; all of these performances were surpassed, by and large, by his San Francisco remakes which feature better playing, better sonics, and generally a bolder and livelier guiding hand from the podium. Still, there are things here to enjoy.

The original post added a pair of short works to the Fourth. Today’s share expands by adding the second symphony, nicknames “the four temperaments”. Nielsen himself describes the background to the symphony in a programme note for a performance at the Konsertföreningen (Concert Society) in Stockholm shortly before he died in 1931.

I had the idea for ‘The Four Temperaments’ many years ago at a country inn in Zealand. On the wall of the room where I was drinking a glass of beer with my wife and some friends hung an extremely comical coloured picture, divided into four sections in which ‘the Temperaments’ were represented and furnished with titles: ‘The Choleric’, ‘The Sanguine’, ‘The Melancholic’ and ‘The Phlegmatic’. The Choleric was on horseback. He had a long sword in his hand, which he was wielding fiercely in thin air; his eyes were bulging out of his head, his hair streamed wildly around his face, which was so distorted by rage and diabolical hate that I could not help bursting out laughing. The other three pictures were in the same style, and my friends and I were heartily amused by the naivety of the pictures, their exaggerated expression and their comic earnestness. But how strangely things can sometimes turn out! I, who had laughed aloud and mockingly at these pictures, returned constantly to them in my thoughts, and one fine day I realized that these shoddy pictures still contained a kind of core or idea and – just think! – even a musical undercurrent! Some time later, then, I began to work out the first movement of a symphony, but I had to be careful that it did not fence in the empty air, and I hoped of course that my listeners would not laugh so that the irony of fate would smite my soul.

I think you will (still) love this music too

Mendelssohn: Double Concerti

No. 385 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/pcast385

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Over the last couple of weeks on our podcasting channel, we’ve spent time revisiting posts of music by Felix Mendelssohn. Today’s Friday podcast is the first in several months that doesn’t revisit Tuesday programs, ad proposes a pair of double concerti by Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn was considered by many of his time to be a prodigy comparable only to the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Besides being a brilliant piano virtuoso, his composition took a firm step forward in musical development. At the age of eleven, he had written a trio for strings, a violin and piano sonata, two piano sonatas and the beginning of a third, three more for four hands, four for organ, three songs (lieder), and a cantata. While aged 12 to 14, Mendelssohn composed twelve string symphonies; the two concerti proposed here today are contemporaneous to that period.

The Concerto for Piano, Violin, and Strings in D minor was written in 1823 when Mendelssohn was 14 years old. Mendelssohn composed the work to be performed for a private concert on May 25, 1823 at the Mendelssohn home in Berlin with his violin teacher and friend, Eduard Rietz. Following this private performance, Mendelssohn revised the scoring, adding winds and timpani and is possibly the first work in which Mendelssohn used winds and timpani in a large work. It remained unpublished during Mendelssohn's lifetime and it wasn't until 1999 when a critical edition of the piece was available. This concerto was previously paired with two Mozart double concerti in an early podcast, with different soloists and orchestra.

The Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E Major (the first of two he composed for that combination in this early phase of his career) was written in the late summer and early fall of 1823. It was first performed in December 1823 with Felix and his sister Fanny Mendelssohn as the two soloists. Regarded as immature by the composer, the work remained unpublished during his lifetime, though he substantially revised it, perhaps a decade after the première, in which form the Leipziger Ausgabe der Werke Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy published it in 1961. The version I chose here is the world premiere recording of the concerto’s first movement restored to its original form thanks to research by musicologist Steve Lindeman. 

I think you will love this music too.

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.

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

Jochum conducts Bruckner: Symphony no. 8

 

No. 381 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages is this week's Tuesday Blog. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast381

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This week’s Tuesday Blog is a “Fifth Tuesday” podcast featuring Bruckner’s Eighth symphony, thus concluding our survey of the Jochum/DGG cycle from the 1960’s.

Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor is the last symphony the composer completed. This symphony is sometimes nicknamed The Apocalyptic, but this was not a name Bruckner gave to the work himself.

It exists in two major versions of 1887 and 1890. In September 1887, Bruckner had the score copied and sent to conductor Hermann Levi, one of Bruckner's closest collaborators, having given a performance of the Symphony No. 7 in Munich that was "the greatest triumph Bruckner had yet experienced".

However the conductor wrote back to Bruckner that he found the symphony “impossible to perform” in its current form. “As much as the themes are magnificent and direct, their working-out seems to me dubious”.

By January 1888, Bruckner had come to agree with Levi that the symphony would benefit from further work and completed the new version of the symphony in March 1890. Once the new version was completed, the composer wrote to Emperor Franz Josef I for permission to dedicate the symphony to him. The emperor accepted Bruckner's request and also offered to help pay for the work's publication.

By the time the 1890 revision was complete, Levi was no longer conducting concerts in Munich. As a result, he recommended that his protege Felix Weingartner. The premiere was twice scheduled to occur under the young conductor's direction during 1891, but each time Weingartner substituted another work at the last minute. Weingartner admitted, in a letter to Levi, that the real reason he was unable to perform the symphony was because the work was too difficult and he did not have enough rehearsal time: in particular, the Wagner tuba players in his orchestra did not have enough experience to cope with their parts. At last Hans Richter, subscription conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, agreed to conduct the work. The first performance took place on 18 December 1892.

Today, Bruckner's Eighth remains somewhat controversial. This is a piece that is attempting something so extraordinary that if you're not prepared to encounter its expressive demons, or to be shocked and awed by the places Bruckner's imagination takes you, then you're missing out on the essential experience of the symphony.

If you think of Bruckner only as a creator of symphonic cathedrals of mindful - or mindless, according to taste - spiritual contemplation, who wields huge chunks of musical material around like an orchestral stone mason with implacable, monumental perfection, then you won't hear the profoundly disturbing drama of what he's really up to.

I think you will love this music too.