2022 Year In Review

 Our 2022 year-end post is likely the last blog post for me – at least for the foreseeable future.

As I stated in September, nearly 12 years into this experiment, I have concluded that it is time for me to take a step back. In that vein, our montage no. 400 featuring Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty will be my last in our Friday series. 

When we began this experiment in 2011, few of us could see a fundamental change in the delivery of music, with the near-dominance of subscription streaming music services and digital media purchases rather than hard media like CDs and the boutique vinyl business. This is true in popular music, as it is in classical/concert music and opera.

I began bundling music in the form of podcasts as a way of filling a gap I perceived, that was created in Canada with dependable sources of on-demand music leaving terrestrial airwaves. Little did we know that the music listening public would make the transition so easily to newfangled media.

In short, what I do isn’t really required anymore, and the time I once thought I’d have in semi-retirement  to dedicate to this venture is more scarce than I imagined it would be.

The future of “For Your Listening Pleasure”

I must remind you that our Internet Archive has the bulk of our music shares readily available to listen to (with their built-in player) or for download. As long as that service is around, that music will be there for all to enjoy.

At this time, I still have a good number of past Tuesday shares and Operas that have not yet been posted on the Podcasting Channel, and in the spirit of curating our archived content I plan to do just that – post them in slow time as I curate the archive. Don't be surprised if the odd A la Carte post pops up every now and then as part of that exercise.

As a service to all of my listeners, I will maintain past episodes currently active until the end of January, slowly reducing our footprint down to the “basic” (free of charge to me) 500 MB storage level – which amounts to 5 - 7 episodes. There will be a commensurate download limit, but if I post to the archive concurrently, that won’t be too much of an issue.

As I post newly curated material, I’ll pull out oldest montages. When I’m done with that, I’ll take stock of the activity om the podcast and decide what happens next.

Before I leave you to enjoy our annual YouTube playlist of goodies, I wanted one last time to thank you for joining me in this experiment. It was fun while it lasted!

Happy holidays and Happy 2023 to all!

Pierre

All Good Things…

At this time, I usually issue a quarterly programming update and teaer for the remainder of the year, but this one will be a little different.

After much thinking over the summer months, and considering the load this activity has taken, I have decided that my 400^th montage will be my last one, and that we will be putting an end to our regular activities at year end. Not an easy decision for me…

When we began this a little over 10 years ago, classical music accessibility landscape was under immense transformation – terrestrial radio services have been transformed by the advent of podcasting and streaming services, and access to classical music “on demand” is more accessible and prevalent. The need for my modest contribution has passed, I think.

When I looked forward to retirement, I thought I would have more time to dedicate to this activity but as it turns out, I feel I’m busier now than when I was working full time! Maybe it’s a temporary thing (with selling the house and moving into a new one being a chief preoccupation over the last few months) but I feel behind the eight ball all the time, and unable to get ahead of things like I used to.

I haven’t quite decided if this is going to be a long pause, s full stop, or something in between – I have a few months to figure that out. More to follow then in December…

September-December Programming

As I ave done since June, we will have regular (rather than daily) podcasts, following grand arcs:

For September, we will be revisiting the Mahler symphonies (with one montage and one Vinyl’s Revenge feeding the arc);

For October, we will be revisiting the Mozart Piano Concertos (with one Cover2Cover and one montage feeding that arc);

November is open right now, likely used to bring back some “In Memoriam” material (including one mintage dedicated to Jean Martinon whose death anniversary was overlooked last year)

Forr December, back to Tchaikovsky with a special crossover Cover2Cover post that will be our 400^th montage).

We have still several weeks of Lundi avec Ludwig, and our Opera Alphabet with two planned “new” large works for the letters U and X.

Happy listening!

Programming Note for June-August 2022

 Normally around this time I reduce my activities here and on different forums. 

Recently, a lot of things are happening on the home front, and I need to focus more attention on these projects - nothing sinister, I assure you - meaning I will enter my summer hiatus a month early, starting June 1st.

I have a number of series ongoing - Lundi aec Ludwig, the Lyrical Alphabet and our ITYWLTMT Podcast series (at 387 and counting down towards 400). I will do my best to continue these series in June, and into the Summer, time permitting of course.

There won't be daily podcasts for the foreseeable future, though I may drop a few shares occasionally. Remember you can always find our old material on the Internet Archive under Community Audio.

Have a great Summer

Pierre 

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

2021 Year In Review and Look Ahead to 2022

 As I usually do this time of year, I issue a quick update on what we did last year and what we plan on doing next year on all our platforms.

2021 - or Year 2 of the Corona Virus Pandemic - has ha its ups and downs, though we have tried here to continue with our daily programming on For Your Listening Pleasure, with new releases nearly every week. We completed our complete recap of our montages in 2021, and started a partial recap of our Tuesday Blog / Once or Twice a Fortnight shares in the form of the 222 day binge challenge - which marks today day 122 with our repost f Die Fledermaus.

The first 100 days of 2022 will complete the chanllenge, whuke introducing two fixtured for the upcoming year :

• Lundi avec Ludwig will replace Mozart Mondays with a weekly Beethoven program every Monday; and
• The Opera Akphabet with 26 weekend programs that will explore the lyric repertoire every other week.

Here is our calendar for the first quarter (January - March)of 2022

And to complete, our annual YouTube collection of odds and sods

Happy New Year ad thanks for listening!

Pierre

Programming – September to December 2021

 

I hope you are having a good summer, and that your area is slowly moving away from COVID-19 Public Health measures. Here in Ottawa, after well over 18 months of pandemic measures, more than 78% of eligible  adults are fully vaccinated, and we are soon approaching what we can all say are near-normal activities.

On our music platforms, we are soon entering the third year of daily podcasts on For Your Listening Pleasure. Year Two will come to a close on August 31^st with the 365^th montage in our series we began way back in April 2011. The theme for that podcast is a harbinger of the coming year of daily programming starting September 1^st.

222 Days of Binging

We spent the last year reissuing all of our montages (thus 365 all together), which marked the ten years of our blogging and music sharing activities. Overshadowed in a way was the ten-year anniversary of our other platforms, notably our presence on TalkClassical (The Tuesday Blog) and OperaLively (Once or Twice a Fortnight).

In the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of time rummaging through our music archives for these two platforms in particular, and (to nobody’s surprise) we have more than enough material shared on TC and OL over 10 years to justify spending some time revisiting them. I challenged myself to come up with programming solely fed by these shares – complete operas from OTF “Classic”, shares from our many Tuesday series (Once Upon the Internet, Cover2Cover, Vinyl’s Revenge) and a hodge-podge of playlists we cobbled together over the years

I came up with programming for 222 consecutive days – which will cover the remainder of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 – to address this challenge. Following our typical two-week frequency of new Friday montages, we will intersperse Friday shares that will respect that challenge – more on that below.

Programming Highlights

Here are some of the highlights (and programming tactics) that merit your attention:

Opera Content – I intend to provide complete operas every other weekend moving forward. Operas may, sometimes, give way to lyrical programs, but the intention here is to showcase our OL content.

Collections – Under our Cover2Cover and Vinyl’s Revenge series, I have planned to share some “collections” – the first three are the complete Paganini violin concertos (in September), the complete Gershwin works for orchestra and piano and orchestra (in October) and the complete Beethoven Piano Trios (in November). The music shares justify more than one “daily spot” on our binge calendar. In some cases, I plan to use a Friday slot (and montage) to deploy some of that content.

A La Carte – Our mission will shift somewhat from the business of “content creation” to that of “content curation” and in that vein, there are some parts of our music share collection that may get “extended” (in the case of playlists that are shorter in duration than 60 minutes) or “broken up” (for rather large shares). The A La Carte series will revisit some of these long or short shares and repackage them with additional material. I have some A La Carte shares planned for Tuesdays, others as Friday montages. I intend to go back to some of the original TC and OL commentary and provide updates where appropriate.

Tuesday Themes Revisited – Finally, as a way of ensuring all our Friday montages meet “the spirit” of the 222 day binge challenge, some Friday montages will revisit some past Tuesday (or OTF Classic) themes. Examples include “Rachmaninov the Pianist” and “Remembering Bob Kerr”, which we proposed on the Tuesday Blog in the early days of that series.

In December, when I tease 2022, I’ll provide more insight into how we intend to complete the “binge challenge”, other programming tactics I plan to use to finish our survey of past TC and OL material, as well as reintroduce ITYWLTMT montages (old and new) into the FYLP programming calendar.

In closing, please let me know what you think of our programming through Twitter (@itywltmt), our Facebook page or by posting comments on the platforms themselves. Your comments are valuable and always appreciated!

Your friendly Music Curator

Pierre

Here’s the programming calendar for the upcoming four months:

Christmas Day and Year In Review (2020)

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 350^th 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 31^st 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 10^th 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

For Your Listening Pleasure

On Monday April 15 2011 we launched our podcasting service, hosted by Pod-O-Matic. This service, along with our YouTube channel and our many posts on the Internet Archive provide music lovers with access to both original and curated content that we feature on this blog (as well as our French language blog) and our enduring presence in TalkClassical, MQCD-Musique-Classique and OperaLively.

Starting on September 1^st 2019, we will recast our podcasting service under a new name and a renewed commitment to providing our content to Music Lovers. Pod-O-Matic continues to be our content distributor and host – that will not change, as we have been very satisfied with that partnership over the years.

The main changes to our podcasting approach are the following:

• We will now issue a daily podcast. As I will elaborate as we get closer to our “launch date”, Part 4 of Project 366 entails “One podcast a day, every day” of the 366 days between September 1^st 2019 and August 31^st 2020.
• Under this new format, we will re-issue old montages as well as some of our past Curated content from our Forum series Vinyl’s Revenge, Once Upon the Internet, Cover 2 Cover and Once or Twice a Fortnight. To do so, these playlists will be converted to Pod-O-Matric friendly “single track” media in the same vein as our Friday montages.
• Because Project 366 and the ITYWLTMT Podcast are currently managed separately, for the coming year we will issue Friday montages (and quarterly Tuesday montages) as we have done so far in addition to the daily podcasts. As a result the Friday Blog and Podcast will sometimes feature “Podcast Vault” selections as well as new content. (It is my intention to remedy the situation after we are done with Project 366, so stay tuned)
• For the time being, we will continue using the YouTube channel and public domain sites as the main purveyor of our curated content. This situation may change in the future.

As we retool over the coming weeks, my intent is to maintain as much of the content currently active on the channel as I can, keeping in mind I will start pre-positioning some media for the launch. Our policy will continue to be that of archiving all our content to our Internet Archive if it stops being available on the channel. I’ll need to come up with a set of guidelines to keep original content up as long as possible to make sure it gets sampled by everybody.

In the meantime, if anything changes with access to content, I will make sure to post updates on this and my other platforms.

Programming Notes – Summer/Fall 2019

Summers are typically busy at home, and work has been busier than usual for this time of year, so I’ve not been on top of things on the Blog and other platforms. As summer is usually a time when I put some of my Forum activities on hiatus, I’m hoping I can catch up on some housekeeping.

Project 366

I need to clean up some links and I need to publish the “Yellow Pages” for Part 3 of the Project (which concluded in June). I should wrap up all of that by the end of August, if not sooner.

The programming for Part 4 is generally done, and the series will resume in September for the final 66 Listener Guides. The tentative title of Part 4 is “Dates on the Musical Calendar”.

Upcoming Changes to our Pod-O-Matic Channel

Near the end of the summer, I plan to recast the channel – in large part to support Part 4 of Project 366 – and this calls for renaming and rebranding. I don’t want to spoil things by doing any pre-emptive announcements, but when things get more serious, I will issue a post with details. Suffice it to say we will be doing a lot more podcasts, and many of these will include past shares edited to be more “P-O-M-friendly”.

Fall Programming

Our summer programming will feature six new podcasts (as both July and August provide “Fifth week” opportunities), and I expect to have one OTF opera share.

In the fall, we will resume with our bi-monthly Tuesday Blogs, and there should be at least monthly OTF’s. Friday podcasts, however, may be more sparse, in part due to the (still unannounced) recasting of the Podcast channel, and in part to dovetail into our long-term programing objective of reaching Podcast # 365 in 2021, which will be our 10^th anniversary year. (The number 365 isn’t a coincidence, and our long-term programming arc will explain that – all in due course).

Our year-long look at piano sonatas will continue in the Fall, with a distinct focus on Beethoven sonatas – you will see them “coupled” in some instances with piano concertos; I know we’ve already done the complete set early in our ITYWLTMT series, but revisiting them isn’t totally unpleasant…

Speaking of revisiting works already considered in past shares, Vinyl’s Revenge will complete sharing the “Late Mozart Piano Concertos” from the TIME-LIFE 5-LP set (which I began sgharing a couple years ago). More Tuesday shares in the works will complete our look at the Berlioz year, and take a nostalgic look at pianist Jörg Demus.

Have a great summer!

2017 - Year in Review

AS we do at this time every year, let me take a moment to reflect on this past year, the year to come and share my collage YouTube playlist for the year 2017.

2017 Highlights

This was a "stay the course" year for us, with 31 new podcasts (including a few "quarterly podcasts" offered on Tuesdays. We introduced a new series on the Tuesday Blog (Cover 2 Cover) and completed the first set of 122 Listener Guides on our Project 366.

We maintained our bi-weekly presence on TalkClassical but failed to do much on OperaLively this year. No time!

Watch for 2018

As we continue at our monthly pace on Project 366, our Tuesday sjares and Friday Blogs will continue to "feed" our ongoing set of Listener Guides in the "Tine Capsule" series.

I hope to post a few times this year on OperaLively, but don't expect our frequency there (and everywhere else) to change much for the first half of 2018.

Don't be surprised if I start slowing things down a bit in the latter half of 2018 - and certainly in 2019. We have some important projects at home in the next year or two, and my musical activities may have to take a back seat. I hope to have all that behind me by 2020. Stay tuned!


Lastly, thanks to all my readers and followers on my many platforms - including Twitter. I always look forward to hearing from all of you.

Happy New Year 2018!

Project 366 - Time capsules through the Musical Eras

For Part One of Project 366, click here.

Part Two - Time capsules through the Musical Eras

A Continued journey through the Western Classical Music Repertoire

In Part One of Project 366, we launched a comprehensive look at the Classical Music repertoire through a series of thematic Listener Guides. So far, we have shared 122 of these, and launch in Part Two a second tranche of 122 guides following a long arc that will take us to the end of 2018.

Part One consisted of a series of chapters exploring different musical genres – from solo instrumental music, to Grand Opera and everything in between. In Part Two, we will start fresh, and intend to traverse the repertoire along a timeline that will feature musical eras, musical traditions and some of the great composers that marked these eras and traditions.

Layout of Part Two

500 years of Western Classical Music can be depicted along a simple timeline:

(Source: Hope of Detroit Music, http://hdamusic.com/archives/454)

There are four “great” classical music periods, which mirror the evolution of most art forms. The choice of the dates shown on the timeline is somewhat arbitrary; the dates 1600, 1750 and 1820 don’t represent anything specific or eventful as far as I can see. I view those as guide posts – call them timeposts – that allow us to provide a periodic context, nothing more. I will extend the Baroque to “the left” of the timeline by including renaissance and ancient music along with baroque under an “Early Music” era.

Each of the four main eras will be explored over several chapters, with a focus on four “significant” transitional and transformational figures: Johann Sebastian Bach (Early Music), Ludwig van Beethoven (classical), Peter Tchaikovsky (Romantic) and Igor Stravinsky (Modern) who will get chapters exclusively dedicated to them. We will meander more in the classical era, allowing us to showcase two of its significant architects – Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – to get significant airtime along with other contemporaries and pupils.

The final caveat I want to leave you with is that, though we will progress along the timeline methodically, I make no pretense to keep things in perfect chronological order (sometimes, music from other eras may intrude into some listener guides, for instance). I intend to keep to the spirit of this time-based approach, but not to the letter!

Early Music
Ealy Music Time capsules	123-133
Bach Gets my GOAT	134-143
Haydn, Mozart and the Classical Period
Postcards from the (Classical) Edge	144-153
Mozart Gets My GOAT too	154-163
Hooked on Haydn	164-173
Beethoven Floats my BOAT	174-184
The Romantics
Les Romantiques	185-194
Die Romantiker	195-208
Midsummer Romantics Mashup	209-217
No more Romantiki than Tchaikovsky	218-227
The Moderns
Modern Time Capsules	228-237
Stravinsky Time Capsules	238-244

Project 366 - A Journey of Musical Discovery

I've been teasing this - and preparing this - for a few months now, so here we go this is the grand unveiling of the ITYWLTMT "Anniversary Project".

On the music forums I visit regularly, the question “ How do I get started listening or acquiring Classical Music? “ comes up from time to time, and I’m always amazed at the answers. Music collecting, in a sense, is no different than any other form of collection: stamps, coins, trading cards…  There’s a lot of it that has to do with personal taste, and the level of obsessiveness you dare to attain.

The Myth of the Basic Repertoire

Going back to the question – that is, where to start in building a music library – we invariably come to the question: why not start with the “basics”?

OK… Most households have movie collections, or book collections, or what have you. How many of us built our movie collections by looking for “the basic films”? What is it about a film that would make it a “basic” – a film everybody should own? Is it the awards it won? Is it the popularity it had? Is it the status of the actors or the director? Is there such a thing as a “basic film”, really?

So what then are the “basic repertoire” pieces? Vivaldi’s Four Seasons? Beethoven’s Nine Symphonies? All nine, or just the Fifth?

Awhile back, I acquired a collection of 200 CDs issued as “Great Pianists of the 20^th Century” (I highly recommend it.) You have there almost 100 pianists, playing everything from early music to modern masterpieces. There were some pieces that were featured several times in the lot: Chopin’s preludes, Schumann’s Carnival, several Beethoven and Mozart piano concertos and piano sonatas, some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s works for solo keyboard, and the list could go on for a page or two. If you were to list all the pieces that were programmed “more than once” in that collection, and declared those as being “the basic piano repertoire”, I could probably bring up piece after piece most of us would view as equally important that didn’t make that list!

The concept of “the basic concert repertoire” is a bit of a misnomer – if it exists, then show me the exhaustive list… Or do we not mean that there are “enduring” works and works that may endure, but probably not… There are 500 years of Western Classical Music history, and to pretend that you can build from a defined set of works “outwards” is simplistic at best.

My conclusion? Simply, collecting music should be approached primarily based on taste and affinity with certain styles of works, and build out from there. Like in anything, Classical Music is an acquired taste, and some are sweeter than others, and it is over time (and trying) that one can develop a taste for other aspects of the repertoire.

ITYWLTMT can help in this process - Did You Know That

• We have now shared 218 montages
• We have shared over 70 complete operas with our partners at OperaLively
• We have shared over 200 playlists between Once Upon the Internet and our YouTube channel
• We have 515 posts and counting (between all our platforms)

That's a lot of music! We could easily have a musical playlist to share for every day of the calendar year!

And that's the challenge I am taking on - I plan to dust-up and share old - and new - material in the context of this "one blog a day, every day" concept. We will "package" 366 playlists (call then "listener Guides"), and group them together as we always do in a thematic arrangement.

In a nut-shell that's what Project 366 is all about.

It will take me more than a year to achieve this a a coherent package - and my intention is to package these eventually as eBooks - starting with the first 122 in a set I call "A Journey of Musical Discovery", where I plan to explore the "basic" repertoire by traversing it through all musical genres.

Here is the Table of Contents for Part 1 of the Project

Title	Musical Guides
Starting with the ABC’s	1-2
Journeys with a Purpose - Exploring Musical Genres
Bare Bones	3-6
The King of Instruments	7-10
A few friends	11-19
Team Sport	20-26
The Orchestra - Symphonies and More	27-34
The Concerto	35-41
Sing, Sing, Sing	42-52
Music Takes the Stage	53-62
Do Not Skip This Chapter!	63-67
Journeys without a Purpose - Day Trips through the Repertoire
The Concert Experience	68-76
Themes and Variations	77-81
The Trifecta	82-89
The World of Transcriptions	90-96
Single Works	97-102
What's In a Name	103-108
Pick Your Poison	109-117
Moonlighting	118-122

For your reading pleasure, here are the Yellow Pages associated with the 122 listener guides:

2015 - Year In Review

Here we are, ready to close the books on another year of ITYWLTMT, and embarking on our fifth – yes, fifth – year.

We had our 200^th montage, explored “the concerto” in its many forms and exposed the music of Mendelssohn and Bruch. Our yearly “video mash up:” is a little thin this year, but you will find it – as we do every year – at the end of this post.

This past year, 2015, is a year of transition on our journey, and I thought I would take a few paragraphs to explain why things changed around here after the summer, and how we might be even less present in the coming months.

No – nothing sinister, I assure you!

As I said in my “year in Review” post of 2014, I find I have less and less time to spend on the blog. In years past, I traveled quite a bit, and had many evenings on the road that I needed to fill with something constructive, and would use that time to work on the blog and on creating music montages. 2015 wasn’t a typical year in that regard – I think I traveled on business once or twice.

This past year, we did some remodeling on our home – some work in the kitchen and on refinishing the main staircase. This ate up a lot of my summer – I had accounted for that, and had prepared an all-Mozart series (I hope you enjoyed that!). When late August came, I found I was quite a bit behind, and though I had lots of ideas for posts and illustrations, the cupboard was bare and I had to scramble to get a sum total of four new montages assembled, documented and uploaded.

Like I said last year, time has a funny way of creeping up on you – family, work, and taking time for yourself (yes, I spend more time at the Gym to try as exercise helps fight ailments like high blood pressure and high sugar that have crept up in recent yearly physicals). I have less time on my hands, and the blog and this experiment – however dear it is to me – simply loses out among all those priorities.

In short – I’m struggling to find the right balance, and the right formula.

I have, however, come up with a great idea, one that may help us get back on track, and maybe refocus the effort – and I think it’s fitting that we try this as we mark our fifth year milestone.

I will keep that new “project” under wraps for now – as I still need more time to mature it and better define it. My plan is to get the ball rolling on this new project in April, which will mark our Fifth Anniversary (April 1^st, more precisely…)

In the meantime, we will continue with new montages at a rate of about one a month, and complement things with the odd post on TalkClassical.

As for the Tuesday Blog for the coming months, I am not planning to run “encore” montages, at least for the next little while. I have a few “Once Upon the Internet” and “Vinyl’s Revenge” posts sketched out, and those may get published. Sorry Opera fans, nothing in the Opera department in the hopper, at least nothing for now.

Another thing I may get out of the habit of is “Programming posts”. I may issue one later in January, more as a “rough agenda”, but I want to steer clear of “set dates”, to give myself more flexibility. I’d like to publish montages, playlists and musings in a more ad-hoc manner, and not have “promise dates”. I think this may make things easier for me as I continue to keep things going until I unveil the “new project”.

I have been delinquent in updating our yearly lists – that again is due to lack of time. I hope to update our lists in the coming weeks! Another thing I want to start doing in these pages is to “move” some of my Tuesday Blog and OTF posts into this website. I got scared when Luiz had a glitch with his service provider, and I thought I’d lost over 50 posts on OperaLively. I think it makes sense to “patriate” some of that stuff – as you have seen, I’d begun to post new TC and OL posts on ITYWLTMT already…

Happy New Year!

Pierre

UPDATE

Our Opera directory, as at 2015

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

Пётр Ильич Чайковский

(1840-1893)

English Text - Le texte français suit

By the end of his fairly short life, Tchaikovsky's inner and outer circumstances would appear to have been perfectly splendid. After his triumphant tour of America, and being awarded an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University, he was accepted as a world figure, not a merely national composer but one of universal significance. In 1891 the Carnegie Hall program booklet proclaimed him, together with Brahms and Saint-Saëns, to be one of the three greatest living musicians, while music critics praised him as "a modern music lord". (More)

About Tchaikovsky, his life and a catalog of his works -  http://wiki.tchaikovsky-research.net/wiki/Main_Page

A look at Posts featuring Tchaikovsky’s music:

• Podcast #6 – Tchaikovsky Festival, Part One
• Podcast #7 – Tcahikovsky Festival, Part Two
• Podcast #8 – Tchaikovsky Festival, Part Three
• Is there a Tchaikovsky Seventh Symphony?
• Montage #17 - Vacanze musicali in Italia
• Montage # 70 - Hommage à Mozart
• Montage # 111 – Bellissima!
• Montage # 112 – Polska

December 2013

December 6 – Tchaikovsky: Concertos (Part 1)

December 10 – More Tchaikovsky Concertante Works

December 13 - Tchaikovsky: Concertos (Part 2)

December 17  – Guido Cantelli’s recordings ofTchaikovsky’s symphonies 4 to 6 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

December 20 – Shchelkunchik

Texte français

On pourrait tirer la conclusion qu'à la fin de sa vie, les conflits inteérieurs et extérieurs qui ont troublé Tchaïkovski semblent avoir trouvé un certain réconfort. Après sa tournée triomphale en Amérique, et ayany reçu un doctorat honorifique de l'Université de Cambridge, il a été accepté comme une personalité avec un attrait universel, et pas seulement comme un compositeur Russe.. En 1891, le programme d'un de ses concerts au prestigieux Carnegie Hall le proclament, avec Brahms et Saint-Saëns, l'un des trois plus grands musiciens vivants, tandis que les critiques musicaux l'ont loué comme «un seigneur de la musique moderne". (suite - en anglais)

La ressource internet la plus complète (biograpohie, catalogue, etc) en anglais  -  http://wiki.tchaikovsky-research.net/wiki/Main_Page

Bilets antérieurs proposant des oeuvres de Tchaïkovski

• Un festival Tchaïkovski - Premier Volet
• Un festival Tchaïkovski - Deuxième volet
• Un festival Tchaïkovski - Troisième volet
• Montage #17 - Vacanze musicali in Italia
• Montage # 70 - Hommage à Mozart
• Montage # 111 – Bellissima!
• Montage # 112 – Polska

Décembre 2013

6 décembre  – Tchaikovsky: Concertos (Part 1)

10 décembre – Tchaikovsky Concertant

13 décembre - Tchaikovsky: Concertos (Part 2)

17 décembre  – Les entreregistrements des symphonies de Tchaïkovski par Guido Cantelli

20 décembre  – Shchelkunchik

The Podcast Directories / Répertoire des Baladodiffusions (Montages 1 to 130)

English Text -Le texte français suit plus loin

The embedded document is a complete list of links for all our montages from April 2011ès first montage on the Musical Alphabet to our recent homage to Mario Bernardi (Montage # 130).

• The first section provides links to commentaries, playlists and our archived montage on the Internet Archive.
• The second section is our complete list of works (with references to montage numbers) sorted by composer last name.

The posted file is in Microsoft EXCEL format and can be uploaded from DOCSTOC.COM. If you prefer, I also provide a link to a PDF version.

Podcast Directory 1 to 130


(PDF) - http://www.docstoc.com/docs/164476181/Podcast-Directory-1-to-130

Texte français

Le document ci-haut est le plus récent répertoire de nos montages audio, dcpuis notre Abacédaire musical (Montage #1) jusqu'à notre hommage posthume à Mario Bernardi (Montage # 130)

• Une première section assemble les hyperliens aux commentaires, playlists détaillées et accès au montage en archive sur le site Internet Archive
• La deuxième section est notre liste d'oeuvres, classés par ordre alphabétique des compositeurs, avec référence au montage où vous pouvez l'entendre

Le format du fichier est Microsoft EXCEL, et est disponible pour téléchargement depuis le site DOCSTOC.COM. Egalement disponible, une version PDF

Nouveau Site en version BETA

L'idée fixe en version BETA

tout le mois de décembre 2013

http://ideefixe-musique.blogspot.com/

C'est avec plaisir que je vous invite, pour le mois de décembre, à fureter l'idée fixe en mode "Beta". Ceci veut dire que nous continuerons à faire des ajustements à l'ameublement et à la présentation du site.

Pendant la construction, j'ai entrepris la transition d'un bon nombre de billets, histoire d'offrir une programmation initiale sommaire. Pendant le mois de décembre, nous allons continuer notre tradition bilingue sur ITYWLTMT, mais présenterons les même billets (en version française bien sûr) - les billets du mardi et du vendredi, ainsi que les Quinze que j'en pense programmés pour MQCD Musique Classique le 15 et 30 décembre.

Parmi les nouveautés (devrais-je dire les exclusivités) de l'idée fixe, nous commencerons dès dimanche le 1er décembre notre nouvelle série "Dimache en pantoufles" avec son menu de repiquages bloguesques.

Consultez notre page de programmation pour les détails.

Je rappelle que l'idée fixe, c'est plus que mon blog, c'est un site veut plaire aux mélomanes et aux collectionneurs. Vos commentaires sont sollicités - et appréciés à l'avance. Il ne suffit que de les laisser en fin de billet, ou de me les faire parvenir par le biais de notre paf=ge Facebook ou par courriel (les hyperliens se trouvent sur la opartie supérieure droite de nos pages.

Bonne visite, et bonne écoute!

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Johannes Brahms

(1833-1897)

2013 is the 180th anniversary of the German composer’s birth, and this page will serve as a handy location for links to our musings, musical illustrations and other relevant information

2013 marque le 180^e anniversaire de naissance du compositeur Allemand, et je vous propose ici une page de navigation rapide qui vous permettra d’accéder à nos réflexions, illustrations musicales et autres informations pertinentes.

Brahms Bio

English: http://www.classicalarchives.com/composer/2239.html#tvf=tracks&tv=about

Français: http://www.monsieur-biographie.com/celebrite/biographie/johannes_brahms-1439.php

Brahms works catalog (in French/en français): http://alambix.uquebec.ca/musique//catal/brahms/braj.html

Past Posts / Billets avant 2013

2011-10-04: A Playlist of Brahms Firsts/ Un programme de premières, signées Brahms

(Series on the complete Brahms concertos/série dédié à l’intégrale des concerti)

• 2012-04-06: This Day in Music History / Ephéméride musical 06-04-1962
• 2012-04-13: Brahms, Szell & Serkin [Re-issued in our Podcast Vault Series on TalkClassical http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/itywltmt/1079-one-degree-separation.html]
• 2012-04-20: Brahms and the violin/et le violon
• 2012-04-27: Violin and Cello/violon et violoncelle

2012-06-29: Powers of 2 / Puissances de 2

2012-08-21: Rodrigo Alqiuati Plays Brahms / Rodrigo Alquati joue Brahms

Brahms Festival 2013/Le Festival Brahms 2013

• The Complete Symphonies/L’intégrale des symphonies
• 2012-01-04 – No. 1 (Carlo Maria Giulini / Philharmonia) http://itywltmt.blogspot.ca/2013/01/montage-86-festival-brahms-festival.html
• 2012-01-11 – No. 2 (Leonard Bernstein / Wiener Philharmoniker) http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2013/01/montage-87-festival-brahms-festival.html
• 2012-01-18 – No. 3 (Istvan Kertesz / Wiener Philharmoniker) http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2013/01/montage-88-festival-brahms-festival.html
• 2012-01-25 – No. 4 (Eugen Jochum / Berliner Philharmoniker) http://itywltmt.blogspot.com/2013/01/montage-89-brahms-festival-btahms-part.html
• Brahms Clarinet Works (Once Upon the Internet/Jadis sur Internet) http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/itywltmt/1080-once-upon-internet-brahms.html
• Eine Deutches Requiem http://itywltmt.blogspot.ca/2013/03/montage-94-ein-deutsches-requiem.html
• Btahms in camara (Summer/été 2013)

From our YouTube Channel/De notre chaine YouTube

One Year of Once or Twice a Fortnight

Once or Twice a Fortnight (OTF for short) is my contribution to OperaLively, and regularly features complete operas, with my personal thoughts, additional musical illustrations and links to key material (such as synopses and libretti).

OTF is more than just Opera – sometimes, we venture into other vocal, lyrical or sacred works, and even leave the tight box of the vocal genres to explore different music.

I usually provide notifications on the ITYWLTMT Fan Page on Facebook when I issue a new OTF post, as they are not delivered on specific dates of the month (like I do for Quinze que j’en pense).

In addition to the below links to the material, you can access most of the posts on special compilation pages maintained by OperaLively and accessible in the “Exclusive Articles” area of the site. At the time of writing this post, there are two OTF pages: Page 1 and 2).

Complete Operas (In Alphabetical Order by Composer)

21-Apr-12    Beethoven - Fidelio

15-Aug-12    Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande (en français)

20-Oct-12    Donizetti - L'Elisir d'Amore

2-May-12     Estacio – Filumena

17-Jul-12      Gounod – Faust (en français)

18-Feb-12    Leoncavallo - Pagliacci (en français)

11-Oct-12    Louie – Toothpaste/Burnt Toast, Menotti – The Telephone

8-Feb-12       Mascagni - Cavalleria rusticana (en français)

4-Jun-12       Massenet – Werther

31-Oct-12    Menotti - The Medium    

14-Sep-12    Mozart - Idomeneo, re di Creta

28-Sep-12    Mozart – Le Nozze di Figaro

25-Nov-12   Puccini – Il Tabarro (Trittico #1)           

10-Dec-12    Puccini - Suor Angelica (Trittico #2)

21-Dec-12    Puccini -  Gianni Schicchi (Trittico #3)

23-Dec-11    Rimsky-Korsakov - Christmas Eve (en français)

23-May-12   Rubenstein - The Demon

31-Dec-11    J. Strauss II - Die Fledermaus ()

13-May-12   R. Strauss - Der Resenkavalier

18-Jun-12     Thomas – Mignon

20-Dec-11    Verdi- La Traviata (en français)

Other Music Posts (In order of publoication)

9-Jan-12       Mr. Liszt Goes to the Opera

17-Jan-12     Mr. Thalberg Goes to the Opera          

29-Feb-12    The Pilgramages of Francis Poulenc (en français)

7-Mar-12      Toscanini’s Broadcast Performance of Verdi’s Requiem

15-Mar-12   Sacred Music by Beethoven (en français)

22-Mar-12   The musical Legacy of Mgr. Richard J. Schuler (en français)

1-Apr-12       Agnus Dei (Re-Post of ITYWLTMT Montage # 3) (en français)    

5-Apr-12       Bach`s St-Matthew Passion (en français)

7-Apr-12       Mahler's Resurrection Symphony 

2-Jul-12         Faust (not by Gounod) (en français)

1-Aug-12     The art songs of Claude Debussy  (en français)

30-Aug-12    My favourite versions of "La mer" (en français)

11-Nov-12   Lest We Forget (Re-Post of ITYWLTMT Montage #30) (original bilingual commentary)

Miscellaneous (In order of publoication)

14-Dec-11    Once or Twice a Fortnight (BM de MQCD)                

26-Jan-12     Opera Podcasts 

26-Dec-12    Il Trittico - The Recordings

Disclaimer

OTF, like ITYWLTMT, makes use of embedded links to third-party content that is not necessarily under the sole control of those of us who use them. We remind that embedded links and their content are provided here for musical enjoyment, and can be experienced on your PC without downloading required if you have access to the Internet. (Downloading files for use on your personal digital companion is generally possible, depending on the site.) Because we are not managing third-party web content, we cannot  guarantee the currency of the link – all we can guarantee is that the link worked “as advertised” at the time of the original blog post.