A Second or Two

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 1, 2013. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/Pcast090

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For a third week un a row, our daily podcasts exploited past thematic arcs to inform our posts, and this week we relied on two similar arcs – “Terrible Twos” (from 2012) and “My Number Two Obsession” from 2013. Today’s Podcast Vault selection comes from the 2013 set featuring “second works”, or "number twos" from Bach to Buczynski. The original post discusses the individual works in good detail, so I have nothing much to add.

Featured are a couple of "second rhapsodies". Both Debussy and Gershwin had their "first rhapsodies" featured in past montages. To keep the theme going, as filler, I thought I would share Béla Bartók’s second rhapsody for violin and piano. Rhapsody No. 2 was subsequently arranged with orchestra accompaniment - composed in 1928 and orchestrated in 1929. The orchestral version was revised in 1935, and the version with piano in 1945. It is dedicated to Hungarian violinist Zoltán Székely, who later became the first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet in 1937, two years after the founding of the ensemble.

The performance here is if the version for violin and orchestra – Isaac Stern is soloist, Leonard Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic.

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

Frédéric

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from February 14, 2014. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/pcast143

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For the last three days, we shared past podcasts featuring works for piano and orchestra by Chopin. Today’s podcast vault selection is an all-Chopin montage, whose title comes from the classic song by Claude Léveillée – which closes the montage. The bulk of the montage contents were extracted from two albums.

Thomas May asked in a review “How can it be that a recording by one of today's indisputably unequaled pianists performing some of her prime repertory--made fresh within months of her triumph in the 1965 Warsaw International Chopin Competition--could languish for decades in the vaults before its official release?” Known as ”The Legendary 1965 Recording”, this rare performance sat in limbo for years for contractual reasons. To everyone’s delight it was finally released on CD in 1999, and to this day is still hot to the touch.

This is a unique piece of musical history. Much of the session done in one take including the demanding final movement of the the B- Sonata. Masterful performances full of raw energy from beginning to end define this CD and help dispell the myth that Chopin’s piano music is wistful and serves only as frilly background music.

The remaining Chopin tracks are from Vladimir Horowitz’s “Last Recording”, for Sony Classical, completed four days before his death and consisting of repertoire he had never previously recorded – including some of these Chopin gems. Horowitz had an autumnal last period in which he was constantly looking at new literature and playing it in a relaxed, charming manner. Gone were the neuroticism and outsize dynamics that could surge into his playing. In this kind of performance he gives the feeling that now he is no longer out to prove anything, that he is merely having a good time playing the piano.

As bonus tracks, here’s a YouTube playlist featuring the entire album.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PHeC5f0TTctagwkme3VIv7TULYKVo6J

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

PTB Classic – Gustav Mahler

 

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

To mark the Tuesday Blog’s Tenth Anniversary year, I intend to bring back throughout the year an old post format – which I have dubbed PTB Classic – that threads together works off a YouTube playlist to mark a theme (today, a pair of works from one composer) that may not fit any of our recurring series.

The main work today is Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the last of the so-called Wunderhorm symphonies as it is inspired from that very collection of poems, and repurposes one of the texts Mahler set to music within that larger 1890’s encyclical, "Das himmlische Leben", that presents a child's vision of Heaven. It is sung by a soprano in the work's fourth and final movement.

I own several versions of this symphony, and the one I retained as my selection this week is something of a rarity. Back in 1958, when this recording was made, Mahler's greatness as a composer was not the foregone conclusion that it is today. Fritz Reiner himself had gone on a figurative voyage of discovery before realizing that this was music worth conducting and recording. He made two Mahler LPs with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra: this, and Das Lied von der Erde. Both have stood the test of time well.

Mahler began work on a Piano Quartet in A minor towards the end of his first year at the Vienna Conservatory, when he was around 15 or 16 years of age. The piece had its first performance on July 10, 1876, at the conservatory with Mahler at the piano, but it is unclear from surviving documentation whether the quartet was complete at this time. Following this performance the work was performed at the home of Dr. Theodor Billroth, who was a close friend of Johannes Brahms.

Following the rediscovery of the manuscript by Mahler's widow Alma Mahler in the 1960s, the work was premiered in the United States on February 12, 1964, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York City by Peter Serkin and the Galimir Quartet.
The performance retained is a live performance from the Lugano Festival in 2012.

Happy Listening!


Gustav MAHLER (1860-1911)

Piano Quartet Movement in A Minor (ca. 1876)
Sascha Maisky - violin
Lyda Chen – viola
Mischa Maisky - cello
Lily Maisky - piano

Symphony No.4 in G Major (1899-1900)
Lisa della Casa, Soprano
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Fritz Reiner, conducting

YouTube - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...ZX0uJ-p94OkmmM

Internet Archive - https://archive.org/details/03-mahler-symphony-4-in-g-3.-ruh

Brahms Symphony no. 4

  

This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from January 25, 2013. It can be found in our archives at  https://archive.org/details/BrahmsFestivalPart4

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Throughout the week, I programmed our Brahms Cycle podcasts from January 2013 in sequence, culminating today with a Podcast Vault share featuring Brahms’ Symphony no. 4.

In his Classical Net review of Eugen Jochum’s Brahms cycle with the Berlin Philharmonic reissued on CD, Brian Wingman makes an audacious claim, given the high standard the Berlin orchestra has maintained in the German repertoire under luminaries like Furtwangler, Karajan, Abbado and even more recently Simon Rattle: this is the finest Brahms cycle to ever come out of Berlin. More than simply having the Berlin Philharmonic sounding splendid for 1952, Jochum is also able to bring out enormous amounts of detail through his careful attention to the winds and brass - freewheeling, but always musical.

Ignoring monophonic recordings is a dangerous gamble that causes you to miss out on exceptionally great musicianship. Jochum was nothing if not a great musician, and his Brahms recordings happily stand the test of time. Jochum did record these pieces later in stereo, with the London Philharmonic on EMI. Those readings (available on YouTube here) are wonderful, and the best Brahms with that particular ensemble.

Completing the original montage, a lively interpretation  of Brahms’ Serenade no. 1 by Raffi Armenian and his then orchestra in Kitchener-Waterloo.

As our bonus share, another recording by Jochuim and a London orchestra (this time, the LSO) in Brahms’ Haydn Variations (we heard the two-piano version this past Tuesday), coupled with Elgar’s Enigma Variations

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3B_RNobM-BQl3M_QPc1rIU4gMv8vSkhV

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