The Classical Music Guide Forums

piston

I guess, John, you just can't think historically today. And your choice of words --such as "perverse"-- to counter a simple proposition frequently stiffles discussion. So I'm done with this thread.

piston

The name "concerto for orchestra," in distinction to the other names mentioned above, is an invention of the mid-twentieth century, coinciding with a "Back to Bach" movement and referring to the original use of the word "concerto" as a combination of instruments, such as in the first and third Brand...

piston

It's like a mind game with him, because some of his titles are translatable. When asked if Adiemus was a derivation of a Latin word for "let us assemble" he denied awareness of such a connection: The word Adiemus itself resembles the Latin word 'adeamus' meaning 'let us approach' (or "let us submit ...

piston

Go to youtube and google "Concerto for orchestra." Bartok prevails, by far, page after page! In fact, googling "concerto for orchestra" yields a wiki page on Bartok's work. It's not that he's the only one to have called a work by that name. Many have followed in his footsteps: Lutoslawski (Poland), ...

piston

The opera Koanga, with its story based in Louisiana, is back on stage in southeastern Ireland: Set in early 19th-century Louisiana, its narrative must have seemed challenging in its day. To pacify the recalcitrant captured African prince Koanga, plantation owner Martinez tries to marry him off to hi...

piston

To last year's radio broadcast of F. David's "symphonic ode" Christophe Colomb , now uploaded on youtube. This work, first performed two years after his Désert , also proved a great success. In a 1847 Revue Musicale review of Christophe Colomb, it is pretty obvious that David was no less appreciated...

piston

He's a curious fellow who creates words, like Adiemus, or borrows words from different languages, like Kayama (Swahili?). Why even attempt translation?

piston

To some very good old "scratchies" on Melodiya: Revol'd Bunin -- -Concerto for organ and chamber orchestra, op. 33; -Music for Strings, op. 86; -Ten Days that Shook the World, op. 39; -Oratorio for Voices and Orchestra on the Words of Shakespeare, op. 35. There's much confusion in the virtual media,...

piston

Nezet-Seguin is m.d. in Philadelphia until 2021-22, for the Metropolitan orchestra of Montreal also until 2021-22 and remains principal conductor in Rotterdam until 2017. What is so unusual about the Nelsons situation? I don't quite understand. These days, it's almost just as fast to fly between Nor...

piston

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/3/JPG_400/MI0001/103/MI0001103705.jpg?partner=allrovi.com In one sense, this magnificent CD offers a logical coupling of two Koechlin works. It is perfectly consistent with the story of Docteur Fabricius to match it with an earlier work called Vers la voute étoilée (T...

piston

Justin Trudeau's Liberals won 184 out of 338 seats, leaving 99 seats for the Conservatives, 44 for the New Democratic Party, 10 for the Bloc Quebecois, and 1 for the Green Party. From the electoral map, I see that Harper's party was primarily successful in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well...

piston

Amazing, simply amazing: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41l8XLQmjhL._SX355_.jpg Three volumes of solo flute music, 96 pieces, and it's not repetitive. Composed between February and September 1944, when Koechlin had isolated himself from the war. The three volumes are thematically organized wi...

piston

The Le Pens are doing great in French polls. Trump's popularity in the US largely rests on a similar anti-immigration platform. The German group "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West" draws large crowds in Dresden. That is the current trend: anti-immigration with very palpable xe...

piston

Do try his Lyric for Strings. If it's not Barber, it's the same story as his Adagio for Strings: Walker revised the second movement of his first string quartet for a chamber orchestra. You might also like his first Sonata for violin and piano. He did not keep any symphony from his earlier period; hi...

piston

Hard to be any more specific than to refer to Walker as a modernist who balks at being identified with any school of thought. Let's remember that he has been composing music for seventy years! I'd say that his early music (e.g., the popular Lyric for Strings) sounds to me like Barber's and that he c...

piston

Albany Records has issued no less than 16 CDs featuring American composer George Walker (b. 1922). At first, the label appeared more interested in George Walker the pianist than the composer. But once he won the Pulitzer for his Lilacs for voice and orchestra, in the late nineties, the label truly c...

piston

I tracked down the repertoire for the twenty-one most important American orchestras during the 2014-15 season and, I confess, I was wrong in my criticism of the NYP's "conservative" programming on another thread... :oops: I guess that to sporadically listen to an orchestra's concerts on the radio ca...

piston

I have been listening to several works by Juan Orrego Salas (b.1919) mostly on ytube which primarily covers his "Chilean" period (up to his third symphony, op. 50). He was a student of Copland, at Tanglewood, and of R. Thompson, in Virginia, during the 1950s. With the help of William Schuman, Orrego...

piston

I have listened to Matilde Capuis' works for cello and piano, including five sonatas. At 103 years of age, she could well be the oldest recorded and performed living composer today. Capuis had a long performing career in a pianist/cellist duo and thus devoted much of her composing efforts to that fo...

piston

I forgot the operettas, also very much out of vogue today, and the bulk of opera production too! It's amazing how much the opera repertoire is narrow when compared to the repertoire for orchestral works and chamber music. Delius wrote three operas.

piston

One more point. During their life time, these composers we love were also appreciated for their art songs and their choral music and they wrote a lot of it. It so happens that these two genres are out of vogue in our own life time. Unless you've got Dawn Upshaw championing your music, this sort of w...

piston

He's got a number of melodious works, such as la Calinda, that your listeners would readily respond to. The question is, would you challenge them with more difficult works of his, such as his big, quite loud, Mass of Life? What do radio listeners want? "The best of" this guy and this other guy? Or d...

piston

Looking at the Stanford database on opera (and oratorio) premieres, I selected this country and scanned the entries for the first four to five hundred operas in the USA. A lot of opera composer's names have come and gone, the vast majority of them before 1920. The name of Victor Herbert stands out a...

piston

What would you play if given an hour or two per day of programming on that radio station? What would you consider a wake up call for your listeners?

piston

A 450 million Canadian dollar settlement has been approved in court for the families of the 47 victims.

piston

I certainly want to be fair and, based on John Francis' statements, he does seem qualified as an artistic director. But his responsibilities in San Diego are no less "general," including the all important financial ones, than they were in his two previous NYC positions. If he represented himself as ...

piston

His successor at DNA, Kate Peila, already faced with a dance company on the verge of bankruptcy in 2008, made "herculean" efforts to cut costs and keep it afloat. But the extremely high rent (just under $69,000/month) on the Lower East Side, nearly half of which served to pay city property taxes, ha...

piston

Or Bennett, M.B.A. and M.A. in Arts Administration, is the kind of guy who's good at selling grand visions of international reputation, does not hesitate to double and triple operating budgets, and leaves behind a trail of over-grown bankrupt companies unable to pay their rent... Before joining Goth...

piston

Sorry. It's scheduled to come out on 13 November, for 43 euros or about fifty bucks if the exchange rate is respected: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014E89SE2/ref=s9_simh_gw_p15_d2_i4?pf_rd_m=A11IL2PNWYJU7H&pf_rd_s=desktop-1&pf_rd_r=18ZWG07T8NEQTYXSBXYG&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=577208427&pf_rd_i=de...

piston

Orchestral (2), piano (6), songs (1), choral (1): http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61fAX4TbVqL._SL500_AA300_.jpg The complete piano music was issued a few decades ago. The main interest of this Erato boxset is thus to be found in CDs 1-2 (orchestral) and 9-10 (vocal). Disc: 1 1. Satie : Sonneri...

piston

From a long term perspective, the NYP has been at the cutting edge. Leonard Bernstein certainly wasn't afraid of bringing all kinds of new music to people's attention.

From the short term perspective of New York's financial woes in classical music, it's a different story.

piston

That's not what I've been hearing on NPR's New York Philharmonic's weekly performances this year. Of course, there may be the obligatory gesture toward the "contemporary" piece, here and there. But the programming has been extremely conservative, far more so than the CSO or the BSO. Lots and lots of...

piston

May as well put this note here. I mentioned the Messiah strad earlier because it is considered the most expensive violin of all. The estimated value (there's no auction value for it) is twenty million dollars:

piston

I'm not a violinist either but information on the net puts the "typical" body length of a full size (4/4) violin at 355 mm. See for yourself: http://www.kennedyviolins.com/violin-setup-specifications/ That's also the length of many of the strads and guarneris of the early to mid-18th century that ar...

piston

I haven't accessed it but a major search engine for violins is called Baxter's database for violin and bowmakers. It's available on the net for 99 dollars:
http://www.violindata.com/web401.htm

piston

Three volumes of the ninth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie have been completed, to the word quotité, between 1986 and 2012. But it is a very slow process...

piston

the body length of that violin is 35.5 cm, just like the Vieuxtemps strad (35.7), the Messiah strad (35.5), and the Cannon Guarneri (35.4).

piston

It seems to me that if one is writing about the songs of the sky ( Canticles of the Sky ) its environmental "metabolism" is very slow compared to us humans, and particularly so for urban dwellers. After two or three days of being completely "unplugged" in the wilderness and cut off from any and all ...

piston

Apparently, Strauss and Krauss agreed that:

die Musik kleine Moglichkeit fur eine tanzerische Ausdeutung gibt und sie doch viel zu symphonisch ist.

music is too symphonic with little possibility for dance interpretation.

piston

To Fikrat Amirov's Sevil (1953) in a 1970 film-opera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVxIEMHeK-k While this is not the first Azerbaijani opera, this work pertains to an interesting and highly relevant topic today: the completely male-dominated and oppressed status of Muslim women, beginning at birt...

piston

The difference between the two is that "John," like the near totality of composers, writes anthropocentric music and "John Luther" writes environmental music or, more accurately, he is interested in "sonic geographic." To my knowledge, the only human variables that have entered John Luther Adams' wo...

piston

Whether it is ever possible to record all of Kodaly's choral music work, much of which he never intended for performance and expressly said so, I stand in awe at this man's grasp of what we call today "child development." In fact, both Kodaly and Bartok, in all their greatness, applied themselves to...

piston

I neglected to mention that there are also two Hungaroton labels, Hungaroton and Hungaroton classics, with the latter also offering choral music by the composer.

piston

Anything instrumental and orchestral by Kodaly is easily collected on CDs: orchestral works (2 CDs), chamber music (2 CDs), piano music (2 CDs), organ music (1 CD). The complete edition of his art songs fits on 2 CDs. Combined, his stage works --Hary Janos and The Spinning Room-- amount to 3 CDs. Ch...

piston

No longer in the public domain. :lol: "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" is comin' back into the hands of the heirs of a songwriter who composed it. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City reversed a lower-court judge Thursday and ruled in favor of the heirs of John Frederick Coots. He c...

piston

But it was a really good film score for its time (1934). That old Soviet movie is worth watching to better appreciate the music.

piston

The label Trito, devoted to the music of Spain and "Ibero-America," has done much to spread the music of Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) whose cultural output extends from early piano music in 1933 to his final works in 2001. Mainly known for his Five Black Songs, from the days he did field work amo...

piston

How could I not watch hit?! It's you who don't know half of the background story!

By the way, do you or anyone else here know the origin of the name "The Donald"? It's a pretty hilarious immigrant story.

piston

First thing to remember about Tournemire is that he was a true artistic descendant of Cesar Franck. Also noteworthy is that he composed his eight symphonies in preparation for his master piece, l'Orgue mystique. That is certainly an intriguing creative concept. While some of his symphonic work can s...

piston

From NPR: The Argentine National Symphony, homeless since 1948, the year it was founded by the Peron, has moved into the Centro Cultural Kirchner in Buenos Aires. Instead of investing in a new building, the government opted for the complete renovation of the old Postal Palace: http://media.npr.org/a...

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