Eric S notapenguin's blog: "musicstuffs"

Delaying a bit because I'm fascinated by something and want to hear it (isn't that typical). The "Spanish Mozart" (Juan Arriaga, also see this interesting site) wrote interesting and good music in a very brief lifetime- not Mozart-level but still very good. A symphony, an opera, three string quartets, and - this unknown to me - a dramatic scene "Herminie" (which Berlioz also set, though his is rarely heard, just not quite as rarely!... the Berlioz was performed in the UK in the last few weeks and a friend attended, so the name was in the mind when I saw the opportunity of hearing a broadcast of Arriaga's. So - 15 minutes of Arriaga- which I will tape for future hearing too..., then I get ready. Excuses. Excuses.) Eric

for bandwidth reasons. When the bandwidth 'draw' on my account is 2 megs in 7 days as against 5 megs for the whole month of December, I worry; there's a penalty for too large a use at that site. I will move them to another site I know (not the thrice-accursed Photobucket) soon. Will keep the first of them up for awhile longer. Edit: I looked at my site's rules. Finally found them, which took something. Rates change when total bandwidth for my whole account exceeds a gigabyte (for that month. - 2007-01-14).

Having almost had one of my accounts (not here) hacked a couple'times, I do support the salute policy, but I can't hear the word salute right now without thinking of a piece of music by that title by Charles-Valentin Alkan, a very weird 19th-century composer-pianist. (I haven't heard it yet, I think... I'll check; if it's at our local library I probably have, once..., though I've heard much else by him.) Descriptions of the piece suggest that if anything else it's one of his -less-... normal ones. :) So I hope to hear it sometime. (Though one googled article is dismissive: "We pass over Op. 41, a group of three fantasies, as offering nothing new, as well as Op. 45, the Salut, cendre du pauvre-a paraphrase. " (This is a reprint of a 1924 article by H. H. Bellamann for the Musical Quarterly, accessible in full- online I mean- to people like me with university IDs but not to the general public. But yes, the google search did turn up that excerpt.) Off to have my tea and rest; I know why the cag I wasn't feeling so very well yesterday...

Should have mentioned this a week ago when it was on, since it won't be after tonight (though the piece will be again in different performances, and probably this one again too.) If you have RealPlayer or the browser plugin and would like to hear one of my two or three favorite pieces out of curiosity, before 2am this morning EST, either open this URL in RealPlayer- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio3/throughnight_tue.rpm or this URL in your browser- http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/throughthenight/pip/sc6xz/ (and click the "Listen to this episode for up to 7 days after broadcast" link.) It's the Stenhammar quartet (his fourth of six, written around 1904), beginning about 37 minutes (maybe 35, with introduction by the announcer) into the 6-hour night program and lasting - in this performance - about 35 minutes. Dedicatee of the work was Stenhammar's friend Jean Sibelius, who later dedicated to Stenhammar his own 6th symphony, a work with a few similar qualities... (I started writing a description of it here years ago, and never finished. The 3rd quartet is another of those favorites, and it's also described on that page.) I have one commercial recording (there have been a few :) ) of both works, and a few taped broadcasts of each (likewise), one of them (of the 3rd quartet, not the 4th) by the Borodin Quartet, a reasonably well-known group of players (their 2nd "incarnation", I think, not the original- it's a wonderful performance, anyway, better than the commercially released one I have). I obsess *shrug*... Off to make tea and lie down. Great piece, I hope you have a chance to catch it.

Quick note a propos Frank Bridge

Morning on 3 - a program on BBC Radio 3 - this morning - had Nicholas Cleobury's recording (w/Britten Sinfonia) of Frank Bridge's brief tone-poem There Grows a Willow aslant a Brook. When I first heard that piece I didn't recognize the line from Hamlet*, but then I hadn't read Hamlet yet and didn't read the notes to the recording carefully, either. Between today and a week from the broadcast (so, January 6 EST or so) you can hear it, and I recommend the piece (it's been awhile since I've last heard it, and it's quite good, like so much of this unusual early 20th-century British composer's music.) (Teacher of Benjamin Britten and very highly-regarded by him, so fitting that the Britten Sinfonia should be playing... anyway, recommended.) If you have RealPlayer (set to

rtsp://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio3/morningon3_sun.rpm )

or go to

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/morningon3/pip/ozr4q/

and click a link near the top to launch a RealPlayer plugin, if you have that.) *It's the opening line to the announcement of Ophelia's death- though I gather I may be misunderstanding that...

Listened to Svetlanov's 1991 recording of this work - Nikolai Myaskovsky's sixth symphony in E♭ minor, opus 23, from around 1922 - which (the recording) was broadcast on a syndicated program out of Chicago (Henry Fogel's Collector's Corner) awhile back and released first on Russian Disc, then on Olympia (a now defunct British label). A description of the work and its history can be found here, and a review of Svetlanov's recording here (OCD 736 - Olympia Compact Disc, not Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder). One of the more often recorded works by this less known 20th-century Polish-born, Russian-trained, Soviet composer - I count five recordings:

• Kirill Kondrashin's,
• Robert Stankovsky's (which I have, and will talk about),
• Veronica Dudarova (she did well by other works of this composer but I haven't heard this one...),
• this one! and
• Neeme Järvi's, the most recent one.

(See also a comparative review here!)

This is Myaskovsky's only symphony to use voices, with a brief choral part in the finale, and Svetlanov's recording omits the chorus entirely (I believe that's actually an option, but only taken by his recording so far. The part can be sung in Latin or in Russian, the poem is "As the soul leaves the body".) Stankovsky's uses Latin. I gather the others use Russian.

So...

I wrote a runthrough of the symphonies and other works by this composer that I knew, years ago (gyah, when was that?... 1994 or so that I finished the first draft I think.) - adding to it occasionally and for awhile as I encountered scores in libraries and recordings in stores. (Since Downes' recording of symphonies 5 and 9 - very, very recommendable, and one I definitely had bought before writing the sections on those works - came out around 1994, I'm guessing I wrote those parts around 1994 or a bit later, anyway. Contrary to what Amazon's contributor may say, while they're a bit brassy, especially the end of the 9th, the performers are not "the BBC Philharmonic Brass" by themselves!)

So to the point of my writing all this: with Stankovsky on Marco Polo- a label I often favor and often patronize in the business, not the other, sense :), the sixth symphony seemed generic, the major-mode finale more inevitable because the minor-mode first two movements seemed more play-acting, more gestural, less felt!... than in many another work by the composer (the third symphony with its painful funeral march close, the first and last of the string quartets, the second of his cello sonatas, just for examples...) Svetlanov makes me realize why "the audience wept" at the premiere of this symphony, and so while he does omit the chorus - whose entry, with themes heard earlier, at a climactic moment toward the end, while brief is important- there's more than enough reason to regret that this recording has left the market, anyway...

(I do hope to hear Järvi's, described as the one recording now available that really is "in the running" against it... and especially because it is available, and Svetlanov's now isn't, though a company Regis is reissuing some of Olympia's stock, so it might be again? They've already reissued some Myaskovsky piano CDs played by Murray McLachlan, which I have in their "original incarnation" and recommend.)

I try not to recommend individual broadcasts - especially ones I haven't finished listening to :) - in my blog (occasionally I have in my MySpace blog) - but there's a live broadcast of a very favorite piece of mine, the first of Sergei Prokofiev's two string quartets, on BBC Radio 3. It was broadcast on Tuesday 12/19 and will be in their archives until 12/26, can be accessed using the "Listen Again" menu if you have the Realplayer plugin or application (link rtsp://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio3/lunchtimeconcerts_tue.rpm ). I have two commercial recordings of this piece and have heard others. Performance by the Psophos Quartet at Bridgewater Hall. (It was my favorite piece until "supplanted" by a few others, but is still up there ;) )

(Not really begun last week- began using LilyPond last year; but this particular project- using it to transcribe this piece- yes, began it a week or so ago.) The 6th symphony (written in 1969) of Benjamin Frankel was broadcast over the BBC in March of that year (New Philharmonia/Denis Vaughan- this was the premiere performance, and was preceded by a talk given by the composer) and published by Chester Novello Co. of London. The score is a photocopy of the manuscript, which to my mind discourages much further performance. I have a recording made by the German label cpo a few years back, I like the piece, I want to encourage this as much as the quality of the work will allow. The computer program LilyPond (www.lilypond.org) is free, and designed to specialize in creating very good, typeset-quality music. I've been using an early version for a year- the most recent version I can use. (I'm going to purchase and install a more recent version of my computer's operating system soon. More on that in another post anon. With that, I can install a more recent version.) The third movement, Adagio, twenty-three pages of orchestral score, is the object of my present converting endeavor *g*. If I do a good job on that, the remaining four movements (115 pages in all) are next. Only about five pages done so far, though, and not even really done.

These are books about music I've read and re-read in the last year, for one or another reason. Alan Walker- Franz Liszt. Volume 2- the Weimar Years: 1848-1861. The second volume (bought cheap *g*) of a major three-volume biography of a major 19th-century composer, taking in his music, his life, his students, his musical and literary contemporaries, his times. Apparently well-researched; there are some points on which the author had, or claims to have had, access to currently otherwise-inaccessible sources - on the question of the success or failure of Liszt's mistress, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein's annulment, and exactly what happened when she went to plead her case in Rome, say - and so, until those sources are opened up to more people, his research on those subjects isn't verifiable. Alfred Einstein (distant cousin to Albert, apparently, yes)- Mozart: his Character, his Work. Not so much a biography, this time- assumes one knows the basic biographical facts about Wolfgang- but goes through the music as it was known ca 1947 (when the first version of the book came out), shows developments within the music of a composer whose music was (still is??) considered too often as basically unchanging from his earliest to his last pieces, also tries for an overview of the musical situation of the period and characterizes Mozart well, I think, as a "revolutionary conservative"- with no intention to break the bounds of the traditions he had, but making the most of them and putting everything he had to the most musical of uses. Some very perceptive comments on individual works, too... Also about Mozart: (1948, revised 1958, republished by Dover Publications in 1962) "Mozart and his Piano Concertos" by Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone. When first written, there were many fewer recordings of the piano concertos (Mozart's best works, on the whole, that don't use the human voice, in my opinion) than there are now, and many fewer performances generally (now a season of the New York Philharmonic or in another large city will probably include at least one, and not necessarily the 20th or 26th, which were the only ones known at one point, either. Actually, on a quick websearch, I see that the 10th concerto- for 2 pianos and orchestra- was performed just a month or so ago in New York, and the 12th was played back in May in rehearsal if not in concert, along with some Hindemith... of course, this is the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, and more performances than usual is not unexpected.) Anyhow, Girdlestone's book I recommend for many of the same reasons as Einstein's- perceptive comments on the concertos, linking them with other works in the composer's output, thoughts about myths that have grown up about individual work (the 18th concerto has been called the Paradis concerto because of a line in one of Leopold Mozart's - Mozart's father's- letters, but there may not be good evidence just what concerto was referred to, nor that the pianist did take the concerto to Paris as Leopold wrote) ... Two collections by Arnold Schoenberg also, but they can wait until another blog really...

Not the software, the piece of music (written in 1924 by the Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius, and first heard by me back when I was in college- probably 1988 or so :) on a tape together with his 4th symphony...) Placeholder for now, (cheating, that, but I need to find something and go to bed. And I did want to point out that there's a good article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_%28Sibelius%29 Not complete, but what is there, is very well-done... not by me :) ) Eric