My Latest Listening Material
May 14th, 2007 Posted in beethoven, classical music, shostakovich
In the last week or so I’ve been particularly listening to/discovering:
- Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 - The next installment in my apparently accidental quest to work backwards through Beethoven’s solo piano repertoire. It’s similar to number 32, sorta. There are two relatively quick and dramatic initial movements followed by a paced, more gentle set of variations for the finale. I love the contrast between the end of the flowing, watery first and start of the Baroque-ish second.
- Shostakovich, Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 – I keep wanting to get into this, since (as regular readers know) in general I love Dimitri’s late stuff, especially the Alexander Blok and Marina Tsvetaeva songs. This has so far seemed more, errr, impenetrable. More strident. An additional barrier is that I have the Haitink version, in which the texts are sung in their original languages (or German) and I can’t stand the Herz/Schmerz rhyme in “Loreley”. It reminds me of insipid pop rhymes like: ‘my heart wants to fly/so high in the sky‘. Yeah yeah, I know I’m being ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. I think I’ll listen to Rostropovich or Jansons instead.
- Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Op. 123 – My first impression of this is: Wow, this is gonna take freakin’ ages to understand. It somehow doesn’t sound very… Beethoveny? Maybe that’s just because it’s full of people singing, which up to this point I completely didn’t associate with Ludwig. The “Kyrie” has been in my head all day.
- Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4, Op. 43 – Ahhh… the classic abandoned at the last minute fourth. It’s probably a good thing he came out with the 5th instead of this, or Stalin would have been royally pissed off. It wanders all over the place, jumping from one mood to another (Mahleresque, I think is how it gets described) and has loads of sonic weirdness and dissonance, and the first example of his tick-tocking percussion finish (used again in the 2nd Cello Concerto and 15th Symphony). I love the grating dissonances in the horns, which sound like bizarre trills, and the flitting between playful melodies and dramatic climaxes in the humongous final movement (27 minutes for Rostropovich, who I prefer to Haitink for this one).
I wonder which of these will morph into favorites…
