Classical Convert

Back from Toronto, with 2 new CDs

Well, Toronto was lots of fun even if I consistently and often felt pangs of I-should-be-in-the-lab type guilt. It also takes a lot longer to get across the border than I remember previously, and the QEW (I’ll refer to it as the Queen-E next time, thanks ever so much wikipedia) was completely, utterly, jam-packed up full of Canadians in their cars on Friday evening. I forget what gridlock is like, living out here in the middle of nowhere.

Lying in wait for me upon my return were two previously ordered CDs - neither of which I have had much of a chance to listen to yet. I have:

Which completes my set of Nielsen symphonies (plus other opus goodies). After listening to everything through approximately once, my first impressions are that these symphonies sound a little more traditional - and more romantic - then the last three. In places some of it almost sounded like Tchaikovsky. I’ll probably completely change my mind after a bit more listening, though.

I also got this copy of the 12 London symphonies of Haydn. As I’ve been humming the ubiquitous second movement of the “Surprise” for about a year, and don’t actually own any Haydn (other then this brand spanking new CD) I thought it was about time to do some Franz Joseph purchasing. I have this wild dream where one day I will be able to distinguish Haydn from Mozart.

Off to Ont.

I’m gonna be in Toronto this weekend, so no updates for a couple of days. Don’t be too inconsolable…

A Bunch of Classical Articles

Good god, each time again I type “classical”, the worse it gets. I’m not gonna go all complainy over the lack of satisfactory replacements for the c-word this time, though. It never gets anywhere productive, and no-one knows what the heck I’m chatting about if I try call it something which isn’t…. shudder …classical.

Enough milling around on the keyboard. The point to this little post was that last Friday the Guardian film and arts section did an extra-special issue on classical music. Unfortunately, I’m completely incapable of finding a link to, like, a master index or something similar such. You’ll just have to look at the links at bottom of this article which discusses (and berates) the ubiquitous and insidious (and other GRE words ending in ous) use of classical and classical influenced music in films. It’s mostly amusing, and lessly just a tad pretentious, but the most important thing is the writer dislikes Rachmaninoff as much as I do, so gets about 20 thumbs up.

A sampling from the section where he describes in films certain pieces appear :

Anything by Antonio Vivaldi

The stuffed shirts are preening, the plutocrats are beaming, the gentry are celebrating, the society matrons are congratulating themselves on yet another job well done. High time for Adam Sandler to fart into somebody’s face, doncha think?

Nielsen Out-Schnittkeing Schnittke

As part of my exciting foray into the compositional world of Nielsen (who is sneaking his way progressively further up my list of favorites every day) I’ve been listening a lot to his symphony No. 6, within which is a remarkably Schnittke-esque, in-your-face blurring of musical styles (or polystylism, as the cool kids call it.) Blurring probably isn’t such a hot description of it actually, it’s more like a smack in the face.

This is the kind of thing Schnittke does (taken from the second movement of his viola concerto):

And here is the section of Nielsen’s 6th symphony:

The Nielsen is even more surprising, in a way, because of the (comparably) reasonably normal tonality preceding the outbursts. It really jumps out at you. With Schnittke you’re always three-quarters expecting (Get it? It’s like half-expecting, but more so) something like that to happen. The Nielsen is one of the most sonically violent passages I know of from that time period - it was written in 1924/1925. I really like it. I love pieces which play off tonal order, versus disorder.

Underrated masterpieces

Browsing around for I can’t exactly remember what the other day, I restumbled across this list of underrated masterpieces. It’s a collection of relatively non-mainstream classical music recommendations, both for well known and pretty much totally unknown composers. I love reading people’s opinions of the different composers, and contrasting that to how my personal tastes are distributed. I also love discovering previously unexplored avenues of the musical map. (I can’t tell if that metaphor sounds trite right now or not. Too much biochemistry dangling itself over my eyes…)