Classical Convert

Thoughts From Last Nights Concert

Last night, total lunar eclipse night 2008, at a concert by the Alban Berg quartet:

Pre-concert: Are these chairs made from wood or cunningly crafted plastic? They’re too precisely curved to be wood I think but.. OW. The lamps under the soffit of the armrest are a) hot and b) grounded, and all the dry air has shoved far too much static on me for that not to hurt in two different ways at once. Oh, here we go…

During Haydn Op. 77 No. 1: Sonata form, you cheeky devil, you sonofagun – I can hear you the first time through now! You’re marchy today, too. I just saw you repeat the exposition, and now look at you all developing. 2nd movement: your start brings to mind in me Shostakovich SQ 13, and the rest of you is exceptionally lovely, I like your rising ripples. Huh, rising ripples sounds surprisingly filthy. The rest of you is sturdy and wonderful to watch as everything gets thrown back and forth but, sorry Haydn, you just didn’t quite do it for me this time.

Berg Op. 3: Uh-oh, 2nd Viennese school, my classical music mostly nemesis, but… oooo… this stuff sounds rather different when it’s being performed live, it’s suddenly far more appealing, why is that? I wonder if it’s because it’s more shocking to see that these are actual people, playing actual music, on instruments of all things! It’s not some kind of electronic device whirring and chirping away and generating all those odd sounds. It’s wood and guts. You lose that through a CD, don’t you? You almost forget that once upon a time, someone actually played the stuff you are listening to. The live effect is particularly overpowering during the really dramatic sections. Watching those players batter their instruments has an intensity that recordings just cannot match.

Beethoven Op. 132: I know you. You’re the string quartet that starts out like the Grosse Fugue. Then you have that bit in your first movement which sounds like Schubert’s Trout. The third movement is the really good one, this is spiritual stuff, and deliberately so. It’s amazing during a movement like this to watch the faces of those watching the performers. Us, the audience. So many heads turned upward and sideways and all heavy with contemplation and concentration. Eyes lightly lidded but clearly alive, active below. The fifth movement is almost a song, lyrical but certainly not saccharine. Stubborn. Resilient. And the ending kicks about ten kinds of arse.

Coda: Huh. the moon’s all red.

Tags: alban berg quartet, beethoven, berg, classical music, concert, cornell, haydn, review, string quartet

Haydn is a slow infiltration (and how to tell him apart from Mozart)

Some pieces are puppies, after a glance they are hugging the legs of my listening habits and chewing away at my head when it’s supposed to be sleeping. Other pieces hover around at the periphery, waiting for their chance to unexpectedly leap in: a warm bath that you unexpectedly find has crinkled your fingers. Hmmm. The metaphors aren’t exactly on par tonight, are they? Puppies… bathwater… Perhaps if I deliberately try to find horrible illustrations, fantastic ones will magically manifest themselves all over the screen. But don’t count on it.

So why the bathwater allusion? Well, Haydn has been doing that recently. Franz Joseph is such a cheeky, sneaky fellow. It’s mostly the fault of the “Military” symphony, which keeps getting played because of its prime placement at the start of a CD that has lodged itself in the stereo. As mp3s dominate the sonic surroundings in my milieu, the poor old compact disc player doesn’t get much love, and thus doesn’t get its innards swapped out very frequently. This means the Military is getting a lot of playtime, a large amount of background exposure, when play gets pushed to fill in the silence. Recently, however, it’s far exceeding its role as background and leaping right into the foreground.

I’m liking Haydn more and more. As I mentioned previously one of my all-time ultimate tip-top life goals is to be able to reliably distinguish Mozart from Haydn. That last time Miss M. gave me a few hints for separating them (can you imagine it being in an opera? Probably Mozart) and I just explored a link my Dad emailed me to a Slate article centering on the differences in style between the two. It’s got audio comparisons of each of the points they illustrate and everything. Briefly their ideas are 1) Haydn is more rustic than Mozart 2) where Haydn is heartily funny, Mozart is craftily witty 3) Mozart is generally more ambiguous.

Maybe in a month or so I’ll be a bit more qualified to cast my own differentiation opinions.

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.