Classical Convert

Rearranged

Well, we’re starting to get back into music again over here, despite having had a bit of a down few weeks. Sometimes your brain needs a break — everything’s all cyclical, right? A musical rediscovery which is right now dominating the highly in demand speaker-time is this guy:

Which contains, beyond the very sexy cover photo, the 15th symphony of Shostakovich arranged for six musicians, three of whom are percussionists. Kick arse. Here’s an example from the cheerfully sly third movement, first a Haitink conducted rendition of the orchestral version:

And here is the same section performed by the sextet:

They particularly seem to relish those impudent little glissandi at the end.

I love hearing pieces arranged for completely different instruments: aside from letting you distinguish all kinds of things that are either masked or you are accustomed to in the original versions, there is something purely delightful about listening to a familiar piece played in an unfamiliar way. Although, you purists out there might disagree…

You can buy the CD online over at DG, if you’re interested.

Tags: classical music, shostakovich

The Goldberg Variations, Right Up Close and Personal

We just arrived back from a jaunt down to the city. The main attraction was my girlfriend’s brother’s kickarse piano recital including a Haydn sonata (which I thought had surprising amounts of dissonance, but maybe I’m just getting accustomed to that older stuff) a Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue, and the Mendelssohn Variations Sérieuses.

The main meat of the performance was the Goldberg Variations. This is one of those must-love/must-know-really-well pieces for all serious classical music people. But I don’t know it. Well, I’ve maybe heard it through once before when a friend lent me his Glenn Gould CD, but that’s about it. In general I think theme and variations form is awesome (it can beat up rondo form any day of the week), but it’s often well hard the first times through to put it together. In order to actually hear the variations you kind of need to know the unvaried theme enough to hum it (and mentally fill in the harmonics), or you tend to lose track of things in the variations.

This was definitely in effect yesterday. It wasn’t aided at all by the descriptions of the variations, which are not very descriptive. Take a peak over the extensive list of them on wikipedia. Instead of (relatively) easy to pick up on describers like “presto” they are instead mostly labeled with either “a 1 Clav” or “a 2 Clav”. This only served to confuse me more, as I knew enough score-Italian to suspect that Clav means keyboard. Are some of the variations meant to be played on two pianos?

Well, it turns out that is actually sort of correct, but in this case it’s 2 “manuals” on a harpsichord which as my limited understanding of harpsichord design tells me are multiple keyboards on the same instrument. This means that your hands are less likely to collide. However, on a piano you of course don’t have this luxury and it becomes extra-hard to perform, but he did a totally awesome job of it.

The other descriptive element which became a lot more descriptive after the fact are the labels Canone alla Seconda, alla Terza, etc. which I did manage to deduce were numbers, but did not manage to deduce meant that these were variations based on the major second interval, the interval of a third, and so on. In fact they are specifically in the form of a Canon, which is a form in which there is leading melody that gets followed by various imitating melodies.

If I had known all that I might have had a chance at spotting them as they came at me, but as it was I just basked in the music. Next time I shall be better mentally equipped to parse them all out. The concert still rocked though, despite my ignorance. He is truly an amazing pianist.

(Oh, by the way, if anyone is looking for parking recommendations to get into Manhattan with minimum fuss I can heartily recommend taking the ferry from Port Imperial at Weehawken. It’s $10 a day to park, and there are ferries to Midtown minimally every 20 minutes which take only about 5 minutes to cross. Then there are free buses when you get to 38th street.)

Tags: bach, goldberg variations, piano recital

What I’ve Been Listening to Lately: Shostakovich 14

One of the relatively few remaining late Shosty pieces which I had not yet up to this point had much exposure to is the 14th symphony. The reason for the lack of exposure was mostly because I had been put off by the operatic nature of it, which even still feels annoying and grandiose at times. The thing is, when I start to like pieces involving voice they seem to have become favorites (at least with Shostakovich: the Alex Blok and Marina Tsvetaeva poems, and the 13th symphony) but there is a rather large hurdle to getting into them still. (Resist… dorky analogy… ahh screw it: the activation energy is high even though the free energy change is large and negative. Euugh.)

For everyone else who hasn’t been exposed to it, it’s less of a symphony and more of a song cycle. It contains the setting to music of 11 poems all of which are rather not cheerily about death. Yes, classic depressed, sparsely orchestrated, uncertainly tonal late Shostakovich. Nice. It veers between moping, melancholy strings and astringent clanging chromaticism. Confusingly there are three different authorized versions of the piece, one in Russian, one in German, and one in the original languages (almost… “Loreley” is still in German) of the poems.

In fact, the high point of the cycle/symphony so far is Lorelei (or Loreley), which I incidentally hated at first. Here’s one of the best bits:

I’ll write about this movement a bit more in a few days probably, but at this point the heroine, Lorelei, is throwing herself off a cliff into the Rhine — and not too surprisingly this is the big climax of the song. I love how the frantic strings bubblingly warp into the tolling of the bell. Even better is the harmonization of voice and strings in the eerie section that follows, it’s smudged and not quite resolving, kind of creepily innocent. I know negative amounts of stuff about vocal techniques, but whatever the voice equivalent of glissando (sliding between notes) is sounds fantastic (quite literally) here.

Tags: classical music, lorelei, shostakovich, symphony

An Effective Meme

via Musical Perceptions and Chandler Branch there is a list of alternative Mozart Effects doing the rounds. The original list contains tidbits such as:

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams - at great length and volume that he’s dying.

And via comments and editing at musical perceptions we have in addition:

RZEWSKI EFFECT: the child tells the teacher that s/he is a victim of capitalist society in 36 different ways.

BACH EFFECT: Child weaves multiple sentences into an eloquent whole that takes ages to be properly understood.

So I am going to submit:

SHOSTAKOVICH EFFECT: Child appears to work diligently, but on careful examination you find his work mostly consists of disguised remarks about how much he hates you.

Anyone else fancy a go?

Tags: classical music, joke, mozart effect, shostakovich

Present-ed Music

Two CDs received by moi, ich, ik, me over the brief but very pleasant (and already being missed) Christmas excursion to Maine are:

Which got stuck on my ultra-selective Amazon public wishlist so it must be something that was particularly attention grabbing when it got all aural up in my ears. It hasn’t had any listening time yet due to not being available on the CDDB — the database which mp3 ripping software uses to work out the names of tracks (which, incidentally is how the Hatto scandal was detected). I’m extra lazy when not officially at work, so couldn’t be bothered to spend the five minutes required to type in the track names. The Naxos info for this recording is here.
The other CD I got is (was?):

This was on the hitlist due to: 1) me wanting to own every available Shostakovich opus, but also 1++) me especially being fond of the late (post about Op. 100) pieces. Until now these had been unfamiliar. After a couple of listens all of these pieces sound WONDERFUL. The main event, Op. 119, is a 30 minute cantata-ey type piece in the style of his symphony No. 13. Very, very similar, in fact - but since I flippin’ love Op. 113 that’s not necessarily a negative thing at all. Op. 131 “October” is a vibrant little nationalistic number commemorating one of the revolutions, it reminds me of the driving 2nd movement of the 11th symphony. The 3rd piece on the CD, op. 42 ‘Five Fragments” are a set of five precursors to the desk-drawered and schizophrenic 4th symphony. Some of the fragments survived the transition basically intact, others I can’t place so well. All are interesting, but short. The Naxos CD info is here.

More thoughts as they get processed! Anyone else get anything interesting for xmas?