Melody Unresolvement
You know what is absolutely beautiful? (Aside from my hot bod?) Listening to a poor sound quality YouTubey type recording, and then immediately listening to the same piece in high quality. The first few bars are like the heavens expanding and exploding over shafts of sunlight, or stepping from a shivering, poorly heated room into a shower shimmering with steam. It’s freakin’ delicious.
The story behind this particular revelation is wrought out of blood and tears and toil. You see, earlier today I was simply GASPING and/or GAGGING to hear one particular piece of music. My old true love: Shostakovich’s 2nd Cello Concerto, Op. 126.
But I was at work, where only a few little escaped scraps of music live. “Still” (I thought naively, pacing the corridors and byways of the basement back to my office) “I MUST have a copy of that on my work computer — it’s always on my MP3 player. It must have been copied over at least once”. Oh foolish Ben, whiling the way back whistling the melody from movement one, plonking down on the blue spinny chair with the broken pneumatic cylinder. Ennhh wrong. It wasn’t bloody there.
If only I had found these excellent videos of Rostropovich performing the piece:
Mvt 1:
Mvt 2:
Mvt 3:
They don’t have the best sound quality, and the 1st and 3rd movements have tragically early deaths. But Rostropovich is gold. His performance of the lyrical bit (6:00-7:40) in the 3rd movement is particularly devastating. I love how he’s got this kind of coarseness, as if each of the notes is just about to fall off of it’s proper tonal place.
After listening to that I put on a CD performance of him performing the same piece. Wow. Clarity like nuts.
But… something is missing without being able to see him play.
By the way, does anyone know if that could possibly be the premiere performance of the piece?
Bloody Treadmilling
There was a dramatic face-off between me and the Russian imperial guard in the gym today. It ended with me turning the treadmill speed down to 4mph and holding down the play button on my mp3 player, which rather unintuitively turns the thing off:
That’s the spark igniting the battle.
Ordinarily classical music kinda sucks to listen to while exercising, and so I stuff my mp3 player full to the brim with audio-books. That movement rocks for working out to, though, even if it does put me in a close to bawling kinda state. It’s a musical reenactment of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, from the 2nd movemnt of Shosty’s 11th symphony.
Today it totally took my mind away from the running, as I was scheming out a very dramatic, and cinematic, and award winning-scene from a movie, with this movement as the soundtrack. Someone needs to CGI it up.
It’s a spectacular soundtrack to a non-existent film. That huge, slow crescendo breaking into dissonant full-orchestra machine-gun fire… oooo. Chills every time.
Unfortunately the YouTube sound quality leaves a lot to be desired; even more than usual. This is one of those pieces that deserve to be blasted at high fidelity through a decent pair of speakers, with the volume cranked way up.
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:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
And here is the same section performed by the sextet:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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.
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.)
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:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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.