Varying
Oh yeah. Forgot to stick this in the very exciting and meaningful and touching discussion about acquired tastes yesterday… the ROCOCO VARIATIONS. Mister Tchaikovsky. Here’s the youtubey experience for you crazy kids who can’t concentrate without some audio/visual accessories thrust in front of their grinning face:
Part two:
Aaaaaaand part three:
T’sky (c’mon, his name doesn’t abbreviate well, give me some slack) is one of the ultra-famous composers who I don’t mesh with so well. If he was in my class at school I’d probably hang out with him, but when it was just us, without anyone else, it’d be hard to make conversation. I can see why people might get really into his music — and there are some pieces I really like: certain movements of the symphonies, Marche Slave, etc. — BUT in general, ennnnh…. he doesn’t really do it for me.
BUT (again), recently the rococo variations have slipped and slided and skidded into the front bit of my perception. The first time I heard the piece properly (as in, not as an incidental piece on a CD which got glossed over as background music) was at the ROM in Toronto with G, when we got given free tickets to an unexpected concert on a Friday night. There were kids crying and people walking around the museum about 50 feet away, but that performance sowed the seed of future recognition.
You know how sometimes there is particular mote which catches your eye in a piece? A snippet of melody, or a key modulation, or weird orchestral texture — something small which ends up being the spoon on which the rest of the piece gets fed to you? Well with the Rococo variations it’s the orchestral bit at the end of the variation. Or is it? I can’t tell if it is the end or the beginning (but then, I’m fairly musically retarded) and that sort of adds to the mystique…
It’s the bit between 2:35 and 2:50 in the first video above. Particularly the last three seconds. It rocks!!!
Getting Smutty
SmuttyNOSED that is! Ba-dum tssch. It’s the guy over there on the left, one of these. This is basically my bestest, most favorite brand of beer, and there is one sitting next to me right now. Unfortunately it’s now a bit empty — about 99% empty, and I’m not touching the lukewarm dregs. Back in the glory days though, with knights and such, about fifty minutes ago, it was full.
It’s hoppy as hell. It drips IBUs like a wet cat.
Here I am tonight enjoying two acquired tastes. Hoppy beer and classical music. For the first unperformance of the evening I listened to that old standby, Shosty’s CC#2. It’s one of my oldest and deepest favorites, one which will ALWAYS shove a warm dagger directly between my cerebral hemispheres. SLICE, goes the first morose saw across the cello; ignore everything else but this.
Here is Rostropovich playing the first movement. Well sort of. The video cuts off right in the middle of the big climax, and there is no part 2 for the first movement. Aggggh! Well, what you do get is frickin’ sweet. He’s got this kinda coarse, throaty, push-it-to-the-last-millisecond way with his playing. It’s sexy stuff:
An old favorite – Saint Saens PC4
Here is one of my oldest favorites: the stunning two-movement piano concerto #4 by Saint Saens, with Stephen Hough performing. Protip: it gets (a bit) louder after the first ten seconds or so:
Part 1 (beginning of 1st movement):
Part 2 (end of first movement, beginning of second):
Part 3 (end of 2nd movement):
Discovering the Sunday Composer
Last night I heard a Borodin piece for the first time. He’s one of these guys whose music didn’t manage to weave its way into the general-purpose classical music hivemind. That is, if you haven’t deliberately tried to hear his music you probably haven’t heard it at all. Or at least that’s my extrapolation from the statistically significant pool of me.
Here’s the last movement from the 1st string quartet:
I like it. It’s not sappily romantic, and he’s got some good Russian vigor going on.
Plus, it turns out Borodin’s day job was being a scientist — how can I possibly not like him after finding that out?
Pre-Capped Edges
My seat is warm. My newly revived, re-batteried laptop radiated into it like a huddled puppy. Visualizations are falling and firing all over the front of my monitor, over there on the desk.
My exam is almost over. Almost. I need to shore up some simulations of DNA getting stretched, and rescale some graphs, and describe everything in a few thousand words… but the bulk of everything has happened already. I don’t miss the three weeks of 11 hour days.
It is nice in lab at night though. We work in a large basement. A very large basement. At the beginning of the year we irregularly get undergraduates wandering lost into the lab, begging for directions to the exit. During the not-seeable daylight there are gallons of physicists filtering around the corners and doorways and pipe-chases. After 8pm the numbers drop off. I can walk down the long corridor while pretending to draw in the far wall with my thoughts, without anybody interrupting the line of sight.
Late, alone in the lab I’ve been cranking out mad tunes:
Well, not Glenn Gould… but that Liszt transcription of Beethoven 6. I used to not like the 4th movement as much as the 1st and 3rd, and now its starting to become my favorite. Well, second favorite. Those first few notes still reign supreme.