Classical Convert

Beet Farming

I’ve been craving, CRAVING, the Liszt piano orchestrations (isn’t that backward? De-orchestration?).  Unfortunately they were left standing, wailing at the altar of my other computer: the old, crummy, dusty leviathan of a desktop hiding in the undertable dust. It’s a scary proposition to boot that baby up. I’d have to grease the wormgears and prime the pumps and lower the cooling rods, and that’s too tiring after another 11-hour workday (boo-hoo me).

So instead I redownloaded them off of eMusic, which (I bloody hope) you get to do for free. Or at least, I downloaded the one that was really rattling the bars of it’s cage: number 6. Despite the classical music hivemind selecting 5 and 9 as THE SYMPHONIES, I prefer 6 and 7. Especially the first movement of 6. The introductory bars are so… well… what’s it like? It’s like the satisfaction you feel when given a beautifully wrapped parcel, or spectacularly presented desert. It’s the anticipatory x-factor. The mouth whetting.

After satisfying THAT von-Beethoveney urge, I moved over to the Appassionata, which also has a stupendously awesome first movement. That trill, man, it rocks. It sounds so stereotypically classical and prissy, and then those plundering, pounding octaves blast the hell out of it. I love the way Arrau plays it, doing the trill in a really precise, delicate, prompt fashion. It’s almost — not quite — sarcastic.

And musical sarcasm is the quickest way into my heart. And/or pants.

Tags: beethoven, classical music, liszt, symphony

A Distributed Youtube Orchestra

The almighty and benevolent gods of youtube are putting together an orchestra. You sign up, download the score, and record a performance of your part. Then the LSO mix together all the best ones and make some kind of funky uber-video from the submissions. However, that’s kind of just a promo for the main event. The really cool kids get sent to  Carnegie Hall to perform “The Internet Symphony” (eugh) live under Michael Tilson Thomas.

I can’t decide if this is completely awesome or just a really elaborate way of arranging a regular audition. I think it’ll actually be more interesting to see how the video turns out than the live performance. That’s the part which is technologically new.

Of course, now I’ll probably find out that like fifty avant-garde composers already did this.

Main site here, PDF details here.

Tags: symphony, youtube

Free Symphonies!

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (or the RCO to their cool friends) are offering 10 free symphonies to download in honor of their 120th birthday. They are adding a new one each day until the 24th of October. Here’s the list:

Franz Schubert – Symphony no. 8 ‘Unfinished’ (15-10-08)
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony no. 2 (16-10-08)
Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony no. 4 ‘Italian’ (17-10-08)
César Franck – Symphony in D minor (18-10-08)
Gustav Mahler – Symphony no. 1 (19-10-08)
Antonin Dvorák – Symphony no. 8 (20-10-08)
Camille Saint-Saëns – Symphony no. 3 ‘Organ’ (21-10-08)
Jean Sibelius – Symphony no. 2 (22-10-08)
Anton Bruckner – Symphony no. 8 23-10-08
Johannes Brahms – Symphony no. 2 (24-10-08)

You can download them here.

Tags: concertgebouw, free music, mp3, symphony

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:

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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