On Wednesday night at 8 (as they say, check your local listings), Great Performances on PBS will feature Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in their opening night concert, taped on October 8 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. The program includes a new piece by John Adams, City Noir, and Mahler's First Symphony.
I have already spoken with a number of people who were in the Los Angeles audience that night, and in the wake of their overwhelming enthusiasm I'd say, don't miss it.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
October 19, 2009
From Bruce Hodges: This week’s TV tip
June 26, 2009
Thursday’s tragic death of a great musician
On Thursday, one of the great musicians of our time died. No, I am not thinking of Michael Jackson.
I am thinking of the amazing Ali Akbar Khan, who I was fortunate enough to see many, many times, who was named as a “national treasure” by the Indian government. He was a great classical North Indian composer and performer. He was the leading virtuoso of the lutelike sarod, and he often performed together with his brother Ravi Shankar.
Here is a brief obituary.
Here are links to some albums:
Pre-Dawn to Sunrise Ragas (1967)
Morning and Evening Ragas (1955)
The Emperor of Sarod, vol 1 (1970)
This is a man who touched my soul and intellect through his music. I am sorry he is gone, but happy that we have such a rich legacy of memories and recordings.
Correction: Khan died Thursday – last week (June 18)
June 14, 2009
Recreating those quaint days of the last decade
The New York Times reports on a shocking anachronism – a CD store:
Boston Early Music Festival: As in Days of Yore, CDs in a Store
BOSTON — At an early-music festival, you expect to see antique instruments: pegless cellos, gambas with ornate scrolls, wooden recorders and tranverse flutes of every size, and perhaps an occasional shawm, rebec or vielle. And you expect to see re-creations of ensembles that composers no longer write for (although a few composers seem to be gravitating toward the gamba now).
But the Boston Early Music Festival has taken museumlike recreation a step further. Just outside one of the exhibition spaces at the Radisson Hotel, it has recreated a physical CD shop, called, in fact, the BEMF CD Store. You may remember those: they could be found almost everywhere as recently as two or three years ago but are quickly going extinct.
Like the historically informed ensembles that thrive on the festival’s stages, the BEMF CD Store actually works: you can browse the bins, arranged handily by composer or (for discs with mixed composers) soloist or ensemble, just as you could in CD shops of yore, and you can take some home with you in exchange for cash or plastic: another lifelike touch. The cash-register player said the shop was doing a brisk business; quite often, the instrument’s blue lights flashed totals in the hundreds of dollars.
May 22, 2009
Download delights
Three wonderful albums offered free under Creative Commons by SHSK’H; see these insightful comments on the site by Elliot Cole.
February 1, 2009
On wishing one listened to the CD instead
Carnegie Hall. Expensive tickets. Difficult new music. Out of control cell phones. Drunk patrons. Rashomon-like retellings of the stories.
(HT: Alex Ross)
January 31, 2009
Karajan and the big box set
In a comment to my post on that the live Mackerras Beethoven symphony cycle, Kevin Edgecomb mentions that he has a special fondness for the recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with Karajan and Alexis Weissenberg.
Kevin and everyone who loves Karajan is luck. Last year was Karajan’s 100th anniversary, and all of the big record companies have obliged with huge, relatively inexpensive collections of Karajan recordings.
EMI has released the most ambitious projects with an extensive web site, two massive box sets, and an audio documentary entitled Remembering Karajan.
- Complete EMI Recordings (Orchestral), 88CDs (track listing). This is the set that contains Kevin’s favorite recording. It is available for $148 from Amazon and £81 from Amazon UK.
- Complete EMI Recordings (Operatic and Vocal), 72 CDs (track listing). It is available for $130 from Amazon and £90 from Amazon UK.
- Legendary Decca Recordings, 9 CDS. This contains the complete orchestral recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic, including the version of Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra used in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. It does not include the many outstanding operas that Karajan recorded with Decca, including the version of Die Fledermaus with the amazing gala scene. The Decca box set is available for $72 from Amazon and £31 from Amazon UK.
- Deutsche Grammophon Karajan Symphony Edition, 38 CDs. Deutsche Grammophon is the label most closely associated with Karajan, and this is their big release (albeit, a limited edition). Mostly 1970s recordings: Beethoven symphonies 1-9 and selected overtures; Brahms symphonies 1-4, Tragic Overture, Haydn Variations; Bruckner symphonies 1-9; Haydn (“London” and “Paris”) symphonies 82-87, 93-104; Mendelssohn symphonies 1-5; Mozart symphonies 33, 35-41; Schumann symphonies 1-4; Tchaikovsky symphonies 1-6. It is available for $90 from Amazon and apparently out of print in the UK.
- Deutsche Grammophon Karajan Master Recordings, 10 CDs. See the Amazon description for details. It is available for $120 from Amazon and £68 from Amazon UK.
- Deutsche Grammophon Complete Recordings of Mutter and Karajan, 5CDs. The complete recordings with Karajan’s leading protégé. This should definitely be purchased from the UK, it is $126 (!!) from Amazon but only £25 from Amazon UK.
Clearly, the super-bargains here are the (soon-to-be-out-of-print) DG Symphony Edition and the EMI “everything” box sets. I think even Karajan detractors might enjoy these sets.
There is quite a wealth of super-classical box sets available now, but I must mention (because I think it will be out of print soon) the amazing Stravinsky 22 CD box set or conductor-supervised recordings for a mere £18 from Amazon UK.
January 30, 2009
Saving money by buying CDs from the UK
The rapid decline of the British pound has given us some remarkable UK bargains. When shopping for CDs (or DVDs, if you have a player capable of playing region 2 PAL disks), it may behoove you to look at Amazon.co.uk. It is worth noting, as I mentioned in my previous post, that US customers have VAT deducted from the price at checkout, which generally more than makes up for the shipping charges from the UK. (Books have no VAT, and are more expensive to ship, so buying books from the UK is not quite the same bargain.)
An exciting Beethoven cycle recording
I am reasonably certain that the first records I ever owned were the 1960s Karajan Beethoven cycle. And, over the years, I’ve accumulated a cycle or two most years, so by now, I have a fair number of them. But I’ve just heard one of the most exciting renditions in the last few years: a live cycle from August (and September 1) 2006 conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras at the Edinburgh Festival.
The Edinburgh Festival in 2006 did something imaginative – they scheduled a series of individual concerts – going through the entire Bruckner symphony cycle and the entire Beethoven symphony cycle. Experienced conductor (and something of a Beethoven expert Mackerras) conducted all of the Beethoven symphonies – the first with the group he is arguably closest with – the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The Ninth symphony was performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra (which has a “bigger sound”). The programming was remarkable – each symphony formed the whole of an entire concert and was priced at only £10. BBC Scotland did an excellent job of recording these performances for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Hyperion, a British music label which is known for the high quality of their releases and which seems to focus mainly on less-well known pieces was apparently so taken with the performance that they licensed it for CD release. As a work of recording engineering, I found no shortcomings in these CDs.
Original reviews of these performances complained about a crying baby during the Eroica or poor vocal sonics during the “Ode to Joy”, but I found no such problems in the recordings proper. It appears that these problems were fixed by sound engineering rather than rerecording – the work as a whole seems to have the “live excitement” that one expects in a performance. The recording engineering is as good as I’ve seen for a live recording.
These performance generally follows Beethoven’s original tempos, which is to say, fast, and uses Del Mar’s critical edition of the scores which fixes many errors in older editions. (Del Mar, by the way, wrote some excellent books – written in a very practical style – on conducting Beethoven and on how orchestras work.) I learned a great deal from listening to these pieces, and especially noted how energetic and bright Mackerras’s performances were.
If you are a Beethoven fan, you can certainly benefit from this recording – at the very least you’ll enjoy the “live excitement” of this recording.
Currently Amazon US sells this recording at an overpriced $71.98, although individual Amazon merchants will sell the work for as $37.27. Amazon UK sells the work for even less (£25.39), and US purchasers benefit from the reduction of the VAT tax (which almost makes up for the cost of shipping).
(If this is too much for you, and you want a budget Beethoven, I would recommend the Zinman cycle on Arte Nova available for $20 or less from Amazon retailers – it is not as good as the Mackerras, but it shares some of its virtues, namely the Del Mar score).
January 28, 2009
January 27, 2009
Just four chords
A Sydney comedy song group called the Axis of Awesome claims to have analyzed all songs and to have proven that only four chords are needed to play all popular music. Here is their medley proof.
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