Rolling Classical 2020

Anyway, what are everyone's favourite Penderecki recordings? As noted, I favour the Penderecki Quartet's SQ3. I have the Wit/Polish NSRO disc with Symphony 3 and Threnody but I feel like I've heard some more intense Threnodies. Good recordings of St Luke's Passion?

Penderecki's own 60s recordings are where it's at. For the St. Luke Passion, I've only heard his 1989 take, which is as good as you'd expect. Of his works in a self-consciously tonal idiom, I vaguely enjoy his Violin Concertos (No. 1 with Isaac Stern & No. 2 with Anne-Sophie Mutter).

I really liked Utrenja, a huge piece recorded in Wit’s series on Naxos

Don't know that one. I'll have to binge on his complete works one of these days.

Listened to that St. Luke's Passion today but it ended up being broken up and sometimes distracted so I definitely will come back to it. A lot of really striking and intense moments, though.

Listening to this disc now, which I bought as an undergraduate: https://www.discogs.com/fr/Krzysztof-Penderecki-Musica-Da-Camera/release/1805311
First string quartet still so striking.

I absent-mindedly heard said disc once, more than 15 years ago. Time to make up for that, especially now that the 1960s poll is on its way.

Another obituary worth reading, courtesy of Tim Rutherford-Johnson:

https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/krzysztof-penderecki-1933-2020/

some of the most emo music in the classical canon - that's more like it!

National Arts Centre Orchestra musicians doing solo lunch break Youtube performances from home every day: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL90GqA5xhozq9vZwEpm-7VB5o-DxYHuBN

Something about the phenomenon of NACO players doing solo livestreams from their living rooms really impressed on me what a world-historical crisis we are living through.

Listening currently to Thomas Adès' piano concerto, premiered at the BSO last year but released this year. They played it on the radio last night but I slept right through it. It's really something! I picked up a couple older Adès CDs and I wasn't totally impressed with them, but this has this amazing sense of motion going on, like "Giant Steps" arranged for two orchestras and they both started in different places in the changes.

Adès is as good as they say, imo. I adore his violin concerto so so so much... the first movement's harmonic material is, effectively, a Shepard tone (though I don't know if he's acknowledged it? Google turns up nothing but it is exactly what he did)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTth0fp13aU

This was pretty amazing AND it sent me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole about impossible geometric figures and sci fi vampire novels.

there is so much awful crossover classical. today i'm on a rabbit hole watching videos by the salt lake city pops orchestra with things like EDM bassoon. is there crossover classical music worse than this stuff? i must know.

i mean... lindsey sterling?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujZ0dSBMGu4

If anyone's interested, I put together a list of my favourite 2020 classical albums so far:

Alberto Posadas – Poética del laberinto
Amatis Trio – Enescu, Ravel, Britten
Barbara Hannigan & Ludwig Orchestra – La passione: Nono, Haydn, Grisey
Benjamin Dwyer – what is the word
Célimène Daudet – Messe noire. Liszt, Scriabine
Edvard Grieg – Violin Sonatas (Eldbjørg Hemsing & Simon Trpčeski)
Élodie Vignon – D’ombres. Dutilleux, Ledoux
Éric Montalbetti – Chamber Music. Harmonieuses dissonances
Franz Liszt – Années de pèlerinage (Suzana Bartal)
Howard Skempton – Preludes and Fugues; Nocturnes; Reflections; Images (William Howard)
Jean Sibelius – Symphony No. 2; King Kristian II (Gothenburg Symphony, Santtu Matias-Rouvali)
Jean-Pierre Collot – The Way to Sound: Spectral Visions of Goethe (Dufourt, Liszt, Schubert)
Johann Sebastian Bach – Johannes-Passion (Collegium Vocale Gent, Philippe Herreweghe)
Johannes Brahms – The Final Piano Pieces (Stephen Hough)
Liza Lim – Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus
Luciano Berio – Coro; Cries of London (Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Grete Pedersen)
Ludwig van Beethoven – The Last Three Sonatas (Maurizio Pollini)
Philippe Pierlot, Lucile Boulanger, Myriam Rignol & Rolf Lislevand – Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe et ses filles
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Symphony No. 3, ‘Pastoral’; Symphony No. 4 (BBC SO, Brabbins)
Richard Valitutto – Nocturnes & Lullabies
Tõnu Kõrvits – Hymns to the Nordic Lights
Víctor Ibarra – The Dimension of the Fragile

Very much interested and appreciated! I'll be working my way through.

Tõnu Kõrvits – Hymns to the Nordic Lights this is simply sublime, and very moving <3

What is the word: "A musical meditation on the relationship of sound to linguistic structures"... this honestly sounds quite interesting!

It’s one of the better Samuel Beckett-inspired albums (and they are legion) I’ve heard over the years.

Tell me about spectral images of Goethe

Five settings of Goethe by Schubert undergo a series of diachronic metamorphoses for solo piano. Czerny’s transcription of ‘An Schwager Kronos’ introduces us to Hugues Dufourt’s echoic reimagining of the same. ’Rastlose Liebe’, ‘Meeresstille’ and ‘Erlkönig’ are rewritten by Liszt then thoroughly overhauled and drawn out into infinity by Dufourt. The whole thing ends with Liszt’s take on ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, followed by silence. And although the album purportedly showcases Goethe’s Sturm und Drang period, there’s a quiet tension to Dufourt’s spectral reinterpretations, which bring to mind Feldman.

It’s pure pap for yours truly and I’m sure you’ll like it too. If you’ve heard Marilyn Nonken’s Voix voilées recital from 2012, you’ll already be familiar with Dufourt’s suitably monstrous and sprawling ‘Erlkönig’.

I have nonkens book but have not heard that disc- and it looks amazing thanks for tipping me

https://boomkat.com/products/the-heart-sutra-arranged-by-janel-leppin

latest Susan Alcorn on Ideologic Organ is well worth checking out.

Ottawa Guitar Society livestreaming a concert by Daniel Bolshoy rn: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=537306683820643¬if_id=1589655993272897¬if_t=live_video

Followed you there.

What do you think? Some of the repertoire didn't excite me that much but this Assad piece he's playing now is v nice and he is interpreting it carefully and sensitively. Liked the Barrios too.

I liked it overall but I was doing something else at the same time and wasn’t paying as close attention as I might, sorry. But yeah, some of the material didn’t really grab me.

I was washing dishes for part of it too.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/17/did-singing-together-spread-coronavirus-to-four-choirs

Has anyone heard Samuel Andreyev's Kairos monograph? I know (of) him as that rare beast: an expat Canadian YouTuber who makes videos about contemporary European art music in English, but I wasn't familiar with his compositions at all. I'm a few minutes into Iridescent Notation and I like it so far: delicate and gestural, even at its most curt, and very much in written in response to 20th century aesthetic dilemmas, which gives it a more 'classical' sheen than, say, Ryan Carter's own Kairos disc from last year.

delicate and gestural

Tbf Événements quotidiens and especially Night Division are more Stravinskian/Varèsian in terms of instrumental attack.

I find Another Timbre's releases to be fairly hit or miss (too visually-oriented, too noncommittal in terms of affect for my tastes) and am mildly annoyed by its growing omnipresence but this is a worthwhile endeavour:

https://johnsonsrambler.wordpress.com/2020/05/19/music-wed-like-to-hear-another-timbre-150-apartment-house-at-25/

By a former counterpoint student but I do think this is a very nice guitar album, released to streaming services today: https://open.spotify.com/album/09cWEgDZaHt9MsP7ickZGQ?si=x32u8ulRTh2rCpxy3hnA7w

Looks cool, I'll check it out. Thanks!

Xpost re another timbre Linda Catlin Smith is amazing. Annoying that they don’t offer digital purchases though. I don’t even have a way to ripping a cd currently - I was “forced” to download her stuff from myfreemp3

I was being cranky tbh. I like LCS's stuff, she's probably my favourite Another Timbre composer.

wait, why does jordan peterson have an hour and a half video about samuel andreyev?

if anybody can come up with a good reason for that one, let me know. otherwise i'm fuckin' done with andreyev.

Huh, really? Weird. I assume it’s got something to do with the University of Toronto. I’ll look into it.

Jon not Jon, Another Timbre is on Bandcamp: https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/drifter for example.

Welp, just saw it now, Andreyev can go fuck himself.

xp

it's exhausting. so exhausting. i'm so tired of it.

thank you for confirming/verifying, though. i just couldn't stomach it myself, you know?

I don't blame you in the least. Consenting to an interview with JP for any purpose other than explicit pushback is unacceptable, all the more so in 2019, by which point everyone with a functional brain had figured out what the fuckstain is all about.

i mean, fuck. what has been the news on ilx this week? kaitlyn aurelia smith being an anti-vaxxer, black dresses breaking up and i don't even know why because believe it or not i _am_ trying to take care of my mental health by not directly exposing myself to transphobia, whatever the fuck is going on with doja cat, and today it's this random dumb canadian motherfucker who makes youtube videos about the compositional approach of the keyboardist from pink floyd being buddy-buddy with jordan fucking peterson

true/false: "ilx is fine as long as you stay away from the politics threads"

i reiterate: i am tired of living in this world.

Fwiw based on my admittedly all too limited understanding of the Black Dresses situation, transphobia doesn't appear to have been the main catalyst; it seems to be a case of toxic fanbases spinning out of control, with no regard whatsoever for the humans who make the art they claim to adore. But yeah, it's unfortunately impossible to interact with just about any facet of aesthetics without being privy to some amount of reactionary political bullshit. My go-to mental defence is that people are fallible and easily fall prey to hateful discourse as a means of dealing with their own deep-seated anxieties. It's not much but it helps me cope.

Many Xposts
I could have sworn I checked bandcamp about 6 months ago
Looks like I owe them some downloads

Bredeson will be performing via livestream in about 20m here: https://m.twitch.tv/concertsfortheendoftime

I missed the stream, unfortunately, but I'm listening to his album right now, and it's lovely. Just the right time for it, too.

Ah, cool, glad you like it. He played the Chopin arrangement, the Mertz, and the Prelude and Allegro from the Bach in the concert. I was also impressed by a Sean Clarke piece.

Just a couple of pieces into this almost 7h-long playlist of classical guitar music by black composers: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1CUR6hLOqbHKOQJx5jiSk3?si=BJDqQVXrTVijWHtCzDBG8w

Both Thomas Flippin's "A Soldier's Sonata" and Errollyn Wallen's "Three Ships" are p good so far.

Also heard this Shelley Washington electric guitar quartet this morning, which is pretty nice and reminiscent of Fred Frith's quartets: https://soundcloud.com/shelleywashington/the-workers-dreadnought

On another note, this is absolutely lovely (recent/new music for harp and elect y Richard Barrett and Milana Zaric, streamed last night): https://t.co/PJmTR28RQg

— Tim Rutherford-Johnson (@moderncomp) June 8, 2020