The Classical Music Guide Forums

Modernistfan

Definitely agreed about the quality of the CBSO under Rattie. I have that Adams disc and virtually all of their Szymanowski, including King Roger. His Benjamin Britten was also very good. I would like to see less negativity around classical music.

Modernistfan

Well, I have more complete information. The orchestra is the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Cello Concerto is the only work on the disc; no Karawane . That makes it rather a short CD, but I will definitely get it. Hopefully, Karawane shows up on another CD with Salonen conducting, most likely on Deut...

Modernistfan

Hysterical!! The singer, Merle Hazard (not Haggard), is probably the world's only economist/bluegrass singer.

Modernistfan

Well, a recording of the Salonen Cello Concerto is scheduled for release in March according to Presto Classical. This is, in fact, with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and is on Sony Classical (not Deutsche Grammophon). I do not have full details as of yet; as the duration of the Cello Concerto is about 38 minu...

Modernistfan

More nasty comments sneering about the quality of the CBSO and suggesting that Deutsche Grammophon would be slumming to have them on their label. Seemingly, according to such comments, the only worthwhile orchestras for DG would be the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic (maybe the Bavar...

Modernistfan

The rising young conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, now music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (the post from which Simon Rattle rose to stardom) has signed a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, supposedly the first woman conductor to sign with that label. Her first recording is to...

Modernistfan

It depends on the cat, and it depends on the music! Some years ago, I was in Tower Records (R.I.P.) in Westwood in Los Angeles, and that store had a rather grumpy cat named Walter. Someone put on the opening of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's opera "Die Soldaten," which is some of the most dissonant music ...

Modernistfan

I heard some of her music yesterday, in particular her First Violin Concerto and the symphonic poem "The Oak." Her music is very well made but extremely conservative for the period; I could not hear a trace of jazz or ragtime, and could hear no influence of any contemporary idioms, such as neoclassi...

Modernistfan

I disagree strongly with Mr. Furedi. The reality is that the phrase "boys will be boys" used to be used to excuse minor roughhousing and other similar transgressions. (When I was about 12, I was playing baseball with one of my friends and smashed a line drive that went straight into a living room pi...

Modernistfan

This is a perennial problem. I can see why it might be desirable to present operas live in the language of the audience, but, for recordings, I always look for recordings in the original language. The accents and rhythms of the language vary greatly, and the composer, in nearly all cases, wrote for ...

Modernistfan

I worked in Watson's lab when I got my Ph.D., although I did not work directly under him. I also worked at Cold Spring Harbor one summer as an undergraduate, and published a paper in Nature on bacteriophage, and subsequently presented another paper there (also on bacteriophage). I never knew, when I...

Modernistfan

Meanwhile, Gramophone has just reported that the sales of classical physical CDs , not downloads, not streaming, increased 6.9% in the United Kingdom in 2017, this despite the wavering of the British economy in the wake of the murky Brexit issue. (Undoubtedly, this does include some British-style Kr...

Modernistfan

I do some downloading, always in CD-quality FLAC or better; I generally then burn the downloads to a CD for playing in my system. (I downloaded the entire Harbison symphony cycle from the Boston Symphony website; most of these works do not yet have a commercial recording on CD available.) I have no ...

Modernistfan

Agreed. That's why I kept the old Barenboim/Chicago Bruckner cycle on Deutsche Grammophon. I cannot stand the Bruckner Seventh and Eighth Symphonies with wimpy brass. (And that goes double for Mahler and Shostakovich!)

Modernistfan

I most definitely am no fan of Hogwood, particularly in the London symphonies (Nos. 93-104). I had the Hogwood many years ago and dumped it; like nearly all period-instrument recordings I have had the misfortune to hear, he badly underplays the "surprise" in the slow movement of Symphony No. 94, all...

Modernistfan

Sorry, I disagree with the use of the term "no-name performers." The exalted status of some performers in an earlier era, such as Heifetz, Rubinstein, or Horowitz, stemmed from the relatively fewer performers performing to a high technical standard as compared with the situation today, the high leve...

Modernistfan

The reports of the death of classical music, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, the genre has significant problems (when hasn't it?). The issue of costs and financial support has been with us ever since the days in which the audience shifted from the nobility and the estab...

Modernistfan

It has just been announced that Esa-Pekka Salonen will replace Michael Tilson Thomas as music director in San Francisco when MTT retires. It seems like a great hire for San Francisco, who should delight in Salonen's repertoire and support for various modernist tendencies. Unfortunately for New York,...

Modernistfan

Actually, Schoenberg was living not in Hollywood, but in Brentwood, a relatively affluent community to the west of Hollywood. Stravinsky was living in Beverly Hills, about four or five miles from Schoenberg. Apparently, they never met (Stravinsky did not begin to explore the twelve-tone technique un...

Modernistfan

If I am not mistaken, that recording of the Gerhard Violin Concerto is on Chandos, not Naxos (I have it in my collection). It is coupled with the Gerhard First Symphony.

Modernistfan

Actually, I would go for that. I love some of that stuff, especially Fats Waller (even though I am now actually listening to Olivier Messiaen's "Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum.") That music is presented for what it is and does not insult the listener's intelligence the way the junk on KUSC does.

Modernistfan

Well, Thanksgiving was one day ago and the turkey is barely cold and, already, the local station, KUSC-FM, has already decided to junk up their programming with all sorts of holiday slop. I just fired this note off to them on their comment line: With the holiday season starting, I urgently request ...

Modernistfan

I just listened to the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony in the recording on EMI (now Warner) conducted by Mariss Jansons, and I now am taking the view that he takes the last movement too slow. It makes me want to go back to Bernstein, who rolls through the last movement as though he were the engineer on ...

Modernistfan

Finally, there is going to be a reissue of the Columbia Black Composers Series of LPs. issued from 1974 to 1978, but mostly absent on CD. This is a 10-CD series mostly conducted by Paul Freeman with several major orchestras, including the Detroit Symphony and the London Symphony. Chamber works are a...

Modernistfan

Please see the material being put out by the American Constitution Society, the liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society. I am a member (yes, I am also a lawyer, doing predominantly intellectual property law, particularly patents (I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology in addition...

Modernistfan

Yow! I am convinced that much of the Right would like to completely scrap America's common-law-based legal system and replace it with a civil law system. Please note that the law of most European countries is a civil law system as distinguished from the common law system prevailing in the United Ki...

Modernistfan

No, it wasn't the Nazis who invented the "stab in the back" myth, but that myth was widely propagated by all sorts of ultra-right groups after the Armistice, of which the Nazis were only a small proportion. The myth then fed directly into anti-Semitism when it was apparent that some of the supporter...

Modernistfan

A very explosive letter from Arthur Schnabel describing a meeting with Wilhelm Furtwangler that occurred in 1947 (therefore, after the war), has just surfaced. The following are quotes: Last night Furtwängler and wife came to see me. . . . It was partly pleasant, partly opposite. So far it seems ...

Modernistfan

Maybe so, but he still bailed out of the Thirteenth Symphony, and that apparently caused a substantial break in relations between Shostakovich and Mravinsky.

Modernistfan

Shostakovich probably authorized the revised, bowdlerized version because he felt he had little choice. The option would probably to have had the work completely banned at that point, with uncertain consequences for him. His health problems had started to surface, and he had already faced off with t...

Modernistfan

Watch out with respect to earlier Soviet recordings of the Thirteenth Symphony. Because of government pressures, the text in the first movement ("Babi Yar") was changed to soften the emphasis on anti-Semitism after the original premiere. As far as I can determine, all recent recordings, as well as a...

Modernistfan

My point exactly. This issue should cut across party lines. Remember that Democratic senator Al Franken of Minnesota, a flaming liberal by most standards, resigned as a result of allegations of sexually improper conduct.

Modernistfan

Republicans, is this what you want for the highest court in the United States--a party-hearty frat boy? Don't you want a legal scholar who will fairly judge the cases before him on the law and the facts? The contrast with the late Antonin Scalia could hardly be more glaring. Yes, Scalia was a conser...

Modernistfan

Of course, I was kidding about the box set having only five works in 49 CDs. I was mocking Celibidache’s ridiculously slow tempos. Don’t take me seriously. The reality is that I wouldn’t spend a nickel on recordings by that fraud. Please see the online postings by William Osborne about what his wife...

Modernistfan

I don't know the contents as of yet. It probably is, as Warner has the rights to the previous EMI recordings with that orchestra. I certainly will not be buying it.

Modernistfan

Warner has announced a 49-CD box of Sergiu Celibidache recordings with the Munich Philharmonic. Of course, there are only recordings of five different works in the box. Seriously, though, I cannot see purchasing this. (There are boxes with Ricardo Chailly and Claudio Abbado coming out, and I might l...

Modernistfan

Agreed, but this has to do with a number of other things other than dress. It is interesting to note that, on the current Supreme Court, none of the liberal-leaning justices, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor (three Jews and one Latina), ever worked for any of the major national large law firms.

Modernistfan

A story has just surfaced that a professor at Yale Law School had advised female students to dress in a certain way to exhibit a "model-like femininity" if they wanted to clerk for Kavanaugh. This does not surprise me in the least; when I have gone to meetings, I have noticed that most female assoc...

Modernistfan

Frankly, this doesn't surprise me one bit. This behavior is far from uncommon among boys of Kavanaugh's socioeconomic class and background, particularly if they are in prep school and especially if they are athletes. When I heard this story, I would have been willing to bet $100 that he had been an ...

Modernistfan

I remember Father Drinan quite well as a member of Congress from Massachusetts when I was a graduate student at Harvard. (He did not represent Cambridge; rather, he represented some of the suburbs to the west of Boston, starting with Brookline and Newton.) Ironically, he was wildly popular in the la...

Modernistfan

Yes, you can have it. By the way, when is Amazon going to start offering downloads in a lossless format? At least Presto Classical in England has that option for virtually all of their downloads.

Modernistfan

This has happened all too frequently. The coaches regard the players, particularly if they are African-American, as barely human expendable cannon fodder. Why are they holding these sorts of practices in August where the temperature is 95 degrees with very high humidity (I have been in Washington an...

Modernistfan

I am a huge Rimsky-Korsakov fan. I have that Chandos set and I have recordings of nearly all of his operas, although I am trying to get a recording of "Tsar Saltan"; it seems that there is no modern stereo recording (calling Valery Gergiev!). One of my all-time favorite operas is "The Golden Cockere...

Modernistfan

Although the statement that the arts are a protective factor against authoritarianism is a drastic oversimplification, to say the least, it is still noteworthy that virtually every authoritarian government winds up suppressing and censoring the arts, although they might not start out doing so; Lenin...

Modernistfan

I might look into this. His Vaughan Williams was excellent. (It is rather interesting that two of the excellent conductors of Vaughan Williams, Previn and Leonard Slatkin, were of Russian origin; all four of Slatkin's grandparents were born in that country, and Previn was born in Germany to parents ...

Modernistfan

It is a misconception based on previous history that Munich is a conservative city. The current mayor is a member of the Social Democratic Party, and Munich has been governed by the Social Democrats or a Social Democrat-led coalition for all but six years since 1948. Yes, rural Bavaria and the small...

Modernistfan

There are a number of musical Milsteins. There is also contemporary composer Silvina Milstein, born in Argentina and now living in England. I do not know if she is related either to Nathan Milstein or the sisters Nathalia and Maria Milstein, but it is likely that her family had emigrated from Russia...

Modernistfan

Although Anton Rubinstein and his brother Nicolai Rubinstein both were converted from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy in their youth, Anton Rubinstein still retained some relationship to Judaism; according to Wikipedia, Anton Rubinstein later considered himself an atheist. He actually wrote two operas ...

Modernistfan

I have posted several times regarding this. Furtwängler was not in fact a Nazi, but definitely did have some anti-Semitic and völkisch views. It needs to be remembered that, prior to 1933, there were several strands of anti-Semitism other than that of the Nazis, and many people sometimes labeled ...

Modernistfan

Unfortunately, that is probably true, but note that Sony Classical just released a recording of double concertos by Wolfgang Rihm and John Harbison, not exactly the sort of repertoire that they are generally emphasizing. Of course, that was not with their big stars. I am sure that Salonen will proba...

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