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diegobueno

In case you've never heard it, here is an abridged version of Vexations , with only 2 of the 840 repetitions. It alternates between an unchanging bass line and two harmonizations of it, both consisting (almost) entirely of diminished or augmented triads. If you like, you can replay this video 420 ti...

diegobueno

Enescu's Dixtuor for winds, op. 14, 1906 (2 fl., ob, E.H., 2 cl., 2 hn, 2 bsn) is one of the glories of wind chamber music, and a very complex piece to put together.

diegobueno

One of the problems with German mythology as a musical subject is that Wagner's influence was so all-pervasive that no composer after him could use it except as a commentary or parody on Wagner. One could mention Die lustigen Nibelungen by Oskar Straus (1904), which falls in the parody category. Als...

diegobueno

[triplicate post deleted]

diegobueno

[dupicate post deleted] According to this site, Stoltzman's net worth is $3,000,000. Chicken feed compared to Itzhak Perlman's $10,000,000 or Yo Yo Ma's $25,000,000, but still I don't imagine he has to worry too much about making ends meet https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-s...

diegobueno

We haven't forgotten Richard Stoltzman, for sure; at least two of us have mentioned him in this thread. I wonder how he's been able to make ends meet through solo gigs and record royalties alone. You must be desperate for something to dispute if you're going to pick apart the introductory words to ...

diegobueno

And not to forget Richard Stoltzman, certainly the most prominent solo clarinetist of our time, one of the few who can make a whole career as a soloist, without the need for an orchestral gig. His own playing style is so unique, he pretty much has to be the soloist. He, like Benny Goodman before him...

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One of the masterworks of the Clarinet repertory, the Brahms Sonata op. 120, no. 2, is played here by another of the master clarinetists of the present, Anthony McGill, currently principal clarinetist of the New York Philharmonic. Unbelievable tone, legato, musicality. There's a long interview with ...

diegobueno

You can find a pretty extensive list of Faust pieces here, all from the 19th and 20th centuries: https://www.faust.com/music/ In the 19th century, every composer and his uncle wrote their own version of Faust. I don't know of any Faust pieces pre-1800, so maybe should be the focus of the discussion.

diegobueno

John, you're right. The Girl Scouts are a much more enlightened organization.

It would probably be better if the Girl Scouts admitted boys (and showed them how to tolerate different kinds of people), than the other way around.

diegobueno

I joined the Boy Scouts around the same time I started eyeing girls, so I guess nothing has changed.

diegobueno

One of the Gods of clarinet playing today is Ricardo Morales. I'm posting this video, which is really just an advertisement for a special brand of clarinet which is fashionable today, manufactured by Morrie Backun in Vancouver. But he also demonstrates his incredibly even sound across registers and ...

diegobueno

Messiaen eventually got around to the Japanese birds. Thanks. Regards, Len [bewildered] :lol: What you can't hear the birds in this piece? :P When Messiaen writes birdsongs, they all sound like Messiaen birds, no matter what their nationality. In this case he was invited to Japan in 1962 for perfor...

diegobueno

Since there's also a Messiaen discussion going on, I'd like to say just a couple words about Messiaen and the clarinet. His most celebrated work is, of course, the Quatuor pour la fin du temps , for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, written in a prisoner of war camp in WW2. During his last decade M...

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The Pianist Taka Kigawa on Playing Messiaen’s Bird Marathon Yes, and YouTube. It’s quite amazing. But I actually first studied it before the internet era. European birds — they aren’t in Japan, so it was completely out of my imagination. Now it’s much easier. You can actually hear a European bird a...

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Lance started this thread with a tip of the hat to Dieter Klöcker, for his work in digging up and recording all the concertos of little-known 18th century composers. One of these concertos, the 2nd concerto of Francesco Rosetti (aka Franz Rössler), is well known to student clarinetists because a goo...

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With Benny Goodman it's not a matter of him shrinking from difficulties. He had ample technique, and he clearly had a strong work ethic. He held his band to high standards, and his musicians lived in fear of getting "the ray" from him. I'm sure he had no problem playing the notes of the concerto tha...

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Thanks Mark. All of the music Hindemith conducted for EMI has been issued ina stereo 2 CD set with excellent sound, including the clarinet concerto. AFAIK (maybe JohnF knows more details) Goodman premiered the Hindemith Clarinet Concerto in 1950. I have that set, and was just enjoying it recently, ...

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I have never had any ambition to be a concerto soloist, but if I were given the opportunity, I might select the Clarinet Concerto of Paul Hindemith, simply because it doesn't (for the most part) try to be showy. I'd do it just for the enjoyment of the lines and to have fun with music I enjoy. Althou...

diegobueno

Another saxophone war, is it? Well, you all know how I feel about it. But here's more eloquent testimony from the composer Florent Schmitt, and his sumptuous Légende for saxophone and orchestra.

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Tippett - The Knot Garden - Colin Davis https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/81yC9QvTYWL._SL1500_.jpg ... Yes, I certainly remember that LP set. I used to listen to it a lot. Colin Davis was such a terrific champion of Tippett's music, and his recordings of this opera and The Midsummer ...

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Jack Gallagher's colorful and engaging Symphony no. 2. Splendid performance by Joanne Falletta and the London Symphony. Clocking in at a full hour, this unfailingly energetic work may be a little bit too much of a good thing. But it's beautifully orchestrated, and never boring.

diegobueno

10 years ago I played a gig with the Orchestra of the Southern Finger Lakes, in Elmira, New York. This was on March 4, 2007. Yuja Wang was the piano soloist, and she did a really stunning performance of the Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto. She wasn't yet the star she is today (indeed there's no way a m...

diegobueno

Never heard of him. When I saw the thread's header I jumped to the conclusion that it had a gay angle; Lord Alfred Douglas was Oscar Wilde's lover, and while his middle initial wasn't C, the expression AC/DC is slang for bisexual. Does this relate to "Douglas" at all? Of course he could just have b...

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Cliftwood,

I'm sure you are right. I suspect he died, but I wanted to find confirmation. There are no obituaries on line for A.C. Douglas, but there wouldn't be if that was only a pseudonym.

diegobueno

Lost in the Stars[/i]? Musical? opera? both? Bernstein: Candide . musical? operetta? opera? all three?Britten: Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace, The Prodigal Son . Operas? Britten called them "Parables for church performance"? “In the great age of countertenors, the idea of opera was being r...

diegobueno

Kurt Weill's big American opera is Street scene , set in a city block in Manhattan populated by various nationalities of European immigrants. It calls for operatic and Broadway-type voices and employs a diversity of styles. Weill would not be particularly interested in pigeon-holing his works as mus...

diegobueno

The sounds of the human body provided the sonic material for one of his earliest compositions, “Symphony for a Solitary Man” (1950), written in collaboration with Pierre Schaeffer, considered the founder of musique concrète . I always assumed that was written in collaboration with Neil Diamond. Ql4...

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I haven't given Pierre Henry a thought for several decades, and I'm amazed that he was still alive until just now. The age of musique concrete seems like ancient history, and must have given people like Pierre Henry a kind of hands-on pleasure, splicing together little pieces of tape to make a compo...

diegobueno

jbuck919 wrote: ↑
Wed Jul 05, 2017 1:35 pm
Mark may be too recent a member to know that A.C. Douglas was also a member here for quite some time.

Then we can date his departure as some time between Jan. 2004, when you joined and March 2005, when I did. I would imagine he left of his own accord, after some Wagner-related argument.

diegobueno

Some of you who have been on other classical music discussion forums have undoubtedly run into A.C. Douglas. He was, well, a colorful personality, and self-appointed expert on everything having to do with Wagner. For those who remember the New York Times classical music forum and opera forums, he wa...

diegobueno

I recently saw the New York City Ballet perform The Four Temperaments with a lovely score for strings and piano by Hindemith and choreography by Balanchine that really followed the music. It was a special delight to see dancing that seemed to be part of the music, rather than something layered on to...

diegobueno

I have a hypothesis about this. I think Copland really had an identity crisis. He was a Communist and most of his music exemplified the aesthetic ideals of socialism realism. Soviet composers had it imposed on them, and many chafed under its stifling influence. Copland seems to have gloried in it. ...

diegobueno

Ives was composing and running his insurance agency at the same period in his life, and he retired from both activities at about the same time. I think there was a health issue (he was a diabetic), but really he just burned himself out. Sibelius did have a drinking problem, which he tried from time ...

diegobueno

Yes, it's the 3rd sonata that I found most deficient in the Zukofsky set, because it is the longest and the most conventionally romantic. It was clear from the looking at the score that Zukofzky was not giving the music the expression that it needs, that the tempos were dragging, and the climactic s...

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I was not an admirer of Paul Zukofsky's playing. He could play the bejeezis out of the technically demanding contemporary music he favored (such as the Penderecki Capriccio ), but in the more traditional end of his repertory, such as the Ives Sonatas (for him Ives is traditional), which he recorded ...

diegobueno

I treasured those Living Stereo discs from the LP days, the way the music seemed to leap from the grooves. One of my favorites was Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony playing Stravinsky's Song of the Nightingale, which is a real knock-out, especially the opening.

diegobueno

The New York Times article prompted me to get out my copy of the recording. It's a very affecting work, though I would like more contrast. The Kronos Quartet was performing Gorecki's two [edit: I should have said three] string quartets quite widely for a period of time, during the 90s. I heard them ...

diegobueno

The MIT music department also has on its faculty the distinguished composer John Harbison and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn.

diegobueno

how do you honor the memory of FJH on 31 May? I play from his choral works pieces such as the Kyrie of the Missa Cellensis, a truly dazzling introduction to one of the most eloquent settings of the Ordinary of the Mass. :D I have to say the idea of a "heavenly birthday" is new to me, and I'm a prea...

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I'm not sure what May 31 has to do with Haydn (his birthday was March 31), but I find any day will suffice to celebrate one of my favorite composers.

diegobueno

It would be more productive to note the impact of Tchaikovsky on Stravinsky, who composed all his life for the ballet. Of course the place to start is the ballet La baiser de la fee in which he took material from Tchaikovsky's works, mostly minor piano pieces, and deconstructed them to fit his own p...

diegobueno

Yes, I assume it's in English, though I didn't recognize a single word of the text.
Nice piano part, though.

diegobueno

Hooray!!

diegobueno

Here is the performance. The group had two hours to rehearse four pieces, and since my piece is complicated, they asked me to come up and conduct them. I had to put aside my apprehension of waving a stick in front of people who've played under the best in the business. They just needed someone to ke...

diegobueno

I'm not too concerned about their choice of venue. It sounds like they want to make it an ongoing ensemble, so they might well have occasion to play it in a regular concert hall in the future.

diegobueno

"in-between music" works for me. In any case, I am always drawn to those moments when the high and the low draw close to each other, when the lines are a little bit blurred even. Joplin's Euphonic Sounds is a fine example of a popular musician stretching the boundaries of his style in subtle ways wi...

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Classical musicians are often the conservators of older styles of popular music, especially those that can be set down accurately on paper and played as written. I remember chuckling when I saw a publication with the light green Edition Peters cover and the title "JOPLIN Ausgewählte Rags". I realize...

diegobueno

Congratulations, Mark, you've made it to the Big Apple! :D Thank you! This is a very informal setting, a bar rather than a concert hall. They are playing 3 or 4 other new pieces and the rest of the evening will be jazz. I don't know how the people who come for the jazz will react to the new composi...

diegobueno

To those in the New York area: a chance to hear some Mark Simon music. "Nevertheless, She Persisted" will be performed at the Bar Thalia on W. 95th St. and Broadway, 7:00ish. The jaw-droppingly amazing players will be: Patrick Jee, cello (NY Philharmonic) Joseph Lee, cello (NYC Ballet) Andrew Yee, c...

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