The Classical Music Guide Forums

John F

How about that! I think I will.

John F

Philip M wrote: ↑
Mon Sep 23, 2019 3:53 pm
Donald had 2 sons - I met them both. But neither of them was a musician....

Maybe then it was about a young cellist he knew.

John F

As I said, " whatever measures we may take (including doing nothing) will have economic and social consequences, likely to be painful." I should think no more painful than rising sea level drowning the coasts and whole islands; droughts turning croplands barren; and the other consequences of global ...

John F

Toscanini conducted Kabalevsky's second symphony several times, giving its American premiere, and often conducted the Colas Breugnon overture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCExc3xZQq4

John F

I half-remember that Donald was hostile toward Mstislav Rostropovich for his treatment of a pupil who may have been Donald's son, if he had one. How much there actually was in it I don't know, and I may be misremembering.

John F

Hockenos is determined to take a dim view of everything he possibly can. No question but that the unification of free West Germany and Communist East Germany was and remains difficult, and the massive influx of low-wage Turkish workers under Germany's open borders policy has aroused hostility from t...

John F

I doubt The Gramophone would have reviews and information about Oceanic Records, a very small American label with no distribution outside the United States. Besides High Fidelity, reviews were published in American Record Guide, The Nation, Royer Smith's New Records, the New York Times, the Gramopho...

John F

...The people our age whose families, relatives and the like suffered and died in that war (grandfathers/mothers and friends of our parents) and whose memories and stories we've all heard since childhood ensure we won't (can't) forget what Germany did in a hurry. And, John, 74 years doesn't seem a ...

John F

Oceanic published recordings from ca. 1951 to 1954, some with the Paris Radio Orchestra cnducted by Leibowitz, others by the Vienna State Opera Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Sternberg. My guess is that they didn't actually produce these recordings but licensed at least some of them from European s...

John F

Why the baby boomers? They by definition bear no blame. Quite right. It's 74 years since the end of the war and the Nazi Party. Hardly anyone is still alive who came of age and can be assigned responsibility. Both German and Japanese societies have long since been transformed from what they were to...

John F

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra musicians reach tentative agreement with management, could perform Friday By Mary Carole McCauley Sep 21, 2019 The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and its musicians announced Saturday that they have reached a tentative agreement on a one-year contract that could return the ...

John F

I only know two of the Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses, the Benediction de Dieu dans la Solitude and Funerailles. The latter is a tremendous virtuoso piece that I expect most here know, but just in case, here it is as played in 1955 by the young Alexis (Sigi) Weissenberg. 5Qj4DmoZB_Y https://www....

John F

And on the other hand there's Oskar Schindler, as in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" which I gather is the true story. And acts of heroism such those by as Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose. They don't balance out - nothing balances out crimes against humanity - but should nonetheless b...

John F

I thought well of "The Tempest" too, though the Met would possibly have done better to pick up the Covent Garden production as its own by Gelb favorite Robert Lepage was lacking in magic. But after the first run of 8 performances in 2012, it hasn't been revived - unusual, as the Met almost always re...

John F

Belle, I don't know or care about the science of the Great Barrier Reef. What I do care about is the validity and integrity of science itself., real science rather than self-proclaimed science You can find credentialed scientists who hold and publicly argue for patently antiscientific views - not a ...

John F

music cannot be usefully judged by standards of the past (nothing anywhere at any time can be usefully judged by inappropriate standards) That's your position in a nutshell - very neatly put. But who says the "standards of the past," however these are defined, are "inappropriate," and why are they?...

John F

I'm not going to disagree with this as I simply don't know. All I know is that nothing I have seen or read is conclusive so I don't think that there is enough empirical evidence. In other words, nothing will persuade you - that's what it amounts to. If a radical reduction in human-made carbon in th...

John F

I'm afraid my traveling days are over. It's my legs - I can only walk short distances now and more than a couple of stairs are too much for me. Hey, I'm 78! But I have memories of many happy times in London and England, going back to 1956-7 when my family lived in Leeds and my father was doing diale...

John F

Yes, Philip, that was an exceptional Bruckner 9 (3 movement version). The main thing I remember about the Messiaen is how loud it was. For all its faults, the Barbican doesn't mute an orchestra's sound; a Shostakovich Leningrad Symphony there by the LSO and Mariss Jansons got so loud it hurt my ears...

John F

Lance wrote:Virgin Thomson

John F

the jury is still out on the causes because it hasn't been conclusively proved What proof would you accept as "conclusive"? As far as I'm concerned, there's scientific evidence enough to justify humanity's trying to do something about it; if we wait and wait until every last doubter has come around...

John F

The New Yorker has a pay wall, but they let some of their articles through it. Ross's web site, https://www.therestisnoise.com/, has links to the New Yorker pieces we can read.

John F

Major American orchestras have appeared on such labels in the past when the recorded repertoire lacks commercial appeal. New World Records published some recordings of new American music by the New York Philharmonic and other top orchestras.

John F

Thanks for spelling out what you mean. It makes sense in its own terms. However, I don't think it makes sense in terms of the actual history of music and its reception when new and later when not so new. As Schoenberg said, "There is still much good music to be written in C major." And it's that new...

John F

When I was looking for Sigi Weissenberg's Lumen records in Paris record shops, more than once the clerk thought I meant Wayenberg instead of Weissenberg and brought out several of his records. Most likely he was doing well in France at the time. I wasn't interested and didn't listen to any of them, ...

John F

The best music writer nowadays, I'd say, is Alex Ross of The New Yorker. Unfortunately he is almost never given the space to review music and performances - the New Yorker's music criticism has steadily shrunk since Andrew Porter retired. To tell the truth, I don't think very highly of the NY Times'...

John F

the Chaconne - I instantly wondered if Bach knew the music of Purcell. It so reminded me of "When I am Laid in Earth". Unlikely. That ground bass, known as the lamento or lament bass, was common property in the 17th century and after; Bach used it often. As for "Dido and Aeneas," the earliest known...

John F

When I was a staff announcer for WBAI in New York, we signed off the air every night with this recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujLK28Nlmq4

John F

The Vienna Philharmonic "took a hiatus" from performing Mahler after 1938, the year of the Anschluss; Mahler's music was banned in Austria by the Nazis. Immediately before that they had performed the 9th symphony and 2 years earlier "Das Lied von der Erde," both conducted by Bruno Walter and publish...

John F

There's still an Arts section in the NY Times every day, and today's paper has 12 articles (I subscribe online so I don't know how many pages), but since that section also includes movie reviews, pieces about serious music, theatre, and dance aren't given much space.

John F

the point of doing any art is to do something that hasn't already been done There are other reasons for "doing art" and other criteria for judging it than total originality from the ground up. Of course works of art differ from each other to some degree, but there's no need for the differences to b...

John F

I guess we are not surprised to find multiple members of a family who share musical talent: married couples who met "through work" and their talented offspring (there must be a genetic factor, I suppose). It probably shouldn't be surprising, but many notable composers - maybe most of them - were th...

John F

Relatives or not, the best singers aren't necessarily chosen for performances and recordings. Bruno Walter's recording of Mahler's 4th symphony and some of the Gesänge aus der Jugendzeit (with him at the piano) featured the soprano Desi Halban, daughter of the Viennese prima donna Selma Kurz but ver...

John F

[quote="David Hurwitz"the New York orchestra has an even more authentic Mahlerian pedigree than do the Viennese[/quote] What can Hurwitz mean by that? Mahler was the chief conductor of both orchestras, but he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic as the orchestra of the Court Opera far more often and lo...

John F

"The best classical music works of the 21st century" pretends to something more definitive than that. Add "so far" and it's OK.

John F

Page isn't talking about record reviews, which rarely appear in newspapers and magazines, but about reviews of live performances, an entirely different matter. After all, reviewed or not, the recording will still be there as primary evidence of the performance; not so a live performance unless it ha...

John F

In Memory of the Critic’s Trade Tim Page September 2019 Back when most of the leading newspapers in the United States employed paid, officially designated music critics, the artists reviewed were, quite naturally, pleased by positive reviews and less happy with negative ones. The only unpardonable o...

John F

The occasional eminent guest conductor in season after season of Bruno Bartoletti does not a conductor's opera company make. As for Andrew Davis, he's certainly competent but he's the wrong Davis.

John F

With my long and broad experience of classical music performances, on records and in person, going back 60 years, I'm hard to please. I don't easily forget or put aside what has pleased me and gone into my personal standards of excellence. The first performance of "The Marriage of Figaro" I ever saw...

John F

Brother and sister partnerships are perhaps not the same as other blood and non-blood relationships; growing up in the same household, etc. Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart, and any number of Bachs.

John F

This kind of nepotism ... didn't just start in recent times. Quite so. The great conductor Felix Weingartner (1863-1942) featured his wife, the not so great mezzo-soprano Lucille Marcel, in several recordings, including some songs he composed for her. And I'm sure there have been many earlier examp...

John F

Noseda studied with Valery Gergiev and then became his principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Opera, so doubtless he knows the Russian repertoire specially well.

John F

For me, Haefliger had a fine voice and sang well but was rather dull. I heard him only once in person, in Mozart's "Seraglio" at Glyndebourne in 1956, but I had learned the music from the Fricsay recording in which he also sings, and maybe that makes a better impression with a more vital conductor t...

John F

Copeland became friends with Debussy who approved his way of playing his music. One of Copeland's most remarkable feats, repeated in several recordings, is his transcription of the Afternoon of a Faun, which you might think would lose a lot minus the colors of Debussy's orchestration. Well, judge fo...

John F

Adriana Lecouvreur......Anna Netrebko Maurizio................Piotr Beczala Princess di Bouillon....Anita Rachvelishvili Michonnet...............Ambrogio Maestri Bouillon................Maurizio Muraro Abbé....................Carlo Bosi Jouvenot................Sarah Joy Miller Dangeville...............

John F

The 21st century has 80 years to go; selecting its best classical works might seem a trifle premature.

Also, after the top 15 most of which I might agree with, most are by British and American composers, a provincial orientation that's perhaps not surprising given the source but not encouraging.

John F

That's as anti-rhetorical performance of this very rhetorical concerto as you're likely to hear. Incidentally, there's another recording with anti-aircraft fire in the distance - Wanda Landowska's of the Scarlatti sonata in D, Kk 490, made in 1940. She was recording a second volume for EMI's Scarlat...

John F

This is one of my pet peeves, and not just with Lance's listing: to exclude important pianists and exceptional performances merely because the pianist did not record the composer's complete works in the genre. It may be convenient but I think that's usually all it is. For example, William Kapell rec...

John F

I see that Lance doesn't mention Walter Gieseking, who recorded the Beethoven concertos more than once. But I wouldn't recommend the ones I've heard, including the 4th concerto with Böhn which my parents had and which taught me the music. Gieseking never made an ugly sound at the keyboard, not that ...

John F

Besides G&S, the Boston Academy also performed Sullivan's opera "Ivanhoe," its American premiere, with cuts but still complete enough to assess the piece. Apart from a few numbers ("Jolly Jenkin") I heard very little that I'd want to hear again - nothing bad about the piece but it's as dull as can b...

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