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Joe Barron

It's a short piece, but I've always found Debussy's "Footprints in the Snow" from Book I of the Preludes a marvelous invocation of cold weather. Indeed, it's one of the few programmatic pieces I know of in which the subject is discernable without the benefit of reading the title. It feels like ice, ...

Joe Barron

And, of course, the handle makes perfect sense, since the other Piston was also from Maine.

Joe Barron

There's really not much to it, and there are no rules. Op. is the abbreviation for Opus, Latin meaning "work." In the old days, opus numbers were assigned to works to reflect their order of publication, and they could contain any number of individual pieces. When Haydn published his String Quartets ...

Joe Barron

And speaking of Walsh --- Karl, do you remember when I was writing about the Minnesota Carter festival last March? Of course you do. I reported that Paul Griffiths said that Carter sang with the Harvard Glee Club in the US premiere of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, and you pointed out it must have...

Joe Barron

Karl, did you really like vol. 2? I am almost through vol. 1 now and am finding it something of a chore. It's like an underwritten Russian novel— lots of long names, but very few real personalities. Katya, the most sympathetic character in the whole story, seems to vanish halfway through, and what I...

Joe Barron

Remember that even Charles Ives sold insurance in Massachusetts while simultaneously composing his music. Long after his death, Ives' music is heard more frequently today, but his name is still not a household word. Just a point of clarification. Ives's insurance company was located in New York Cit...

Joe Barron

I could not agree with you more, Joe. I was thinking of Mozart's trios. As for being a Mozart expert, thank you for the compliment. :lol: :lol: However, there are others on this Forum who are much better informed than I am. My interest lies mainly in Mozart's Vienna years and the post Mozartean era...

Joe Barron

If you're going to do a 17th-century poll, please include Heinrich Schutz, or I'll be 0 for 3 ...

Joe Barron

You didn't include my favorite turn of the 21st century composer --- Elliott Carter. I'm 0 for 2 in these polls.

Joe Barron

Agnes is our resident Mozart expert, and all of her suggestions should be given serious consideration. Still, I'd like to put in my two cents. According to pianist and writer Charles Rosen, Mozart's breakthrough is the Piano Concerto in E-Flat, No. 9, K. 271, subtitled "The Jeunehomme." (Is that eno...

Joe Barron

Of the ones listed, I'd say Debussy, Mahler, and Sibelius, but one of my other real faves, Carl Nielsen (1865-1931), does not appear. He was an exact contemporary of Sibelius and every bit as good, imho. Like Sibelius, he carried on the abstract symphonic tradition into the 20th century. He was a ma...

Joe Barron

I did not find her personally as funny as I had found her recordings. The audience was so familiar with the Ring thing that they actually recited parts of it along with her. "The opera opens in the River Rhine." IN IT! Well, from what I understand, she could not not perform the Wagner analysis. It ...

Joe Barron

diegobueno wrote:Isn't this the same David Schiff who wrote "The Music of Elliott Carter"?

Yep, same guy.

Joe Barron

David Schiff is an eloquent writer and an insightful man. This essay almost made me want to listen to Reich again.

Joe Barron

Great assortment of quotes, Dave ! Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. So, what's the name? And how do you know when the unknowable has been communicated to you? :-) Cheers, ~Karl Music can also digest the indigestible and reverse the irreversible. Thanks, Karl, that struc...

Joe Barron

go to every Elliott Carter premiere, just because the composer is a sentimental favorite of mine. Because he’s so old, and because the odds are never entirely in everyone’s favor, I’ve started to lower my expectations. I’m always prepared to be disappointed, to think, “It’s OK, but maybe it’s time t...

Joe Barron

I just purchased a recording of The Soldier's Tale with the Prague Chamber Harmony conducted by Libor Pesek, on the Supraphon Label. I got it because it was cheap, but it's very fine for a non-name group with a non-name recording. Excellent sound quality, and the group makessome interesting choices....

Joe Barron

Thanks for mentioning Metzmachers work with Ives's music, pizza. The Portrait and his reading of the Browning Overture are indeed top notch. Several years ago, before the opening of the Kimmel Center, Metzmacher conducted the philadelphia Orchestra in a perfromqance of Ives's Orchestral Set No. 2 a ...

Joe Barron

Gee, I seem to be in the minority. Neither composer appears on my can't-live-without list, but I've always been more partial to Reich than to Adams. To me, Reich's music is more colorful and has more snap. I find much of Adams' inistrumental music either dull or vulgar. Nixon in China, to my ear, wa...

Joe Barron

Welcome to the world of difficult listening. The first thing that came to mind when I read your post is the Requiem of Gyrgy Ligeti. Scored for chorus and orchestra, it's intense, dense and modern, and also very beautiful. Sveral ecordings are available. I don't think you can get any more opposite f...

Joe Barron

I'm still thinking it was Brahms. For one thing, what possible motivation could there have been to send back a false recording.? Whoever ran around Europe making those would have simply brought back the ones he could make. Thomas Edison, a famous egotist who couldn't think past his nose, not to men...

Joe Barron

He apparently said it in German first. Those words are indistinct, but my friend happened to be a (very brilliant) native speaker and was sure he was saying the same thing in German before he said it clearly in English. If it was a fake, it was a pretty good one, because there is a decided German a...

Joe Barron

She was very patient with us, because we must have listened ten times to that voice saying "I am Dr. Brahms, Johannes Brahms." Not to get into an argument, but there is some question whether the voice on the recording is actually that of Brahms. The words are indistinct. and it is possible that it'...

Joe Barron

No, I think it unlikey, if not impossible. When Chopin died in 1849, Edison's invention of the phongraph was still almost 30 years away, amd I know of no earlier successful methods of recording. There is a recording of Brahms at the piano, but it's only a few seconds long and so degraded it sounds l...

Joe Barron

Ralph wrote:
It was the composer himself who inaugurated the purpose-built opera house at Bayreuth in 1876 after having searched in vain for a venue big enough to stage epic operas like the four-part Ring cycle, with its monumental scenes and huge choruses.

Where is there a huge chorus in the Ring?

Joe Barron

I always recommend new folks start with the nine symphonies of Beethoven. They are central to the repertoire, and through them you can understand everything that came afterwards for the next hundred years, and much that came before. And they contain enough drama and dynamic shifts to keep any conduc...

Joe Barron

Interesting how in our culture the best jokes seem to deal with death. This one put me in mnd of another that has two guys jumping off a building.

Joe Barron

The pissing contest was moved to the Pub ... And with it, the reference to Bach's salesmanship. For the sake of completeness, I include here a quotation from The New Grove book The Bach Family: "Bach publicly praised Silbermann's later pianos and helped to sell them (a receipt for one sold to Polan...

Joe Barron

I'm not sure any composer has a "popular image" like Brad Pitt or JaLo for it to be distorted. I've thought about it, and it seems to me that composers are a distinctly cognoscienti kinda thing. If you know what one is, you are most likely to have a pretty conventional image of him. In my view, the...

Joe Barron

The notion of Bach being a broker for Silbermann pianofortes in any contemporary sense is beyond laughable. Why? A lot of buying and selling went on in the 18th century. It's a perfectly straighforward business proposition: You pass along an order to the manufacturer from a musical acquaintance and...

Joe Barron

jbuck919 wrote: Don't get carried away. I was not apologizing ...

Well, D'uh.

Joe Barron

jbuck919 wrote:The man who could record the fugue from the Opus 106 in, as it were, the same breath as the six-part from the the Musical Offering can be forgiven a little license of the moment for his fifteen minutes of Scott Simon fame.

I accept your apology.

Joe Barron

As to the Musical Offering, Rosen said nothing of the sort and in fact was perfectly aware that the late works of Beethoven, which he also recorded, are even greater than the late works of Bach. Sorry, jbuck, but Rosen did say something of the sort. In fact, he said it exactly. You can listen to hi...

Joe Barron

Wilkommen im Unterhaltungsplatz! Ja, wir interessieren uns fuer e-mail mit Audlaenderinnen. Hier habe ich viele Freunden gefunden, die wohnen in vielen Laendern. Mit dem Internet macht man die Distanz als nichts. Die Musik verbindet uns. That probably made no sense whatsoever. Anyway, welcome aboard...

Joe Barron

I used to be a purest myself, but after hearing Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations and his Well Tempered Clavier, I can no longer doubt the validity of the piano in Bach's music. Unlike Sir Thomas, I love the sound of the harpsichord, and I treasure my old Nonesuch LP set of Bach's complete harpsicho...

Joe Barron

I don't know, Karl, but TDM was a let down after Tehillim. I thought the slow movement was dull. Reich's technique doesn't really lend itself to slower tempos. He's had to work at it, and not all his attempts have been successful.

Joe Barron

Call me crazy, but I always thought Larry David could write a good opera libretto. Seinfeld had all the classic ingredients of buffa — basically, people lying about themselves to avoid embarrasment, only to be more embarrassed when the lie is discovered.

Joe Barron

I was fond of Reich's music when I was younger, but I lost touch after the Desert Music, which was a deep disappointment. Since then, his music has struck me as mechanical, and the pulses don't jazz me up the way they used to. His "New York Counterpoint" for clarinet and orchestra, struck me as lay....

Joe Barron

Ah, there we go. just logged in again under the correct name.

Joe Barron

You know, in his day, Mozart was considered a master of terrifying effects --- such as in the final scene of Don Giovanni.

If you're looking for Friday-Night-Flicks scary, however, check out Black Angels for electric string quartet by George Crumb.

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