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Day 43. Beethoven (continued)

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

So tonight I am finishing up the Brendel Beethoven discs on Vox Box. I mentioned to my friend Katherine (who is an amazing pianist) that I LOVE that in this set, Vol. 1 Disc 1 starts with the ‘Hammerklavier’. On top of that, the whole of Vol. 1 (two discs) is dedicated to the late sonatas. Scoff at Vox Box all you want – this set is intended for collectors who know what they are looking for. Young Alfred Brendel, and they are throwing one of the most difficult works of Beethoven at you as disc 1 track 1.

I have the ‘Appassionata’ on right now (and I’m ripping disc 6 of 15 at the moment). And wow – I forgot how good these performances are. The accelerando in the last movement is thrilling, and played so clearly. Just amazing.

The recordings themselves though are a bit noisy. Tape hiss is audible, and this makes close editing of the movements feel choppy (end note, QUICK fade out of hiss, then onto the next movement). Other then that though I have nothing to really complain about with these recordings.

And my favorite aspect of them is that for the most part Brendel takes all the repeats. This is really a pet-peeve of mine – it drives me crazy when a performer omits a repeat from a performance. I still remember the first time I heard Brahms’ first symphony WITH the repeat in the first movement and I couldn’t believe how big of a difference it made! It is somewhat known that Brahms actually told people that he thought the repeat could be omitted ‘once the piece is known’, but I think that is actually a huge mistake. WIth the first symphony, the repeat back to the beginning has an extremely jarring effect on the listener. It makes the c minor of the first symphony even more c minor! It is darker with the repeat, and as a result when you reach the stunning B major triad at the beginning of the development THAT moment is so much brighter. Without the repeat is smooths the piece out… with it, and it is much more dramatic.

Beethoven’s music (and most works from the classical period) need the repeats to work structurally and rhetorically. Repetition is so crucial to musical understanding, and Beethoven used repetition better then just about any composer. Beethoven used the structural patterns of the classical period on so many levels as well, and took this aspect of the classical period and manipulated it (and how listeners perceive repetition) in the most dramatic way possible. His understanding of how melodic fragments could be referenced within the music for the listener is probably the quality of Beethoven’s composing that I think makes him truly unique. The connections he creates by taking advantage of how a person builds up memory is truly masterful. At the same time – it is this aspect of Beethoven’s writing that I think Brahms misses the point on most of all. The sweeping gestures that Brahms created in much of his music are a bit too long to be remembered as a whole for most listeners (but they are often discovered by music students who study his work!). If there is any reason why Brahms’ 1st ISN’T Beethoven’s 10th, it is in this difference. However, I think this is something that Brahms did pick up on in the end of his life. His pieces that are the most Beethoven-ish are his last sets of piano works (op. 116. 117, 118 and 119). Hmm… if I get done with these Brendel recordings tonight, I think I need to grab those late Brahms pieces next…

Tags: Alfred Brendel, Bee
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Day 42. Leon Parker, Beethoven, Bach and more Beethoven (maybe).

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I couldn’t get the girls downstairs tonight for any picks, so I grabbed Leon Parker’s ‘Belief’, then my set of Wilhelm Kempff’s recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos (with Berlin and Ferdinand Leitner… one of TWO complete recordings I have with Kempff)… then I grabbed the Harmonia Mundi box set of Kenneth Gilbert’s Bach keyboard works… then Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations by Alfred Brendel (on Vox Box)… then I decided ‘well, maybe I’ll get through all the Brendel Beethoven solo piano works’. As everything sits right now I am done with Leon Parker and the Kempff recordings, and am about halfway through the Kenneth Gilbert. We’ll see how far I get tonight (the Brendel stack is 15 CDs… I’ll be surprised if I finish them).

Leon Parker’s disc is one of my favorite non-avant-garde contemporary jazz discs. That’s a lot of qualifiers, but I think most serious jazz listeners can understand (if not agree) with the need for them. ‘Belief’ is a very accessible disc but at the same time doesn’t fit into the ‘rock with words’ world of most mainstream jazz. There are elements of 20th century minimalism, some sharp, punctuated horn playing, and lots of good percussion (which is what Leon Parker plays). The album closes off with a great, sparse version of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’, but the stand out on the album is ‘Calling Out’. After buildup and crash of cymbals, a percussive ostinato starts up, followed by additional layers of vocal patterns that keep getting added to create a dense vocal / percussive heterophony that certainly owes quite a bit to West African music.

But right now I have the Beethoven concertos on. I love Wilhem Kempff’s playing. And these performances (and recordings) are beautiful. One of my fondest orchestra memories was playing the 5th concerto one summer. Steve (another bass player who also actively performed in a Black Sabbath cover band) taps my shoulder with his bow during one of the piano solo parts in the first movement during a rehearsal. I turn around, and he is pretending to tap his bass strings a la an Eddie Van Halen solo, in perfect rhythm to the soloist. Of course – Steve completely called it. This IS the Eddie Van Halen solo music of the 18th century (and I mean that in the best, most bad ass way it can be taken – early Van Halen shredding at its best). 3 seconds of pantomime summed up Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto for me better then any history book or paper on the piece I ever read.

The Brendel recordings (that I just might get to tonight) are his first recordings of the Beethoven solo repertoire. He would go on to record the sonatas two more times on Phillips (and may have even done one more set as he was preparing to retire… i heard something about that??? did he???). While he later set (from the 90s) is certainly very interesting to listen to, the set on Vox Box is probably my second favorite set (after Kempff’s set). I remember when I bought them… the classical manager at the time scoffed at me for ‘being willing to touch those dirty things’… Vox Box… the dusty budget set in its own rack that he felt didn’t deserve even to be shelved much less purchased. But, the joke is on him. There were some great older recordings that Vox Box put out, and I’m certainly glad I didn’t let his classical snobbery deter me. After he left and I was given more control over classical purchases at the store, the memory of his pricing snobbery bothered me so much that one of the first things I did was order one of every Naxos title. I though then (and still firmly believe) that it shouldn’t cost a fortune to explore classical music. Or any music for that matter… but at least with classical music, you could get to know repertoire for a reasonable price as long as the guy at the counter was willing to suggest those discs to a new customer. Sure, they aren’t always ‘the best’, but they are often quite good and you will get to hear more when you are just starting out that way.

Tags: Beethoven, J.S. Bach, Leon Parker
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Day 40. Garth Knox, Haydn and Marais.

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Most of tonight’s choices come as a result of talking to an old friend from Berkeley. We were discussing early music in particular and some of the ‘obsolete’ instruments that would be nice if they weren’t so obsolete. Viola da Gamba was one of the them (which I played for a few years at UW during grad school, and would love to get back into again) as well as the Baryton and Viola d’Amore. These last two are string instruments (similar to cello and viola, respectively) that feature a second set of strings that are strung through the neck and below the regular strings. These are usually tuned to a specific scale and are then allowed to resonate in sympathy with whatever is being played – creating a stringy, halo-ish reverb. Haydn wrote a huge number of pieces for Baryton trio (that have been recorded a couple times). But just as rare is the Viola d’Amore (though, since I have helped out Garth Knox with a few concerts I have actually seen and heard this instrument a number of times).

Garth has been touring and gathering new works for Viola d’Amore for a number of years now, and I have also worked with him on a project to re-do the electronics for Grisey’s ‘Prelude’ for viola and resonators. Sympathetic vibration (and spectral modeling) has been a fascination of mine for a number of years now, going back to my ‘Music for Bassoon’ that has a VERY crude model of a resonating piano as its basis. But since that piece (over the past 6 years or so) I have been working on different ways to make it sound as though one instrument is playing through another. Working on the Grisey piece actually brought me close to doing what I wanted, but it wasn’t until I was working on the electronics for my viola piece ‘Theta‘ where I was able to get something to work that would take a snapshot from a performer in real-time and then let that player make it resonate. Hearing Garth play pieces on the Viola d’Amore was really the inspiration for this, and I spent a better part of a year coming up with algorithms that allowed me to do this, and I think the sonic result is quite convincing.

However – I’m not saying that I think my stuff sounds like Viola d’Amore. The sound of this instrument is beautiful and his playing on his disc ‘D’Amore’ is wonderful. There are some older pieces on the disc (a Marais piece, some traditional tunes as well as a set of variations by Garth Knox on ‘Malor Me Bat’), but there are also a couple of modern pieces that take advantage of the idiosyncrasies of the instrument. Of particular note is Klaus Huber’s ‘…Plainte…’ which is an elegy to another favorite composer of mine Luigi Nono. The microtones slide around leaving halos behind them when they come into tune with the sympathetic strings in a delicate way.

I also ripped Garth’s ‘Spectral Viola’ disc (with Grisey, Murail, Scelsi and Radulescu) and his solo debut disc on naïve (with the Berio Sequenza for solo viola and Sciarrino’s ‘Tre notturno brillante’). The Sciarrino may be one of my favorite late 20th century pieces… and I am not ashamed to say that I grabbed a number of tricks from the score for these works for ‘Theta’.

Tags: Franz Joseph Haydn, Garth Knox, Marin Marais
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Day 39. Beethoven and the Powerpuff Girls.

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Celia grabbed ‘Heros and Villians: Music Inspired By The Powerpuff Girls’ and the 1963 Herbert Von Karajan Beethoven symphony recordings tonight. I am quite tickled by the combination.

Over the next few hours, I will hear what I consider to be some of the greatest recordings of the greatest music of all time. But first – Devo, Shohen Knife, bis and Frank Black. Tamiko and I spent quite a bit of time watching the Powerpuff Girls early on in grad school. 10 minutes of sillyness with some pretty decent writing. ‘Meet the Beatalls’ is an episode I just referred someone to the other day (written almost completely in Beatles lyrics – pure genius). As for the music on the disc, it is rather hit or miss. But the bands above provide some pretty good tracks, especially Shohen Knife’s ode to Buttercup. I don’t think Celia or Mira are old enough for the Powerpuff Girls yet… but I am looking forward to the day when we can watch them together.

I think the Karajan discs are probably the recordings I sold more of then anything else during my record store days. Or it may be better to say, these are the discs I recommended to more people then anyone else (because I am pretty sure that even if I suggested and sold 50 of these sets, it would still pale in number to the thousands of copies of pop hits I would have actually taken cash for). These older analog recordings sound great, and the performances are stunningly beautiful. Quite possibly the height of Deutche Grammophone’s recording days matched by the height of Karajan’s conducting. I believe Karajan had recorded complete sets of the Beethoven symphonies two or three times before these DG recordings with his orchestra (Berlin). And he would go on to record the complete cylce two more times (once in the 70s and again in the 80s so they could be captured digitally), but it is the 1963 recordings that stand above and beyond the other recordings.

I tend to like my Beethoven played with smaller orchestras though. In fact I prpbably like other recordings here and there better then individual performances on these discs. But these performances really are the standard of standards for these pieces, and the quality and musicianship across the whole set really hasn’t been matched before or since. While tempos may be slower then what Beethoven may have wanted or the orchestra bigger, what these recordings seem to capture for me is a sense of what Karajan was doing as an interpreter in his time. This was HIS orchestra (he had been appointed director for life in 1955) and he had been shaping its sound for quite some time. And the Beethoven symphinies were the backbone of his repertoire. As recording technology improved he was always at the forefront, eager to explore new possibilites. I think in the 70s and 80s, this actually hurt his recorded documents however. These recordings were mostly recorded (I believe) in a church in Berlin, and the recording engineers were in a building across the street because of the lack of space. After a take was done, Karajan would run across the street to hear the recording and judge whether or not to do another take. But recording technology in these days wasn’t as advanced as they would be in the 70s… and while I am sure there is some editing in these discs, they feel more dynamic and musical to me then the performances from the 70s that seems unrealistically smooth and even (and the poor early digital technology couple with his old age make the recordings from the 80s particularly difficult to listen to). These are quite fiery at times, as well as amazingly dramatic.

The recording of the 7th on these discs is especially beautiful. It is the stand out of this set. The first movement has excitement (the transition from the opening Adagio to the Allegro almost sounds avant-garde in it’s clarity). The second movement is by far the most deeply moving version of this piece I have ever heard, and it provides stunning contrast to the third and fourth movements. Karajan is often given credit (in his live performances) for shaping a beautiful dramatic arch through an entire piece, and while his reocrdings sometimes lose this it is far from the case in this recording of the 7th.

Time to put it on actually…

Tags: Beethoven, Herbert Von Karajan, Powerpuff Girls, Shohen Knife
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Day 38. Louis Couperin.

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Louis Couperin (part of the same family as François) lived to 35, and was best known during his lifetime as one of the most important keyboardists in Paris. None of his music was published during his lifetime, but he is often credited as the creator of the baroque French harpsichord tradition. While I am much more familiar with François’s music, I came across some of Louis’s music while I was preparing for my doctoral exams. The ‘unmeasured prelude’ – a prelude that was written down rather then simply improvised – brought about a significant change to the composed suite. While the suite consisted pretty much entirely of dance movements before L. Couperin’s time, the idea of notating the prelude brought about a significant change… composing the what would traditionally be seen as improvised of course provided the opportunity to play with the idea of compositionally showing off before the more traditional movements would begin. While they mostly consisted of figurations of changes of harmony, the notation itself was particularly beautiful. Mostly just whole notes and slurs that showed phrasing. I find the pages of these works that I have seen as being fairly avant-garde, even for modern times. Here is a work within a musical tradition that had become rather measured and rhythmic, and it removes this rhythmic aspect quite brutally. Surely these ‘whole notes’ could not be performed as whole notes at any sort of reasonable tempo. The notation implies a flexibility of execution, and at the same time a sense that these notes overlap and build up texture. I imagine his work as an organist influenced these notation decisions (in the same way that Bruckner’s organ playing influenced his orchestration).

The five discs I have were a box set I found used for $20. It features 133 movements that make up Louis Couperin’s knows works for harpsichord. They are great pieces and they are also the work that will lead to greater works later in history. As with most composers who die young but leave a large impression, I wonder what Louis’ career would have led to. Would there have been other innovations? Other attempts to capture in notation what performers do when they realize works out of thin air? Would he have been seen as ‘Le Grand’ Couperin rather then François? And why should I feel a need to wonder these things? He is seen as the father of one of the grandest traditions of the Baroque period – not to shabby.

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Day 31. Berio.

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

Mira’s love of box-sets (or at least large spines) continues with the second set of Berio Sequenzas I have (on Mode records with other solo pieces), and she also grabbed the DG 20/21 recordings of ‘Sinfonia’ and ‘Coro’.

When I first started grad school, Richard Karpen would gather all of his students together every other week for a group meeting, and often we would listen to a piece and read a score. ‘Coro’ was one of those pieces. The opening five or six minutes begins like a song for voice and piano, then explodes into more typical Berio orchestral colors. I don’t mean the word ‘typical’ here to sound disparaging… but Berio’s orchestral writing has a clear, crisp sound that is one of the more recognizable voices in 20th century writing. His orchestration is almost like some of the great jazz player’s sounds – you can hear Coltrane when he plays tenor sax, and Dizzy Gillespie is the only one that sounds like Dizzy Gillespie. And in the same vain Berio’s orchestral writing can be identified… such a pristine and clear musical voice, even when expressing complex and dense textures. While I had been sent to Berio to look at solo instrumental writing already (mostly through the ‘Sequenzas’), seeing his orchestral scores (and his vocal writing in this piece, which requires the singers to be seated within the orchestra) presented a number of challenges to me. I had just finished an orchestral work a couple years before during by BA at Berkeley, and thought that one of the things I would be doing a lot of at UW would be writing orchestra works. At this meeting, where we all listened to ‘Coro’, the question was thrown at us… ‘Is there anything left for the orchestra to say that is new?’ … and if there is, how do we do it?

I remember thinking that innovation needs work, and that I couldn’t believe that there is ‘nothing left for the orchestra to say’. And I still believe that. The reality that struck me later that year though, was which orchestras want to try and find that new language? Gerard Schwarz (the director of the Seattle Symphony) talked to the music students at UW that year as well, and when asked why he doesn’t program more new music (or even give readings) he given a simple response… he said that he loved programming new music and he listed a number of composers that he liked to program because ‘they gave the audience familiar yet new sounds’. In other words, any composer that may be trying to find something new to say with orchestra won’t be getting played in Seattle while Gerard Schwarz was conducting. It was all ‘new music’ with a romantic voice. As his tenure comes to an end, I wonder if that will change? Are there examples of other major orchestras that do take an adventurous view? How many in the US would even perform ‘Coro’, a work now 35 years old and almost conservative by modern avant-garde tastes? Can a piece like this survive if it isn’t getting played? Is the recording it’s end all be all?

So it is no wonder that most composers work on solo or smaller chamber works. Personally, it is how my work gets performed. I would love to dive into a work for orchestra, but I also can’t imagine working on a piece that may never get played. While ‘Coro’ is a rarity in the concert hall, and we have to rely on a couple of versions to get an idea of what can be done with the work as far as interpretation goes, the Sequenzas have had a much more successful concert life. This second set I have features performances by Stuart Dempster (who the trombone Sequenza was written for) as well as Garth Knox and Irvine Arditti. Some wonderful playing in this set to say the least.

Tags: Garth Knox, Irvine Arditti, Luciano Berio, Stuart Dempster
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Day 27. Arvo Pärt.

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Right before Celia was born I began looking for discs that we could play for her that would let her know it was bedtime. I figured if we had a few discs that we could play for her every night she would take become accustomed to hearing certain pieces of music and associating them with sleep. The first disc that wound up in her CD player was Arvo Pärt’s ‘Alina’ with three versions of ‘Spiegel Im Spiegel’ and two versions of extended performances of ‘Fur Alina’. I think that disc was in Celia’s CD player for almost 4 years. When Mira was born, a copy was put into HER bedroom CD player (where it still sits). Celia has moved on to Dowland or Bach for her bedtime listening, but every night for about 5 years now, I have heard Arvo Pärt’s ‘Alina’ either during story time or over sound monitors. On one hand, once you know the music it can disappear into the background easy enough. On the other, the music is simply beautiful and I can lay there, holding my girls for a few minutes before they go to sleep and listen to the music.

At one point I mentally dictated ‘Spiegel In Spiegel’ in my head. When I first heard it I just thought of the piece as a simplified ‘Moonlight Sonata’. For the most part it really hasn’t stood up that well for me. It doesn’t bother me, but I don’t find it to be an amazing piece. It is great for the girls to fall asleep to though… simple, calming and pretty. ‘Fur Alina’ on the other hand (and specifically the recordings on this disc – extended improvisations on a two minutes piece that stretch on for about 10-11 minutes each) is a stunningly beautiful work. I actually think this performance is a masterpiece. It sounds so simple, and the piece itself analyzes quite easily. After B octaves in the low end of the piano, the upper voice moves in a stepwise B minor melody against a broken B minor triad in the right hand, all in the upper part of the piano. It seems ‘Ode To Joy’ simple, but I imagine it took an immense amount of revision to arrive at. This piece marked Pärt’s change of style in the ’70s, and it was a drastic one. From a serial complexity to a simplicity that, from a composers point of view, is extremely difficult to achieve.

If I finish reading to one of the girls and ‘Fur Alina’ is on, I lay and listen to it through. The piece makes the piano vibrate a shimmery B minor, and the music is a beautiful mixture of dissonant 9ths and resonant minor chords. The music almost always reminds me of my first trip to Copenhagen. It was my first trip to Europe and on my first morning there (a Sunday morning) I walked out of the hotel to explore a little. I wound up standing in a large snow covered courtyard surrounded by old buildings and cold, quiet air:

I didn’t see another person for probably an hour when I got back to the hotel with some very cold feet and fingers. It was an amazingly peaceful feeling mixed with drowsiness from jetlag. And I get this feeling of cold expanse mixed with calm when I hear this music. Then, I wrap my arms around my little girls to make sure they are warm and comfortable for a good night’s sleep.

Tags: Arvo Pärt
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Day 24. J.S. Bach.

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Mira is still under the weather, but for the first time since last Sunday both Celia and Mira are (for the time being) sleeping in their own beds. Hopefully I can get back to the tradition of the girls choosing the ‘DAC’ discs soon. But I tried my best by closing my eyes and grabbing some Bach off the shelf. I grabbed a couple of different recordings of the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ as well as a Brandenburg Concertos recording and a recording of the sonatas for violin and continuo for tonight.

My senior year at UC Berkeley I was very fortunate to take a class on Bach by Prof. John Butt. Tamiko had taken a more general Bach survey from him during one of her first years at Cal and he was one of her favorite professors. He was an amazing performer, great lecturer and VERY funny (Tamiko made a comment once that it was like having Monty Python teach her about Bach). While I was going through the major, I eagerly anticipated each semester’s course schedule to see if Prof. Butt was teaching a Bach class, and he finally did my senior year. The course was a much smaller seminar and focused on Bach’s Passions (and the tradition that they came out of). There were five of us in the class and we spent 12 of the 17 weeks just looking at the two Bach pieces. I had never looked at any pieces in such depth before, and while getting to spend most of an entire semester with Bach I also learned a huge amount about how to look at music itself. A couple years ago, Prof. Butt (who left Cal for Cambridge in the late 90s) released a recording of the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ with the Dunedin Ensemble. Like Joshua Rifkin’s recordings of the B Minor Mass and a few of the cantatas, the John Butt ‘St. Matthew Passion’ is recorded with a single performer on a part. While performances usually range from large modern orchestras and choirs to smaller baroque ensembles, a good amount of research shows that one player per part performances were a good possibility during Bach’s time. This performance (along with the Rifkin recordings) present convincing arguments. The pieces present the music with a clarity that I had never heard before, and it is amazing how much more can be heard with a smaller ensemble.

The other recording of the St. Matthew I pulled tonight is the John Eliot Gardiner recording with the Monteverdi Choir. These were actually the recordings we used as a reference in John Butt’s class. At the time of their recording they were one of the first period instrument recordings of these works. The performance is very dramatic, and if you have only heard recordings of this piece with larger forces (like most of the recordings from the ’50s and ’60s), I highly suggest finding the Gardiner recording.

The Brandenburg Concerto recordings are by ‘Il Giardino Armonico’. The performances are lively and fun. Tamiko and I had a chance to see the group perform Bach and Vivaldi in the 90s (also at Berkeley) and it was one of the most enjoyable concerts I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if I have ever seen a group play with such big smiles before. Between the first and second movements of the Vivaldi concerto they opened the concert with, there was some clapping (which doesn’t bother me personally as much as it does many musicians). The players in the group paused and acknowledged the applause, then played the rest of the first half of the concert without a single break… one movement into the next with only a brief breath in between. The line between pieces was broken down, and the audience could do nothing but listen for about an hour. The result was wonderful. No one was worried about clapping at the right time, and after about 20 minutes I remember feeling like the group had taken their energy and were propelling us along with them.

Tags: Il Giardino Armonico, J.S. Bach, John Butt
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Day 23. Mari Kimura and Francis White.

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Tonight’s post will be short. Mira has been sick for a couple days, and spent a good part of the evening sleeping on my chest. I couldn’t get up to rip CDs, so I spent a little time organizing the mp3s that are on the computer that had been purchased over the past few years. In the playlist of ‘things to be categorized’ I came across Mari Kimura’s ‘Polytopia’. Mari is truly a virtuoso violinist, and a number of the pieces on this disc show off her stunning abilities and musicianship as a performer. My favorite piece on the disc though is Francis White’s ‘The Old Rose Reader’. It is a beautifully melodic piece, more meditative then flashy, and very classical in many ways. However, unlike most new music that is so strongly connected to past traditions, the piece is not derivative at all. In fact the piece is stunningly fresh even with its older musical vocabulary. The computer part of the piece features Mari’s husband (and his thick french accent) reading a list of different rose names, interspersed with the occasional vignette. The other sounds in the tape move between piano-ish sounds to bell like sounds that swell rather then decay, shimmering in the background then slowly becoming the foreground. The relationship between the violin and the computer is wonderfully balanced, and Mari’s performance is a key part to the recordings success.

Francis White is one of my favorite living composers… if you haven’t heard her work, it is well worth tracking down. And for those of you in Seattle, Mari will be here in Seattle at the chapel on March 4th. Definitely not a show to miss.

Tags: Francis White, Mari Kimura
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Day 18. George Crumb. Beethoven.

Friday, February 5th, 2010

There are two performances that I have seen that have unexpectedly changed my life. And tonight’s selections actually capture both of them.

I have many recordings of the Beethoven String Quartets. They may be my favorite body of work … ever. Beethoven is often thought of first and foremost as a symphonist (and for good reason, don’t get me wrong). The quartets are a different beast though. Intimate, close and extremely personal. He took this instrumentation (already standardized by the earlier Viennese classical tradition with Haydn and Mozart) and greatly added weight to its repertoire. I have MANY recordings of the quartets (5 or 6 I think?) so I will talk about them a great deal over the course of this project, but since this is the first set I am transferring, I’ll start with a story about the first time I heard one of them.

My junior year of high school, a quartet visited Roseville High School and performed the Op. 59 #1 and Op. 59 #3 quartets in the school library. I was not in the least bit interested in hearing them. In fact I wasn’t that into classical music at all. My main contact with classical music had come from the concert band repertoire that we played in band during the non-marching band season. Holst and Vaughn Williams were OK, and I did really like a band arrangement we performed of Bach’s ‘Little Fugue’ in g minor. Anyways – I wasn’t interested in hearing any string quartets, much less an hour of them. But – we had to go.

I had no idea people could play like this. The opening cello melody in Op. 59 #1, the independent melodic lines that seem to fight around each other only to come together into large chords… and … and I didn’t know! What was I hearing? I ran to work that day and found a cassette of Op. 59 #1 (the little Roseville Tower didn’t have #3) and on that tape was also a recording of the Grosse Fuge which I was excited about since I liked the Bach fugue we played in band so much. Wow – was I in for a shock. This wasn’t anything like the Bach fugue, and I couldn’t believe how intense the music was. I didn’t realize it at the time, but hearing that group play was what got me interested in listening to (then trying to understand and finally wanting to perform and compose) classical music. The Op. 59 quartets are still some of my favorite. The recording from tonight is from the 70s (if I remember correctly) with the Quator Vegh. Some very nice performances (relaxed for the most part), but the recording is a bit boomy in the cello, and thin in the violins. Like I said though – much more about Beethoven quartets in the future (especially about the differences in performance).

The second performance that would greatly change my life occurred in Copenhagen (during my first trip to Europe). Bassoonist Külli Sass (now Lambertsen) had contacted me about performing my ‘Music for Bassoon and Computer’, and I was able to pull together funds to make it out for the concert during the conservatory’s new music festival. Külli was an amazing performer, and we had a great couple days rehearsing. The night of the concert though featured a performance of George Crumb’s ‘Vox Balanae’. I had heard this piece once before and enjoyed it, but seeing it performed (masks, blue lights and amplified) was thrilling. Even more thrilling was watching the performers. They paid SUCH close attention to each other and played together in a way that I hadn’t ever seen students other students do. After the concert I wrote to Külli and asked if she would be interested in having a new piece, and also wondered if the performers from the Crumb piece and another player who had performed a solo bass piece may also be interested. They all said yes and we figured out a way to put the piece together. The piece became my doctoral dissertation ‘Organon Sostenuto’ for flute (Tanja Backe), cello (Pia Enblom), bassoon (Külli), double bass (Kristján Orri Sigurleifsson) and computer (myself). We performed the piece in Copenhagen a year after my first trip out, then they all came to Seattle a few months later for my doctoral recital. One of the main ideas behind the piece was a lack of information in the score about how melodic parts were supposed to line up – the performers needed to pull this aspect of the piece together as a group (and as a result, I had to program a computer part that could be flexible with them). When I think about the composer I was before this piece and then who I am after working with this amazing group of musicians, I am stunned at how much I changed. I grew more working on this one piece then I probably did in the 5 years of graduate school leading up to it. The experience drastically changed my belief in what is important for musicians and composers to learn. They made me realize how little notes on a page can matter. The end result – the sound that the musicians create – is the only thing that matters and it doesn’t really matter how that information is passed to them as long as it is passed! And typing this tonight, I realize that this is what happened during that first performance I heard of the Beethoven quartet. It was the sound of the group working as a whole that is greater then its parts.

Tags: Beethoven, George Crumb
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Archive for the ‘Classical’ Category

Day 43. Beethoven (continued)

Day 42. Leon Parker, Beethoven, Bach and more Beethoven (maybe).

Day 40. Garth Knox, Haydn and Marais.

Day 39. Beethoven and the Powerpuff Girls.

Day 38. Louis Couperin.

Day 31. Berio.

Day 27. Arvo Pärt.

Day 24. J.S. Bach.

Day 23. Mari Kimura and Francis White.

Day 18. George Crumb. Beethoven.

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