DIGITAL TO ANALOG CONVERSION

Day 116. Arvo Pärt, Beethoven and Bach.

Posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 8:12 pm in Classical by josh

Tonight I grabbed a stack of Arvo Pärt, along with another set of Beethoven symphonies (the Gardiner box or rad) and Anner Bylsma’s second set of Bach cello suites. Still ripping the Beethoven and the Bach, but they will be fun to have on.

Arvo Pärt is one of my guilty pleasures. I’ve mentioned before that the girls both had some of his music for bedtime music as they were babies learning to fall asleep. And I can say that for the most part, I like and have learned quite a bit from him. As I heard in a composition lesson once, ‘his music is the REAL minimalism… Reich and Glass are just repetitive. And while listening to his music, I can really hear how this is true. When I first heard Pärt, while working at Tower, his music was often connected to New Age music, and found a bit of an audience there. As such, I wrote him off. There was certainly no need for music in my life that attracted Yanni fans. But after hearing ‘Tabula Rasa’ (the concerto for two violins, strings, prepared piano and percussion) I gave pretty much his whole body of work another listen, and the more and more I heard the more I found it worth hearing. Looking back now at how I tend to think about harmony, dissonance and melody, the more I see relationships in my music to what I have heard in Pärt’s. Not that my music sound like bells, or really anything like his, but there are many things I do in my music that I wouldn’t do if I hadn’t contemplated some of his approaches.

The big one for me is the use of quiet, and space to let moments resonate and decay. There is so much beauty in how sound disappears, and really so much activity. I also learned how important it is to consider the space a performance (or a recording) occurs in, as they will shape the quality of the sound so much. When I listen to recordings of Pärt’s music, I become intensely aware of the feeling of its location and spatial quality. The last piece I had performed (Risonanza) takes particular notice of these qualities. And more and more, I am looking for ways to make live electronics simulate and place instruments and their sounds into different acoustic environments (even within the physical structures of the instruments themselves!). So when I hear Pärt talk about the major changes in his compositional style, and the intense contemplations he made into the sounds of bells and how they sound, I still think about how magical that kind of contemplation on sound can be. I would love to see more composers do the same, and think that this will be one of the most important aspects of music to me throughout the rest of my career. It seems so obvious! But as anyone who has been to a new music festival can probably tell you, it is a rare thing.

Tags: Arvo Pärt, Beethoven, J.S. Bach
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 115. Some mix-discs.

Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 8:51 pm in Celia, Rock / Pop, Tamiko by josh

So tonight when I took Celia downstairs to look for some CDs, out of (what I think is) nowhere, she asks ‘Daddy? Do you have a tape player?’ Now, I’m a little surprised that she would even know what a tape player is, but don’t think too much about it and say ‘yeah, but I think Popi has it…’ and I keep looking for CDs. Then she picks a tape up and says ‘then I think you should do this one tonight’ and it is a mix tape from over ten years ago from my friend Charles. Then it occurs to me… ‘Celia… how did you know that was a tape?’ and she says ‘I just know’, then she turns around and heads upstairs (and I can tell she is quite pleased with herself). Then, there in my hands, is the ONE redeeming reason for cassette tapes to exist. The mix tape. Really, what a horrible medium. The sound quality was horrible on these things (especially compared to records!), over time the sides would start to bleed together, but that was only if some tape machine didn’t eat the damn thing first. All those moving parts as well made for many points of failure, and then there were the compromises manufacturers had to make to get more time onto them (thinner film or added weight which would lead to MORE chances for the thing to get eaten). But by the early ‘90s the 90 minute tape seemed to be pretty ideal for friends to share music with each other (still well before file sharing and mp3 reached any popularity, and CD burners were still VERY expensive, as were the discs to burn onto.

So, 12 or 13 years after the fact Celia finds a mix tape from Charles. And this reminds me that it is also time for me to get my yearly mix disc going. Charles and I worked together at the Tower in Berkeley for a couple years in the mid to late ‘90s while he finished his undergrad degree in English. We became pretty good friends, and have kept in touch here and there. Actually, I really need to write to Charles and see what he is up to. I miss talking to him. But one thing both of us have done, pretty much since we have known each other, is pulled together mix-tapes (then mix-discs then mix-downloads that we know will fit onto a disc) just about every year. We share them with other friends as well, and though Charles may not know this he is one of the main reasons that I still make them. The other reasons are that for Tamiko and me it has filled the role of re-exploring our music collection about once a year, and the other is my friend Colin. So, while I know that other people do listen to some of my mix discs, Tamiko, Charles and Colin are the three people who I really feel a need to impress. This last year, I had a little making up to do in the mix disc department (Mira being born shut down the mix disc making for a year for obvious reasons… ‘Wow… I’m tired and Mira and Celia are asleep at the same time! I can start making a mix-dis… >snore<‘).

So this year I pulled together three discs, and released them as downloads over the course of three weeks. The first was an homage to the first mix-disc (post-tape compilation) that I got from Charles in 1999. Charles’ 1999 mix-disc was called ‘Wood and Smoke’ and pulled together an amazing collection of quieter acoustic tunes, with some choice cuts from The Spinanes, Smashing Pumpkins and Neil Young. ‘Wood and Smoke’ also established the ‘double-album mix-CD’ format for Charles with the sound of a needle dropping, followed by five tracks (about 20 minutes) repeated four times to give the impression of four sides to a double-album. I absolutely love that Charles includes the needle drop, and that each side is thought of as a whole… the tracks expertly arranged into their own little entities. Charles told me a couple years back that I’m his only friend that really appreciates this effort, and I was shocked. I told Charles his other friends didn’t deserve to get copies of his mixes. Anyways, my first of three mixes paid homage to ‘Wood and Smoke’ with ‘Tinder and Soot’. ‘Wood and Smoke’ is probably the most played mix-disc that I have, and I had to see if I could do something just as good with the ‘rules’ that Charles seemed to lay down. I like ‘Tinder and Soot’, but after about 10 listenings I don’t think it stands up as well as Charles’ original.

The second mix-disc of last year was really for Tamiko. She commented to me once (quite accurately) that women singers make WAY too few appearances on my discs. Looking back at my compilations over the years, she was dead on. I hate to say it, but if I was analyzing my mix discs from the outside, it would even appear that the appearance of a woman singing wasn’t exactly token, but a female voice’s appearance was rarer. It was usually a highlighter, a rare enough occurrence so that when it happened, it took on a special significance on its own. A Yo La Tengo song with Georgia singing was common, but other then that there was just an Ella Fitzgerald song or someone soulful or Nico here and there. So ‘Black Dress On’ was, as Tamiko put it, my ‘chick disc’. All female vocals, starting of with Hildegard leading into Ronnie Spector singing ‘Be My Baby’ followed by Sonic Youth (‘Kool Thing’). Unlike ‘Tinder and Soot’, the more I have listened to ‘Black Dress On’ the better it has gotten. I actually think it may be the best mix-disc I ever made, and there is little that makes me happier then throwing it on and watching my girls dance around the living room.

The last disc ‘Born To Gaze Into Night Skies’ follows my more typical mix-disc formula. Lots of genre jumping that attempts to connect what seems to be unrelated music into the musical consciousness that is my musical world. This can frustrate Charles all to hell at times, but I insist that it all works. This would be my radio station if I had one. Why not go from Iron & Wine into Sly and the Family Stone? Throw in some Kenny Burrell, Marc Ribot and The Five Stairsteps, and while the music may hop from genre to genre, it’s all good.

So, these were the discs I put on the server tonight, along with the other mix-discs of mine that I have made over the past 10 years or so. I’ll need to dig out the tape deck and get the ones that Celia wants as well sometime soon, though I wonder if it would be easier to just find the tracks and re-create it that way… but then the tape hiss would be missing, and if Celia is going to get the true experience of what a mix-tape was, that part will be needed. Better start digging around for that old tape deck…

Tags: mix discs
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 114. Paganini.

Posted on Sunday, June 20th, 2010 at 9:13 pm in Celia, Classical by josh

After playing the Beethoven violin sonatas a bunch today, Celia really seemed to be getting into violin playing. I put on some of the Paganini violin / guitar duets after breakfast (wafflepalooza for dads) this morning and Celia really liked those as well. She also learned the word ‘violinist’. So I went downstairs and dug up the rest of my Paganini for tonight. And as I started to listen to more and more of his work (I have a stunning amount of Paganini CDs it turns out) I started chuckling to myself more and more. There really are time in his music that are just simply ridiculous. Like – how in the world did anyone think of putting that many notes down at one time for a single instrument to play ridiculous. Like Bugs Bunny playing Liszt with both hands and ears ridiculous… and that is when I made a connection. Celia (and Mira) are going to love this music. It is fun, flashy and just a little silly sometimes. At others, it is operatic. Sometimes very serious, and sometimes SOOO serious that it becomes comic again. Music historians have often compared the early romantic period virtuosity of Paganini and Liszt. It broke away from the classical restraint that so much music of the late 18th and early 19th century sometimes had, and pushed the virtuosic into another realm altogether. So it is no wonder that this music would show up in Looney Tunes, which both of my daughters have taken a serious liking towards. And the fast, joyful playing of Paganini’s violin, I imagine, doesn’t strike Celia as too different from the music she has been hearing in those cartoons.

Of course, as a musician I also find this work fun from the technical standpoint. It really is pretty crazy at points, and having tried to play some of it I appreciate how amazing any of these players are. Even more astounding to me is that, even in Paganini’s music that seems to be just for light entertainment (the violin and guitar duets, or the guitar quartets), I’m surprised at the demands placed on the players. And while so much of the writing is flashy and showy, it is also very musical. Technically it is amazing, but that is only after it is amazing musically.

This is a point of frustration to me with so many composers today, especially in academic circles. There seems to be a need (or expectation) that music should be challenging and difficult (to play as well as listen to). And I certainly think new work should push the art along. But often what I hear that is challenging isn’t that engaging. There are composers who explore complex approaches to composition but want the work to sound un-complex (then why do it???) and there are others that want to write something that just isn’t playable. Just because we can compose out of time, subdivide rhythm into impossible ratios and pitch into minute distinctions doesn’t make the music good. However, if the music is good and requires that such demands are made, then that is a different story. In Nono’s string quartet ‘Fragmente Stille, An Diotima’ there is a wonderful chord that happens about 2/3 of the way through the piece, and I know that Nono knew it. It lasts longer then just about anything else in the work (including the long rests), and when I was doing an analysis of the piece I was surprised to see how it was built. Within the piece, it is a moment of clam beauty. On the page, it is built with quarter-tone dissonances which, from the sight of it, should be jarring. But within the context of the whole work, it is a shimmering moment of beauty that had to happen. I have no way of knowing for sure how he came up with this chord, but it is the perfect one. And it is challenging to play and tune. It is technical complexity that comes from a musical need, and I see a connection between this and the demands Paganini placed on his performers. To make it worse, the result of these passages needs to feel effortless. Virtuosic performers can make it sound like their fingers know where they are going, but virtuosic musicians will make it sound like there is simply no other way to do it.

Tags: Paganini
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 113. Beethoven and Brahms.

Posted on Saturday, June 19th, 2010 at 10:05 pm in Classical by josh

Tonight I grabbed a few discs from the back of the shelf. Anne-Sophie Mutter’s complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Lambert Orkis, as well as her recordings of the Brahms sonatas with Alexis Weisenberg, and a collection of Renaissance music. I remember quite well the hype of the Mutter/Orkis complete Beethoven. They spent a year touring, performing the complete set over two nights at each venue, and the recordings were going to be the culmination of the work. The recordings were also all live (which I was particularly excited about… I love live recordings). In the classical music world, you often don’t have a set of discs anticipated for months, but these certainly were. I got a promotional set of them, and while I won’t say I was disappointed, I was certainly underwhlemed at the time. I don’t remember why, I just remember thinking… ‘eh’. And while I remember that feeling, I can’t think of what recordings before then that I would have suggested. No matter… but this is the reason these discs found their way to the back of my shelves rather then the front (where the Menuhin/Kempff discs lived). But listening to them tonight, I am finding them much more interesting. I would even use the word enchanting. I put on the A minor (number 4) before I started typing this, and it is great. Perhaps I just needed to be older or to know these works better, but I am excited to listen to this set again now. The last movement of the A minor is amazing (I’ve played it three times now). I love how much her bowing and tone color can vary, and Orkis’ playing is very dynamic. Most of all, the two really seem to be breathing together. Now this is something that I definitely appreciate more now then I used to. Not that it used to bother me, just that it wasn’t something that I noticed as much as I do now. Anyways – I know what I’ll be playing tomorrow morning as I make waffles with Celia for father’s day breakfast.

No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 112. Johnny Cash.

Posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 10:44 pm in Folk / Blues / Country, Tamiko by josh

After Johnny Cash died (a mere few months after his wife June did), Tamiko and I were caught by Sarah Vowell on ‘This American Life’ telling ‘The Greatest Love Story of the 20th Century’. You can hear it here as Act III (about 45 minutes in… but you really should listen to the whole episode… it’s ‘This American Life’! what a great way to spend an hour). About halfway through the story (which we heard sitting in our car, waiting for the story to end before we got out) we were leaning on each other’s shoulders. By the end I think we were both getting teary. Sarah Vowell’s story is beautifully done, and I still get choked up hearing it. And of course, June and Johnny Cash’s story and the music and influence they had on country music (and rock, and punk, and folk music… etc. etc.) is not just a great love story, but a story of life, joy, grief and music. My friend Colin sent me and Tamiko a postcard some time later. June and Roseanne are on a big front porch, June holding her autoharp, Roseanne holding her guitar. Both are listening to each other, and a younger boy stands to one side. On the other is an older Johnny Cash, watching and listening to his girls. It’s a beautiful picture that I would like to believe was a chance snapshot of their life. I know that can’t be the truth, but I would like to think it is.

But what probably impresses me most about Johnny Cash and his musical life is what he did over his last decade. In 1994, he sat down in his living room with nothing more then his Martin guitar and recorded an album with rap / metal producer Rick Rubin. The sound is stripped down, yet produced with a bit of a harshness. As his age progressed and health deteriorated, he continued to make recordings for Rubin and American Recordings. The thing about these discs that amaze me is how as Johhny Cash’s voice starts to break and weaken, the music seems to zoom in closer and closer on what it means to be human, and how music is an integral part of our lives. To hear someone taking that music with them as their body begins to fail them, as they move closer and closer to death, takes bravery. A little after June died, Johnny mentioned that she urged him to keep recording as long as he could. Johnny said it was June coming down from heaven to give him the courage to keep singing. It’s hard to explain, but hearing the physical limits of Johnny Cash in his last recordings seems to me to reveal that he isn’t afraid of where he is or where he is going. There is not shame of a warbly and cracking voice in these songs, I can only imagine that there is acceptance that this is what happens to a body that has lived the life that he has. Johnny died about four months after June did, and I’d be surprised if there was any fear at that moment for Johnny, but a sincere and strong belief that he was about to see the love of his life again.

20 years ago on June 15th, Tamiko and I started dating. Unlike June and Johnny, we were lucky to find each other early in our lives. I was explaining to a friend that as far as my memory goes, I can probably think back to about when I was 5 or so. At 35 now, I have about 30 years of memories, and over 20 of those (2/3 of my life so far!) include me and Tamiko as friends, lovers, exes (briefly), husband and wife and parents. I love the story of June and Johnny Cash, and I know that Tamiko and I had the same thought go through our minds when we heard Sarah Vowell’s story… it sure is amazing to find love.

Tags: Johnny Cash
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 111. Thelonious Monk.

Posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 9:47 pm in Jazz by josh

One of my favorite parts of taking jazz improv classes (which I really only did for a few years at the community college level) was that at some point in the semester we would usually end up watching the Thelonious Monk documentary ‘Straight, No Chaser’. It is a great documentary, and I think I saw it 5-6 times in school. (As a quick aside, the other film that would find its way into the curriculum of many classes was the James Baldwin documentary ‘The Price Of The Ticket’, which I also saw 5-6 times… I don’t say this in any way as a complaint… Both of these are amazing documentaries, and if there are any two films every undergraduate should see 5-6 times in the pursuit of their Bachelor’s degree these are the two). Monk’s story was amazing, and whether or not he had mental illness to overcome (never confirmed though highly suspected), there can be no mistake that he was a musical genius. The intricacy and complexity of his playing rewards multiple listenings. At first you may be drawn to the sharply angular melodies or sharp syncopations. After another listen or two, your ear may start to recognize bits and pieces of the original melody, displaced by octaves and stretched or shrunk on the fly. And one of the most amazing things I tend to find in Monk’s playing is his impeccable timing… he knows when to stop and let the others play (usually so he could stand up and dance). It may seem quirky, but just about everything he played was very musical and very deeply thought out, even if the amount of time allowed for the thought was only a few moments.

And though I say above that the documentary is an amazing thing to see (even over and over again), it is also a little depressing. After spending a few weeks learning scales and how to play over different changes (and taking your 2 chorus turn when you were pointed to) we would be shown this video. Why, oh why, would an instructor do this to us? To crush our spirits? Show us what can’t really be attained? Because there was at least once or twice that this happened to me. Here I’ve been, with my saxophone or guitar for a few weeks, trying to become a better jazz improvisor, and then I’m shown videos of Thelonious Monk operating at a musical level that I imagine no one in that room could operate at. But what I finally got out of that video is that while we certainly can’t be Monk, there really isn’t anyone else that can be either. I’m not sure if this was something we were supposed to figure out on our own or not, or even if our instructor that this, but I think the point was that if we are going to make any mark in music, we need to figure out what our voice is going to be, then practice our art every day after that.

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it seems like these are clear cut steps. And there certainly aren’t. The more I’ve thought about it actually, it seems like you are supposed to cycle through these steps many many times. If you don’t, you get stuck, possibly too smoothed out. Not that you shouldn’t try to refine what you do, but if you aren’t re-exploring all the time either, chances are you aren’t experimenting either. There is music among the Thelonious Monk discs I ripped tonight that spans over three decades. And what it seems to me that Monk was able to do was find an excellent balance between these two extremes. Monk sounds like Monk in the 40s and in the 60s. He gets to play with most of the greats (but at the same time the greats got to play with him). And you can tell that he is listening and absorbing what he is hearing, and conversing with them all.

For the past few weeks, there has been a double bass in the window of a pawn shop here in Tacoma, and every time I have driven by it I have been tempted to take a look at it and see how much it is. While I play other instruments, bass is still the only one I probably can see myself getting back to performance level with again (over a few years to be sure). But yesterday, it was gone. I have other stories about instruments that I have seen in stores (some even that I worked in) that one day just disappears. Now – I certainly don’t have the money to just plop down and buy good instruments (assuming this was a good bass… a stretch I’m sure), but at the same time a number of these opportunities have passed me by and I begin to realize how much I miss performing. I should start to think about how to do that again. And soon. Because I think one of the things my composing needs more then anything else right now is my ear hearing what others do first hand again. Hearing Monk again playing with John Coltrane helped remind me of this.

Tags: Thelonious Monk
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 110. U2, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beach Boys and ‘Pulp Fiction’.

Posted on Monday, June 14th, 2010 at 10:44 pm in Rock / Pop by josh

Tonight I grabbed a stack of discs out of the car… ‘The Beach Boys Classics selected by Brian Wilson’, the ‘Pulp Fiction’ soundtrack, ‘Electric Ladyland’ by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and U2’s ‘Zooropa’. Yep – sounds like some music I would drive with.

‘Electric Ladyland’ – one of the best albums ever? I think so. One of my favorite aspects of the album is the way production quality changes from song to song, yet the album also weaves a mostly continuous feel (side breaks aside of course). Going from ‘Crosstown Traffic’ to the live ‘Voodoo Chile’ is an amazing job in production. The sound of the drums in ‘Gypsy Eyes’ leading into the guitar and bass riff is stunning. The R&B sound of ‘Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland’ is a brilliant contrast to the opening ‘And The God’s Made Love’ (which could have come out of the tape studios of Europe at the same time). And all this happens before disc two!

Side three of the LP (‘Rainy Day’ -> ‘1983’ -> ‘Moon Turn The Tides’) might be my favorite album side in rock and roll. The feedback sections are are beautiful. And the whole shape of the side is perfect. From the ambient smoky room coughs in ‘Rainy Day’ into the trickling of sound of ‘1983’ is a nice pulling together of a rock song – from sitting around in a room smoking with some friends into slick state of the art rock and roll. And then it dissolves again into a jam at first, then into sparks and flashes of sound. The side seems to create then destroy the rock song, and makes so much beautiful sound along the way. Then (if you are listening on LP), you turn over to side four and seem to start all over again with ‘Still Raining, Still Dreaming’. But from here on, it is blues and rock Jimi Hendrix Experience until the end. ‘House Burning Down’, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ and a second reprise for the album (the slight return of Voodoo Chile). This was the Experience’s third and final album… Hendrix would put together the Band of Gypsies after this, and would be dead shortly after that.

Technically, there are some amazing things done with this album. The exploration of what the tape machines in the studios could do is at the level of what John Lennon and Yoko Ono were doing with ‘Revolution 9’ on the ‘White Album’, but where most people couldn’t bear to listen to that whole song, there is little in the experimenting on ‘Electric Ladyland’ that would turn people off. He plays around with sonic space, moving sound around your head in ways that most composers are still trying to do as effectively and meaningfully. And on top of that, the songs rock. They are bluesy. They are ambient. They run a VERY wide swath of musical style to create an album that is engaging for pretty much its entirety. For a double album this is pretty astonishing. And that this keeps up over repeated listenings is even more phenomenal.

U2’s ‘Zooropa’? No, it isn’t ‘Electric Ladyland’, but it is a great album as well. I don’t know what I can say after talking about ‘Electric Ladyland’ that wouldn’t sound like I was being a downer about ‘Zooropa’, so I will just say one thing and leave it at that: ‘The Wanderer’ is a stroke of collaborative genius.

Tags: Greatest Rock Album Ever, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Pulp Fiction, The Beach Boys, U2
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 109. Ravel and Mahler (mostly with Herbert von Karajan)

Posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 10:08 pm in Classical by josh

So, more about Richard the loyal Tower customer. He once told me that he rated conductors by how he thought they would be in bed. Some of these rating were quite graphic and won’t be shared here, but for any given piece he would have a couple conductors that he thought would get the job done and others that he thought would leave you wanting. Almost always near the top of his list was Herbert von Karajan. And after a few required listenings in the classical room to this work or that work, I began to agree more and more. Karajan certainly had a way to shape phrasing, and certainly knew when to pause for a breath before continuing on… pacing quite often seems to be everything in Karajan recordings. And though he could handle the classical and romantic repertoire just about better then anyone else, I think it is also good that Karajan knew when there was area he couldn’t handle. The number of recordings of his that break into the 20th century avant-garde are few (his recording of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ is good to hear, only because you can really see how much of a problem even a great conductor can have with it). But with the 20th century works that grew out of late romantic works, he could be brilliant. His Debussy is very well done, same with his Sibelius and Richard Strauss. But the recording that I remember Richard suggesting to me above all else was Ravel’s ‘La Valse’. Karajan conducted the Viennese new year’s concerts a number of times, and he certainly knew his was around the Strauss waltzes like few conductors do. But his recording of the Ravel is stunning. And if there is a work that needs Richard’s ‘good in bed’ rating system, ‘La Valse’ is certainly one of them.

But here was the trick – the CD of this recording was, in the 90s, long out of print. It also featured the Orchestre de Paris, and may have been the only recording he did with the group. I was able to find a vinyl recording a couple years later at Amoeba in Berkeley (oh Amoeba, I miss you so). The LP was in good condition, but the recording level was VERY low for the first part of the bass (the rumbling basses). But it wasn’t until about two years ago that I finally found a CD pressing during a trip to Copenhagen. This was one of three CDs or so that I looked for at every used record store I would go into, and after 8 or 9 years, I had finally found it.

It’s so good.

Also on the disc are good recordings of ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’ and ‘Rapsodie espagnole’, but it is ‘La Valse’ that is the highlight. And it is damn sexy.

Also ripped tonight was lots more Mahler, including a few harder to find Karajan recordings (the 4th and ‘Das Lied von der Erde’). I have way too many recordings of the 9th and ‘Das Lied von der Erde’. But one find in the stack was the Herreweghe recording of ‘Das Lied’ with the Schönberg chamber version. Quite beautiful.

Tags: Herbert Von Karajan, Mahler, Ravel
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 108. Ravel, Debussy and Mahler.

Posted on Saturday, June 12th, 2010 at 9:50 pm in Celia, Classical by josh

After last night’s Pascal Rogé fun, as promised I searched for the other recordings of his that I have. The disc with the violin sonata took some time to find. It was literally the last place I looked in the back row of discs, at the bottom of a shelf. Didn’t find the piano trio disc yet though. Along the way, came across his Debussy London two disc set. And I also saw (by other artists) a number of Ravel chamber music discs, piano concertos, and scattered about, a number of Mahler symphony recordings. So I grabbed those for tonight as well.

The Rogé discs are on the speakers tonight though, in more ways then one. Celia wanted some different music for her room, and when I told her about ‘Mother Goose Suite’ she was open to Ravel. So the second disc of that set has been beaming through the house over her room monitor. The high notes are represented quite well. I ripped the disc with the violin sonatas first, and that has been on for a bit already. The disc features Chantal Juillet on violin, and Truls Mørk joins in for the violin and cello sonata. I forgot about the recording of ‘Tzigane’ on this disc which features a kind of prepared piano – the ‘piano luthiel’, which consists of an attachment to the harp of the piano that makes it sound like a cimbalom. Very cool. When this disc came out originally it was only available on Decca which, at the time, wasn’t available in the US. It’s presence was revealed to me by one of Tower’s regular customers named Richard who really knew his classical music (there will be a second Richard story probably tomorrow night… another disc I associate with him was in my ‘ooohhh… look what I found’ stack tonight). Richard regularly bought then returned discs to keep his library rotating, and since he usually bought more then he returned, we didn’t have too much of a problem with this at the Berkeley store. For me, the stuff her returned was always quite good, so from my point of view, we had good music to play once he brought it back. Anyways – Richard picked the disc up during a trip to Europe (I believe for a ‘Ring’ cycle) and let me borrow it. I brought it back to him a week later and was visibly sad to give it up again… but I imagined that since it was on Decca, at some point it would be released here in the states on London. About a week later I saw the release of it announced, but it wouldn’t be coming for another six months! I told Richard about it and that I was excited it would eventually be coming in, and about a week later he brought it back to the store with a post-it note on the disc saying ‘Don’t postpone the pleasure! I’ll get another soon for myself.” I still have the post-it note in the liner notes… it really was a very nice thing to do, and it is still one of my favorite discs that was ever given to me.

The Rogé Debussy is quite well done, and just playing a few tracks tonight was fun. The other discs were a couple of Klemperer Mahler symphonies. The Mahler 2nd (a live recording) is just damn amazing. And the recording of the 9th is still one of my favorite recordings of that symphony. The beginning is just about perfect… pulsing and dying at the same time, until finally the spring of life finally comes out of the strings playing the first melody. Just beautiful. Also in the stack is the soundtrack to ‘Un Coeur en Hiver’ featuring all Ravel chamber music. And for a soundtrack, the performances of the pieces on the disc (the trio, violin sonata and violin and cello duo) are great. It might actually be my favorite recording of the trio and IS my favorite recording of the duo.

More tomorrow as I keep working through the stack of fun…

Tags: Debussy, Mahler, Ravel
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 107. Stravinsky, Ravel and Josquin.

Posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 10:17 pm in Classical by josh

Some Ravel, some Stravinsky, some Josquin. The Josquin is a disc of motets, another with some of his music played on viols. The Stravinsky discs are a Philips ‘Two-fer’, CD re-issues of usually pretty good older recordings that were priced two-for-one. The two discs cover his ‘Symphonies and Concertos’, the stand out being Igor Markevitch’s recording of the ‘Symphony of Psalms’. Great performance and recording. I first got to know this piece by playing it at UC Berkeley (as part of an all Stravinsky program) and, compositionally, it comes to mind quite often. In some ways the work is quite classical (as Stravinsky would do at times). The opening chord and the melodic material between them has a bit of an echo of Beethoven, if not in content and color, but in how repetition and time are used. The violin concerto recording is also very well done, with Arthur Grumiaux on violin. Grumiaux is one of my favorite violinists in general. His Bach recordings are phenomenal, and his Stravinsky is right up there as well.

The Ravel disc is also a two-fer, but in the Decca / London version (the Double-Decker). Funny how classical music used some of these marketing schemes. Again, the performances are amazing… in this case, it is Pascal Rogé’s complete Ravel piano pieces. This is, and has been, one of my favorite discs for some time. Ravel is one of my favorite composers, and these discs are a big part of what got me into him. So much shimmer in his music… wonderful use of register and texture. These discs offer great performances of these works as well. They are older recordings though, a bit quiet, and could probably do with some clean-up. But one thing the background hiss caused me to do with these discs is not play them too loudly. And the funny thing is, it is because of this technical flaw that I actually started to listen to most of my classical music at proper volumes. There should be dynamics that allow the performance to go from a whisper to a roar. And while there is tape hiss in these recordings, it is better then having to deal with the compressed dynamics that so many digital recordings offer now. The piano is quiet on the Rogé discs when it is supposed to be quiet, and it is quite loud at other times. The recordings benefit as a result, and if you grab these yourself and find that the sound is sometimes very soft, that is probably because it should be. My suggestion would be to start the third movement of ‘Gaspard’, and find a comfortable (but loud volume), then don’t touch the knob on your stereo. Just enjoy the full range of sound and color on these discs.

More on Rogé and Ravel later – possibly tomorrow. Now I want to dig up his recordings of the trio and violin sonata… both are LOTS of fun as well.

Tags: Josquin, Pascal Rogé, Ravel, Stravinsky
No Comments, Share Your Thoughts!

Day 116. Arvo Pärt, Beethoven and Bach.

Day 115. Some mix-discs.

Day 114. Paganini.

Day 113. Beethoven and Brahms.

Day 112. Johnny Cash.

Day 111. Thelonious Monk.

Day 110. U2, Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Beach Boys and ‘Pulp Fiction’.

Day 109. Ravel and Mahler (mostly with Herbert von Karajan)

Day 108. Ravel, Debussy and Mahler.

Day 107. Stravinsky, Ravel and Josquin.

Latest Blog Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta

Search!

Tags

Pages

Categories