Music of the Day

DonB · Sat Jun 02, 2012 6:48 pm

Arrau - Beethoven op. 109:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU1Y_ImfvDI

second part:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8eE-H39VlQ

couch · Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:56 pm

No doubt some might quibble with his wilfulness with the tempi, rubato, and dynamics (not I), but what a moving experience to see someone with both the technical power and the experience and sensitivity to so completely inhabit this profound piece and deliver such a deeply coherent and thoroughly expressive reading. It's wrenching to miss the conclusion. Costi, here's style for you!

Thanks, DonB.

You've inspired me to look for some YouTube recordings of Czech master Ivan Moravec, who has an equally developed and powerful style in the Romantics; not so much online, but I'll post a couple.

couch · Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:27 pm

Ivan Moravec:

Chopin barcarolle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXOIHtUvrXA

Chopin Ballade No. 1, 1960s:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_zM49emRoE

Chopin Ballade No. 1, live in Prague 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cKBIh5zEbY

Moravec's Chopin and Beethoven recordings for the Connoisseur Society in the 1960s (from which I believe the first files above were taken), are among the greatest piano recordings (interpretation plus beauty of sound quality) in history. They were reissued on excellent CDs by VAI Audio and (for the complete Nocturnes) Nonesuch Ultima. Producer for most of them was Alan Silver, and the recording engineer was David B. Jones, who among many other famous sessions recorded the iconic Bill Evans Village Vanguard sets (Live at the VV and Waltz for Debby) and the Ali Akbar Khan's Signature Series for the Connoisseur Society. Moravec plays on most of them a Bösendorfer Imperial which gives the lower registers immense richness and has a less brittle top than most Steinways. Vinyl lovers who come across any of the Moravec discs might want to snap them up.

I've never understood why Moravec is not better known in the U.S.

DonB · Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:45 pm

couch wrote:No doubt some might quibble with his wilfulness with the tempi, rubato, and dynamics (not I), but what a moving experience to see someone with both the technical power and the experience and sensitivity to so completely inhabit this profound piece and deliver such a deeply coherent and thoroughly expressive reading. It's wrenching to miss the conclusion. Costi, here's style for you!

Thanks, DonB.

You've inspired me to look for some YouTube recordings of Czech master Ivan Moravec, who has an equally developed and powerful style in the Romantics; not so much online, but I'll post a couple.

Thank you for your kind reply. I am glad I inspired you to share recordings of Moravec. Listening to the fragments supplied by members is entertaining an interesting indeed and this thread becomes even more so if suggestions such as yours are included in subsequent replies to the fragments. I will look into recordings of him.

PS: I forgot to add a link to 'III. Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung' I edited my message and added the link.

Costi · Tue Jun 12, 2012 2:42 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdnqt4yAznk

"He is a genius, says an old legend, but he is a malign genius. King of the spirits of music and song, he knows all their secrets, and even those, when we want to get close to him, of escaping to far off places, always impossible to hold on to." At the time of Ascanio, while we sought him in France, he was travelling around the Canaries. This evening, hiding behind the name of a charming, deceased musician who he is about to bring back to life, he will steal away once more from our homage. Will he now escape the clutches of my thoughts as they try to hold him, and will he slip through my fingers like a vanishing sprite, leaving nothing but "thin air"?
A genius inspired by music, endowed with a deep sensibility - you have only, without speaking of the lyre and the harp, to glance through Ascanio, the lyre, or Samson et Delilah, the harp, - he prefers, like a Gustave Flaubert, like an Anatole France, to hide behind his riches, behind his skill as a great composer. Because nothing seems to bespeak this famous opinion more fittingly: "All the intellectual beauties to be found in a fine style, all the aspects with which it is composed are as many truths... more precious perhaps than those which make up the core of a conversation".
He understands how to rejuvenate a formula by using it in its old sense, and to take each musical phrase, so to speak, in its etymological sense. He borrows their charms from Beethoven and Bach, or rather, as in one of his most beautiful transcriptions, bestows on Bach charms which were not his before.
To paint in a harmony, to dramatize as a fugue, to render eternal through style; to make use of so much creative invention and genius by taking one scale rather than another to outline a melody, makes it glide all around an idea, like ancient ivy that preserves a monument from falling down; to thus confer through archaism his noble credentials to modernity; to give bit by bit to a common cause the value of an original imagination the masterly, singular, sublime quality of expression, to create from an archaism a flash of wit, a general idea, a summary of civilisation, the essence of a race, a shaft of genius burst out of the instrument or fallen from the sky; to give an English accent to a prelude, the prelude to Henri VIII, a matrimonial character to a scene, the duo between Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, a Neopolitan light to a chorus, Quand vous chantez Scozzone, make fun of art in a march, Suite algérienne, transpose the style of a Renaissance goldsmith into an opera, Ascanio; finally, to make a religion be understood, to abhor a tyrant, to pity a woman, to see Eros, to understand the Eternal, to make use of his resources not even of music but of the language of music, to amuse himself like a god and like the devil by taking up the world into music, music into harmony, all the expansiveness of the organ from the slightness of the piano, these are the expert, disconcerting, diabolic and divine games of this musical humanist who at every moment instills bursts of inventiveness and genius into what seemed to be a field bound by tradition, imitation and knowledge.

Marcel Proust

Article published in "Le Gaulois", December 14th 1895.

hectorm · Fri Jun 15, 2012 8:49 pm

Once again Friday afternoon and getting in the mood. The forecast of the Weather Report looks great for the weekend (not Heavy at all).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae0nwSv6cTU

Costi · Fri Jun 15, 2012 9:06 pm

Great mood, hectorm!

And now, that we are in the mood...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcEYu6juiTg

davidhuh · Sun Jun 17, 2012 1:53 pm

It is warm, the sun is shining, which makes me turn to the "spanish Pictures of an exhibition" - Goyescas by Enrique Granados. Enjoy Doña Alícia de Larrocha in Los Requiebros and the most famous piece, Quejas, o la maja y el ruiseñor. Btw, the pop song Bésame mucho is derived from the latter.

http://youtu.be/3E3lFqsa4uE
http://youtu.be/V9lAaB02SxU

cheers, david

hectorm · Sun Jun 17, 2012 10:32 pm

David, here's the pop song in one -among many- of its most curious recordings.
I only detect in the chachachá a stretch of 8 notes that follow Granados exactly but they are key to the theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLnJEYdK-yo

Costi · Mon Jun 18, 2012 6:00 am

davidhuh wrote:Btw, the pop song Bésame mucho is derived from the latter.

I never knew it had such heavenly origins, David...
And how interesting that the nightingale is masculine in some languages and feminine in others. English, while simpler for lack of gender, is poorer for that. I mean, how did Oscar Wilde decide that the nightingale is "she", while in a translation of Aesop's fable it is "he"? Or perhaps English is more rich precisely for this lack of determination?...

davidhuh · Wed Jun 20, 2012 9:37 pm

and here some more music fallen from heaven

http://youtu.be/PXglXeONApw

Cordovan · Fri Jun 29, 2012 2:34 pm

The great Miguel Fleta singing Mi par d'udir ancora

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYJl1B-b ... re=related

hectorm · Fri Jun 29, 2012 3:30 pm

Beautiful, Cordovan.

And the disciple seems to have learnt from the master.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rz9HOuz5JI

Cordovan · Fri Jun 29, 2012 3:37 pm

Costi · Sun Jul 01, 2012 1:43 pm

Camille Saint-Saens, Symphony no. 3 with organ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEfgTSdvVzI
and not only...

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