Classical music [Youtube Clips]

[ihno]

hi loretta, makes me freezing...



Klaus Nomi brings back memories!

For those, who don't know this aria - here it's with orchestra:

 

[Zimbodood]

@ Zimbodood
A truly great suit of posts !!! Thank you so very much!!!
And since there are more great russian composers, I hope you will make some more posts...

I will be doing some more soon. So far i have only don three of The Mighty Five and Tchaikovsky, there are quite a few more!!

 

[ihno]

I will be doing some more soon. So far i have only don three of The Mighty Five and Tchaikovsky, there are quite a few more!!

Do some about Tschaikowsky's fifth symphony, peeease.

(yes, I know, jirmen spelling).

edit: Last movement!

 

[loretta]

east meets west

Pablo de Sarasate: Zigeunerweisen
skip to 3:15




and for Ihno: have you seen this, it makes me cry. i was in munich at his (as far as i know) last appearance at a concert and you can hear that he was dying - a few month after this concert he was dead

 

[jjjack]

Emma Kirkby

Here's Emma Kirkby's version of Dido's lament:



I'm also a J.S. Bach fanatic --- this is his motet "Lobt den Herrn":

 

[zortek]

hi jjjack ... i am trying to find the tutorial to link for you, but buggered if i can find it (could just be me) ... i will pm you as soon as i have found it

 

[jjjack]

When you listen to Bach, then you don't feel alone.

This has maybe a deeper way of thinking but hope it makes sense

It does make sense, plus it's an intriguing insight. I've been a Bach fanatic most of my life and have spent an astonishing amount of time alone, compared to most people, yet only very rarely have I felt any real loneliness. Just lucky, I guess. On the other hand, Bach's music does seem like a feast of good luck, so maybe that's the reason solitude has so rarely become something negative. A friend once described Bach's music as miraculous. I would agree with that too.

 

[ihno]

It always comes back to Bach, doesn't it?

The "fromme"/"religious and docile" Bach is a clichee though. We would know a different Bach if we'd have more of his works. He did a lot of secular music for weddings, Birthdays, feasts of all kind etc but it all got lost (if Bach didn't preserve and reused it himself). He would appear frivolous, more wordly and more operatic if we'd have more of those works. Bach liked the booze, he had constant fights about his duties, often filed complaints, when the Leipzig council didn't do as he liked - he even wrote to the Duke of Sachsen.

Here are some others:



Nun verschwinden alle Plagen, BWV 32, Suzuki etc.



Was des Höchsten Glanz erfüllt BWV 194, Suzuki etc.



Ich habe für mir ein schwere Reis, BWV 58, Harnoncourt etc.
I don't like the Harnoncourt Recordings very much. They're interesting because you can hear that they were experimenting the old instruments but well...



Lobe den Herren BWV 137 Gardiner (a little too fast but the best at youtube anyway).

The best recordings are those from the Koopman cycle. Historical with just the right amount of cheese thrown in.

 

[jjjack]

The "fromme"/"religious and docile" Bach is a clichee though. We would know a different Bach if we'd have more of his works. He did a lot of secular music for weddings, Birthdays, feasts of all kind etc but it all got lost (if Bach didn't preserve and reused it himself). He would appear frivolous, more wordly and more operatic if we'd have more of those works. Bach liked the booze, he had constant fights about his duties, often filed complaints, when the Leipzig council didn't do as he liked - he even wrote to the Duke of Sachsen.

Lobe den Herren BWV 137 Gardiner (a little too fast but the best at youtube anyway).

The best recordings are those from the Koopman cycle. Historical with just the right amount of cheese thrown in.

Thanks for the nice selections. Big fan of Suzuki and used to listen to Harnoncourt a lot. Koopman I liked better in his younger days as an organist, but he still crafts his share of inspired performances. I grew tired of Gardiner long ago. Too many track races. Naturally, I don't mind allegros and excitement, but turning sublime music into typing contests too often leeches out the meaning---unless one's intent is to convey neurosis. Fewer "competitive," neurasthenic performances would make Bach and Chopin even more popular than they are. Conveying the proper "affekt" and striving for a cantabile (singing) style were two of the very few "theoretical" recommendations that Bach left in written form. Merely the notes themselves are the lion's share of his pedagogical output, not texts. He gathered many of his collections with the intent of edifying students, as many of the title pages attest.

Most church musicians have constant fights about duties, sad to say. They're slaves, more often than not. You'd be feisty too if you had superiors whose primary gifts were probably gullibility and obsequiousness and they forced you to teach math and Latin, even though you were one of the greatest musical geniuses of all time. That would be like Princeton forcing Einstein to teach P.E.

Cliches are probably inevitable with the great ones, due to the near universality of their works' appeal. But I'm a mere fanatic, not a scholarly expert. Even so, since the missing works are missing, do we really know how many were "secular"? Of the lost 100 cantatas or so, probably only a handful were in the same category as the coffee and wedding cantatas. And all of the non-service works---the sonatas, suites, partitas, concertos, etc.---are arguably secular yet still project an aura of spiritual transcendance. They are certainly full of worldly gusto as well. The suites are all Baroque dances---try dancing a gigue while praying. Boing! Even "Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben" (often called the Cantata for the New Year and a.k.a. Part IV of the Christmas Oratorio) sounds like a hangover after New Year's Eve. Moreover, anyone with 22 kids (i.e., an organ with no stops) could not have been all that docile. That said, I've never believed Bach was truly pietistic, as that Lutheran age in Thuringia would have demanded. Rather, I've always hoped that he was more of a mystic. But I could be very wrong about that. Viewing the mores of past cultures through the lens of modern sensibilities is prone to misperception. I don't blame myself or others, however, for desiring a Christianity (or any other religion) that is less dangerous to minorities. Bach did write J.J. ("Jesu Juva" or "Help me, Jesus") at the beginning of some manuscripts. But that doesn't mean he wasn't a mystic, whatever that is. More to the point, Bach's music has always seemed to me more cosmic than churchy. But that might be nothing more than the ravings of a former acid freak. haha

I must thank you, Ihno, for beginning this awesome thread. It's a delightfully efficient way of discovering new gems from a group of listeners who have obviously done a lot of shopping around. That is to say, of course many gays love quacksical music and I'm no exception. I was raised with it. It's been a huge part of my life. Drums, piano, pipe organ, harpsichord and composition were my "specialties." But I'm really just an unashamed dilettante. Most of us probably know that many composers were/are gay as well.

Another thing, I've always dreamed of finding a "Prokofiev buddy" on Craig's List or some other forum. Perhaps that can happen here. Like too many gays, though, musicians are prone to flame wars on forums and in chat rooms, so that danger is always lurking to consume us if we're not vigilant of it.

 

[gm1911]

Karajan 105

Deutsche grammophon celebrates the 105th birthday of Maestro Karajan!

You can download from myDG 3 pieces (for free):

1. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.5 in C sharp minor, 4. Adagietto

2. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op.23, 1. Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso - Allegro con spirito

3. Jacques Offenbach: Gaîté parisienne (Arranged by M. Rosenthal), 1. Barcarolle

Join in end injoy.

Deutsche grammophon

 

[peter123]

:cheers::cheers:

 

[ihno]

(...) Cliches are probably inevitable with the great ones, due to the near universality of their works' appeal. But I'm a mere fanatic, not a scholarly expert. Even so, since the missing works are missing, do we really know how many were "secular"? Of the lost 100 cantatas or so, probably only a handful were in the same category as the coffee and wedding cantatas. And all of the non-service works---the sonatas, suites, partitas, concertos, etc.---are arguably secular yet still project an aura of spiritual transcendance. They are certainly full of worldly gusto as well.

Thanks for your wonderful post. I had a longer answer but lost it. So just this - though there is more in your post that's worth an answer and I may come back to it.

"do we really know how many were 'secular'?"

Well, I just ignore the possibility that this is a rhetorical question...
We cannot give an exact number but there were of course a lot of them. How do we know? I would have to check the details concerning Bach but we just use the typical means and sources that we always use: so called "Ego-doents" like letters f.e.. There are official doents like reports, programs. There were also newspapers at that time, who reported about public events. He performed at and for weddings, parties/feasts of all kind, birthdays, funerals. At one time Bach complained about too few people dying so he doesn't make enough money (which hardly fits in the clichee). And it doesn't matter, how many there were exactly.

The archives of the nobility and the church were simply better than personal family-archives and the like. And so all that got lost and we only have a part. It's the same with Mr. Fasch (or was it Mr. Fux? ). From him we only have, what he did in Darmstadt. You must consider that Bach was not overly famous in his lifetime. There was no real interest in him and very few cared about the written music (which is totally normal for that time).

I've posted some examples already in the thread: Bach used his music again and again (parody) and didn't bother for the reason or occasion. He wrote catholic masses, lutherian music and what we today(!) call secular music. Zelenka did the same, as did Handel. That was typical in the time and the whole "Bach praises God" thing is an idea of the romantic 19th century.

Of course he was a religious man but at first he was a professional musician, who considered himself an artist. Take a religious pharmacist of that time. Nobody would say that he mixed his medicine to praise God but it was done with Bach, because it was just too tempting not put that clichee over him. But we would not have 220 cantatas from Bach if this wasn't part of his job. I don't know how accurate it is that Bach didn't like the opera (he thought highly of Lotti for example, an opera composer at the court of Dresden) but if he had a different job, we might listen to Bach-operas today.

So if you see a difference between bis sonatas and his cantatas that's an anchronism.

Interesting, what you write about the conductors. I agree with you concerning Gardiner but as for Koopman, I rather recently began to appreciate his work. What do you think of Herreweghe? I like him very much.

 

[jjjack]

@ Ihno

Yeah, I see Herreweghe as nearly flawless. More later (if there's time) on how "religious" JSB really was. Is that the discussion we're having? LOL. I try to shy away from ineffables, plus i don't wanna wear out our fellows here with too much analysis. But I've never heard of a lot of the sources you mention. I thought Forkel's biography was pretty much the last word on JSB's life from his contemporaries. I haven't kept up with the latest research, though. Like I said, I'm far, far from a Bach scholar. Sometimes scholars wreck enjoyment of the music with overanalysis, though. I definitely agree that the so-called secular and sacred works are musically interchangeable. Practically everything he wrote that I called "secular" could be slapped to religious texts and used as service music. And you're absolutely right, many did that very thing all the time back then. In fact, the interchange tween pop and "sacred" happens today too. The only reason Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes haven't been set to religious texts is because the original lyrics are too embedded in our brains due to the pop culture that electronics have made global.

by the way, apothecaries weren't required to mix their wares to religious texts in order to keep their jobs. When I was younger I never liked to see Bach as all that religious either, mainly because I was always way more atheist or agnostic than theist or deist. These days, I'm none of the above and like to see myself as more of an aspiring gnostic (small "g"). But even my enthusiasm for that label is fading---unless jacking off can be called aspirational. LOL

These days, it seems that, in the grand scheme of things, I will enter the grave with about the same level of ignorance as when I arrived on this confused orb.

Anyway, when trying to sell Bach to non-Christians, I have always asserted, whether the idea is correct or not, that he had to spout the party (i.e., priestly) line or get his head cut off. But the works he wrote to religious texts are not always an easy sell to some from other faiths.

Your point about Bach's lack of fame---compared to, say, Handel---is pretty widely known among those who have played a goodly amount of his works.

Actually, if I had my way, I'd love to see JSB's music toss off its religious albatross entirely. I'd love to see the pipe organ throw off its churchly shackles. So many hate the organ not just for the overabundance of mechanical performances and growling, turgid sound (or screaming mixtures), but also because of its association with the church. Your Saint-Saen's 3rd Symphony post makes a good case for the organ outside the church or cathedral. Thrilling! LOVE the Proms and Royal Albert Hall---ever since Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" and Lennon's lyric about the "holes." haha I need to see the score of the 4th mov., though, to ascertain whether the organ is as "mixed down," in certain places, as it always is by modern conductors who can't seem to stomach competition from the pipe organ's overwhelming power. I suspect Saint-Saens didn't really write sotto voce in the organ part at those points, yet when the hammerklaviers are tinkling we never hear the organ's giant chords much beyond a whisper. That just doesn't sound right.

Another work that uses the pipe organ, albeit only very briefly, is the Big T's Manfred Symphony, one of my fave works of all time. The organ enters at the monumental apotheosis of this 55-min. work and parodies Schubert's "Ave Maria" as Manfred (after Byron) "sees God." Or he dies anyway. What he actually sees after death is up to each individual's cosmological fantasies.

What freed me from time-wasting arguments over ineffables was the idea that such "fantasies" are primarily useful---if they're useful at all---as myth and metaphor---sort of a la Joseph Campbell, the well-known comparative religionist from Sarah Lawrence. That way, I don't have to begrudge even the literalists too much. Or kick them in the ass. Metaphor and mythology have a lot of personal utility beyond the dull thud of literalism and thumping, I suspect. When they asked Einstein if he believed in God, he replied that he did, but only in Spinoza's God. As far as I can tell, and that's not saying a lot, Spinoza figured most all religion was metaphor at best, and junk at worst. I try to keep the peace by being willing to allow anyone and everyone whatever mythology they want---as long as they don't kill people over it or try to cram it down others' throats or mischaracterize faith as knowledge. I figure that any sort of evangelism is the first step towards violence. And it seems most religions have a LOT of problems to work out in this regard. I try to live by the following aphorism---feel free to use it whenever, as I wrote it: No one has the right to deny another's right to make reasonable sense of the world.

Rock on, Sebastian!

 

[cnot]

Thanks!

Deutsche grammophon celebrates the 105th birthday of Maestro Karajan!

You can download from myDG 3 pieces (for free):

1. Gustav Mahler: Symphony No.5 in C sharp minor, 4. Adagietto

2. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No.1 in B flat minor, Op.23, 1. Allegro non troppo e molto maestoso - Allegro con spirito

3. Jacques Offenbach: Gaîté parisienne (Arranged by M. Rosenthal), 1. Barcarolle

Join in end injoy.

Deutsche grammophon

 

[jjjack]

Ihno, your knowledge of Baroque music suggests that you are aware of this quotation from Gerhardt Niedt but often attributed to J.S. Bach: "The sole purpose of harmony is the Glory of God; all other use is but idle jingling of [you know who - lol]."

Bach produced over 40 composers worthy of note---more than anyone else I've ever heard of. Evidently, according to Bach's many students, their master often quoted Niedt's assertion.

For a long time, I considered the Dona Nobis Pacem from Bach's B Minor Mass to be the best piece of music in the world, but now I like his motets better. (By the way, the Dona Nobis ends the mass, but it also appears earlier with the text Gratias agimus at the end of the Gloria.) Bach used the Kyrie and Gloria of his monumental mass as application for a job at a Catholic parish in Dresden. No doubt he was tired of his superiors' pettiness in Protestant Leipzig, where he had been third choice for that position (after Telemann and Graun), but he didn't get the job at Dresden either. Here's what the Dresdeners rejected:



I prefer the Dona Nobis Pacem (a.k.a. Gratias agimus) slower than that, but Herreweghe's choruses always sound pure and perfectly in tune. Karl Richter's version (from the 1950s) was probably too slow, but its majesty is hard to beat.

Any fans of the Renaissance out there? Here's a beautiful Sanctus by English composer John Taverner (1490-1545) from his mass "Gloria Tibi Trinitas":



Below is the Agnus Dei from Bach's B Minor Mass. I was already in tears by the end of the first bar. Huge fan of countertenor Andreas Scholl. This tempo is ravishing:



Here's the Dona Nobis again sung by Cantus Colln, an ensemble famous for using only one voice per part, as in many Renaissance masses. Tempo is probably way too fast, but despite that, the counterpoint is quite clear with only one mastersinger per part:

 

[gorgik9]

@jjjack

Andreas Scholl singing Bach's Agnus Dei - so utterly incredibly beautiful!!! Just fantastic!!! Thank you so much!

 

[ihno]

@ Ihno

More later (if there's time) on how "religious" JSB really was. Is that the discussion we're having? LOL.

No. LOL. Of course he was a religious man. Being religious and "fromm" (godly/docile) was typical for that time so his religion is out of question. But the point is: he didn't do 300-400 cantatas because he wanted to do them but because he had to do them. His personal feelings don't matter in the end.

What I wanted to say was something different. Let me try the other way around. Music was the last art to emancipate. What we today consider "music as art" and the "musician as an artist" is an idea of the 19th century. We tend to believe that artists do, what they want to do, that they express their feelings through their music. We think that music comes from the artist's "inside". This idea though is directly linked to the process of enlightenment and to the new burgeous society but was just not fitting for Bach and his contemporaries, when music was always linked to an "outside" cause.

I definitely agree that the so-called secular and sacred works are musically interchangeable. Practically everything he wrote that I called "secular" could be slapped to religious texts and used as service music.

And that's what Bach did. What Zelenka and Handel and everybody did. Mozart did it too.

In the past most scholars working about Bach believed that he cared more about his "religious" music and that he wrote music of a "better quality" for service. When they found out that he used the same piece of music over and over again and that their idea was wrong, they had a problem with it and a lot of just don't want to realise that Bach was a man who used his music in an economical and efficient way.

I recently saw an interview with Gardiner who said that Bach was a docile man - subservient to God and authorities (based on BWV 214, 215 etc pp). But he was just judging the man by the cover (the cantatas he wrote). And that's a misconception. The overly docile praise (kriecherisches Lobgehudel) of August etc. you find in BWV 215 are not Bach's personal opinion but what August etc. wanted to hear.

The complaints he filed to the elector of Saxony don't fit into that picture. If you search for the "private" Bach, you won't find him in the cantatas but in his letters etc. pp. And they speak a different language. (there is a resarch project to find more about the "private" Bach - afaik we only have one "private" letter from Bach - they now try to find letters from his pupils, hoping to find some lines about him).

Some examples: Parodie of "Osanna" from the mass in b-minor:


Preise dein Glueck, gesegnetes Sachsen



Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110

again here in the "Overture no 4"



Don't know if you know this parody – the “dona nobis pacem” from the mass in b-minor: Here it’s from BWV 29, here as "Wir danken Gott..."
Skip the sinfonia, the chorus I mean begins an 3.14

by the way, apothecaries weren't required to mix their wares to religious texts in order to keep their jobs.

My point exactly. Bach did a job, not following his heart as "a private artist".

Anyway, when trying to sell Bach to non-Christians

to non-Christians like Mr. Suzuki? The Japanese show that you don't have to be a christian to admire Bach's cantatas. But you're right, there are a lot of people who reject Bach because it's "christian music", most often atheists in the West. It's their loss in the end.

conc. mass b-minor: Agnus Dei/Scholl:
It's not Scholl's tempo with the Agnus Dei, it's Herreweghe's ravishing tempo. And that's something I adore about Herreweghe. He's usual rather slow and very precise. I have his Schumann's symphonies (as well as the Gardiner cycle [like both in their way]), his recordings are just fantastic!

 

[jjjack]

This Miserere is very peaceful, written by Gregorio Allegri for Urban VIII. As the legend goes, it was performed exclusively in the Sistine Chapel until, after one hearing, Mozart transcribed it and shared it with the world. No clue if that story is apocryphal or not and don't much care either. Either way, the music is exquisite.

 

[Sebaceous]

Well said. Just because Bach was religious doesn't mean he was conventional. His music has some conventional elements, but his genius just blew apart those narrow conventions (especially as slavishly held by narrow composers). He was a fiery character with strong opinions and must have had a realistic view of his own gifts and ability.

I do disagree though with your view of Gardiner. He is somewhat contratined by the strictures of HIP- however in my view far less than many others (say for example, Norrington who seems exactly what you describe, an old bald jockey, galloping through without any poetry). Another to drive tempos hard without any real payoff or poetry, (in the piano genre) is Argerich. Gardiner on the other hand is quite exhilirating in most of his works. It is no secret that 20th century performance was way slower than 17th, 18th and even 19th. Too much deadening of the tempo brings dead music, in my opinion. Perhaps Gardiner sometimes rides it too hard, to extend your racing analogy (or is that a sex analogy?), incidentally rather like Toscanini, another to have lost favour in recent years.

I have to admit, that I have never heard a Gardiner performance that I thought was routine and which didn't give me at least a certain amount of exhiliration. I'm no HIP dogmatist, but I really feel like Gardiner is doing a job similar to that of the restorers on old great paintings.

They are extolling Karajan somewhere, but frankly the old Nazi should be forgotten. His work just got slower and slower, without any real insight or transcendence, or frankly, any real life.

 

[ihno]

I do disagree though with your view of Gardiner. He is somewhat contratined by the strictures of HIP- however in my view far less than many others (say for example, Norrington who seems exactly what you describe, an old bald jockey, galloping through without any poetry).

I think Gardiner is good with some things, not so good with others. Which is a rather normal thing. I like Gardiner's Don Giovanni but dislike his Zauberflöte. I like Norrington's Zauberflöte while I dislike his Don Giovanni. I also like Norrington's Beethoven symphonies much more than Gardiner's. As for the cantatas, I prefer Koopman and then Suzuki over him.

Gardiner has done very good recordings: his Schumann symphonies or the Mendelssohn he did with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Best is anway (if you can't see it life) to have more than one recording of the works you like.

They are extolling Karajan somewhere, but frankly the old Nazi should be forgotten. His work just got slower and slower, without any real insight or transcendence, or frankly, any real life.

Yes, Karajan... I still have his recording of the mass in b-minor (as a bad example).