What Classical Music Are You Listening To Tonight?

[Antonmb]

Originally Posted by bart

This accompanied our dinner and was clearly better than your average Christmas music.

Playing this now, very nice.

[jimtranr]

SACD rip. Nuanced performance of the 3rd ("Polish").

[bart]

I wanted to hear more of Witold Lutosławski.

Witold Lutosławski - Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hannu Lintu
Qobuz 24/96




Quite a journey!
In the second I hear resemblance with Revolution 9 from the Beatles.
As it was composed before their track on the White Album, I now know where their inspiration came from...

In 1966, Pierre Boulez conducted the world premiere of Witold Lutoslawski’s Second Symphony. Boulez was then the head of the NDR orchestra in Hamburg and the city welcomed a series dedicated to contemporary music. The following year, the piece was performed fully in Katowice, Poland, conducted by the composer. Lutoslawski was a brilliant man: he spoke many languages, including French, and was an excellent conductor.

First influenced by Bartók and French impressionist music, Witold Lutosławski then forged a much more cutting-edge style based on the Second Viennese School. He invented the “aleatory counterpoint,” which remains his trademark. It can seem odd that Lutoslawski chose the frame of the symphony to express this new language. Nevertheless, it is with this form, that everyone thought dead, that he radically explored his aleatory techniques, specifically in the two movements of his Second Symphony. Melody and Rhythm are replaced by tones, harmony and texture and the music is continuously pulsed. Lutoslawski’s Second Symphony saluted Beethoven’s Fifth. His Third Symphony went further, developing the two-part structure of the previous and adding a long and abundant epilogue which left room for a few melodic elements during its elegiac final rising. © François Hudry/Qobuz

[jimtranr]

Originally Posted by bart

I wanted to hear more of Witold Lutosławski.

Witold Lutosławski - Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hannu Lintu
Qobuz 24/96




Quite a journey!

That puts it mildly. :-)

The recording itself, as with the 1st and 4th, is stunning in its transparency.

[bart]

Originally Posted by jimtranr

That puts it mildly. :-)

The recording itself, as with the 1st and 4th, is stunning in its transparency.

Hi Jim, yes, very very good sound.

Thank you for bringing these albums to my attention.
So far, I've liked almost all Lutosławski's works I've heard.

[bart]

Weinberg - Clarinet Concerto - Clarinet Sonata - Chamber Symphony
Dresden Chamber Soloists, Michael Jorowski
Robert Oberaigner, clarinet
Michael Schöch, piano
Qobuz 24/96




Very interesting works from a composer I've grown very fond of.

Mieczysław Weinberg was familiar with the clarinet from his youth, given its prominent place in klezmer bands and theatre ensembles, and he wrote three works specifically for the instrument. In the Clarinet Concerto he draws a wide range of textures from the accompanying strings, over which the soloist explores the clarinet’s extremes of register in virtuosic fashion. Despite having been written when Weinberg was still in his mid-twenties, the Clarinet Sonata is a mature work with Romantic and folkloric elements. His last completed work was the Chamber Symphony No. 4, an impassioned piece with a wrenching chorale theme and role for obbligato clarinet. © Naxos

[bart]

J.S. Bach - Lute Music
Jakob Lindberg
via Qobuz




This is playing into the practice.

I've got my statistics from Qobuz.
Seems I'm in the top 5% of the worldwide Qobuz streamers, and Jakob Lindberg is the artist I streamed the most.

[PHC1]

Originally Posted by bart

J.S. Bach - Lute Music
Jakob Lindberg
via Qobuz




This is playing into the practice.

I've got my statistics from Qobuz.
Seems I'm in the top 5% of the worldwide Qobuz streamers, and Jakob Lindberg is the artist I streamed the most.

Bart! Top 5% in the world?? That is something indeed!

[PHC1]

Qobuz 96/24


In 2015, when Ruby Hughes discovered Clytemnestra by the Welsh composer Rhian Samuel, the work had not been performed since its première some 20 years earlier. Hughes describes the 24-minute score as ‘sun-scorched and luscious’ as well as ‘intensely visceral’, but in it she also heard echoes of Gustav Mahler and Alban Berg, two of Samuel’s influences.

For her first album as soloist with orchestra, she has therefore devised a programme which brings together the three composers but which also spans a wide range of emotions and moods. For his Rückert-Lieder, Mahler selected five highly intimate and subtle poems by the great Romantic poet Friedrich Rückert, using his large orchestral forces sparingly in a chamber music style.

Ten years later, in 1911, Berg found his texts closer at hand as he set contemporary poems by Peter Altenberg, one of the main proponents of Viennese impressionism. Berg's advanced harmonic language caused a scandal at the first performance in 1913, and the songs were only performed in their entirety in 1952, sixteen years after Berg’s death.

For Clytemnestra, finally, Rhian Samuel assembled her own text, based on Aeschylus' tragedy Agamemnon and focusing Clytemnestra’s deep anguish at the death of her daughter and her need for revenge. Bringing this wide spectrum of human emotions to life, Ruby Hughes is supported by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Jac van Steen.

https://naxosdirect.com/items/clytemnestra-517028

[PHC1]

Listening in my native language this morning.




What makes Anna Netrebko more than just the next Russian soprano? Is it her as direct but not as quite so refined technique, her less restrained but much more effective interpretations, and her intensely expressive but always under control tone? Or is it her distinctively non-Russian vibrato -- leaner, cleaner, and with a much tighter focus but just as much power?

One has to listen to Netrebko's Russian Album and judge for one's self. Listen to her tenderly touching Arioso from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, her brilliantly colorful arias from Rimsky-Korsakov's Snow Maiden, her passionately despairing songs from Rachmaninov's Russian years -- especially her inconsolable "Oh, Do Not Sing Me Those Sad Songs" -- and finally her utterly enchanting and deeply affecting "Letter Scene" from Eugene Onegin in which Tchaikovsky's Tatyana grows from a girl into a woman right before our ears.


While in the past Netrebko has delivered terrific recordings -- her Violetta in La Traviata was absolutely riveting -- this disc seems to cut closer to the heart of the singer and her sympathetic understanding of the style, the music, and the idiom makes the Russian Album perhaps the her best and most characteristic calling card. Deutsche Grammophon's sound puts Netrebko center stage. Lamentably, it leaves Valery Gergiev and the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater in the pit.