wooo, another muuuusic post

[calimac]

I've been to three concerts within the last week that I didn't mention at the time because I didn't have much to say about them. SF Symphony did nice run-throughs of Britten's Violin Concerto and Schumann's Fourth. A Stanford student new music ensemble did a strange quasi-polka by Gorecki and some other much more boring pieces by other people. And of a flute-and-piano recital, all I have to say is that a flutist must be crackers to place the Franck Sonata (which is really for violin, and consequently takes no notice of the breath demands it places on a flutist) at the end of a long, exhausting program. He was wiped out.

But I had to say more than that, because I was assigned to review the thing.

So instead, let's talk about recordings.

When some time ago I posted the track list of a survey of 20th century classical music that I'd compiled, someone - I think it was rwl - asked reasonably why Rachmaninoff was omitted. This was simply because I had nothing by him on CD of appropriate length.

In the ruins of Tower Records, though, I've found some more Rachmaninoff. Among them is something I've wanted since the CD was invented, a recording of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with each variation given its own track. That means I can go directly to my favorite variation, the maniacally syncopated number 13. It also means I can try playing the entire work backwards, something I've also done with Pictures at an Exhibition. This recording, on RCA with Dmitri Alexeev at the keyboard, with Yuri Temirkanov conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, is paired not with one of Rachmaninoff's garrulous numbered concertos, but with my other favorite work of his, the Symphonic Dances. Nothing lush or soppy here, this is a tough, brutal work in a splendid performance, though the first movement's tempo is "Non allegro" and it does seem to me as if Temirkanov failed to notice the first word.

Also in my basket was somebody named Dmitri Kitaenko conducting the Moscow Philharmonic in Rach's Symphony No. 1. This work got such bad reviews on its premiere in 1897 that the composer had to take two years of therapy to get writing again. He withdrew the symphony, and a neglected library copy was only found after his death. At which point the world was astonished to find that, however decent his other symphonies were, the First was by far the best of the bunch. It's too big to get played often in a world where other composers have cornered the Really Big Symphony market, but it turns up occasionally. Remember that bristlingly efficient march that plays over the clips introducing the Mouse Problem sketch on an early Monty Python episode? That's the main theme of the finale from Rachmaninoff's First Symphony.

But for some reason I only had an LP of this great work. So I picked up this, which turned out to be a pretty good performance, but the most bizarrely engineered CD I've ever heard. The winds are all right under your nose, while the strings seem to have been sent far away into a deep dank wet cave, with the violas crouching on a little rock island in the middle of the cave. I don't know if I'll keep it.

Here's a CD of the sole Symphony of Ernest Chausson. I've never much liked this work, and I don't like it now, but it fills a conspicuous hole in my collection. From the liner notes I learn that the composer, who was more at ease with smaller works, went through mental agonies to write this, sweating blood all the way. I know how he felt: I get that feeling sometimes when writing. What makes it worse is knowing that prose produced that way is not going to be very good. It applies to music too.

And don't blame the performers (Dallas Symphony, Eduardo Mata) because they're just fine in the colorful pieces by Jacques Ibert (pronounced Jackey Bear) that fill up the album.

Tonight, since we've gone off the sugar habit in this household, we're handing out plastic whistles, groucho glasses, toy dinosaurs, and - since growing children have to eat something - lunch packets of crackers. We'll see how that goes.

Comments

[redbird]

I suspect you'll be just fine as long as the toy dinosaurs last.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

That Rhapsody is my favorite thing by Rachmaninoff. I bought his complete recorded works twice, once on LP and once on CD. The CD didn't have as good a book as the LPs did, so I saved one of the books from the LPs when I gave them to Dad (who has stopped lsitening to LPs, I now find).

Rachmaninoff's performance of the piece is, of course, authoritative and well supported by Stokowski and the Philadelphians, and the sound is rather good for something that came from 78s. The variations are individually tracked, which means (on an iPod), a kind of catch between each one and maybe even the loss of a little bit of music. It got so irritating I finally sat down with an editing program and stitched variations together into about four movements, so there are only three hiccups to deal with. (They put each of Beethoven's 32 variations -- actually 26, since he had to cut it for fitting on 78s -- into individual tracks, which makes this favorite performance titanically irksome to listen to. When I have the strength, I'll be stitching those, too.)

Putting the tracks backwards sounds like something worth trying once. I've tried the random shuffle feature a couple of times, but I end up hearing too many individual variations, and that's just too fragmentary for me.

I think I have an LP with the first symphony. I'll have to give it a listen. I've heard the third a number of times, because Rachmaninoff conducts it in the set.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big one for historical recordings, though I do have a few - Furtwangler conducts Bruckner, that sort of thing.

Were I to take my CD of the Rhapsody and copy it in "disc-to-disc" mode in the CD recorder in my computer, it would come out exactly like the original. If I were to record it by individual tracks, however, even all of them in the exact order of the original, I would get this "catch" and loss of music that you refer to the ipod doing, even if I specified no gap between the tracks.

When asimovberlioz announced his purchase of an ipod recently, the first model that puts no gap between the tracks, I tried but apparently failed to find out whether it still puts in that "catch."

I like the precise tracking because I'm not planning on putting my CDs on such a machine. I fear the loss of sound quality; more importantly, I rarely listen to recordings except in my home office and my car, where I have CD players.

Were I to do so, I'd just get myself another recording of the Rhapsody in just one track (there are plenty of those) or which divided it into the canonical "movements", Vars. 1-10, 11-18, and 19-24. There are other places, though, where the music actually stops briefly between variations, and those would have been sensible spots for you not to bother performing your electronic welding.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I just checked, and I seem to have it in five pieces (it was recorded on six sides, and I can't tell offhand where they divided it for that): 0 to 6, 7 to 10, 11 to 15, 16 to 18, and 19 to 24. I'm kind of impressed that I matched that closely to the canonical three, with perhaps two of those opportunistic pauses thrown in.

I seem to tolerate lower fidelity than many of my friends. This may be due to years of listening to thrift-shop records dubbed onto cassette. At the time, I was always looking for something better, but I can deal with some aspects of sub-optimal sound as a result. I don't even use the highest setting when making mp3s, because I don't really hear enough of a difference to justify taking up more disk space. I usually go for the 128-196 setting, which average somewhere around 1 meg a minute of storage. These are said to be "CD transparent," so at least they're better than cassettes, eh?

I still have all my CDs, and all my LPs, 45s, 78s, and all my cassettes. I know people who say they converted to mp3 and threw everything else away. Not me.