BaL 29.02.20 - Bartók: Piano Concerto No 3.

[Pulcinella]

Well now, here's an interesting development. Having listened again to the third concerto yesterday, this morning upon waking, I found myself actually humming a phrase from the last movement! A sure sign that Mr Bartok is seemingly getting under my skin at last.

Whereas I DIDN'T wake up this morning humming an aria from Alceste, which arrived and got spun yesterday.
Doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it though.


The 'chorus' is not identified in that single-issue CD, but I assume that it's Christ Church, like in the others on the twofer reissue.

[MickyD]

Whereas I DIDN'T wake up this morning humming an aria from Alceste, which arrived and got spun yesterday.
Doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it though.


The 'chorus' is not identified in that single-issue CD, but I assume that it's Christ Church, like in the others on the twofer reissue.

I don't think there is a chorus as such, just the unified voices of the soloists. I have every confidence that after two or three playings, you WILL be humming the tunes!

[Pulcinella]

I don't think there is a chorus as such, just the unified voices of the soloists. I have every confidence that after two or three playings, you WILL be humming the tunes!

I wondered that, but surely not the case for Comus, also on the CD?
The Presto site gives Christ Church as being involved in Alceste in the twofer reissue, but that might be just from overall information in the liner notes of that issue.
(Apologies to others for being off topic!)

[MickyD]

My original liner notes show that there were only three singers involved for the 1980 recording of Comus, so again they must have sung together to make a very small chorus! On the other hand, there were 10 soloists in all for Alceste, recorded just a year earlier.

[Bryn]

Not the 3rd Concerto but the 2nd, and pretty awful audio quality and incomplete but what playing by someone who ought to and did know how to play it. Many thanks to Ian Pace for alerting me to this via FB:

https://soundcloud.com/daniel-plante-511223801/bartok-piano-concerto-no-2-bela-bartok-pianist-live-performance

The recording is also to be found on YouTube, replete with some interesting comments:

[Richard Barrett]

there's not much hope for me coping with the retrograde inversions of the tone rows in Stravinsky's late works, still waiting to be tackled.

It's really hard to hear retrogrades of pitch-series (although not so hard to hear those of duration-series), let alone inversions of them! To my mind things like that have more to do with conceptual consistency, with hearing the relatedness between things without necessarily having to be aware of their precise interrelations, than with setting puzzles for listeners to unravel, as many people seem to think. I feel that if we're concentrating on that kind of note-counting, we run the risk of missing what's "really going on", as Bryn implies. Having been reading much about Stravinsky of late, I've been finding it highly annoying that discussions of his late works place so much emphasis on serial manipulations of pitch. To me that sort of thing makes the music seem much less interesting than it actually is - imagine the composer of Firebird et al. suddenly deciding that was more important than what the music sounded like!

[Pulcinella]

Thanks for that, Richard.
From the little I've read so far, it seems that Stravinsky took care to use series that themselves had some features that (presumably) made the music more 'interesting' (perhaps both for him composing it and us as listeners): the first six somehow balancing the last six; having a few of the notes 'centre' around a tonality; using certain ('standard') intervals between notes in the rows.
But you're right: I need to listen more first and investigate later if I feel I would like to learn more.

Probably the wrong thread again (as was my Alceste comment); I'll get thrown out for unruly behaviour soon.