What Classical Music Are You listening to Now? III

[BBMmk2]

Frank Bridge
CD 1
Enter Spring, H174 (1926-27)
Isabella, H78 (1907)
Two Poems for Orchestra H118 (1903)
Mid of the Night, H30 (1903)
CD 2
Dance Rhapsody, H84 (1908)
Five Entr’actes H95 (1910)
Dance Poem H111 (1913)
Norse Legend H60 (1905/38)
The Sea H100 (1910/11)
CD 3
Coronation March H97 (1911)
Summer H116 (1914-15)
Phantasm, Rhapsody for Piano & Orchestra H182 (1931)
There is a Willow that Grows Aslant a Brook H173 (1927)
(Impression for small Orchestra)
Vignettes de Danse H166 (1938)
Sir Roger de Coverley, H155 (1922)
BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Richard Hickox.

[silvestrione]

Robin Holloway
Third Concerto for Orchestra.
LSO/MTT. NMCCD.
Stunningly powerful and imaginative, far more gripping than I recalled..... playing now, and often....

Robin Holloway
Serenade in C, Op. 41.
Nash Ensemble/Brabbins. Hyperion CD.
Just the opposite - draws you in & fascinates with its understatement, subtlety and elusiveness.... of idea, melody and texture.

More Holloway coming here soon....the NMC Concertos Disc is a peach....yet another forgotten classic....

The Holloway NMC CDs are on offer at Presto, but it finishes today! I just ordered some.

[Stanfordian]

Canteloube
Chants d'Auvergne (selection)
Véronique Gens (soprano)
Orchestre Nationale de Lille / Jean-Claude Casadesus
Recorded 2004, Auditorium du Nouveau Siècle, Lille, France
Naxos

‘Sonates’ - Fauré & Ropartz
Fauré
Cello Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 109
Cello Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 117
Ropartz
Cello Sonata No. 2 in A minor
Louis Rodde (cello), Gwendal Giguelay (piano)
Recorded 2016, Auditorium du Gennevilliers Conservatory, Paris
NoMadMusic

[Joseph K]

Now Spinning: Robin Holloway - Violin Concerto

[jayne lee wilson]

Now Spinning: Robin Holloway - Violin Concerto

Oh, that's the one.... the classic work..... look forward to your views....(I heard the premiere on R3....dazed and dazzled afterward..)...

[Serial_Apologist]

Oh, that's the one.... the classic work..... look forward to your views....(I heard the premiere on R3....dazed and dazzled afterward..)...

As did I... and so was I!

[Serial_Apologist]

Canteloube

Melon colic music?

[Joseph K]

Oh, that's the one.... the classic work..... look forward to your views....(I heard the premiere on R3....dazed and dazzled afterward..)...

I'm afraid it's another 'Dalbavie' moment - except I already had the CD! It's better than the symphony, though the criticisms I made of that apply also to this one. It makes me wonder what I like about tonal music in the first place...

Also, I have read some of Holloway's writing, and I know some of his views are kind of paraphrased in the biographical note in the CD booklet. Apparently in the early 60s when he started composing there was a 'modernist imperative' and any other approach might be derided (also it implies this modernist imperative is contrary to talent for harmony and counterpoint). So through his time at Oxbridge (by which I mean both) he wrote in a grey dreary constructivist modernist style. Moving on, it states his purpose in not to make a vice of atonal modernism and virtue of tonal fustiness etc. etc. Various things that make me think he doesn't really understand 'modernism', because apparently 'modernism' is not pleasure giving, and is without grammatical cohesion etc. It's a bit sad that this is the 'ideology' seemingly behind his musical thinking, and I can't imagine, say, a Birtwistle biog having to inveigh against tonal post-modernity.

To be honest, it could be a failure of my ears, but I just don't hear enough formal contrast in his music; it's like a polite sort of blur. I'd say - though with some exceptions like the second concerto for orchestra, at least in my memory - that his music never really stopped being grey and dreary, at least in the last two pieces of his I've listened to.

[Dave2002]

This Youtube video seems worth watching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhypHbuK8bU

Not heard of María Dueñas before - perhaps some of the violinists round here could let us know if she really is going to be the next big thing. Certainly seems good to me.
Difficulty always to be sure because of recording techniques.

Honeck and the NDR Elbphilharmonie orchestra provides a solid backing - perhaps could push on a bit more in places.

[jayne lee wilson]

I'm afraid it's another 'Dalbavie' moment - except I already had the CD! It's better than the symphony, though the criticisms I made of that apply also to this one. It makes me wonder what I like about tonal music in the first place...

Also, I have read some of Holloway's writing, and I know some of his views are kind of paraphrased in the biographical note in the CD booklet. Apparently in the early 60s when he started composing there was a 'modernist imperative' and any other approach might be derided (also it implies this modernist imperative is contrary to talent for harmony and counterpoint). So through his time at Oxbridge (by which I mean both) he wrote in a grey dreary constructivist modernist style. Moving on, it states his purpose in not to make a vice of atonal modernism and virtue of tonal fustiness etc. etc. Various things that make me think he doesn't really understand 'modernism', because apparently 'modernism' is not pleasure giving, and is without grammatical cohesion etc. It's a bit sad that this is the 'ideology' seemingly behind his musical thinking, and I can't imagine, say, a Birtwistle biog having to inveigh against tonal post-modernity.

To be honest, it could be a failure of my ears, but I just don't hear enough formal contrast in his music; it's like a polite sort of blur. I'd say - though with some exceptions like the second concerto for orchestra, at least in my memory - that his music never really stopped being grey and dreary, at least in the last two pieces of his I've listened to.

But was this after only one hearing? Whenever I go back to such works, I find one's perceptions can quickly change on repeat, especially with lengthy single-movement or continuous multiple-section works.......and I would always, always put the listening before the reading...remember what Mahler said about Bruckner and Brahms......!
Also, I think the 3rd Concerto for Orchestra is a significant advance on the 2nd (whose intense formal integrations can indeed sound like a blur at first....)....

But this music, as so much else, simply doesn't get played (or recorded) enough....

[Mandryka]

I didn't know this existed -- I've just bought the CD on the strength of it. I just think it is really disarmingly sincere music making.

[Serial_Apologist]

I'm afraid it's another 'Dalbavie' moment - except I already had the CD! It's better than the symphony, though the criticisms I made of that apply also to this one. It makes me wonder what I like about tonal music in the first place...

It's not so much tonal music but the way in which recent (post let's say 1980 - see, I'm getting old!) thinking, translated into a lot of the "new music" I've been hearing (trundled out by Radio 3 euphemism), treats it as if all its expansions, modifications and denials from let's say 1600, along with the ramifications thereof, have been binned in capitalism's debased museum of cultural history. Many of the anti-modernist revisionists liked to say that modernism amounted to no more than a spasm. Yes, a lot of outworn and clichéd habits had needed clearing out, but afterwards the terrain of battle was found not to have changed much and everybody could sensibly return to some putative middle ground where artists connected with the public, leaving just a few stragglers struggling in self-denial against a returning tide of common sense. It's unfortunate that we have to persuade such thinkers to think outwith the province that delivers their salaries, but what shapes change in music as elsewhere lies not solely in the lap of music as elsewhere and can only be understood from other perspectives. As in politics, the "middle ground" that gains the biggest popular support would not have enjoyed its "middleness" without the extremes related to which it defines itself and on which it draws by being "only prepared to go so far": the general music loving public eventually catches up with innovations that are 50 years old. Something similar is happening in jazz with the veneration of such as Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman, and maybe one day Cecil Taylor. In politics of course the difference is that the timeline for acceptability is as calibrated to the short-term as the market, the gods' final arbiter of lasting value(s).

Also, I have read some of Holloway's writing, and I know some of his views are kind of paraphrased in the biographical note in the CD booklet. Apparently in the early 60s when he started composing there was a 'modernist imperative' and any other approach might be derided (also it implies this modernist imperative is contrary to talent for harmony and counterpoint). So through his time at Oxbridge (by which I mean both) he wrote in a grey dreary constructivist modernist style. Moving on, it states his purpose in not to make a vice of atonal modernism and virtue of tonal fustiness etc. etc. Various things that make me think he doesn't really understand 'modernism', because apparently 'modernism' is not pleasure giving, and is without grammatical cohesion etc. It's a bit sad that this is the 'ideology' seemingly behind his musical thinking, and I can't imagine, say, a Birtwistle biog having to inveigh against tonal post-modernity.

The first Holloway Concerto for Orchestra was, I now remember, grey in an austere kind of neo-classicism, so this may be indirectly a rationalisation for his own failure to produce something of worth in that aesthetic - as far as his own memory is concerned!

To be honest, it could be a failure of my ears, but I just don't hear enough formal contrast in his music; it's like a polite sort of blur. I'd say - though with some exceptions like the second concerto for orchestra, at least in my memory - that his music never really stopped being grey and dreary, at least in the last two pieces of his I've listened to.

The millennial Symphony was supposed to be a retrospective on 20th century modernism, filtered through Holloway's own aesthetic preferences, and in re-listening to it (for the first time) my impression was much the same as the first time, that I found the ending moving but the journey less convincing. Things seemed to get blurred (as you say) in the unfolding of the pre- and post-WWI periods, Holloway's rather Straussian approach to orchestration by this point further obfusticating issues.

[pastoralguy]

The new Vivaldi album from Nicola Benedetti and some other people.

Gorgeous playing.

[vinteuil]

I didn't know this existed -- I've just bought the CD on the strength of it. I just think it is really disarmingly sincere music making.

Thierry de Brunhoff is the son of the creator of Babar the Elephant.

He is now a Benedictine monk


.

[Serial_Apologist]

Thierry de Brunhoff is the son of the creator of Babar the Elephant.

He is now a Benedictine monk


.

One wonders if he was aware of Poulenc's wonderful Babar setting.