Originally posted by HighlandDougie
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What Classical Music Are You listening to Now? III
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Originally posted by richardfinegold View PostI am intrigued by the “Esoteric “ comment. Is it a CD, or enhanced CD, issued by that company?
I bought a supposedly ex-dem Esoteric SACD for here (France) from a dealer in Madrid last year and I was pleasantly surprised to discover an Esoteric SACD in the box (it turned out that it was brand-new, rather than ex-dem). I also have an Esoteric SACD player in Scotland, which was most definitely "pre-loved" and certainly didn't come with a free SACD. I can't see myself ever buying other players in the future.
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Well, there's nothing esoteric about my fifty-year-old American hi-fi, on which I've just listened to some even older HMV LPs:
Paisiello and Rossini string concertos (at least they say it's a concerto by Paisiello: hmm...) : Virtuosi di Roma.
Mozart: Divertimento in D, K 131: RPO/Beecham.
Sibelius: Romance in C : RPO/Anthony Collins.
All went down well with a couple of glasses of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. What fun...
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Originally posted by smittims View PostWell, there's nothing esoteric about my fifty-year-old American hi-fi, on which I've just listened to some even older HMV LPs:
Paisiello and Rossini string concertos (at least they say it's a concerto by Paisiello: hmm...) : Virtuosi di Roma.
Mozart: Divertimento in D, K 131: RPO/Beecham.
Sibelius: Romance in C : RPO/Anthony Collins.
All went down well with a couple of glasses of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. What fun...
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Originally posted by RichardB View PostThat surprises me since voices were so central to his musical thinking - I always think of Edda Moser's beautiful recording of the ecstatic high soprano part in Cantata della fiaba estrema (or the figure of Death in Das Floß der Medusa) or, at the opposite extreme, William Pearson's embodiment of the narrator in El Cimarrón. As with his orchestral music, I think his creativity went a bit off the boil after the 1970s though.
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Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View PostI often feel that tragedy and hoped for redemption were the themes that inspired Henze to his powerfullest music - I remember him speaking heartrendingly and at the same time reluctantly to Rattle of the inspiration for the violent third movement of Symphony No 7, namely the inhuman treatment meted out to the poet Hölderlin - lashing him to a revolving wheel, to "cure" him of his madness - and of the image evoked of a calm lake in unsullied nature set against the clamour of war and flags flapping in the momentarily almost tonally resolving final movement. And of the Rhine carrying the wounded soldier to final freedom at the close of either the Ninth or the Tenth. The "jollier" Henze of the Eighth for me represents a self-indulgent escape route it is difficult for me to indentify with, one which I suspect Henze indulged as a means to try to cope with the aftermath of betrayals he and some of his closest friends and associates suffered, most especially from the Castro régime. That whole period (from say Medusa to Come To the River) had represented a re-birth, wouldn't one say? Retrieving the subtexts buried deep in German culture and philosophy the way a postmodern Mahler might have done. I have no knowledge of any bearing his own homosexuality had on all this in terms of how he was treated by contemporaries, though I would have my suspicions.
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Originally posted by RichardB View PostIt would be very nice to have a recording of We Come to the River, which I listened to on the radio back in the day, I thought it was really the culmination of all the radical tendencies in Henze's music during the 1970s, apart from taking place in an opera house. The only time I've really appreciated his 7th Symphony was in a live performance - what I thought of as muddy scoring after hearing the recording was not a problem in the concert hall. As for whether being gay had an influence on the way he was treated by contemporaries, he did of course have this in common with Boulez who was one of his most vociferous detractors.
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Originally posted by smittims View PostWell, there's nothing esoteric about my fifty-year-old American hi-fi, on which I've just listened to some even older HMV LPs:
Paisiello and Rossini string concertos (at least they say it's a concerto by Paisiello: hmm...) : Virtuosi di Roma.
Mozart: Divertimento in D, K 131: RPO/Beecham.
Sibelius: Romance in C : RPO/Anthony Collins.
All went down well with a couple of glasses of chilled Sauvignon Blanc. What fun...
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Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View PostHow "out" was Boulez about his own gayness? - genuinely ignorant question.
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Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Postfor the violent third movement of Symphony No 7
I've posted before about this but a very dismaying moment was sitting listening and then watching a (ceramic) speaker cone disintegrate in front of me when subject to the Markus Stenz recording of that movement. Speaker duly replaced but I'm not sure that I've listened to that recording since then. This exchange has prompted me to get the DG box down from the shelves and start to work my way through it.
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Originally posted by HighlandDougie View PostI've posted before about this but a very dismaying moment was sitting listening and then watching a (ceramic) speaker cone disintegrate in front of me when subject to the Markus Stenz recording of that movement. Speaker duly replaced but I'm not sure that I've listened to that recording since then.
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Originally posted by smittims View PostThe much-missed Oliver Knussen gave a fine peformance of the Barcarola at the 2013 Proms. From the way he spoke about it I guessed he had a special affection for it. It was in one of those carefully-assembled mixed programmes he used to offer.
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