Originally posted by Bryn
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Prom 21 - 30.07.17: Beethoven – Symphony No. 9, ‘Choral’
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I have to admit that I have chosen and performed pieces by Sir Gymnast with my choir but even they were recycled to produce tonight's piece. Such fluency, such a wide knowledge of what has been written since organum was trending, but adding up to bangers and mash.Last edited by edashtav; 30-07-17, 19:23.
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Originally posted by edashtav View PostI have to admit that I have chosen and performed pieces by Sir Gymnast with my choir but even they were recycled to produce tonight's piece. Such fluency, such a wide knowledge of what has been written since organum was trending, but adding up to bangers and mash.
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Originally posted by jean View PostHe shouldn't be allowed anywhere near an orchestra, he has no idea what to do with it.
But should we judge him more harshly because we know of the Scrote influence?
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Re Beethoven 9: I was on a holiday one year in the Italian Alps with my Dad when I was about 15 - 16 (1961) and had recently become interested in classical music. The only source of music - other than the local village band on a Saturday night - was an AM only radio. I was station-surfing on MW when I fell across the first movement of this symphony, about halfway through: I did not know it well, but well enough to recognise it. Echoing what Jane has said of its revolutionary nature, it seems to me now that I instantly heard that this was not like earlier (and more often broadcast) Beethoven: in the contxt this seemed like music from another sphere of existence, another planet maybe. The reception was full of the pops and whistles you'd expect listening to an AM broadcast in the Alps. At the end, I heard that is was conducted by Casals, and I fancy was a RAI relay from South America. The power of this memory lies in the sense in the first movement particulary of crossing boundaries into the New.
Others have described above the impact on them of particularly fine performances. But our appreciation (or otherwise) is contextual, and this experience was the more powerful because I didn't know the work well, was isolated from my normal sources of music, and found a performance as though coming across a visitor from another world.
On IV - I share some of others' discomfort. The entry of the soloists - 'Oh Freunde nicht diese Toene! - invariably slightly jars (as the composer intended) but I am happy with the choral element. I've always liked the Turkish march.
I wish this had not been chosen as a European anthem: to me that degrades the music in some way, like the ubiquity of Vivaldi's Four Seasons as telephone 'hold' music.
EDIT: Listening to IV tonight, I think the quartet before the coda has never worked for me. But then, I'm not the biggest fan of Fidelio, either.Last edited by kernelbogey; 30-07-17, 20:20.
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Originally posted by Bryn View PostI was rather hoping for great things from Xian Zhang but I am truly sorry to say she just has not delivered for me, so far. All very pretty, but not the Beethoven of the early 1820s, I feel, too 'polite', for one thing.
This is developing into a forgettable Choral.
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Trying to remember my first live ninth. I think it was this with Giulini conducting
2 October 1977
Royal Festival Hall, London Philharmonia Orchestra
John McCaw, clarinet
Michael Thompson, horn
Sheila Armstrong, Alfreda Hodgson, Robert Tear, John Shirley-Quirk
Mozart: Sinfonia concertante for winds, K. 297b Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Choral
What a musician he was ....and what a line up of singers ...
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