The Free Box Tapes #18 & 19: Steely Gustav

More tapes from the Free Box of yesteryear. 

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Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic (1974) 

Sixty-Four Words: This is widely considered to be one of the great albums of its time. I think that if you enjoy Steely Dan, this record really captures their production values and instrumental virtuosity. Personally, I feel like they made songs musically complex without making them exciting, beautiful, or interesting. I could never have guessed that “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” would be a hit song.

Disposition: Will be disposed of.  Yell if you want it.

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Mahler, Symphony #2 ("Resurrection")

Sixty-Four Words: I've never much warmed to Mahler's Second, and I had low hopes for an anonymous recording on a low-grade "LN" cassette.

Turns out that it’s an exciting recording, very energetic and dramatic! The unknown conductor and orchestra treat the ol’ “Resurrection,” which often comes off as stodgy, as if it were fresh and new. Even the sound quality is better than it should be!

Disposition: A definite keeper.

The Free Box Tapes #14, 15, & 16, & 17: Eclectic Boogaloo

I recently spent a long afternoon clearing the dense towers of papers, notebooks, and bric-a-brac from the top of my second-string desk.  To pass the time, I turned to some of the neglected Free Box Tapes for a soundtrack. 

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Henry Threadgill, Carry the Day (1995) / Jon Jang & The Pan-Asian Arkestra, Tiananmen! (1993)

Sixty-Four Words: The project had stuck on this one; I didn’t know quite what to make of it. The Jang album is a fusion of conventional jazz with traditional Chinese music. It’s more middle-of-the-road than it sounds. The Threadgill toys with world music in a jazz format, but experiments freely with tonality. It’s more challenging than it sounds, and sometimes makes me feel a little carsick.

Disposition: I don’t think I’ll ever love these, or even ever listen to them again, but for now I will retain the tape on probation.

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Steely Dan, Greatest Hits (1978)

Sixty-Four Words: I dismissed Steely Dan pretty breezily the last time we encountered them in this project, but I wouldn't say no to having a collection of their familiar radio hits as something to play in the background of an occasional rainy afternoon. I think “Deacon Blues” is a good song. Unfortunately, it turned out that the tape was missing. It was just an empty box.

Disposition: I used the tape case to replace a broken tape case.

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GP GM Klotz: Biographies (1980) 

Sixty-Four Words: OMG! It's really Grandpa and Grandma Klotz, narrating their biographies in response to a questionnaire that their granddaughter, Karen, sent them for a school project. It is awesome. Grandpa is not nearly as into it as Grandma. They are both articulate, intelligent, and more candid than they would have been if they knew their tape would end up with a stranger. It's found gold!

Disposition: The tape broke when I tried to rewind it, but that’s easily mended. One could have a lot of fun with this treasure! There are plentiful clues that would allow someone with the interest and a modest budget track down the descendants of the Klotzes, and send them all copies of the tape. Or, one could rip the tape to their computer, and sample the narrative to have the couple make utterances that are poignant or evocative (or vulgar, I suppose) over an ambient soundscape. Whee!

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Steve Reich: Tehillim (1983) / the Desert Music (1985

Sixty-Four Words: I like the idea of Steve Reich more than Steve Reich compositions. Often I forget that I’m listening to music and think that I’m suffering a headache instead. On this tape, the sound quality is quite poor, and there are choral parts, which is not perhaps playing to Reich’s strengths. I’ll give it a few more listens and report back if there’s an epiphany.

Disposition: As noted.

The New Monday Beethoven's Birthday Eve Quiz

It's Beethoven's Birthday tomorrow!  Every five years, whether you need it or not, you get a Beethoven's Birthday classical music quiz!  The 2009 iteration is here...  and today's version is immediately below this horizontal line:

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1. He’s traditionally credited with 41 symphonies, but honestly they don’t get very interesting until at least the mid-twenties. Also, 27 concertos for piano, five for violin, and four for the french horn.

2. Igor Stravinsky is said to have quipped that he wrote the same concerto 500 times; the four versions that are well-known today are collectively called The Four Seasons.

3. His third symphony is “the Scottish” and his fourth symphony is “the Italian”; his music for A Midsummer Night's Dream is pretty popular, and his violin concerto has been a hit from its first performance in 1845 to the current day.

4. He was shy about writing symphonies for years, because he was afraid of being compared with Beethoven, but his First Symphony is obviously modeled on the Big Guy’s Ninth. He eventually wrote four of ‘em in total, plus two sprawling piano concerti and the very lovely Variations on a Theme by Hadyn, which is a set of variations on a theme that is was not written by Haydn.

5. Two words: Carmina Burana.

6. He’s traditionally credited with 104 symphonies, but honestly they don’t get very interesting until the eighties. Also, he pretty much invented the form of the string quartet.

7. His Symphonies #5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 used to be his Symphonies #1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, until people dug up some of his early work. He wrote a popular cello concerto, a middling violin concerto, and a much-ignored piano concerto. Everybody loves the Slavonic Dances.

8. Scheherazade and… well, Scheherazade. And the Capriccio Espagnol, and the Russian Easter Overture, but mostly Scheherazade.

9. Bolero, of course, plus Daphnis and Chloe and La Valse. He didn’t write Pictures at an Exhibition -- that was Mussorgsky -- but he did the orchestration that makes it work.

10. After this Polish composer’s 3rd Symphony, the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” became an international hit in 1992, he proved himself the very model of a modern major composer by “pointedly resist[ing] the temptation to repeat earlier success, or compose for commercial reward.”

Ten Records from the Classical Past

In years past, like 2009 and 2011 and other long-ago times, I used to write a lot here about my hauls from the Friends of the Multnomah Public Library books sales.  Since then, however, Mrs.5000 and I have apparently grown old, the key symptom being that we have lost the acquisitive urge.  I don't know if we even went to the sale last year.  This year we did, and our total combined haul of books amounted to, I think, five.

Maybe we're just out of places to put them.

I did, however, take the opportunity to buy ten classical albums at a buck a pop.  Genuine LP records!  They are my current favorite recording medium, partly because I think one takes music more seriously if it has a demanding physical form, and partly because, a buck a pop!

Here's the damage:

Music for Viola and Piano, 1987.  Spare pieces by Benjamin Britten and two unknowns, Frank Bridge and Rebecca Clarke, the later of whom was unusual in the world of classical composition by virtue of being female.

Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, 1963.  I know, I'm really stretching myself in the repertoire here, aren't I!  But I actually listen to the famous fifth less then the other Beethoven symphonies, except for the less-of-a-big-deal first two, so this will bring me back into true.  Also, this recording was in the tiny record collection of the small-town library that I cut my musical teeth on, so it has nostalgic appeal.  It's significantly slower than most modern performances, which makes it feel a little ponderous by today's standards.

Songs of the Auvergne, 1973/1973.  Volumes I and II.  These concert pieces by Joseph Canteloube, which some classical fans consider lushly Romantic to the point of absurdity, have become guilty pleasures of mine in the last few years.  We call 'em Chants d'Auvergne these days.  These recordings are sung by Victoria de los Angeles, and the albums are labelled "VICTORIA DE LOS ANGELES, SONGS OF THE AUVERGNE" and then have the name "Canteloube" in tiny tiny letters underneath, literally in parentheses.  I had the idea that the orchestra was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but that was an obvious cognitive error (it's actually the Lamoureux Concerts Orchestra, whoever they are).  They are nice recordings, but quite unlike the other two very nice versions I have. 

Cello Concertos by Haydn and Mott, whoever Mott is.  1969.  Haydn and Mott, whoever he is, get a font size about half that of Jacquline du Pre, the famously doomed young cello star.  Pleasant performances of pleasant music, played with a little more Sturm und Drang then these pieces would get today.
  
Mahler, songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.  1958, and looking every inch of it:

The cover art was a big factor in my decision to bring this one home.  I haven't listened to it yet.

Schubert, Mass in E Flat.  Probably 1960s.  This is apparently Schubert's 6th and final Mass.  Who knew?  Likely to be a bit heavy.  Haven't listened yet.

Music for the Baroque Oboe.  Perhaps 1967.  Until the late 1970s, baroque music outside of Bach was quite an esoteric niche in the classical spectrum.  Recordings from the 1950s and 1960s are kind of fun, because they often lack the courtly lightness and constancy of tempo and volume that modern players give the baroque.  The modern way is supposedly righter -- more in keeping with the composers' intentions -- but it's also the reason why some people (not me, of course) find baroque music a bit sterile.  I like to occasionally hear it played as if it were written by Beethoven.

Haydn, Symphonies 44, 45, & 49.  1986.  The famous Hayden symphonies are pretty much all in the last 20 of his whopping 104, and I imagine I have copies of most of them in one format and/or another.  Being way down in the 40s, these are likely pleasant, tame, and new-to-me.

Walton, Variations on a Theme by Hindemith and Symphony #2.  mid-1960s.  Ever since there were records, people have struggled with the problem of how to make 20th-Century music alluring to the record-buying public. I don't know if the jacket design for this particular recording really hit the "sweet spot."

New Year Sabbatical: Some Romantic Notions

The Fiscal New Year Sabbatical continues for at least one more day!

Five Years Ago in The Infinite Art Tournament!

Every once in a while I think it would be interesting to try to write about classical music.  Today's rerun comes from July 1, 2008, and was from a short series called "Classical Wednesdays."  

I've argued before that one of the advantages of cultivating an interest in classical music is that it holds still, relatively speaking.  A list of favorite rock bands from five years ago would look pretty long in the tooth if I dug it up now.  This list of favorite 19th century music is still as fresh and shiny as it was the day I made it.

The Romantic Era: Conventional Choices

Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto: Mendelssohn, who did most of his writing in the 1830s and 1840s, was considered a conservative composer in his day. If you have been listening to lot of Mozart and Haydn after we talked about the Classical era, though, the difference of style will be plentifully obvious to you. In the Mozart Concerti I talked about last time, you always get a minute or two of jaunty introductory material from the orchestra before the solo instrument makes its entrance. Here, Mendelssohn gives the orchestra about three seconds to set the mood before the violin announces itself with a dramatic line that feels at once sobbing and soaring. Through the rest of the first movement, there will be plenty of crashing orchestral passages, yet the whole thing maintains a melancholy tenderness that is pure Romanticism.

If you pay close attention, you’ll hear some interesting tricks in the construction – there’s a bit, for instance, where the orchestra as a whole takes over the solo line, and the solo violin essentially plays the accompaniment. It took me decades to notice that stuff, though, and this is certainly not a piece that needs to be dissected to be appreciated. A must!

Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Haydn: The theme, it turns out, wasn’t really by Haydn, but whatever. When a serious composer writes “variations,” they dig into the deep, theoretical structure of the melodic line they are toying with, so it’s not just a matter of speeding it up, slowing it down, having the bassoons play it, and adding a few extra notes the fourth time around. Just from listening, there’s no real way for an amateur like me to tell what the eight variations have to do with the original theme. But that doesn’t really matter. This piece has a wistful, autumn sweetness to it, and it has a real grandeur without being off-putting. It’s not at all challenging, and that’s just fine.

Dvorak, Slavonic Dances: The Czech composer Dvorak was by all accounts a real regular guy, and of all the major composers his music has the highest ratio of joy to angst. He was also one of many Romantic composers who were excited by the ideas of nationalism percolating in late 19th Century Europe, and he was among the first to actively mine the folk music of his country for melodies and tonalities. The Dances were a product of this interest.

The Slavonic Dances were originally composed as piano pieces to make some cash in the sheet music market, and later orchestrated to be short concert pieces. With that pedigree, they really should suck. But they are actually a lot of fun: rambunctious, high-spirited, a bit goofy, and unabashedly noisy. (They were such a money-maker that he wrote some more of them later. The second set isn’t as good, so make sure you get the opus 46 set, not the opus 72 set.)

Borodin, Polovetsian Dances: In an inverse of Romantic nationalism, a Russian composer imagines the culture of the people of the Central Asian steppes. Colorful and exotic, it is rotten musical anthropology but a vigorous and exciting guilty pleasure as pure music.

Mahler, Symphony #1: One of the last great composers of the Romantic era, Mahler still worked with the basic forms inherited from the classical era but pushed them to extremes. Even this, his first symphony (of nine), is a big, sprawling experiment in sound and texture. The first movement coalesces very gradually out of a indistinct, mysterious soundscape, with several minutes already gone by the first time we hear a recognizable theme. That theme, though, is a lovely one, well worth the wait. Keep an eye out for the third movement too, with its crazy minor-key rendition of “Frere Jacques” that periodically degenerates into something that sounds like a German academic’s concept of a New Orleans funeral. Cooooool.


Off the Beaten Path

Lalo, Cello Concerto: Dvorak has the most famous Cello Concerto, but minor-leaguer Maurice Lalo wrote the best one. From its knock-you-out-of-your-shoes opening fanfare to the sonic strangeness of a warp-speed waltz that keeps cropping up unexpectedly in the slow movement, this Concerto offers a smashing showcase for the loveliest of the string instruments. It also captures a wistful, joyful nobility that is characteristic of the finest works of the Romantic Era.

Dvorak, Requiem: Dvorak is such a fun, joyful composer so much of the time that his more serious and somber stuff often gets overlooked. The Requiem is pure symphonic power. Sweeping, hard-hitting, and emotionally austere, this is devotional music on a massive scale. Warning: Contains choral parts.

Sibelius, Symphony #5: The great Finnish composer conjures up themes of the most sweeping pop sensibility, but never turns them into show tunes. Sibelius is continually setting up your expectations, but then undercutting them and sending the music in surprising new directions. In the final movement, the elusive main theme builds up enormous tension before finally resolving in one of the most singular endings in the symphonic literature.

Schumann, Fantasiestucke. Short, but very sweet. A light-spirited but just slightly melancholy duet for cello and piano, it is just possibly the most charming piece of chamber music ever written.

Got some suggestions of your own? Related to music of the Romantic Era, that is? Put 'em in the comments!

DorkFest Marches On!

It has been a quiet DorkFest, which either means that you readers are slavishly putting together the dorkiest possible application packages and strategically holding on to them until the very last minute, or -- possibly -- that you are just not a very dorky group.

It bears mentioning, however, that Chuckdaddy has recently put in a rather strong statement of intent on the original DorkFest post.

Also, Nichim -- the incumbent Vice-Dork candidate -- has sent in a Dork CV this weekend that includes such phrases as "oldest extant copy of the Popol Vuh," "notary public," "They Might be Giants," "euphonium," "psychedelic space rock," "Central Vermont Fiber Community," "obsessive interest in... the taxonomy of fungi," and "Reed College." It runs to three pages. I say this not to discourage you, but to spur you on to do your damnedest.

Meanwhile, sisterjen -- who, as the name would suggest, is my sister -- has insinuatingly inquired as to whether I, Michael5000, am eligible for DorkFest.  The question has subsequently been parroted on a few occasions, I'm not sure why, by Mrs.5000.  The answer is: no.  I'm the blog's author.  I can't also be the blog's Dork.  It would be a total conflict of interest.  Say what you like about IAT, but we run a tight ethical ship.

Remember: the deadline for all DorkFest submissions is

12:30 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time on 10 Brumaire CCXXI 

(Thursday, November 1, 2012)

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Meanwhile, and having nothing to do with Dorkfest...

The week before last, I posted a list of old classical vinyl albums I had bought at the Friends of the Multnomah Public Library Booksale for a dollar apiece.

Here's a list of old classical vinyl albums I subsequently picked up for 50 cents apiece at half-price day

Beethoven: Piano Concerto #5 (Emperor) – New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter. Rudolf Serkin, piano (1942)

Dukas: “La Peri” & Roussel: Symphony #3 – New York Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez (1976)

“The Glorious Sound of Brass; Renaissance and Baroque Masterpieces” – The Philadelphia Brass Ensemble (1967)

Handel, “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day.” New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein (1961)

“History of Spanish Music, Volume XV: The Songbook of the Duke of Calabria” – Madrid Madrigal Quartet (1974)

“The Philadelphia Orchestra Plays Victor Herbert” – Eugene Ormandy, conductor (1959)

“Ukranian Songs” – Eugenia Zareska, Mezzo-soprano (1960 or so)

Veracini, Nine Sonatas for Violin and Basso Continuo – Double album! (1980)

Introducing the Fall Line... of vintage classical vinyl

...being a list of vinyl classical LPs I bought on my first trip to this falls Friends of the Multnomah Public Library booksale, at a buck a pop.

Brahms, Piano Concerto #2 – Chicago Symphony (1975)

Brahms, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel & Waltzes – Leon Fleisher, piano (1957)

My nomination for awesomest Brahms cover art of all time.

“The Contemporary Trumpet.” Music of Kraft, Campo, Henderson, and Hamilton, whoever they were. – Thomas Stevens, trumpet. (1972)

“The Debussy Album” …or first half of a double album – Philadelphia Orchestra (probably mid-1970s)

Gabrieli, assorted pieces – Eastman Wind Ensemble (1961) “Hi-Fi Monaural” (!)

Handel, Four Concerti Grossi – Munich Bach Orchestra (1970)

Liszt and Grieg, Concertos. RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Artur Rubinstein, piano (1954)

Litolff, Henry (!), Symphonic Concerto #4. Monte Carlo Opera Orchesta, Gerald
Robbins, piano (1973)

What, you're not familiar with the concert music of Litolff?

Lopatnikoff (!), Divertimento & Rozsa (!), Serenade for Orchestra – La Jolla Musical Arts Festival Orchestra (!) (1951)

Mandolin Music (!) by Hasse, Beethoven, and Gianneo – Heidelburg Chamber Orchestra, Jacob Thomas, mandolin (c. 1970)

Massenet, Piano Concerto, plus Saint-Saens and Gounod – Westphalian Symphony Orchestra, Marylene Dosse, piano (1973)

Music for Violin and Cello by Ravel, Haydn, and Hindemith – Oleg Kagan, violin, and Natalia Gutman, cello. “Made in USSR”! (possibly 1974)

Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto #2 – Robin Hood Dell Orchestra of Philadelphia (!), William Kapell, piano (1950)

“Rimsky-Korsakoff,” Le Coq d’Or & Stravinsky, “Firebird” – Boston Symphony (1965)

Saint-Saens, Violin Concerto – New Philharmonia Orchestra, Pierre Amoyal, violin (1977)

Scriabin, Sonata #3, 16 preludes – Vladimir Horowitz, Piano (1956)

Richard Strauss, Rosenkavalier Suite – Detroit Symphony (1985)

Vivaldi, Opus 11 Concerti – I Solisti Veneti (1976)

“The Well-Tempered Synthesizer” – Walter Carlos, early synthesizers (1969)

Zwilich, “Passages” and “String Trio” – Boston Musica Viva (1984)

The 2011 Library Book Sale CD Trove II

A "new" series of CD finds from the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale, of which I wrote up one back in November and then got distracted what with all the lovely art.  (And by the way, that "Random Record Review" thing that I did two of is a dead letter.  (But, yeah, yeah, the Beatles thing is still on.))  

Frank Ezra Levy: Symphony #3, Cello Concerto #2, etc.

RTE National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Takuo Yuasa conducting.

Anyone who assumes that orchestral music written in the 1990s and 2000s must be either abstruse racket or spare minimalism would be surprised by this set of compositions by the American composer Frank Ezra Levy, of whom I had never heard before snapping up this disc.  This music makes good use of the strength and versatility of a modern orchestra, but seems to reach back to the late Romantic period, thus ignoring at least a half century of music history -- which is not necessarily a bad idea.  In fact, as I write this I notice a quote from Levy in the liner notes: I have embraced the work of some twentieth century composers... and have avoided other currents of the time, such as serial music.  He goes in big for dramatic orchestral effects, which makes many passages seem a bit like film music.  If this sounds like a nice way of saying that I thought it was competent, but wasn't particularly moved by it, well, then we are speaking the same code.  It is probably pretty stirring stuff in person; in recording, or at least in this recording, I am not sure it is done justice.

Decision: I will hang on to this disc, as it makes one feel very intellectual to have "classical music" on hand that was composed within the last ten years.

Herbie Hancock: Head Hunters

Back in 2008, I did a post on jazz that turned out to make a big change in my music-listening habits.  Before that post, jazz probably made up at most 1% of my music-listening diet.  These days it's probably over 5%.  That's a fairly serious change for an old dog.

I asked for recommendations in that post, and one of big favorites was posted by still-around-after-all-these-years reader Nichim.  She told me I was almost certain to like Herbie Hancock's Sextant, and golly! she sure was right.  It's one grooOOoooOOoooOOoovy record.  That's right.  One grooOOoooOOoooOOoovy record.  That's what I said.

It says here on the back of the 1992 reissue of 1973's Head Hunters that it is "the largest selling jazz album in history."  Well, that's as may be, but it's no Sextant.  It has a pretty good fusion-y crossover groove, which is likable enough (although to be sure a fusion-y crossover groove in itself just makes some people grit their teeth).

Decision: Sextant will stay in my Castle5000 lair, but Head Hunters will join the collection at work that is good enough and energetic enough to enhance my office productivity, but no so good as to be distracting.  If you are thinking "that's sure damning it with faint praise!" we are once again speaking the same code.



Chopin: Polonaises 1-9

Adam Harasiewicz, piano

I have never been especially interested in solo piano music that isn't by Beethoven, but Niece #2 is into Chopin and it has rubbed off on me some.  The Polonaises are extremely approachable and playful; they seem less like tuxedo classical music than sweater and khakis classical music, if you see my point.  On this no-frills budget disc, they seem pounded out a bit bluntly to my ear.  Well, maybe they are supposed to sound this way.  Also, Harasiewicz probably didn't get any favors from the production team; these recordings are from the late 1960s, and the disc likely dates to the heyday of the compact disc fifteen years ago.   At that time, I've been told, budget classical discs were what was used to keep CD factories busy between real orders because that was less expensive than turning the machines off and then turning them back on again.  This lends a real hit-and-miss quality to them: sometimes a budget recording is a real gem, and sometimes the music on the disc doesn't match what's printed on the label.  Whee!

Decision: Not having much Chopin, I'll hang on to this Chopin.

The Hometown5000 Trove of December 2011

Shortly after I began to re-succumb to the charms of the 33 1/3 vinyl album, I happened into the city library of Hometown5000, the only building -- to date -- to have my name carved on its edifice.  And there, for 50 cents a pop, were vinyl LPs!  Fortunately, I only had two dollars with me, so I was limited to four.  Except, I might have taken five.  By accident.

The first pick was this solid 1963 recording of the Fourth Beethoven Piano Concerto, featuring an uncannily young Van Cliburn.

It is of course an excellent recording, and comes with slavish liner notes with sentences like "Mysticism alone can be a closed circle."  Great stuff.

Then we've got this groooOOooOOooovy 1967 recording of The Baroque Art of Telemann.

It looks more like a Jimi Hendrix album cover than a Georg Philipp Telemann cover, no?  The design is by Jules Halfant, who didn't do covers for Hendrix -- he was on a different label -- but who did design a lot of rock covers and was clearly comfortable in the psychodelic mode.  [Clue that the artist was seconded from the rock music division: the six-peg cello.]

It's interesting to listen to Telemann played in 1967, because that was a time when music of the Baroque period -- which is to say, the stuff before Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven -- was being rediscovered and rehabilitated after more than a century during which it had been very rarely performed.  These days, musicians who play Baroque music tend to specialize in the period and try to reproduce a dry, crisp, precise sound that we think is the way the composers intended it to be played.  In 1967, though, this was still a pretty new idea, so on this record you get Telemann being played as if he were Mozart -- nothing dramatic, but it seems a bit lush if you listen to a lot of classical music.

But we can top that: a recording of Vivaldi concerti from 1953!  With a woodcut design that reminds me of my grandmother!  Or just of grandmothers in general!

If the 1967 Telemann seems a little lush, this Vivaldi record is played like a full-blown Romantic symphony.  It might as well be Leopold Stokowski conducting something like, well, like anything I guess (Stokowski was famous for taking any piece of music in the repertoire and turning the emotional fervor up to a torrid level.)  Treating Vivaldi like Tchaikovsky is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the notes on the page, actually, but it sounds really odd to a modern classicalhead.

This one, also, is played with a fine Romantic intensity.  But then, it's a piece of fine, intense Romanticism.  And wowie-zowie, it is one freaking awesome performance.  Worth every penny of its 50 cents, plus a reasonable chunk of the turntable.

Like the label says, "Incomparable HIGH FIDELITY."

But you can't go out and just buy up no-risk classical gems.  Where's the sport in that?  No, the true music lover must take risks!  Otherwise, how can you grow?  So I picked up this one too.

Hey, it could have been awesome!  Mustard blazers, baby!  Regrettably, it's not especially great.  Turns out that the Salem Singers are still around and active, though, 43 years after this album was recorded!  Presumably there's been some turnover of personnel, but still.  They've put out a dozen or so records over the years, and would be happy to sell you some of the newer ones from their website.  Or, you can come by Castle5000, and I'll put this older one on the hi-fi and we can have drinks.

The Bins Trove of December 2011

I've made several trips to the legendary "Bins" lately -- you Citizens of Roses know what I'm talking about -- and on one of them I finally succumbed to the logic that:

1. I have a record player.
2. Vinyl records are basically free.
3. It is amusing to listen to vinyl records, and
4. The vinyl format is an excellent defense against the evils of prolonged sitting.

So of course you'll want to know what I picked up.

A perfectly cromulent recording of core piano repertoire by a Big Name Pianist of a few decades back.  Reason for grid on cover not immediately apparent.

The Brahms Violin Concerto, with notes by Deems Taylor, a minor league composer and major league musicologist of a few generations back.  You remember him (Taylor, not Brahms) for his stilted, dimwitted blathering in Walt Disney's bizarrely overrated Fantasia.

Like the Brahms, this recording of Mendelssohn's 3rd is a "Book of the Month Club Music-Appreciation Record."  Mrs.5000 and I consider this concept a bit of a hoot.  Note that the performance is by the "Music Appreciation Symphony Orchestra" under the baton (Classical Music Tip: always say "under the baton of" and, for extra points, swallow the "n" in "baton") of Thomas Scherman, whoever he was.  A pick-up band, in other words, which provides the kind of workmanlike performance you would expect from pros putting in a day's work.

Nowadays, of course, we do not refer to the Mendelssohn 3 as the "Scotch." We refer to it as the "Scottish." Especially around large, muscular, politically minded Scotsmen.

This is actually the record that made me decide to make a space in my life for vinyl again.  Brubeck Time?  Just sitting there naked and sleeveless at The Bins?!?  I couldn't let that happen.  It's a pretty sweet record.

And, because there's no reason not to gamble on long odds at Bins prices, I Remember Sweden by Nils Flacke, his accordion, and orchestra.  Which turns out to alternate between pleasant-enough accordion polka tracks (almost all of which are in the basic metrical and harmonic structure of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game") and vocal tracks which are, alas, schmaltzy without being either a remarkable display of talent or amusing in an ironic fashion.  But just to own it is worth the quarter I paid, although whoever eventually has to deal with my estate may beg to disagree.

The 2011 Library Book Sale CD Trove I

A new series of CD finds from the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

François Couperin: Messe à l'usage des Paroisses

Michel Chapuis, organ

I don't really know much about the French Baroque composer François Couperin, so I included this in my stack of thirteen Book Sale CDs with the idea of getting to know a new composer. When I was showing the stack to Mrs.5000, she said "But isn't that organ music?"

"Oh crap," I said.

Five seconds of playing time confirmed that this is, indeed, organ music. In fact it's apparently considered something of a landmark organ piece.

Yeah, we don't do organ music.

Decision: Discard.  This CD is available for the asking.

Random Record Review 1: Mozart's Symphonies #40 and #41

The Record: Mozart, Symphonies #40 & #41 ("Jupiter").  Vienna Philharmonic, James Levine conducting.
Format: CD
Year of Release: 1991
Genre: Classical | True Classical | Symphonic

And the first record – but wait, we have a terminology issue. For this project, I guess I'll use “record” or “album” interchangeably to denote the basic unit under consideration. These words both refer to a coherently packaged and marketed collection of songs or other musical pieces, or sometimes a single extended musical piece. Traditionally offered on one or, less commonly, multiple compact discs, vinyl LPs, or cassette tapes, “records” are usually given a identifying cover image and in most cases consist of music produced by a single performer. They tend to be in the neighborhood of forty-five to seventy minutes long. Exceptions are legion.

Let's Try Again

And the first record summoned to stand forward for review – by a process involving both a random number generator and a 20-sided die – is this pairing of Mozart’s final two symphonies. It’s kind of a funny way to start a culling project, because like most people with more than a glancing interest in classic music I think of Mozart 40 and 41 as absolute core collection. Indeed, I own at least three or four recordings of both of them, and none of them are in any danger of being tossed out.

Mozart’s 40th, in particular, has extremely deep roots in my psyche. It was in fact one of the selections on the Reader’s Digest twelve-album boxed set of "Music of the World's Greatest Composers." I discovered this collection waiting inexplicably among my parents’ folk and country records when I was nine or ten, and it would really lay the foundation for all my subsequent taste in music. A few years ago I went to considerable trouble to secure a surviving copy of this vinyl cultural relic, rip it to .mp3, and burn it to CD, so happily I still have that ur-Mozart’s 40th as well as the rest of that formative canon in my collection.

Mozart’s 40th was also the first classical piece I ever heard performed by a live orchestra, at a campus event during my freshman year of college. Any live classical performance is a rediscovery of how much more amazing symphonic sound is in person than it is on a recording, but the first experience of this – how the music can, on a good day, reach right into your body and grab you by the guts – was especially memorable.

The 40th and 41st Symphonies, as well as the 39th, were all thrown together over the course of a few weeks in 1788. Mozart, his career on the decline, likely thought of them primarily as money makers to keep him afloat while he tried to score another big hit opera.  Nevertheless, they are landmarks in the history of the symphony. Mozart, like Haydn, wrote scads of the short, light concert pieces called symphonies in the early and middle phases of their career. These can be less than ten minutes long, and most of them, although pleasant enough, don't generally knock our socks off these days.  With pieces like the ones on this disc, though, the symphony is in transition to something bigger, longer, more complex, more dynamic, and more expressive.  Beethoven would take the ball from them and continue expanding the symphony into the epic, thundering form that would dominate the 19th Century.

The 40th is wistful and graceful and poignant, and dear to my heart. The 41st, sometimes called “The Jupiter,” is more muscular and assertive, and like all Mozart it’s terrific, but it has never got its hooks into me like the 40th. This particular CD is on the Deutsche Grammophon label, which is always good. I'm really not sure when it entered my collection.

Decision: Strong Keep.

Classical Music You've Never Heard Of, Volume 1: Arnold, Guitar Concerto

Malcolm Arnold: Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra (1959)

When I was a young lad, we stopped by a garage sale in Cannon Beach, Oregon, on a family vacation and I encountered a record of Julian Bream playing this 1959 piece along with the concerto by the baroque composer Albinoni, which is also very good. My mother was deeply skeptical of my request for the 50 cents needed to buy it, having not yet woken up to the reality that her son was a genuine classical music enthusiast. 

It was a sincere enthusiasm and one with a high social cost.  I was perpetually mortified that any of my schoolmates would ever find out about it.  I still vividly remember the crippling sense of shame with which I smuggled a collection of the Beethoven symphonies out of the middle school library in a grocery bag I had brought for this purpose. Happily, however, my mother had been raised to think of classical music as insufferably pretentious egghead stuff, which meant that I would get the same parent-annoying mileage out of my early record collection as some other kids got from heavy metal. (In time, of course, I would warm to rock and Mom would warm to classical, which is mostly what she listens to these days.)

The Arnold piece is a good antidote for anyone convinced that nothing written in the middle of the 20th Century is listenable. This attitude is as regrettable because it is untrue; the truth of the matter is that there is merely very little that was written in the middle of the 20th Century that is listenable. The Arnold Concerto is quite listenable; it starts out with some of what are generally called “angular dissonances” in the full orchestra, but they aren’t too too dissonant nor too too, um, “angular,” and the guitar presses things forward with an energy that is downright jaunty. Then, about a minute and a half in, a theme of surprising delicacy and sweetness pops out. It’s a lyrical little line that could be the melody of a lovely popular song – the guitarist plays it first, but eventually the strings will take a whack at it too. The upbeat, energetic tone sticks around for the rest of the piece, sometimes bopping along at a good clip and sometimes pausing for reflective moments.

There are damn few pieces for guitar and orchestra, which means that guitarists who want to play with an orchestra, or orchestras who want to perform with a guitarist, have only a handful of obvious choices. This makes the Arnold Concerto (or the Albinoni, too) reasonably easy to find; it makes the list fairly often whenever anybody decides to put together an orchestra-and-guitar album.

Here’s a link to the first movement for ya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8-V3OqgeUI.

The Library Book Sale CD Trove XV

The Spring Sale has come and gone, and here I am still reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at last fall's Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Nostalgie

Edith Piaf

I don't know a lot about French popular song, but I usually like it when I hear it. I know next to nothing about Edith Piaf, but I certainly recognize her as a Big Name in the Chansons tradition. So, I expected that this collection of nostalgic old numbers would evoke cozy afternoons in a shabby but cosmopolitan Paris cafe, or something. I thought I'd dig it.

What I actually got was music that I think it is fair to describe as "grating." The recordings are apparently quite old; one way or the other they are about as tinny as you can get this side of a wax cylinder. During the early years of recorded music, musicians would often work around the technology with arrangements that played to the technology's strengths and avoided its weaknesses, but no such effort seems to have been made in this case. In most of the numbers, it sounds like most of the musicians are playing in the next room over.

I'm not sure if I'm getting an accurate representation of Piaf herself, but there's a slightly grinding quality to her voice here that rubs me the wrong way. The songs themselves have a monotony to them, and you can tell without knowing a word of French (I don't) that they are the usual tired recitations about the excitement of romantic love, the melancholy brought on my loss of love, the pain of love gone bad, and perhaps a saucy romp or two on the subject of hilariously sexual love.

Prognosis: Yours for the asking.

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 5, 10, 19, & 20

Emil Gilels, Piano

Hey, it's Beethoven! Played by a great pianist! On a great classical label, Deutsche Grammophon (German for "German Gramophone"). Of course it's awesome! But as I've said before, solo piano music is more chillout music for me than it is music I can sit down and listen to intently. But whatevs!

Prognosis: It's a keeper. It's currently part of a small library I'm keeping at work and listening to with an old-school "Discman."

The Library Book Sale CD Trove XIV

Yes, still reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Mozart: Piano Sonatas K. 282, 545, and 310

Sviatoslav Richter

Well, this is a collection of piano sonatas by Mozart, one of the great musical geniuses of all time, played by one of the great pianists of the 20^th Century. So obviously, it’s awesome on a technical level. What it comes down to is, do you like Classical music for the solo piano? I have to admit that, for me, there is a certain lack of emotional drama and range in the genre, but it is certainly nice chillout music to play when you’re writing, or reading elegant literature, or whatever it is you do.

It’s hard to go wrong with classical recordings on the Phillips label. This is a 1989 live performance that is so flawless that, when the crowd starts clapping at the end of each sonata, you’re all like “hey, where did all those people come from?”

Prognosis: I'll hang on to this one. But it will be in pretty light rotation.

The Library Book Sale CD Trove XII

Reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

William Henry Fry: Santa Claus Symphony

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

The received wisdom about symphonic music in the United States is that nothing that happened before, oh, 1920 is worth talking about. Then you have Aaron Copland, who established something resembling an American voice, and later the discovery of the music of Charles Ives, an eccentric New England insurance executive who wrote a great deal of music for symphony that had however had virtually no audience whatsoever.

If you dig a little deeper, you find that sure, there were of course plenty of American composers running around in the Nineteenth Century. They are almost universally held in contempt as being too German. And indeed, formal music in the U.S. was often written, conducted, and played by German immigrants, and almost all American composers worked from the musical models laid down by the Classical and Romantic German masters. In music history, this is seen as Derivative and Very Bad. The usual whipping boy is John K. Paine, a perfectly competent composer whose two symphonies sound vaguely like Schumann. He's pretty good, really, but your only hope of hearing his work performed live is to go to a music history concert, where the orchestra might play an exaggeratedly stiff rendition of a few bars so the audience can titter before getting down to appreciate some real American music, probably some -- let's face it, somewhat overrated -- Ives.

So Holy Crap! what we have here is some American symphonic music that actually predates John K. Paine. William Henry Fry, according to jacket, was "the first native-born American to compose for large symphonic forces." And you know what? He's actually pretty good. The Santa Claus Symphony is, as you might expect, big and jolly, but with a certain joyful seriousness to it as well. It is, perhaps unfortunately, seasonal music, with a broad quotation of Adeste Fidelius that would inevitably ring strange during summer months. Other pieces on the CD are an Overture to Macbeth, the Niagara Symphony, and The Breaking Heart. The last of these is fairly poor, calling into question the depth of Fry's output, but the Macbeth is quite stirring and dramatic.

Fry and Paine were not Beethoven and Mozart, but then neither were Schubert and Berlioz. And I am certainly not inclined to call for an America First! movement, where we would all express our love of country by carefully cultivating a taste only for our own native composers. That would be silly. But it wouldn't be much more silly than pretending that our national traditional of formal music began only when Ives got home from work, when Aaron Copland thought he'd found jazz, or when George Gershwin developed high-culture ambitions. Those three guys are important figures in the history of American orchestral music, but they didn't invent it. Hats off to the Naxos label for exhuming our deeper music heritage.

The Library Book Sale CD Trove XI

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This is the 1000th Michael5000 post, if you count all four blogs.

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Yet still reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Salve Antverpia; Romantic Symphonic Music from Antwerp

Choose one of the following.

1. Out of the incomprehensibly huge library of music written over the past few centuries, there is of much that is very good but hardly ever listened to. The reason for this is simple: it is overshadowed by a relatively small body of work that is exceedingly excellent, and has grown to be recognized as such over the course of time through an informal dialogue among music student, performers, listeners, and marketers. For those of us inclined to listen to a little music from 220 years ago, there is little point in listening to the excellent music of Salieri when we can listen to the distilled genius of Mozart. Those of us inclined to listen to a LOT of such music might listen to a little Salieri, a little Benda, a little Cannabich, whatever, but only a serious scholar would dig into the research library archives to find the doubtless perfectly competent music of yet more obscure composer. And that’s not even to mention the scores of composers (get it? get it?) whose work has literally vanished from the Earth.

So it is with this collection of perfectly pleasant, perfectly well-crafted music from the Low Countries. There’s nothing wrong with the music of Flor Alpaerts, Jan Blockx, Jef Van Hoof, Lodewijk Mortelmans, or Daniel Sternefeld. Quite the contrary. It is charming music, with moments of suspense and release, the occasional surprise, and the occasional splash of drama. But neither is there anything truly remarkable, anything to make you feel like the musical ideas of this stranger from the past are still owed your attention. You could listen to the good music of Salve Antverpia, and this might be interesting if you were from Antwerp, say, or had a specialist’s interest in the specific region and period represented. Otherwise, you could listen to the comparable but much more perfect music of Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvorak, or even Weber, Respighi,and Smetana. Life is short, and you are only going to spend so much time listening to music of the past. Why not listen to the best?

2. There is a kind of cultural brainwashing that goes on, a careless but insidious collaboration among those who teach, write about, and sell music. It convinces us through the sheer force of repetition that a narrow range of material represents the great work of our culture. We learn one way or another that Mozart’s last few symphonies are “great,” and we hear them and hear them again until they become so familiar that they are engrained in our bones, and thus we come to agree that they must indeed be “great.” And thereby we become radical conservatives, wanting like children to hear the familiar again simply because it is familiar, or if not at most something that is like the familiar – perhaps some Salieri instead of Mozart if in a daring mood.

Thus it is quite impossible for a person of our times to give a fair hearing to this collection of Romantic orchestral music from the Low Countries. We may grant that the composers are competent – they make no noises that offend us, and some noises that remind us of passages in pieces we have been made to think of as “great” – but unless we were to devote months or years to making the work of Alpaerts, Blockx, Van Hoof, Mortelmans, and Sternefeld as familiar to us as their contemporaries Beethoven, Brahms, and Dvorak, we will inevitably see them as pretenders, people who tried to make great music but fell short of the standard of excellence. Children raised in an isolated colony from which the music of the A-list composers was carefully excluded, raised on the music of Salve Antverpia, might very likely see things differently.

Prognosis: You can have my copy if you want it.

The Library Book Sale CD Trove X

Still reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies #2 & #4

Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra

Tchaikovsky is a strange figure in the pantheon of classical music. If you want to be a real classical music intellectual, you can't afford to take him too seriously. He's a little too clumsy, a little too transparent, a little too heart-on-sleeve. Or, maybe a lot too heart-on-sleeve.

This always seems to stress out the writers of liner notes. They feel compelled to signal that they are in the know about Tchaikovsky's limitations even while they are being paid to praise the product. The notes on this Naxos recording, for instance, begin:

Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky must be regarded as the most popular of all Russian composers, his music offering certain obvious, superficial attractions in its melodies and in the richness of its orchestral colouring. There is more to Tchaikovsky than this, and it would be a mistake to neglect his achievement because of what sometimes seems to be an excess of popular attention.

It's hard to imagine any other musician, of any genre, being treated quite so dismissively in his own marketing materials. It begs the questions: if Tchaikovsky is so superficial and obvious, how come he gets to occupy one of the limited number of spots available for Household Name Composers? It is hard to explain without recourse to a fairly radical theory of his compositions, which is this: most of them sound really cool. They have obvious attractions in their melodies, and rich orchestral coloring, and this, over the years, has continued to attract a great deal of popular attention. They are, in a word, good.

I've been fond of Tchaikovsky's symphonies since I was a little kid, and the Second and Fourth are two of my four favorites. Out of the, um, six. I had recordings of both of them already, but my other recording of the Second isn't very good and the Fourth is worth having two interpretations of. Like most Naxos CDs, this is a first-class recording by a might-as-well-be-first-class orchestra. Amazon has some copies for three bucks and shipping, which is not bad at all. I'm happy as a clam to have got my copy for a buck fifty.

The Library Sale CD Trove VIII

Reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Guitar Pieces by Granados, Rodrigo, Asencio, Barrios, Coste, and Henze.

Jeffrey McFadden, Guitar


I started writing my review of this CD in my head before I even got it out of the case. For have I not often quipped that it is good to have an album of classical guitar music, but superfluous to have two? I've got a small handful of classical guitar CDs, and even a few surviving classical guitar tapes(!), each of which are perfectly pleasant and each of which I listen to somewhat less often than yearly.

Once the CD began playing, however, I was immediately impressed by a more energetic and distinctly more Iberian edge than I expected. And in truth, I know so little about the classical guitar repertoire that I couldn't tell you whether this is due to the program of compositions, or the talent of Jeffrey McFadden, or even the recording quality. Certainly, the Naxos label always does a good job on these "recital" CDs of kicking off with an especially compelling number -- a "rocker," if you will -- and of ending on a high note as well, which is a good strategy when you are selling unfamiliar material. It helps.

I might have to do some comparative relistening, but I think this might become my go-to classical guitar disc.

Prognosis: Maybe it could become your go-to classical guitar disc, too!

The Library Book Sale CD Trove VII

Still reviewing my CD finds from half-price day at the Friends of the Multnomah County Library Annual Booksale.

Veracini: Overtures 1-4 & 6
Accademia I Filarmonici
Alberto Martini, Conductor

These aren't overtures as in the music that comes before an opera, but concert overtures. In the Baroque period, the overture was kind of a proto-symphony -- a piece of fifteen minutes or so for a small orchestra, made up of several loosely related movements.

So no, I had never heard of Veracini either. He's good, though. These are baroque pieces that sound like, well, good baroque music. Even you classical music dorks, if I told you that it was Scarlatti or Gabrielli or whatever, you wouldn't doubt me. Unless you're really good, I could probably pass it off as Brandenburg Concerto style Bach. Ol' Veracini seems to have been a good orchestrator with a solid command of piece writing, a good feel for the standard forms of his day, and an occasional surprise up his sleeve.

Prognosis: Pleasant music worth keeping around. Plus, having written the above likely puts me among the top thousand Veracini scholars of my generation, which is cool.

The L&TM5K Advent Calendar
December 17

From the InLaw5000 family collection of vintage postcards.


Seventh Night