June 2011 - Classical Music

Barber - Summer Music
Beethoven

• Horn Sonata
• String Quartets 6 and 11 ('quartetto serioso')
• Symphony No.7

Chopin

• Rondo in E flat, Op.16
• Impromptu No.2
• Two Nocturnes, Op.37 and Two Nocturnes, Op.55
• Polonaise in A flat, Op.53
• Scherzo No.4
• Piano Sonata No.3
• Three Mazurkas, Op.59

Handel - Keyboard Suites, HWV 436 to 439
Haydn - Symphonies 99, 101 ('Clock') and 100 ('Military')
Haydn - Piano trios, Hob XV: 24 to 26 (set of 3 dedicated to Rebecca Schroeter)
Mozart - Symphony no.31 ('Paris')
Mozart - Piano Sonata No.8 in A minor
Rachmaninov

• Piano Concerto No.1
• Suite No.1 for 2 pianos
• Etudes-tableaux (complete)

Schubert - Piano sonata in F minor, D.625 (unfinished)
Shostakovich - String Quartets 3, 8, 10 and 13

I honestly was surprised by how much classical music I listened to this month. I suppose the occasional 'theme night' can add up, especially as most of these works aren't anywhere near as long as pop music albums.  Still, many of them are 15 to 30 minutes long.

One of the things that struck me during the month was how difficult it is to accurately identify a particular work.  I keep resorting to different strategies.  Where possible I use the simplest numbering system - quartet no.3, sonata no.4 and so on - but this breaks down quite frequently (something that tends to upset my basic desire for an ordered universe).

Handel was the main difficulty this month.  My compact disc blithely told me I was listening to keyboard suites 9 through 12, but it turns out this is the numbering in one particular edition of the works - and not even the first edition.  In the 'HWV' catalogue, I happened to listen to four consecutive numbers but they appear there in the order 10, 11, 12, 9 relative to my CD's approach.

Part of the problem is that Handel may well have had nothing at all to do with the publication of these pieces.  He published his first 8 suites in response to pirate copies, and so the order is well established, but after that things get very muddy. There are things that were originally published as 'suites' that aren't (and so sometimes get counted and sometimes don't), and 2 of the suites I listened to this month were originally published with bits missing out of them.

Better systems than that one still show signs of disorder and can be misleading.  I came across a fairly minor case this month in my Haydn excursion, as it's now well established that Haydn's symphony no.101 premiered several weeks before his symphony no.100 - both, like no.99, in the 1794 concert season in London.  The numbering of some his earlier symphonies is much more random compared to the dates of composition, but at least there is only one numbering system in use for them.  For the piano trios there appear to be two radically different numbering systems still competing with one another.

I also keep having to decide whether to pay attention to the nicknames that various pieces have picked up.  I've basically decided to acknowledge the ones that are official (such as the 'Military' symphony, which was labelled as such in the concert program at its premiere, and Beethoven's 'serioso' quartet), are intrinsic to the music (the 'Clock' symphony, which sounds so much like a clock ticking that the nickname appeared more or less immediately and has just as much meaning now as it did two centuries ago), or genuinely meaningful in some other way (Mozart's 'Paris' symphony, written in that city and for that city - although it begs the question why the A minor piano sonata isn't similarly known as the 'Paris' sonata).

The other thing that struck me several times this month was birdsong.  No, I'm not going crazy. Several times this month, birds were quite audible in the background of classical recordings in the quieter moments. I think this is something apparent in the age of headphones that the recording engineers back in the 1970s or early 1980s simply didn't think listeners would ever notice.  It's also a consequence of where classical works tend to be recorded - in halls or churches rather than in recording studios expressly built for the purpose.

The 'Military' symphony also contains a few audible examples of the conductor's slightly tuneless humming. Whether Sir Colin Davis only found one particular symphony that gave him the urge to hum, or whether they just placed the microphones differently that time around, I've no idea.  While I have his recordings of all 12 of Haydn's London symphonies, they were recorded over the space of a 6-year period so there are all sorts of possible reasons why I've only noticed him in one work.

So there you have it - disordered catalogues, birdsong and noisy conductors.  Oh yes, and I'm sure I did pay attention to the actual music from time to time...