Bach, J.S. - Was willst du dich betrüben (Why do you let yourself be distressed)
Bridge
Oration (Concerto Elegiaco)
Allegro moderato for strings
Rebus Overture
Lament
A Prayer
Chopin - Etudes, op.10
Debussy - La Mer
Mozart - String Quartet No.19, 'Dissonance'
Shostakovich - String Quartet No.5
There wasn't an enormous amount of classical music activity in January, and most of it was right towards the end of the month. I picked up where I'd left off with the Chopin and Mozart, revisited another disc of Bridge's orchestral music (one of the more substantial discs in the set, with Oration being one of the composer's biggest and boldest works), marked another week of Bach's second year in Leipzig off the calendar, listened to one of my favourite Shostakovich string quartets for the first time in a while, and introduced myself to La Mer.
Yes, introduced. I know it's supposed to be one of the great classics of the period and one of Debussy's finest pieces, but as far as I know I hadn't heard it before.
Yeah, it's pretty good. Lots of effective orchestral colour. And, um, that's about all I have to say about it at present. Debussy often doesn't seem to stay with me in the way that some composers do. I suspect that has to do with his approach to form, which doesn't contain some of the signals I usually register. Still, I definitely think he's worth listening to.
Tori Amos - From the Choirgirl Hotel
Bjork - Biophilia
dc Talk - Jesus Freak
Frou Frou - Details
Incubus - Morning View
Wendy Matthews - Emigre
Wendy Matthews - Beautiful View
Joni Mitchell - Dog Eat Dog
Radiohead - Kid A
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Something for Kate - Desert Lights
Thrice - Alchemy Index
Thrice - Major/Minor
Suzanne Vega - Tried and True
Megan Washington - There There
Rachael Yamagata - Happenstance
Thom Yorke - Tomorrow's Modern Boxes
"Tried and True" seems rather apt, because I'm not being all that adventurous lately. Although, the Thom Yorke, Megan Washington and one of the Thrice albums are all fairly recent additions to the collection. Also, daring to tackle Biophilia again was slightly adventurous, but sadly it continued to feel like a couple of fine songs placed together with a number of skeletal outlines of songs. The album I probably paid most attention to in January was Major/Minor. I've never really talked about Thrice much in the context of The Alchemy Index, and I'm still not going to talk about The Alchemy Index. Well, not much anyway.
Thrice is a somewhat fascinating band to me. First of all, they operate in a genre that I wouldn't consider of much interest, or at least that's where they started. Their first couple of albums of punk-hardcore-something-or-other just sound like a lot of noise to me. But they had that one key ingredient of truly interesting musicians: restlessness. A desire to explore and try new things.
By album 4, Vheissu, they were distinctly experimenting, and on the 5th album The Alchemy Index they were basically experimenting in as many ways as possible all at once (more later!). The last two albums after that, though, seem to be a case of a band that has learnt what it wants to know and is returning with the lessons.
Major/Minor, which appears likely to be the last Thrice album for a considerable time if not forever, is an album of pretty straight-forward rock. What that statement hides, though, is that it actually takes a lot of damn hard work to make a piece of music sound straightforward without it also sounding utterly dull.
And Thrice have pretty much learnt the trick over the course of their career. These songs consistently have just the right amount of aural interest, of light and shade, of changes in instrumentation and volume to keep things fresh.
And then there's the other thing I keep finding fascinating: the lyrics.
Now let me say straight up that I don't think that Dustin Kensrue is a lyrical genius of the first order. There are times when the lyrics get a bit clunky. But often they're good, and what arouses my interest is how often they are based on the Bible. We're not talking about dry quotation here, like some of the unimaginative choruses you might encounter in a modern church. More often, Kensrue weaves together a wealth of references, in a way that won't necessarily sound very 'churchy' to a listener who is less Bible-literate but will grab the attention of anyone who knows where the references come from.
Take 'Cataracts', in context probably my favourite song on Major/Minor. At the very least, it lifts material from Jesus' parable of The Sower and two of the more famous passages from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel. (Lyrics are reproduced on Youtube underneath the video, if you can't get them behind the squalling guitars.)
And then there's 'Blinded', which is perhaps my second-favourite song on the album. There's an obvious reference to whitewashed tombs, but it took several listens to the song before it hit me that, in all probability, the song is actually a description of the conversion of Saint Paul.
That's pretty literate stuff for what at first glance might seem like a fairly straightforward rock song.
And, that was it for classical music in December. Of course, the music I did listen to was hardly insubstantial! Some of the finest piano studies ever produced, which helped change the genre from mindless exercises into real pieces of music (although from personal experience not enough credit is given to Ignaz Moscheles for also composing etudes of genuine musical interest). And the last of the set of six string quartets that were a landmark, dedicated by one great composer to another as they played together in his house.
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Despite that weak December, for the year as a whole my spreadsheets are suggesting I listened to 531 different recordings of classical works, large and small, which is a sizable jump on the 383 for 2013. It really was a year where I spent a lot of time on classical music, and I've no doubt the total was helped by the considerable number of new purchases I made - there were three major bundles when previously it would be more typical for me to get just one. I still haven't listened to everything, either.
Really, much of that activity is happening with only a fairly small number of composers. My Dvorak collection received a major injection, and I've enjoyed that so much that I expect there'll be more to come. There's also a fair bit of Beethoven, much of which hasn't been heard yet but with more to come shortly because I'm getting to the stage of filling in specific gaps. There was a decent amount of Mozart, Brahms, Sibelius and Holmboe added, and a few more besides.
What I'm not doing a great deal of is adding new or weakly represented composers to the catalogue. There was a disc of Szymanowski and 2 discs of Vine, those are the only examples I can think of right now of consciously selecting someone new. This doesn't actually mean I'm not listening to new composers at all, because much of that listening is currently being done on streaming services such as Spotify and now Rdio (which I'm finding easier to work with at times, avoiding one profoundly irritating Spotify glitch). It is highly likely that some of the composers of interest will find their way into my collection in the next big chunk of purchases. But for now, streaming doesn't count for this blog. It's my equivalent of trying out an album in a CD shop, back when there were plenty of CD shops.
